Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

Her English was remarkable, Erasmus thought. Zeke had taught her so much. “Did you believe that?” he asked.

As she shrugged, Tom slipped off her lap and hid beneath the caribou skin that had earlier sheltered the moth. She might have answered the question Erasmus didn’t ask: Why did you all want Zet(e to leave? They’d kept Zeke alive because the angekok ordered it, and their efforts had been rewarded. But he couldn’t stay with them once winter lifted; he had no sense of his place and could only bring them ill luck. Her tribe was one great person, each of them a limb, an organ, a bone. Onto the hand her family formed, Zeke had come like an extra finger. They’d welcomed him, but he’d had no understanding of the way they were joined together. He saw himself as a singular being, a delusion they’d found laughable and terrifying all at once. When he strutted around, it was as if one of the fingers of that hand had torn itself loose, risen up, and tottered over the snow.

She might have tried to explain all this, but instead she shrugged again, eloquent shoulders in Alexandra’s ill-fitting dress. “I understood he wouldn’t leave without me; he said he couldn't. This is why my family let me go.”

ERASMUS RETREATED TO Linnaeus’s house. He might have rented pleasant rooms, might even have bought a house — but this was temporary, he thought. He needed to catch his breath and longed for some familial comfort while he did so. Still, he wondered if he’d made the right choice. His books and clothes barely fit into the small guest room allotted to him; the only maid frowned when she came for his chamberpot in the morning and disturbed the papers he left on the tiny desk. He missed Alexandra, who’d returned to Browning’s house the same day he’d left home. He missed Copernicus; he missed especially the long days during which the three of them had worked together. Yet somehow everyone seemed to think he had brought this on himself.

He sat in the small, hot room, watching the flies hurl themselves at the window. Day after day slipping by, and now this, the worst of all. Zeke and Lavinia were being married this afternoon, at his own house. A small ceremony, only Zeke’s parents, his sisters and their families; Erasmus’s brothers and their families. Everyone but him. Lavinia had sent a note:

Why are you acting like this? It's your house still, and I won't feep you from it. I would life you to be with me on my wedding day. But not if you come in a spirit of bitterness. If Zefe can forgive you, if I can forgive you — why can't you accept our new lives together?

To Linnaeus he’d said, “What choice do I have?” Linnaeus, looking uneasily at the heap of books piled near Erasmus’s bed, had said, “You must do what you think best.”

Erasmus had sent a silver tea set and instructed Linnaeus to tell everyone his fever had returned. Now, as if his untruth had brought it on, he had a terrible headache. The maid brought him a pot of coffee, too strong, and forgot the sugar bowl. When she returned with the bowl but no spoon, he said, “Kate — why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

Her broad face, covered with freckles, reminded Erasmus of Ned Kynd; a hint of Ireland was still in her voice although she’d been here since she was a girl. Hard-working, intelligent, usually good-humored; only sullen when she was alone with him. He said, “You know.”

“Didn’t I bring exactly what you asked for?” But she knew what she’d done, she’d done it on purpose. “Is there anything else?”

“Just go,” he said.

After scooping sugar into his cup with a twist of paper he settled down to write a letter to Ned. Such a confusion, he couldn’t imagine where to begin. He started with this room — the desk, the bed, the flies — and wrote out from there. About all that had happened since Zeke’s return home, the two Esquimaux camped in his house while he was sequestered here; about the wedding he couldn’t attend. About the newspaper article, which, although it hadn’t criticized him directly, had turned the whole city against him. He folded up the three long pages of newsprint he was including, and then confessed his theft of Dr. Boerhaave’s journal and the related glimpse of Zeke’s black book. Six pages, eight pages. His hand grew tired.

After a pause he wrote to Ned about the party the United Toxophilites had thrown for Zeke. Part welcome-home party, part bachelor party; all the Toxics in full regalia.

You may remember those suits. From the day Mr. Tagliabeau signed you on; all those men in green coats and white pants, with their bows and arrows. They're an archery club. I used to belong.

He told Ned about the speech Zeke had given, regretting that the Esquimaux bow and arrows he’d obtained for the club on Boothia had been lost through no fault of his own. And the drinking, the wild toasts, the dancing women and the arrows presented to Zeke with jokes about his aim on his wedding night. He wrote about the work he and Alexandra and Copernicus had done on his book before they were stalled. Then he found himself longing to write about the lonely nights here in this room.

The walls were tissue thin, and on Sunday nights — always, but only, Sunday nights — he could hear Linnaeus and Lucy making love. Those squeals, those little groans. He couldn’t imagine Lucy with her hair down, her mouth unpursed, the things she must do to make his brother make those sounds — they wanted another child, he knew. Perhaps that was the reason for their clocklike regularity. As for the way their noises made him think of Zeke and Lavinia, finally together… He kept himself from writing about any of this, describing instead his strange meeting with William Godfrey. Eighteen pages, twenty-one. At the end he wrote:

This is how everyone sees me now; as if I'm just life him.

IN BROWNING’S KITCHEN, the night after the wedding, Alexandra brooded as she cooked. Dismissed, she thought, as she lifted biscuits from the oven. She and Lavinia had never been equals, not really. What they’d done was wait together, and wait and wait and wait; and although this had bound them as survivors of a disaster were bound, so that they’d always have a connection, still she’d been Lavinia’s paid companion, never exactly a chosen friend. As Lavinia had made quite clear. The instant Zeke came back, Lavinia had turned from her. “You’ve been so good for me,” she’d said, when Alexandra proposed returning to Browning’s house. “But of course you’ll want to get back to your own work, now that you’ve managed to establish yourself.”

Their time together was over; she’d learned a great deal and must be grateful for that. And she was determined not to lose her relationship with Erasmus. Working together, she’d felt them building what she’d always imagined a friendship might be. They’d shared thoughts, work, reading, interests; they confided in each other but also respected each other’s privacy. She missed him every day.

On the tray before her she arranged the food she’d prepared for the Percy sisters: boiled chicken in jelly, the hot biscuits, butter, plum jam, lemonade. Browning had taken on the care of the two elderly women who lived across the street, and somehow they’d become Alexandra’s responsibility as well. They weren’t crazy, not exactly, but they were ancient and isolated and for the last six months had been convinced diat people were trying to poison them. They’d take food only from Browning’s hands, and eat it only in his presence. Morning and evening he brought food that had once been cooked by Harriet but which now Alexandra prepared. Then he sat patiently with them while they ate.

The texture of his life, Alexandra thought. Which was becoming the texture of hers. A crowd of people needing help, among which he spread himself and his wife and his sisters willingly but too thinly. Already she was tired of the way Browning assumed he could direct her.