Andrea Barrett - Archangel

“You’re one of my husband’s students?” she asked. The professor’s wife, Henrietta realized. Who had herself written several books, and joined many of her husband’s expeditions. “What’s happened?”

Abashed, Henrietta explained her situation. As she finished, the woman, who’d been nodding and smiling kindly throughout, glanced over at the men and then returned her attention to Henrietta. “You’ll travel with us tomorrow,” she said. The skin around her small dark eyes was soft and crinkled. “It’s not a problem, if you don’t mind roughing it with us until the rest of the students arrive.”

That night Henrietta slept in a tiny room, with a dormer window that leaked and a ceiling so low that she could press her palm against it. The sound of water dripping onto tin made her dream of the buckets she and her sister, Hester, set in the springhouse at home. The rain continued as she woke and dressed and trailed the professor and his wife to the waterfront, where at last she saw the sea — or not the sea, exactly, but a crowded harbor dense with docks and masts. At Oswego, schooners had also crowded against each other along the busy port. But that was a lake, not the sea, and there she’d been a struggling student, sharing sinks and bad food, washing her own clothes between classes with the other girls come from similar small towns and farms. Here — she grasped her bags more firmly — here she was a woman with a teaching certificate, about to start a course she couldn’t have afforded on her own.

The boat awaiting them was bigger, but not by much, than the wooden sailboat her mother used at home. The professor and his wife sat inside the small cabin and she sat outside, across from a mound of packages, between two women in gray dresses, beneath a piece of canvas strung up as an awning. After an hour the rain stopped, and although she’d dreaded seasickness she felt fine. When the captain said, “That’s it,” she leaned over the rail and saw a small island, curved like a comma, completely unimposing.

At the dock she stepped from the boat and saw gulls, a mound of dirty hay, a huge pile of packing crates, and another, larger boat pulling away, half the workmen leaving, on this Saturday afternoon, for their weekend holiday. A man the age of Henrietta’s father greeted the professor and said in a harried tone that he’d been there since early Friday and had rescued the newly delivered dormitory furniture. Fifty-eight beds and blankets and pillows, fifty-eight pairs of sheets and chamber sets — all, he said, as they moved along the sandy shore, piled into the barn that was meant to serve as their kitchen and lecture room.

The barn toward which he gestured, and from which the sheep had only just been moved, stood near an old house and a partly finished new building. Near it were planed boards, stacks of shingles, wheelbarrows, shovels, casks of nails — but not a sign of the microscopes or nets and dissecting trays which, Henrietta thought despairingly, the advertisements for the course had led her to expect. All night she’d fought the feeling that she’d made a terrible mistake. The boat’s captain consulted with the women dressed in gray, who were hanging back uneasily. The older one, who had signed on to cook — she’d earlier mistaken Henrietta for another of the servants — now declared that she was going back to the mainland. Her younger sister, who had looked envious when Henrietta stammered that she was actually one of the students, agreed that she too would leave.

But the house was almost ready, the man supervising the site assured them. The situation was better than it looked. He gestured toward the figures picking their way through the planks, ferrying bedrolls like a line of ants across the sandy ground to the barn: those were the remaining carpenters, moving out of the house and making room. The sheep were on their way back to the mainland and the workers would follow when they were done. At the news that there was a place off the pantry prepared for them, the cook and her sister decided to stay, while the professor nodded happily on hearing that he and his wife could settle upstairs as planned, along with the other teachers when they arrived.

“And you,” the professor’s wife said kindly, turning to Henrietta. “Until the rest of the students show up.”

“Thank you,” Henrietta said, trying to cool her burning cheeks. Soon everyone would be here and she’d be invisible. Near the tip of her boot a little black cricket popped into the air and the professor, sweeping his arm to include not only the cricket but the land, the house, the barn, the sand, the birds and oysters and eelgrass, said, “A rich man donated all of this to us.”

How, Henrietta wondered, did one get given an island? The same way, she supposed, he’d been given a museum, a university department, a staff, a wife who seemed able to read his mind. Not once, either last night or this morning on the boat, had he mentioned where the students would sleep or eat, instead speaking rapturously about all they’d study. Taxonomy and paleontology, the embryology of radiates and the anatomy of articulates, the physiology of vertebrate fishes, techniques of microscopy, dissection and specimen preservation, the chemistry of the sea. Or some selection of those things: he didn’t believe in a set curriculum. They would follow, he said pleasingly, where the book of nature led.

“You’ll see,” said the professor’s wife, patting Henrietta’s arm and pointing out the attractions of the buildings they passed. The barn would be divided into a kitchen and a large dining hall, which would also serve as a lecture room. The empty dormitory, shaped like a giant H , would soon have on its upper floor twenty-nine sleeping rooms for the male students, lining both walls of one long wing, and the same number for the women in the other, with dressing rooms in the short connecting wing. Two enormous workrooms would fill the first floor, each lined with rows of tables and aquaria.

Would, would — but so far the dormitory had no floors at all and the barn floor was only half-laid, cartons and furniture trailing off into packed dirt. No walls had yet been built and there were no signs of either a kitchen or a lecture hall. The foreman explained that his remaining men would work for a few more hours and then leave in the morning for their Sunday holiday. For a moment Henrietta thought of joining them. Then she put down her bag, followed the cook and her sister into the house, seized a broom and, as if she were back home, cleaning up after a family gathering, began sweeping together the sand and tufts of grass and bits of tobacco left behind by the workmen.

The cook lit the stove, boiled water, found a frying pan and some eggs; her sister washed cups and plates. Sweeping the detritus out the door, Henrietta watched the professor, his white hair waving gaily in the breeze and his cuffs flapping over his wrists, convince the workmen of the importance of his summer school for the study of natural history. They would stay through Sunday and Monday too, the men agreed, giving up their day off in an effort to finish the dormitory before the students arrived.

“Aren’t they kind?” said the professor’s wife, coming up behind her. She’d found an apron, which she dropped over Henrietta’s head. “Sacrificing their holiday like that? We’ll follow their example.”

What they accomplished during the next three days would later, when Henrietta looked back on it, seem simply impossible. The carpenters worked until it was too dark for them to drive a nail, laying the floors in the dormitory, finishing the barn floor and raising a partition that set off the lecture room, finally installing the big stove in the kitchen. In the dormitory they didn’t have time to divide the long spaces into bedrooms, but they did enclose several dressing rooms and wall off the men’s side from the women’s. Henrietta, the professor’s wife, the cook, and her sister unpacked and washed and put away hundreds of plates and cups and saucers and glasses and a clattering mound of silverware, then repeated the process with the chamberpots and basins and ewers. They unwrapped the furniture, organized the move across the yard, swept the shavings from the new dormitory floor, and had the men arrange the beds against the walls so that each had its own window overhead. Sheets, blankets, and pillows spilled from the crates and settled on those beds, which along with the chamber sets marked off imaginary rooms.