Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

He is kind enough, smart enough. If you were here, would you tell me what to do?

Q. What is it I feel for James?

Q. What is it James feels for me?

Q. What theory accounts for these feelings, which can come to nothing?

Q. What?

In the garden Mr. Wells held out a sheaf of papers. “From my Charleston cousin, William Wells,” he said. “He practices medicine in London now, and in his spare time studies nature. He is writing an essay on the dew.”

Perhaps you are in London as well, perhaps you are leading the life I long for, rich in friends and good conversation, the universe unfolding before you. I smoothed my skirts against the bench, aware that Mr. Wells was watching me as he talked about dew as rain that falls very slowly, particles of water moving toward the objects that attract them. He stuttered and looked down at his lap, at the papers in his lap.

“Does dew come from the earth, or from the air?” he read from his cousin’s notes. “Does it rise or fall? What is the source of the cold that condenses the vapor? At first I thought that the deposition of the dew might cause the cold we observe on those objects. But I have come to realize that the cold precedes the dew.”

He turned to another page. “My cousin did an experiment,” he said. “Which we might try to repeat.”

We gathered uncarded wool from the aunts’ stores, and on the balance they use to weigh mordants and pigments for dyeing, we weighed out two equal amounts. One sample we spread in a loose circle on the grass. Inside a long, thick-walled piece of clay drainage pipe, set on end so that it was open to the darkening sky, we spread the other sample in a circle the same size. The aunts watched, unimpressed but polite. They have borrowed many books from Mr. Wells.

“I’ll return in the morning,” he said. “Quite early, if you don’t mind.”

When the aunts didn’t offer him a bed, he rode off to his own home. The legs of his horse disappeared in the mist, then the horse’s head, and then his own, leaving only the silver rays of the moon and the clear, cold air. Aunt Daphne made me come inside but then she and Aunt Jane kept me awake, arguing in the fierce, airy whispers they think I can’t hear through the wall between our rooms. Their words were lost but not their tone and I knew they had settled into their favorite topic:

Q. What shall we do with Lavinia?

A. Is there an answer to this?

I slept, and dreamed of you. In the morning Mr. Wells arrived and we gathered and re-weighed the samples. Just as his cousin had found, the sample out on the grass had collected more dew.

“Which it would not,” I said, “if dew fell from the sky like rain; an equal amount should have fallen within the cylinder as without.”

“My cousin’s point exactly,” said Mr. Wells. “He contends that the cooling of the earth’s surface causes water vapor to condense from the air. What matters is how much heat is radiated into the atmosphere. What matters is the exposure of the objects on the surface to the air. The sheltering walls of the drainage pipe lessened the radiation to the sky; it was colder outside the pipe than within, hence there was more dew outside.”

My skirt was wet, our hands and arms were drenched, there was damp wool everywhere and the smell of sheep. “I’ll borrow some thermometers from my friends,” he said. “We’ll set them around and see if the dew is heaviest where they read lowest.”

As I spread my arms, pointing out a sheltered hollow and a promising rise, I caught him looking at me. I forget sometimes how long my limbs are, how fleshy I am in the shoulders and bust. You are built the same, I expect, tall and strong and capable, like James. Mr. Wells looked me over shyly and said, “Forgive me, I don’t mean to stare. But you have such amplitude. You are very different from your aunts in this way.”

They are not my aunts. I wanted to say. Instead I reached over to brush off the bits of wool on his coat, which caused him to color up to the roots of his soft brown hair.

A rain that moves in swirls and gusts, pushing the leaves against the limbs, pushing my hair away from my face; then a rain hardly more than a mist, seeming simply to condense on my skin: it is raining today. And although you disappeared in the rain, perhaps because I last saw you in it, I love the rain. In it I am sleek and slender and smooth, attractive as Sophie is attractive, a woman someone might love. The wide span of my hips reduced, the thick mat between my legs tamed and trimmed and my monthly bleeding dried to a few dainty drops — oh, forgive me for these thoughts. You will know what I mean by them.

Out of the rain stepped James. Behind him his wagon, and on it two boxes: two solid, well-made wooden hives. Gifts for the aunts. But once more they were absent. “I thought they might like to enlarge their apiary,” James said.

When I told him they had gone to consult with a printer about their book, he murmured something about their industriousness. “A pleasure,” he said. He smelled of wood and wool and leather harness, of honey, and himself. “To have such neighbors.”

“I’m sure they’ll be grateful,” I replied.

He nodded and stood at the door for a moment, before hoisting the first of the boxes and hauling it past the barn and the sheds, to join the others among the apple trees. A second trip and he was done, back before me, sweat slipping down beneath his heavy hair. He did not refuse the glass of water I offered. He drank slowly, steadily, the muscles moving in waves beneath the smooth skin of his throat. After he passed me the empty glass, he stepped back. “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“There is something,” I said faintly. “A little spot of something, on your cheekbone.”

The gesture with which he raised his hand — index and little fingers spread, ring and middle fingers together, the whole strong shapely hand displayed — was that of a beautiful woman. Two fingertips brushed his cheekbone, where I would place my tongue. He knew that, knew there was nothing to brush away but a few drops of sweat. That was pity passing over his face, and fear at the hunger in my gaze, and pleasure, just a little, at being so sharply admired. He started to say something, stopped, shook his head, and left.

I cannot have James. This is perfectly clear. In my mind I know he belongs to Sophie and I accept this, I understand it. In my mind. Still my heart lags behind. Though even if my heart wants to be broken, if part of me wants to be brought to my knees, it is not to be my choice. For James I will never be more than one of the three virgins he passes daily.

The aunts have no idea of this, but it is from the likes of James that they have wished to preserve me. From that giving in, that going under, they would preserve me as they’ve preserved themselves. Not the children born every year, half or more of them to die; not the daily bowing down, the loss of my own thoughts and my independence; not the loss of my mind nor (the thing the aunts can’t envision) the loss of that clear separate place in me where I dream of you, and long for you. Through that channel of longing, the world enters me.

Yesterday Mr. Wells took me to visit our elderly neighbor, William Bartram who has grown so reclusive. We’ve met before; when I was a girl, still in short skirts with my hair in a braid, the aunts occasionally trotted me over to him. Great man , they said, introducing him to me. Then me to him: Our niece, whom we are raising. She is very studious. A few questions they would put to me, so Mr. Bartram might see how well I answered. After those I was expected to be silent.

Mr. Wells brought me there as someone like an equal. On a seat in the garden, near the giant cypress Mr. Bartram’s father brought back from Georgia, with Mr. Bartram’s menagerie disporting about us, snakes and frogs and salamanders, two dogs, a possum, a crow named Virgil — there, Mr. Wells had me describe our experiment with the dew.