Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

She has to look away again, breathing against a sensation of queasiness. But it is not seasickness, she thinks.

She blinks, returns to the eyepiece, the brass cold against her cheek.

“Don’t squint,” William says. “Don’t close your other eye. Cover it with your hand, if you have to.”

It appears to go on forever, the universe. But how can that be? How can it be endless ?

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” William says behind her in the darkness, his voice close by her ear. “I could look at the sky all night long. Sometimes I don’t remember to eat or sleep, don’t even want to. There is so much to see, so much to be done, and no end to the obstacles. I’ve found only one optician even willing to consider that it might be possible, what I want.”

She turns away from the telescope to look at him.

“What do you want?” she says.

He looks up at the sky. “It is a matter of mirrors,” he says. “And the length of the telescope, the materials required. And the expense.”

“You are building a telescope?” she says.

“Ah,” he says. He smiles. “You’ll see.”

She looks at him. Despite Jacob’s fine clothes and manner, she thinks that it has always been with William that the family achieved real beauty. Even William’s hands are well formed, she thinks, looking at them now holding on to the rail: there is a model of a beautiful hand. Over their travels together these last few days, she has been reminded of how, beside William, other people’s flaws seem especially noticeable: a stooped back, fat in rolls around the neck, an overhanging brow or jutting teeth, eyes too small or close together. Everyone in the world looks ugly beside William.

She realizes that he has not spoken of wanting a wife. Is it because he is so busy, because of this interest in astronomy, as well as all his other obligations and employment, his duties in Bath? Perhaps he has no time for a wife. But every man wants a wife; he is a man like any other, isn’t he? She can’t imagine that he doesn’t look back at a pretty face turning toward his own, and surely there must be many of those. William is a man who seems designed to be loved.

The thought gives her an uncomfortable feeling. Yet why should she feel bleak at the thought of William’s being loved? It is only having been without him for so long, she thinks; she does not want to consider sharing him. But of course that is absurd and childish. She will share him, and with many people.

Still she feels the chilly vacancy at her side, the place he has left to go and stand instead against the rail.

Maybe it is true that a certain kind of life, a life of success and happiness, is reserved for those who are as beautiful as William, she thinks. But perhaps it is also true that one might stand just within the bright circle of that happiness and catch some of its warmth, even if one is not responsible for the light.

“Yes, I build telescopes,” he says finally, “but the enterprise is too much to describe tonight. And we have plenty of time.”

The thought sends a thrill through her. The time ahead, all the plenty of time ahead.

The moon has laid a road of light across the water, brightest at the horizon.

Once more, Lina bends to return her eye to the telescope. Again she experiences the sensation of leaving the ship’s deck, of moving into space. She reaches out a hand to grope for William’s sleeve.

When he puts his arm around her, she turns away to look at him again.

The wind is stronger now. Her eyes water.

“Time to sleep,” William says. “You will be exhausted.”

She feels like a child being sent to bed. It is a consequence of her size, she thinks, that she is always treated this way.

The shawl she wears across her face to conceal the scars, the shawl her mother insisted she wear — because who would want her, as her mother said so often, if her face is the first thing they see? — has slipped and fallen to her shoulders.

William tugs at it now, gently.

“Do not wear this, Lina,” he says. “You only call notice to yourself with it across your face. There is nothing wrong with your face.”

She is horrified that he has spoken of her physical appearance. She does not want him thinking about her face.

She pulls the shawl up over her mouth. “I’m cold,” she says from behind it.

He looks at her steadily. “She was unkind to you,” he says after a minute. “I know she was. But it was only fear and ignorance — only her fatigue — that made her so.”

Lina takes a step away from him. She had thought he understood. Their mother is a bad person. She might not have been, it is true, if she had been spared the burden of bearing so many children, the endless worry over money, the ceaseless labor of the household. But she is at least a weak person, disposed toward unkindness when her circumstances are trying, afraid of what she does not know, quick to blame, forever begging God not to punish her further, her prayers tinged with anger.

“ You never felt her cruelty,” Lina says.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He looks away from her, gazing up at the sky again. “Now you’re angry with me.”

He is a big man, broad-shouldered and tall. He seems immense against the darkness now, the stars arranged around him.

“I know she kept her worst for you,” he says. “Perhaps it was — I don’t know. Pity.”

Lina is aware of a painful pressure in her ears.

“There was no reason to pity me,” she says after a minute. “Because I look as I do? But I never wanted her life.”

She tries not to brood on her physical self. She is brisk about her hair — too thick, too rough and curly — plaiting it and winding it quickly into a tight knot each morning. Her body is only a constellation of parts to be assembled when required, she thinks: to carry water, to wring out the washing, to split wood, to meet her mother’s gaze when told to, Lina’s eye reflecting back whatever it sees but offering no entrance. She thinks of her mind — that world without end, as William says — as hidden safely within the inconsequential vessel of her body, a bird concealed in a thicket. What does it mean to the mind if its house is ugly? Nothing.

“That’s not what I meant,” William says.

“No, you’re right. She pitied me because I am ill suited,” she says finally. “Ill favored. To be a wife. ”

But now she regrets speaking. She has forced William into a contemplation of her circumstances, which, after all, he has done more to compensate for than anyone else. It is William who contrived this chance at escape, this opportunity for something other than what had certainly faced her. By her own efforts, she had been able to do nothing better than to conceal herself.

“I have nothing but love and admiration for you,” William says now, “as will everyone else.”

His kindness shames her.

She looks up. The sky is extravagantly beautiful.

She adjusts the shawl around her shoulders. It will take practice, this unveiling.

With her face fully exposed, she feels more acutely both the weight and the weightlessness of everything above her, the moon balanced overhead. She tries to remember Newton’s law of universal gravitation: F and m and r and the constant of proportionality, G. Though gravity cannot be touched, she feels embraced by it for a moment. The stars and planets must be God’s particular delight, she thinks, looking up at the jeweled sky, just as the orchard in flower had been her joy, and the shining scales on a trout’s belly, and the beauty of the mist among the trees. She’d had all these, it was true: joys in a joyless life.