Andrea Barrett - Archangel

Owen was at Cambridge now, a rising young astrophysicist with everything before him. Whereas she … at least he was polite about her work. Books and articles for the interested ignorant— Astronomy for the Young, Eclipses for Everyone —mingling what she hoped were sufficient facts with artful descriptions and homely analogies designed to take the place of the mathematics she loved but knew her readers couldn’t understand. The Milky Way is shaped like a biscuit. A nebula is like a cloud on the verge of condensing into rain. Donkey work, requiring a certain gift but not, despite what Owen was polite enough to pretend, a valuable one. She pushed herself to try something new each time. For her latest, The Universe Around Us , she’d promised her publisher a clear and interesting version of the complicated material often mauled in popular accounts. Until recently, when she’d begun this difficult chapter on gravitation and the ether of space, she’d thought it was going well.

She turned back to Owen’s letter, struck again by that image of Sir Oliver Lodge bolting from the meeting. Only a few days earlier she’d seen an article about him in the newspaper. He was on a ship from London to New York, about to begin a big lecture tour. Some of the talks were already sold out, which wasn’t surprising — unusually, for such an eminent scientist, Lodge liked to write for those who had no scientific training, and she’d sometimes turned to his books for help. Remembering that a list of lecture dates had appeared in the article, Phoebe rummaged through the stack by the fireplace until she found the right paper.

ON THE EVENING of Lodge’s scheduled talk, a crowd snaked out between the tall arches of the Academy of Music, and she learned that every seat was sold. Reluctantly, she bought a standing-room ticket and stepped into the moving mass, carried up the stairs and then up again to one of the galleries on the second tier, where she came to rest behind two women pressed against a fluted column.

“You can fit in here,” the first woman said, moving her purse to make room.

“It’s Phoebe, isn’t it?” said the second. Her nostrils faced more out than down, giving her a slightly pig-like air. “Odette,” she continued, tapping her chunky throat. “Jenkins — your mother’s friend?”

“Of course,” Phoebe murmured. One of the scores of well-meaning women who served with her mother on committees to educate the children of China or feed the starving people caught in Russia’s civil war. Too many to keep straight. They’d cheered her decision to go to college, been delighted when she got her job in Washington, tried to conceal their disappointment when she married young and promptly had Sam.

“There he is!” the first woman said.

Phoebe craned her head but could see the famous old physicist only in snippets. One long leg, one big hand; he was enormously tall. A sliver of his forehead gleamed in the light of the chandelier before a woman’s hat eclipsed it. He would speak, he said — he had a fine voice — on “The Reality of the Unseen.”

She missed his introduction. His words floated up through the horseshoe-shaped tiers, interrupted when the crowd murmured or shifted in their seats, obliterated entirely when Odette whispered to her friend. There were things known to be real, Lodge said, but impossible to see: atoms, for example. Molecules. She strained to hear, hoping he’d describe the invisible but omnipresent ether. Instead she caught something about the vast distances between the stars and the contrast between that and the minuteness of the atomic world: also unseen, but also real. After a lost chunk that must have contained a vital transition, she heard next a sentence about the reality of mental events, such as thoughts and feelings, which were also invisible. She peered through the crack between the two women’s necks.

“Likewise,” Lodge said just then, “the human personality survives death in a form we cannot see, but which makes communication after death possible.”

She pulled her head back and jammed her hands into her coat pockets. What kind of science was this? She knew he was interested in psychical research — he was as famous for this, in circles she avoided completely, as he was for his work on the ether and electromagnetic waves — but she’d assumed his lecture would be about physics. Instead, he was explaining how great discoveries in science have reversed the evidence of the senses: the earth is not flat, but round, and it is not static, but whirls through space at inconceivable speeds. “So too will we come to reverse the evidence of our senses with regard to death,” she heard. “Psychic research, the youngest science, deals, like astronomy, with phenomena that cannot be examined in the laboratory. Still, theories can be tested and refined over time. Science will eventually prove the existence, all around us, of former humans; they are not far from us; we are all one family still. To the mothers of boys lost in the war, I would say that they are only separated from us by a veil of sense.”

In front of her, both women sighed, and Phoebe remembered that Odette’s son had gone overseas to drive an ambulance. Had he returned? All around her, the audience — mostly women, she now realized — listened raptly, while Odette reached back to touch Phoebe’s arm, as if they had something in common.

“We should not exalt the senses,” Lodge continued. Phoebe drew her arm away. “They have been developed through necessity for the physical survival of the fittest. But if we did not dedicate ourselves so completely to the daily work of keeping our bodies alive, what organs of spiritual comprehension might we not develop? The space that separates you”—he stretched one hand toward the audience—“from me”—he pressed that hand to his chest—“is not empty. It is the purveyor of light, of electricity, of magnetism; and it may well contain our immortal souls, which persist after matter has disintegrated.”

She stepped back before she understood that she was going to, ignored Odette’s startled face, and pushed her way through the bodies and down the stairs. Wrong, so wrong. She hated when people spoke of communication with the dead, and it was worse when a scientist did so. Rappings and knockings, scribblings on slates, ectoplasm and all of that — ancient history, half a century old, most already proven fraudulent and the rest fit only for parlor games but still strangely persistent. When those superstitions had surfaced again, during the thrilling years when the discoveries of X-rays and radium, radio waves and electrons had made almost anything seem possible, she and Michael had simply ignored them, instead reading eagerly about light as waves, light as photons, energy possessing mass. The space between them, Michael said, was filled with energy, the ground of life itself.

She couldn’t imagine what he’d have made of the ease by which, once the war began to swallow the young, those left behind succumbed to the resuscitated parlor tricks. The turbaned women cracking their joints in code or slipping their feet from specially stiffened shoes to write with their toes on slates — by then, left behind herself, she knew exactly how despicable they were. In 1909, not long after Owen returned to England, Michael had welcomed into the observatory a little boy who turned out to have measles. The boy recovered, but Michael’s fever soared higher and higher until the morning he closed his eyes and sighed and — stopped, just stopped. In that instant she’d known she would never talk with him again.

The lobby stank of face powder; Phoebe pushed through the doors and into the street, where the snow flickered in the electric lights and a cat streaked by with something squirming in its clamped jaws. Michael had wanted to show off the wonders of the universe and now — she was walking so fast that her cheeks were hot and a woman in a short skirt stared at her — now, because a boy had given him measles, because she had a boy of her own to raise (the church bells chimed the hour; he’d be doing his homework), because, despite working all the time, she couldn’t save enough to buy a house of her own, she was, at the age of forty-one, living with her elderly parents, and still, despite having published three books and innumerable magazine articles, orbiting so far from the center of the scientific world that she must turn to others for explanations that would, when included in her book, lend it the air of authority she lacked herself. She must go to a lecture where, instead of learning what she needed, she was forced again to confront the unalterable fact of Michael’s death.