Andrea Barrett - Archangel

The Smithsonian’s copy of that book was one of the last that she remembered Michael reading, and indeed the instant she opened the library’s cheaper edition, poorly bound and smelling of pipe tobacco, she saw the gilt apples along the spine of the red morocco volume Michael had held. Clearly written, she remembered him saying; parts quite useful but canceled out by the odd sentences dropped here and there: If any one thinks that the ether, with all its massiveness and energy, has probably no psychical significance, I find myself unable to agree with him . He’d pushed the book aside, then, not derisively but with a dismissal final enough to keep her from reading it.

Nor would she now; she pushed it, palm flat as Michael’s had been, away. What did she want from this, why did she care?What she’d written was already both too detailed for her book, and not detailed enough for a proper article. Yet that evening, back at her parents’ home, she tried again, meaning to convey some sense of Lodge’s fame as a teacher and scientist:

Sir Oliver Lodge, long a preeminent physicist, is only slightly less well-known than Marconi. At an early age he decided that his main business was with what were then called “the imponderables”—the things that worked secretly and have to be apprehended mentally. So it was that electricity and magnetism became the branch of physics that most fascinated him. Once, in London, at the height of his fame as a lecturer on popular science, policemen had to rearrange the traffic patterns outside the Royal Institution so that the cabs delivering his eager audience could fit in the street. Another time, giving a lecture and demonstration on “The Discharge of a Leyden Jar,” he was as astonished as the audience to see the coating on the walls flashing and sparking in sympathy with the waves being emitted by the oscillations on the lecture table. From the basement came a man, shaken and pale, to report that the gas and water pipes were similarly sparking .

She stopped when her mother, walking the house restlessly long after she should have been in bed, leaned over her shoulder and read the last lines.

“I like the sparks,” she said, resting her fingers on Phoebe’s forehead.

As if the sparks explained how a man could move from the drudgery of his family’s clay and chemical business to the heights of science, and then to an ardent belief in the possibility of communing with the dead. Or how a leading researcher into electromagnetism and the nature of light could end up being the most famous opponent of a radical new theory. If Einstein was right — but he was only possibly right; which meant Lodge was possibly not wrong, or at least not wrong about the ether, although utterly wrong about the spirits in the ether … Phoebe squirmed beneath her mother’s hand.

“That’s — for your book?” her mother asked.

“Not exactly,” Phoebe said. “Maybe. I don’t know. I went to hear him …”

“I know,” her mother said. “Odette mentioned.” She traced the outline of Phoebe’s forehead with two fingers, as if the friction might extract a clearer sentence. “Let me make you some tea.”

Phoebe, pulling away, pushed her mother’s hand toward the newspaper, open to yet another of the frequent pieces about Lodge. “Here,” she said. “I’m not the only one who’s curious about him.”

The article, which her mother scanned quickly, offered an impression of Lodge as he’d appeared soon after his arrival in New York. A typical Victorian, the reporter had noted, “of the tradition of Darwin and Huxley, who still reads his Wordsworth and Tennyson, who still appreciates the poet’s wonderment in those days at the marvels of science.”

Three more columns followed, all meant, Phoebe thought while her mother finished, to drum up interest in Lodge’s forthcoming lectures. His next scheduled talk was actually to be on “The Ether of Space”—his special area of expertise, and the material she most needed to review. Owen had gone to the meeting in London, to hear the results of the Einstein experiment. Maybe she should go to this in the same spirit and listen to Lodge expound what he really knew, taking from it what she needed. Wasn’t science based on weighing evidence for oneself?

Surprising herself, she said, “I should try to hear this next lecture. I think I’ll ask Sam to come with me.” She imagined his quiet, sturdy presence at her side, his quick intelligence; he’d see things she didn’t, and he wouldn’t be easily distracted or upset. “He might find it interesting. And I could use the company.”

“Since when,” her mother asked, moving away, so rich herself in friends and colleagues that she might not have meant her question to pierce Phoebe, “do you want company?”

IT WAS TRUE that she and Sam seldom did things together anymore — he kept to himself, as she did, and he was busy, as she was herself — but to Phoebe’s secret delight he said the trip sounded fun; she’d only brought him twice before to New York. Together they took the train and shared the sandwiches Phoebe’s mother packed for them; together they rode the subway to the towering Woolworth Building and there took the elevator up and up, braving the last little climb on the spiral stairs for the sake of the view from the observatory. The entire island lay before them, the East River and the ships moving out into the harbor, Brooklyn stretching away to one side and New Jersey on the other. Pigeons wheeled and sank and rose again, seagulls floated on curved wings, radio waves poured invisibly from the windows. Marconi himself, Phoebe told her son, had sent a wireless message from his office across the ocean, announcing the opening of this building.

Sam leaned against the railing and pointed north, saying, “Look at the park! Look at the rivers! You can see the museum!” When he laughed and tugged his coat from her hands, she realized she’d been clutching it as if he were a toddler about to pitch over the side.

He teased her about that for the rest of the afternoon, as they ducked in and out of bookshops and took the subway back uptown. After a quick bowl of soup they headed to the theater, where they found seats high in the balcony, and Sam inspected the crowd streaming into the orchestra seats and up the stairs. Around them, coats migrated into seats and hats moved onto laps, until a curtain opened on Lodge’s tall, white-haired figure, bowing into the wave of applause and then, as Phoebe studiously readied her steno pad and mechanical pencil, beginning to speak.

Sam brushed her arm with his — an accident? Turning to him, watching him, she missed Lodge’s opening lines. Usually, when she reached to straighten Sam’s collar or fix his hair, he stood so still it was as if he was willing himself not to flinch. But he bumped her elbow with his again, gently, almost playfully, as he had when he was small. “Thank you for bringing me,” he whispered. “This is interesting.”

Sam was glad he was here, Sam was interested; she focused her attention on the talk. What had she already missed? The ether, Lodge was saying, far from being beyond all comprehension, was in fact the most substantial thing in the universe. Why then had we taken so long to discern it? Just because it is so universal. If we were fish living at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by water, so far from the surface that we had no sense of anything but water; if we were moving in water, breathing water — what is the last thing we would discover? The water itself. So it had been with the ether of space.

Now Phoebe listened intently; she could use this. “Hold your hand near a fire,” he said, “put your face in the sunshine, and what is it you feel? You are now as directly conscious as you can be of the ethereal medium. True, you cannot apprehend the ether as you can matter, by touching or tasting or even smelling it; but it is something akin to vibrations in the ether that our skin and our eyes feel. The ether does not in any way affect our sense of touch and it does not resist motion in the slightest degree. Not only can our bodies move through it, but much larger bodies, planets and comets, can rush through it at a prodigious speed without showing the least sign of friction. I have myself designed and carried out delicate experiments to see whether whirling discs of iron could to the smallest extent grip the ether and carry it round, with so much as a thousandth part of their own velocity. The answer is, no. Why, then, if it is so impalpable, should we assert its existence? May it not be a mere fanciful speculation, to be extruded from physics as soon as possible?”