When the second edition of January 1860 came out, there was a third epigraph inserted between William Whewell’s and Francis Bacon’s:
The only distinct meaning of the word ‘natural’ is stated, fixed or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continuously or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.
Bishop Joseph Butler: Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed
Why did he add that? But it was the Bacon that Sophie loved.
And the word “endless.” The book of God’s word and the book of God’s works were works-in-progress. And so, like evolution, unfinished. A mystery.
Her thought then was that Charles himself had not made endless progress in pursuing God’s word. He couldn’t do it all. He couldn’t study in Edinburgh and in Cambridge, take his voyage, do his collecting and studying, marry, have children, experiment, keep connected to important scientists, nurse his heartbreaking illnesses, write books and still pursue theology and the book of God’s word.
Besides, theology itself had not progressed to the point at which it is today. Charles would have been amazed at the revelations of archeology and anthropology and ongoing exegesis. These were things he had not known just as he had not known in detail about Mendel’s work. He was a creature of his times.
Sophie realized that one of the reason she loved him so much was that he knew that he didn’t know it all. He had a basic humility in the face of creation.
I am also a creature of my times. And if Charles came up a little short in the study of the book of God’s words, Sophie had come up hugely short in the study of the books of God’s works. Her stock in trade had been the printed word and especially literature.
That would continue but now she was in the grip of the book of works, of the science of the natural world. That meant, above all, the close observation of details. How indifferent she had been in her earlier life to the intricacies of nature.
She had moved, had chosen the Land Apart. This precise landscape and no other, together with Charles Darwin and a small cast of desert characters, had given her a new and explosive sense of the holiness of detail. Detail now shimmered through her day. The next step would be to buy a microscope for her work-desk. Yi.
Polly had been sleeping. When she lifted her head she nearly growled: “Whereas I was having a dream of trotting up and down meridians, of running the circles of latitude. Free I was, and all those margins guided me but paled so I was not constrained. I was unbound. Barking and arcing. Whereas, in sum, I had a dream of joyful dimensions.”
“I have recently had such dreams,” said Sophie.
Handwriting of a Scientist
Jack’s gaze was steady. “If you would like to go birding south of here, it might be well to spend two days at it. Maybe stay overnight at the Casa de San Pedro, a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. Take a look at their website if you want.”
Stay overnight?
The website read:
“Casa de San Pedro Bed and Breakfast is a nationally-acclaimed Arizona inn 90 miles from Tucson, near Ramsey Canyon, Bisbee, and Sierra Vista. The Inn is on 10 acres adjacent to the San Pedro River and Riparian National Conservation Area. Here you can view 355 species of birds and hundreds of butterflies. Experts agree Casa de San Pedro is one of the most romantic Arizona getaways and the most upscale Southern Arizona Bed and Breakfast. Naturalists, bird watchers, history buffs and environmentalists herald the inn as a world-class accommodation with a heart.”
One of the most romantic Arizona getaways? She felt—what was it?—a light nausea rising. Had he proposed this because he had seen her in her flowered underpants?
In the end she phoned him and said she would like to go. “I’ll make the reservations for two rooms,” he said.
On the road south, Jack said he had paid the whole bill. “We can settle up later.”
Sophie glanced sideways at him. “We will settle up,” she said, “as soon as we get there.”
She had brought along a bottle of wine and at the end of the day they drank a little of it from the Casa’s tumblers at a courtyard table outside of Sophie’s room. They were largely silent. One time she thought she saw him staring at her wedding ring. The forces of restraint in this odd man were so great that he had really never asked her
Finally she ventured, “One day Stella told me you were in Special Forces. That’s where you learned to dress rattlesnakes.”
He stiffened. “She told you that?”
“She did.”
“Good God. She makes up stories all the time, effectively lying through her teeth. That woman. My sister. She’s a piece of work.” He shook his head.
“So you were never in Special Forces?”
“I was never in Special Forces.”
They shared a long period of silence again. It began to seem to her that Jack did not know she was there. Why had she done this? Why the hell hadn’t he brought Han instead of her?
“I think I’ll call it a day,” she said. She rose and picked up her empty glass.
“Maybe have just a little more wine first?”
Sophie thought he looked weary and a little flushed. Almost feverish.
“I’m sorry?”
He picked up the wine bottle. “I thought I’d like just a little more.”
“Are you talking to yourself, then, Jack?”
“No.”
Sophie sat down. He poured wine for each of them and said, looking away, “Well, you know. I have something in my life.” He looked away and then put the palm of his hand to the angle of his left jaw as if he had a toothache.
“Yes?”
“Cancer.”
She had picked up her glass. Now she put it down.
“It happens to be a chronic lymphocytic leukemia. CLL. But. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say more about it right now.”
She gave him the slightest of nods. They were silent.
“That hawk we saw today,” he finally said.
“You mean the Swainson’s.”
“Yes.”
When Jack had spotted it, it wasn’t doing anything except sitting on top of a telephone pole. The lines moved in the wind. She studied the bird: slender, the white face and throat, rufous breast, the speckled belly. And then, as she looked for more detail, it shuddered. She lowered her binoculars.
It unsettled itself; it took off and flew toward a field. She watched it go; the great wing beats, the gliding. That poet, Hopkins, who must have watched a kestrel rebuff a “big wind” had said it all. His “heart in hiding” had
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery
of the thing!
Now Jack picked up his wine glass and held it in both hands. He looked inside it for a moment and then put it down. “Do you know who Scott Weidensaul is?”
“I don’t.”
“He wrote a book about migratory birds. In 1996, he describes how between fifteen and twenty thousand hawks were killed in the small area of La Pampa in Argentina. Farmers felt they needed to kill swarms of grasshoppers that year and they used monocrotophos. Deadly. But deadly also to the hawks who then fed on those grasshoppers. In one location, almost 3,000 dead hawks were found. My worst daydreams have to do with walking through fields and hearing the crunch of hawk carcasses underfoot.”
“And the hawks were—” But of course.
Jack nodded. “Swainson’s.”
Now that her eyes had taken in Swainson’s, she put herself in the field in La Pampa and saw not 3,000 underfoot, but instead: 3,000 white throats, 3,000 rufous breasts, 3,000 speckled bellies, 3000 pairs of brown eyes.
She had read that a group of hawks was commonly called a “kettle.” All that energy and potential energy stilled. All those wing beats stilled. A
nd some of the 3,000 had grasshoppers, also stilled, in their throats.
Sophie jumped when Jack cleared his own throat. “I think I’ll excuse myself.” He rose from the chair in slow motion, some kind of an uncoiling it seemed to Sophie. “But I have something for you if you’ll wait here a minute.”
“Of course.”
She watched him walk to his room. You, she said to herself, will never again drink more than one glass of wine around that man.
When he returned he was carrying a long envelope. “This is for you. But after you read it, we need never mention it again. And so, good night.”
“Good night, Jack.”
He walked away. Sophie thought she had never seen such long legs.
She held the envelope on which he had written her name. His handwriting—“Sophie”—had precise curves, precisely crossed “t”s—the handwriting of a scientist, of a physicist, of a person who had written equations and exponents all his life. The pen he had gripped with those patrician fingers must be fine-tipped.
That he—a man so reserved—had written her name. It looked unimaginably intimate there against the white of the envelope. The ink was black:
Sophie—
As you can imagine, it is hard for me to talk much about myself to people. So I write you this letter.
I am not especially fearful of where my disease will lead me. I hope I have enough mettle to deal with pain and weakness and general indignity should they be inevitable. But I won’t ask anyone to take care of me.
You are probably thinking that someone has to or will want to take care of me. My sister, Stella? I haven’t told you that Stella has actually moved to Karlovy-Vary to study balneology with a man she met while she was in Prague.
Friends. I do have a few friends. But I have tried to be both open and closed with friends.
Mainly closed, I guess. I need a good deal of solitude. Space. Some distance. Like the birds, I suppose.
But I think the friends need that space too, even if they don’t know it or would prefer otherwise. My thinking has been that I have never wanted to conscript friends to my own ends. Pluck them. Enlist them. Monopolize them.
I do have excellent doctors; in fact, Han has served as my doctor in Tucson and she is outstanding—both in research and in patient care—in her field. One of the best. Her husband, Paulo, was a war correspondent. He and Han and I have become friendly. In case what I am suffering takes a dire turn, I can rely somewhat on them. I go to breakfast at St. Philip’s Plaza with them on most Sundays, but before that, I go across the street from there to—ah—a church. A community where all are welcome—even me, full of doubts as I am.
That is probably of some surprise to you. A physicist who gets down on his knees at the communion rail.
But back to my thinking about my illness. Even if I were married or had a partner I would not ask that person to take care of me. Hospice will do it. And once I get there and if things get tough, I will refuse food and water. I have already made that clear—in writing.
I mentioned marriage. I was once married. Denise, I discovered, was having an affair, but I’m guessing it was not a first for her. My friend, Milton—also a physicist—said that the worst part of it was that she ran off, for Christ’s sake, with a chemist.
I introduce Milton’s remark to add a bit of humor to this letter which must sound grim. Who knows: I may live to quite an old age, though I’m not sure I would enjoy it.
In you I sense a rich inner life which could never be conscripted by anyone. I see that you have come to love the desert—the southern part of the basin and range. Once you live in these borderlands where species prowl in all their variety, you don’t want to leave. Mr. Darwin would have loved it here. We are the Galapagos down here where the mountain ranges are our sky islands.
And you are my friend and neighbor. I have been fortunate to come to know you. You must think my behavior strange, but there it is. What you may see as my reserve, my aloofness, my—what—my mystery would erode, would lose its apparent shine in close quarters. Not that I mean you would want to be at close quarters with me. I see you wear what I presume is a wedding ring, an antique, I think, of great beauty.
Is it presumptuous to write that I sense you have somehow freed yourself? That perhaps you have worked hard to send all the Mr. Guppies of this life packing, just as Esther did in Bleak House.
And who could ever be to you as Charles Darwin has been to you? Or who could ever be to you as the He or She who stands behind Charles Darwin is to you?
I raise my glass in your direction.
Jack
Sophie refolded the letter. She had no words for her sadness.
She wanted to get up and go knock on his door and if he opened for her, get right into his bed and lie down. All, all she wanted, she would tell him, was to curl up next to him. With plenty of space between them. She would lie there in her khaki shorts and denim shirt; she would take off her shoes but not her stockings.
She would say, “Don’t worry. I ask for nothing. I won’t mention the letter. Pretend I’m not here.” Then she would not say another word. If he opened a book, she could watch him read and be perfectly content. That she would consider doing such a thing appalled her. She, who had been by choice so long on her own. But she had been working on mastery all her life and she could master these feelings.
Then she thought of one thing she would say as she lay there after he turned out the light and fell asleep. She would whisper, barely, “Jack, Jack, Jack.” And then: “Are you crazy?” To whom, she wondered, was she talking.
She knew what she would do; she would go back to the Arizona Inn where she had started. She would choose a Sunday morning. On her way through the lobby she would look first to see if the same clerk was there. In the hush, in the coolness, on her way to the terrace, she would look for Moby Dick in the old-world library with its leather couches and dark wood.
She would feel the blast of heat as she was seated on the terrace. There would be an actual, preternatural-green lawn with croquet wickets. There would probably be the gigantic pots of red geraniums and the well-watered trees dripping with living oranges as if in a fairy tale or in the ballet coloring-book she had had as a child.
She would order—something. Coffee.
Then she would scan for clouds, and a little girl would appear with a mallet and proceed to play croquet with her father. The father would smile at Sophie and Sophie would smile back and he would pause at a nearby wicket and say, “Do you know, have you seen the lovely fountain just over there, behind that hedge, in the Inn’s next courtyard?” And Sophie would answer “No, I haven’t.” The little girl was swinging the mallet and it looked for all the world like a pendulum. She would look just like Isabelle, with the perfect, high cheekbones and Shirley Temple curls.
She thought of asking Jack to go with her and then thought better of it. He would probably say no, anyway. In some instances companions were vital. In this instance, a companion would mean that she would see too little of what was there, outside. She would not take Polly. Even Polly was in some sense separate, mutable.
But mutable was not the last word. The nihilists, both the frank ones and the undercovers who smuggled in a fashionable and sometimes a lucrative despair, spoke of her beloved Charles as the purveyor of nothing but mutability, nothing but transience.
She herself believed that the “freshness deep down things” that Charles had taught her to see must somehow survive physical death. It must come out the other side like an umbrella blown inside out, like silly-putty strings stretched past the limits of time and space. How this was, she didn’t know.
When she actually went to the Arizona Inn, she found herself on the terrace having neither looked for the clerk nor gone to the library. While she was waiting for coffee, a line came to her: “I will lead her into the wilderness and there I will speak to her heart.”
There was something else. She could write down her mystery but that would not be quite enough.
The reading, writing, dinners, hikes would continue. She would start giving dinner parties. But now. What else?
A soupçon of something else was in order. She thought she might go up to Tucson and sign up—volunteer for something, somebody.
Maybe work for Gabrielle Giffords who would be out meeting the public one of these weekends. Maybe just a few hours here and there.
But something. Try it. Maybe ask Rachel if she could go with her to El Comedor, a shelter in Nogales run by American Jesuits. Or maybe she would find the woman in the jaguar-print scarf or someone like her and see—what? See what she most needed. Then move to do it. The first thing she needed might not be a book.
Or maybe she would start running and checking trap lines. Camera trap-lines, the ones that run from the Baboquivari Mountains in south-central Arizona to the Animas Mountains in New Mexico. These would help pinpoint jaguar movements and contribute to a federal recovery plan for the species in the U.S. Polly would have to stay home if she did that.
She knew what Ted would write. “Are you crazy? Are you going to make me fly out to that Godforsaken place and straighten you out?”
Yes, fly out. Come and see.
In the book of words and the book of works hung orbs which sometimes took fabulous and sometimes paradoxical and sometimes dangerous shapes and sometimes the simple shapes of oranges. You had to go up close and see. And maybe take and eat.
The Crossings Page 19