Andrea Barrett - Archangel

It should have been easy to write to her mother about their household god — but the truth, Henrietta thought as she folded the letter away, was that she had little to say, despite her early arrival at the island. During those three days of working like one of the servants, she’d shared meals with the professor and his wife and awaited his brilliant insights. Instead, he’d talked about the money due to the carpenters and kitchen staff, the price of coffee and sugar, the state of the sheets. He drank tea without sugar, she learned. Stripped the meat from fish heads and the marrow from bones. As his teaching staff trickled in, she also learned that he greeted old friends with a kiss on each cheek. Six times, while she occupied a place at the table where she had no right to be, she listened to the professor’s wife explain how Miss Atkins had mistaken the date, shown up at the inn in New Bedford wet and confused, accompanied them to the island, and then—“She’s been such a help!”

Six times she smiled ruefully as the professor beamed across the table and agreed with his wife — and this was, apparently, the closest she was going to get to him. The minute the other students swarmed into the barn she’d felt herself disappear, one minnow among a shoal in dark skirts and striped shirtwaists, mingled with young men in loose jackets, all looking up at him. An honest report to her mother would read: I see him from the back of the room. From across the field. From the far end of the dining hall . He was simultaneously genial and boastful, brilliant, confused, brimming with life, half-asleep; unable to remember anyone’s name — he’d twice confused her with a woman from Bridgeport, whose dark curly hair resembled her own — yet strangely alert to their inner selves. I don’t understand a thing about him, she’d have to write. Any more than I understand if I like it here, or hate it .

At first either too lonely, or too surrounded by company, she put off answering the letter. On Monday night she was alone in the empty, echoing dormitory; on Tuesday night it was filled with people; by Wednesday night, when she went upstairs after a day that seemed to have lasted a week, she found that the long, open, empty space had been not only populated but partially divided. Three beds along each wall had been enclosed like oysters within tiny planked rooms, which the workmen had built that afternoon. They’d build more each day, she knew. The professor’s lessons would be punctuated with the repeated tap-tap-TAP of nails being driven home, and each night the common room would seem smaller, the walls advancing toward her own bed until finally she too was enclosed. I wish, she might have written to her mother, that you and Hester were here. Or that I had a friend .

In the dining hall she ate each meal with different students and compared notes with still others in lectures. The blind fish of the Mammoth Cave, she wrote, thought by some to demonstrate direct modification of an organism by the environment … At bedtime, in the women’s wing, she passed soap to the two Marys and chatted with Lily, who slept next to her, and with Laura and Katherine, whose beds faced hers. All of this, the patient rubbing of elbows and the accidental, meaningless intimacy, was familiar from her time at Oswego. But here everything seemed to happen more quickly and some of the students had already formed attachments. Already there were pairs and trios who always sat together at meals, walked together afterward — how had they so swiftly found companions?

By Friday, when the entire class followed the professor, his wife, and two of the assistant teachers to the southwest tip of the island, for a lesson observing and collecting marine invertebrates, she was beginning to think that her days alone with the professor and his wife had done nothing but separate her from the other students. The professor, standing on a rock, said that because the grotto he’d found was accessible only from an hour before dead low tide until an hour after it turned, they would for the sake of efficiency be collecting in pairs. She stood uncomfortably behind a group who seemed at ease with each other, nodding seriously and exchanging glances as he read their names from a list. Her new partner was someone she didn’t know, a slip of a girl she’d glimpsed darting down the stairs while the others were still dressing.

On the rocks, where the professor lined them up, they faced a horseshoe of rocky ledges, roofed over by a boulder to form a watery cave. The professor perched on a wooden stool next to the boulder. At his command, the first pair, a high school teacher from Maine and an instructor at Antioch College, scrambled down the weedy rocks toward the grotto, pausing at the entrance.

“Crawl right inside!” the professor encouraged them. He waved his cane and the wind rose, lifting strands of his white hair. “Don’t worry about getting wet!”

The men disappeared, leaving visible only the soles of their rubberized canvas boots. Henrietta, clenching her bucket and pocketknife, stole a glance at her partner’s tiny feet. Above them the professor consulted his pocket watch. Five minutes later — only by such strict scheduling, he’d said, could they all see the place for themselves — he cried “Time!” and the two young men backed out and stood, grinning, guarding their sloshing buckets as they picked their way back to the shore.

Two more pairs of men entered, and then it was time for the first pair of women. Henrietta realized, as the professor signaled, that she hadn’t quite registered her partner’s plant-like name. “Clover?” she said tentatively.

“Daphne,” her partner responded. “Ready?”

Henrietta nodded and they clambered over the stones. Somewhere in the writings of Ovid, a Daphne turned into a tree. And indeed her partner was as slim as a tree and had pale green eyes. They reached the opening in the rocks and paused.

“Yesterday,” the professor said from above them, waving his cane encouragingly, “my wife was able to reach quite a few specimens by kneeling at the entrance and reaching inside.”

Yesterday, Henrietta recalled, he’d reminded them all that their previous training meant nothing to him, and that he didn’t care what they already knew, or thought they knew. He was interested only in what they could learn by careful observation here. Both she and Daphne balanced themselves on their hands and knees and inched forward, lowering their heads beneath the lip of the roof. Although they’d folded the tops of their skirts around their belts, the hems were already wet and hung heavily around their calves. The sheer bulk of the material kept their lower halves outside the grotto.

“How stupid our clothes are,” Daphne muttered.

Henrietta tugged and shifted, but the folds of her skirt, which dragged on the shells and tore at the algae, kept blocking her way. No wonder the professor’s wife had stopped where she had. “Ridiculous,” she said, trying to fit herself alongside Daphne’s slim torso. From the shore they must look like a pair of handbells, stems slipped into the cave. Still, even if they couldn’t crawl inside as far as the men had, they could see all around.

As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she spotted pink algae, red algae, and something that looked like tiny green tomatoes or grapes. Starfish, barnacles, and sea anemones everywhere, Metridium marginatum : some fully withdrawn into dull lumps of jelly, others showing a coy frill, the boldest drawn tall and waving their tentacles, purple or pink or white or brown, orange or scarlet, absurdly plant-like yet fully animal. When she touched one, the plumy fringe shrank and disappeared.

Daphne, who had already pried loose several Metridium with her pocketknife, fixed her gaze on a patch of seaweed matted over one particular nook. “There is someone,” she said, moving like a cobra, “hiding under that …” She pounced and came up with a sea urchin. The walls were covered, Henrietta saw; the walls were entirely alive; more of the prickly mounds hid here and there, along with terraces of barnacles, which made room for rows of mussels, which gave way to clumps of sea anemones. Every inch of the rock was used in a way that seemed not random but purposeful, a pattern that, like the tiles on a floor, wasted no space but still allowed each creature access to the nourishing tide. How did that happen? She’d seen clumps of mosses and ferns make similar patterns at the Hammondsport Glen, near home.