Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

In the room below me the aunts ignore him as they work on their Manual of Geography, a book for school-girls, they have such high hopes. Lessons composed of questions and answers, which a classroom of girls with scraped-back hair may murmur in unison:

Q. What is the climate of the Torrid Zone?

A. It is very hot.

Q. What is the climate of the Frigid Zone?

A. It is very cold.

Q. What is the climate of the Temperate Zone?

A. It is mild or moderate; the heat being not so great as in the Torrid Zone, nor the cold so severe as in the Frigid Zone.

Aunt Daphne, Aunt Jane. If they knew what I think. If they were to step outside and hail James, and if he were ill-mannered enough (which he’s never been, in his five years as our neighbor) to inquire about our unusual family, they would say they are cousins; they are not. That they are my aunts, which they are not. Not looking at his broad shoulders, the strength of his hand on his horse’s reins; not looking at the planes of his jaw or the shape of his brow, because they care for the minds but not the bodies of men, they would point out the charms of our small stone house. Three women, and everything just so. They would not say that I was born on a farm near Chester, to a family with two parents, two sisters, three brothers all dead of the yellow fever when I was an infant; the surviving brother torn from my side while a few pigs and chickens wandered bewildered through the dirt. The aunts took me in, I belong to them. They think I will live here forever with them, sharing their studies, caring for them: I will not.

Their book is to have a section on meteorology. Why there is weather. What it is. From the papers and books their friends have loaned us, I am to collate the theories of rain. What will be left of all my work, after they simplify it? Something like this, which they wrote today:

Q. What surrounds the Earth?

A. The Atmosphere; composed of air, vapor, and other gases.

Q. What can you say of the Atmosphere?

A. It is thinner or less dense the further it is from the Earth.

Q. When water dries up where does it go?

A. It rises into the air.

Q. How can water rise into the air?

A. It is turned to vapor; and then it is lighter than the air.

Q. When vapors rise and become condensed, what are they called?

A. Clouds.

Anaximenes, I tell the aunts — offering this scrap much as our cat, Cassandra, brings moles to the kitchen door and lays them at my feet — Anaximenes thought air might condense first to cloud, then to water, then to earth, and finally to stone. Why not include, I asked Aunt Daphne, this:

Q: Why are raindrops round?

A: One theory is this: Because the corners get rubbed off as they fall side by side. And because the round shape overcomes the resistance of the air; and because even the smallest parts of the world are obliged to represent and mirror the round image of the universe.

But the aunts are no more interested in these old theories than in the question of why Cassandra has extra toes on her paws. Aunt Daphne said, “Lavinia. When will you learn to keep in mind our audience?”

Yet why would the girls who will someday sit in a hot schoolroom, bored and weary with reciting these lessons, not feel the longings I feel? For the tantalizing theory, the mysterious fact — Descartes’ assumption that water is composed of eel-shaped particles, easily separated. Urbano d’Aviso’s proposition that vapor is bubbles of water filled with fire, ascending through the air so long as it is heavier than they are; stopping when they arrive at a place where the air is equally light. Why must all we write be practical?

September 13, 1810

He comes, he goes, he comes, he goes. The other one I would tell you about: Mr. Frank Wells. He is well enough favored, tall and slim, thinning brown hair, a nose as long and sensitive as a greyhound’s. A bit older than James, with printer’s hands. He has his own business and has built a house upriver from us, which I have never seen. Unlike James he likes the way I look. He comes, he goes, along with the others — botanists and geologists; a Frenchman named Rafinesque, fat about the waist, whose shirt escapes from his pantaloons and shows bare flesh as he lectures us; a shy and friendly entomologist named Thomas Say. They admire the aunts and their work and the way they have raised me. Our house of three virgins, so studious. So neat. Every hour occupied by something useful. We rise, cook, sweep, and wash, tend to the gardens and then study and study, always useful things. The aunts wear spectacles, their eyes are weary. At night they ask me to read to them. Their spirits are weary as well. Aunt Jane has spells.

“It is all too much for me,” she says. April, often. Or September, like now. When everything around us is lush and damp and hot and fertile and florid. The box-hedges send out a powerful smell and the vines trying to strangle the trees send out another, even stronger; the mockingbirds sit on the roof and sing all night; a sound you would like, as I do. Aunt Jane takes to her bed, her skin muddy and cold and her limbs unmoving, with a cloth on her eyes and tufts of cotton blocking her ears from the bird-song. She gets sick for no reason, well for no reason. One day she rises, resumes her duties, declares that she is better. In a few months it will all be too much for her again. Her friends, those studious men, shake their heads in sympathy and whisper, Melancholia.

The aunts are Quakers, and have raised me the same. On our day of rest we go to Meeting, we sit in silence, we wait with the sun streaming through the windows for the spirit to enter and move us. In that calm still place I struggle not to leap from my bench and shout — but what is the use of talking about this, when you are not here to advise me? What is the use?

September 24, 1810

James again. He nods as he rides by, once more on his way to visit Sophie. The slip of a Sophie, in her house on the hill. Half my weight and half my brains and half my wit; and a hundred times my fortune and a father, who’s a banker. Around her neck, a fine gold chain. Little rings on little fingers; little kid shoes on little feet. James could pick her up the way I might a spaniel, if we had a spaniel: the aunts do not like dogs. No doubt he has lifted her lightly into a carriage, or onto a saddle. I hear she plays the piano beautifully. In the garden I watch him passing by; I stand so he can see me and he nods. He rides on, lovely, taken.

If the aunts knew what I think. If the aunts knew what I dream. Aunt Daphne has her room and Aunt Jane hers but they bundle at night in the same bed — for comfort they say, for warmth — and they think I will settle for this.

September 8, September 13; October 1, 2, 3—what is the point of dating these words as I write them? They are for you, and when I find you, dates will mean nothing to us. You are in Ecuador, or in Cleveland; in England or Boston, the Rocky Mountains; or perhaps you are a few miles away, stripped as I was of our family name. Wouldn’t I recognize you, though? No matter how you’d changed? If I saw you at the market, or passed you on the street …

I have but the faintest memory of our last day. The aunts said the plague left only us alive: a little boy, barely five years old, and me, not yet turned two. Did you cry when the wagons came? When everything inside our home was burned, the bedding and furniture piled and torched but the things outside, uncontaminated, prudently saved and divided? The aunts took me, some hoes and hay-rakes, two pigs, a horse, a cart. Whoever took you, said the aunts — and how could they lose the name of that family who stopped on their journey to someplace else and, out of pity and charity, left with an extra, orphaned child? — whoever took you, also took the cow.