Andrea Barrett - Archangel

TWO BRIGHT WHITE ships, crisp and military-looking with broad red stripes across the bow, came out of the distance to meet them when they were still several hundred miles from Halifax. Sailors from the Coast Guard cutters transferred food, which they needed badly — oranges! Sam saw, and apples and cheese, potatoes and meat, fresh bread! — along with toothbrushes and hairbrushes, soap, shampoo, donated clothing, more blankets. Two doctors, wanting to examine the wounded to see who might need the alignment of broken bones checked with their portable X-ray machine and who should be transferred to the cutters for care, also came aboard.

For the first time in more than a week, Sam brushed his hair, cleaned his teeth with something other than a finger, and along with everyone else dipped into the new supplies to spruce up for that night’s celebration. Officers from the cutters joined them, the captain extracted a case of whisky from the hold, a few passengers did what they could to decorate the deck while others, sensing home not far away, started to relax. All around him, Sam saw groups of people, faces suddenly scrubbed shades lighter, smiling and talking with the friends they’d made on the journey. These women bound to those, these students to those sailors; the college girls — for him, still simply pleasant acquaintances — more closely attached to Duncan and Harold and George than he’d understood.

He felt, for a moment, unusually alone — more so when he saw that Axel, standing only a few feet away as the whisky was handed around, was barricaded by Duncan and Harold and George. Fanning out from them were Laurel and Pansy and Maud, talking to a young man Sam hadn’t met; Lucinda, playing cards with the plant physiologist he’d first seen the day they were rescued; and Bessie and Aaron, sitting on one of the hatches, watching the constellations rise in the sky. Sam went over to Bessie’s side as Pansy asked the young man what he planned to do when he got home.

“I’m still in school,” he said shyly.

Sam looked up, spotting the stars of Pegasus. He remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders, following the line of his arm as he traced out shapes overhead. Look at the horse, do you see the dolphin? There’s a whale … Or did he remember those shapes from other evenings, much later, with his mother?

“I’m an art student,” the young man continued. “I was traveling on a fellowship. But now …”

“You’ll go back when the war is over?” Maud asked.

“What’s the point?” he said. “Without my friend.”

As Sam continued to pick from the glittering sky all the constellations he could remember, the student described how he and a dear friend from their school in Boston had split a traveling scholarship meant for one of them so that they could both see Europe. Despite their pinched budget and the signs of war cropping up everywhere, they’d visited Paris, Amsterdam, Verona, Venice, and even Berlin before returning to London, which they’d reached about the same time Sam reached Edinburgh. They too had found their ship home from Glasgow commandeered and later sailings either booked or canceled; they too had boarded the Athenia as a last resort. After the torpedo struck, he and his friend had managed to stay together in one of the last and most crowded lifeboats, which was also the one that had swung too close to the Knute Nelson and been crushed by its propellers.

“We dove into the water,” the student said. “We dove and then we swam until we found a plank to hang on to. After a while we were picked up by another lifeboat. By then the Southern Cross was near us, so we rowed there. And then we got too close to the back of that …”

As his voice trailed away, Duncan, who had moved closer, said, “That wasn’t the boat …?”

The young man nodded, looking over at Axel and Duncan, then down at the deck, as if embarrassed that others had already heard the story and that some had seen the boat overturned. How could anyone be so unlucky? Not one but two lifeboats wrecked beneath him, his friend by his side through the torpedoing, through the first lifeboat’s destruction, only to be lost. Sam closed his eyes. The ship rolled beneath him, a long, slow movement that made him dizzy. A hand touched his: Axel?

Bessie, Sam saw, when he opened his eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“The whisky,” Sam said faintly.

“Let me get you some water,” she said, burrowing through the crowd. Duncan came up on Sam’s other side and poked his shoulder. Jovially, stupidly, looking exactly the same as he had all week — the new supplies had meant nothing to him — he said, “Too much to drink?”

Where had Axel gone?

Duncan stopped smiling. “You don’t look very well.”

“ Now you worry about me?” Sam said.

An odd look crossed Duncan’s face. “What went on at the congress — that’s work. I don’t agree with your work; I want it buried. Doesn’t mean I want you buried. Until you came over the side of this ship, when I thought you might have drowned, I felt—”

“Oh, please,” Sam said.

“You’re impossible,” said Duncan. He pushed past Sam and toward Harold and George. Then, finally, Axel reappeared, his expression concerned and his hand stretched toward Sam.

That night on the water, he’d scanned every boat they approached for Axel’s face. Then, it hadn’t mattered that they very seldom saw each other, that since Sam’s time in Russia — no, before that, even — since Axel’s marriage, perhaps, or since Sam had lost his first job and Axel hadn’t been able to help him, they had drifted apart. He’d come to the meeting in Edinburgh hoping to repair this, tracking Axel through the corridors and cocktail parties like a devoted beagle, but although they’d had pleasant moments and caught each other up on the trivia of their lives, they’d never had the one, real, deep conversation Sam had been missing for so many years. And when Duncan attacked him so vigorously, Axel had not defended him. He hadn’t supported Duncan — but he had not, in public, stood up for Sam. Instead, afterward, he’d pulled Sam toward a bench beneath a holly tree and questioned him closely about his results. Then he said — Sam felt this simultaneously as a blessing and a dismissal — that the work itself seemed promising. But why, Axel scolded, would he expose it to the world at such an early stage! If he would only stop speculating in public …

“It’s all right,” Axel said quietly. “It’s all right. It wasn’t as bad as all that.”

“What wasn’t?” Sam asked stupidly.

“When our boat overturned, under the stern of the Southern Cross —I saw you turn pale when that young man was speaking, the one we’d pulled from the water earlier, with his friend. I was afraid you might be thinking of what had happened to me and how much worse it might have been. But it wasn’t so terrible, not really. I was in the water for a while but I didn’t know I was hurt, I couldn’t even feel the gash on my head. And I had an oar to cling to, and it wasn’t too long before the crewmen from the Southern Cross found me and got me aboard. And then once I got here, and Duncan tracked me down, he arranged everything. If you were worrying about me, please don’t.”

How was he only now learning for sure what had happened to Axel? If they’d had time alone together, if they’d been able to talk … why hadn’t Axel ever come to him ?

“That’s what happened to you?” Sam said now. “That night in the boat?” It wasn’t so much what changed in the environment that altered a living organism; it was the when . A question of timing. When in the course of development does the event arrive that initiates the cascade of changes? “That’s what happened?” he repeated.