The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  It is early, the moon still visible in the morning sky. William, who is almost seventeen and knows everything about the world, says creatures live on the moon and even on the sun. They live on every planet, in fact, he tells her, but they need very big heads to withstand the force of the atmosphere. She has tried to imagine such creatures. The fat priest has a big head, but Lina shrinks from him, towering in his dirty chasuble and his long black linen messe-shirt that smells of his sweat. His head is lumpy as a turnip, his nose covered with greasy boils. From the wide opening of his sleeve, like a dark mouth leading toward secret, unpleasant regions of his body, his hand emerges to bless her when she and her family attend church. She tries to resist the impulse to shy away under his palm when it approaches, but she fails and earns a slap from her mother. Still, she does not want that hand to touch her.

  The moon people—the Lunarians, William tells her—do not look like the priest.

  In the margins of her father’s sheet music, she draws pictures of these Lunarians, giants with long slender legs and faces calm as lakes. She gives these pictures to William, folding them into tiny squares and leaving them in his books or the pockets of his coat, waiting and watching for him to find them. In her mind, the moon creatures have shining tonsures and long eyelashes like those of the gentle horse that occupies the stable. They wag their heavy heads in contemplative agreement with all they see. Soothed by the singing of the stars, they are pleased by everything.

  “Excellent!” William says, smiling, unfolding one of her drawings. “It is exactly as I imagine them.”

  Now, kneeling on a stool by the cold window, she watches the moon fade as the day brightens by degrees. The bonfire’s smoke rises into the morning light, carrying with it the sour must of rotting apples and the distant voices of the people in the street. She imagines the Lunarians inclining their ponderous heads from their high plane to look down and regard the earth. She imagines one of the bantams’ flame-colored feathers rising lazily inside the smoke, the outstretched arm of the creature that slowly opens its hand, fingers unfurling, to receive it.

  Snowflakes drift through the roof in the attic where she sleeps. Sunlight falls through the chinks in summer. This morning the bedclothes wore a layer of frost. She feels the unhappiness of the house around her, her mother’s anger and silence like a presence in the room.

  She will not be allowed outside to play, she knows.

  She leaves her stool to kneel on a chair by the plain deal table closer to the fire and takes up a spoon, dipping it into a cup of water to fill the spoon’s bowl. Recently William demonstrated for her the mysterious ability of liquid to exceed its space and yet fail to overflow its banks. She raises the brimming spoon to eye level, just as William did, to regard the miraculously curved surface of the water.

  The phenomenon in the spoon, William told her, is convexity.

  All her brothers—Jacob, William, and Alexander—are clever. All of them are scholars and musicians, but Lina knows that William is the most advanced of the three boys, though Jacob is older by four years. It is William, Lina understands, on whom their father rests his hopes for the family’s glory.

  The boys serve as bandsmen in the Hanoverian Foot Guards, where William’s mind is wasted, their father frets to Lina, when the others are not around to hear.

  William is our genius, he confides.

  Lina knows that there is a war, the rulers of England and Prussia and Austria and France in conflict over who will have dominion where. She understands that her family and their neighbors’ loyalties are to the King of England, as he is elector of Hanover. They all hate the French and must defend the English crown.

  William shows her faraway England on a map. She is surprised that it is only a little island, a hunched-over old woman with a beaked nose.

  Not even twenty years old, their father laments, yet surely William will be killed in battle.

  “Such a loss to the world,” their father says, as if it has already happened. “Our good, good William. Struck down too young.”

  Lina hates it when he speaks in this manner.

  —

  WILLIAM TEACHES LINA THINGS. For instance: convexity. Also animalcules.

  A drop of water, William had explained—indeed, all matter in the world—his composed of many tiny particles called atoms, invisible to the naked eye. They cling together even without the reinforcement of walls.

  “It’s true,” he’d said, studying her face.

  He’d put his cheek beside hers. Together they had gazed at the bulge of water in a spoon.

  “That little swell in the water’s surface?” he’d said. “That’s a heap of atoms, all of them piled on top of each other. Atom is from the Greek atomos, meaning indivisible. Everything may be divided except an atom.”

  “It is the smallest thing there is?” she had asked.

  “Exactly.”

  He’s told her, too, about Galileo’s instruments of magnification—his telescope, his occhiolino, his little eye, as he called it—and about the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, in which were revealed scores of little swimmers. William had given her van Leeuwenhoek’s word for them: animalcules. They reside in every drop of pond water, William had said, every human tear, in human spittle and blood and mold on a loaf of bread and in the living green of leaves.

  He had showed her pictures of van Leeuwenhoek’s drawings.

  She’d leaned over the table on her elbows to watch William turn the pages of the book.

  Animalcules with little tails! Animalcules with tiny snouts and horns and even hair! How amazing that these creatures perambulate inside the substances that hold them prisoner—even inside her own body—by means of curling and uncurling themselves or twitching their hindquarters or swimming like eels and fish.

  Lina had looked at her hand, made a fist, unfolded her fingers.

  After this, when she follows the erratic paths of raindrops down the glass with her fingertip, she sees in every drop a city, its minarets and towers, its bustling populace.

  It is from William that she understands the central mystery: worlds upon worlds exist in all things.

  —

  IT IS JACOB, THOUGH, not William, who is their mother’s favorite. She praises the elegance of Jacob’s face, his aquiline nose and finely arched eyebrows. But Jacob is hateful, and he likes to direct his malice toward Lina especially. He laughs as he administers secret pinches, fingers gripping her earlobe. She knows that the appearance of pain or fear or anger attracts him, and she has learned to empty her face of all expression when he is near. She has learned, too, to detect his hidden presence behind a door or a tree, waiting to frighten her.

  It is William’s example that Lina wants to follow, William whom Lina loves. William, their father says, is the philosopher king among them. He is the peacemaker, too, somehow holding himself apart from the unhappiness of their family, their mother’s shrill anger, Jacob’s cruelty. Only William is capable of creating harmony in the household, engaging her brothers and their father in discussions of science or mathematics. If William picks up the oboe or violin and begins to play, soon their father joins in, and then Alexander and even Jacob, too, who likes to show off.

  Lina and Sophia, who is now twelve, are not given instruments, but Lina loves to listen from the stairs when her brothers and father play. From the first, it has been easy for her to hear the harmonic line. William plays familiar songs for her in parallel keys to demonstrate major and minor scales, the reason one song makes her cry while another makes her dance.

  She loves music.

  She also loves the placid horse with the drooping lower lip in the stable.

  She loves the taste of the yellow apples and the scent of the orchard budding in spring.

  She loves her father’s foolish jesting, loves the sound of William’s and Alexander’s voices through the bedroom wall at night. They discuss theories of harmonic construction, questions of philosophy.

  “These are complicated m
atters, Lina,” William says, when she asks questions, but he teaches her to read, writes down words for her.

  Calculus. Fluxion.

  She loves William’s eyes, which are very dark, almost black, and in which she can see herself reflected when she sits on his lap and holds his face between her hands and stares deep into his eyes. He is not like their father, though, with his ready sympathy, his cooing and tut-tutting and damp gaze and kisses. William does not offer himself to her as her father does. He does not pet her or comfort her. He is elusive in a way that draws her to him. He is always reading or thinking. It seems that with his thoughts alone he can exchange the unpleasantness of the world, the trouble in their household, for something better, finer. She tries to stay near him. If she is at his side, perhaps she, too, will be transported to a better place.

  —

  NOW, ON THIS COLD MORNING in the kitchen, Lina kneels on the chair, holding the spoon before her eyes as William has shown her. The light captured in the water’s swaying surface sways a little, too.

  Then, strangely—the swaying increases. She tries to hold the spoon steady, but it is her hand that is trembling, she realizes, and the arm attached to the hand. No, it is her whole body, and the chair on which she kneels!

  A scattered mound of dry peas on the table jumps and dances as if dropped from an opened fist poised a half inch above the table’s surface. In her mother’s cup with the delicate blue rim, the tea shivers like the surface of the river when the wind blows. On the far wall, the tin plates on the dry sink begin to clatter.

  Lina looks up in alarm.

  There can be no explanation but this: the unseen particles of the world, the animalcules and atoms, are in revolt!

  Drops from her spoon fall onto the table.

  She rears back, expecting that from these drops hundreds of animalcules will spring forth, waving centipede legs and wagging their bumblebee heads.

  The world as she knows it is about to fly apart, the secret life of all things revealed!

  But nothing happens, except that the terrifying trembling intensifies. In the fireplace beside which her mother has bent to tend the kettle, the logs collapse suddenly as if by dark instruction. Sparks roar up the chimney, and a tide of embers erupts onto the hearth by her mother’s feet with a dry sound like pebbles shifting. Lina sees her mother jump away from the red coals, groping for the mantel with one hand to steady herself, flattening a palm over her big belly.

  She turns toward Lina. From her expression, Lina knows what her mother is thinking: Lina is somehow at fault.

  But Lina is all the way across the room, terrified and wide-eyed on her chair.

  She grips the table’s edge. The rumbling runs from her fingers and up her arms and into her head and teeth. The peas scatter and fall to the floor. With her eyes she follows the teacup as it totters across the tabletop, a precarious half inch to go before it falls and shatters. She knows she should save the cup, but the chair rocks beneath her, and she cannot release her fingers from the table’s edge. From the next room comes a violent musical chaos as the instruments tumble from their places against the wall: the violins, flutes, guitar, the little harp. A moment later the cup tilts over the table’s edge and shatters with a sound like ice breaking.

  From above them comes the crash of something heavy—a wardrobe falling? Pots sway from their iron hooks in the beams across the kitchen ceiling.

  Lina cries out and puts her arms over her head.

  But then, a moment later, the movement dies away. The peas roll to a stop. There is no further parliament of voices from the cups or the fire or the pots or the plates or the harp. Instead, in the fireplace and on the hearth, the thick carpet of fat red embers rustles quietly as if to say, nothing here, nothing here, nothing here. Harmless little new flames begin to raise their blue and white and gold hoods among the disarranged logs.

  Lina looks out the window. Through the rippled glass she sees that the iron lid of the November sky remains locked in place. She can’t see the moon, though. Perhaps it has been shaken loose from the sky, its collision with the earth the cause of the terrible shaking.

  Except for the noise of the fire, there is silence in the room—silence everywhere, she realizes.

  There is a taste of sick in her mouth.

  Her mother has fallen to her knees on the floor, forehead and palms touching the bricks.

  Lina scrambles to stand up on her chair. It seems somehow safer up there.

  She suffers from what her father calls excesses of feeling, the Überangst. He, too, is a fellow sufferer, he confides. Their nerves are too sensitive for this world and its rough treatment. They often have pains in their stomachs.

  Now she claps her hands. She wants the world restored, and she wants to shatter the frightening quiet.

  “Mama,” she says. “Mama!”

  Lina understands that when her father says she is a person of passionate feeling, he means it fondly, even admiringly. He is sympathetic. They are united in this weakness that is also somehow a sign of their refinement in the family. But when her brothers are wild, they are simply shooed outside, while if Lina so much as jumps from bench to floor in high spirits, her mother comes after her with a furious face and catches her by the apron strings, wrenching them hard to make her sit down. A girl is not supposed to demonstrate her feelings as a boy can.

  When she is scolded, Lina runs outside and hides in the stable. She lies on the horse’s back, her face in his mane. Against her cheek she feels the vibrations of his big teeth grinding as he tears at the hay in his stall. Her mind goes into a buzzing state in which she thinks of not her mother, not her mother, not her mother. Nothing.

  Now she stands on the chair in the silent house. Her mother remains kneeling, forehead to the floor, her palms flat against the brick.

  “Mama!” Lina says again. She claps her hands. Mama, Mama, Mama!

  Slowly her mother rises, turns a stone face toward Lina.

  Lina stops clapping. She sees what is coming, but she cannot prevent it.

  In two strides her mother crosses the room and slaps her. Then she collapses on a chair, one hand on her belly, the other across her mouth, eyes closed, moaning.

  Lina slips to the floor, her own gaze averted, her cheek burning. On her knees, she collects the scattered peas one by one. Then she crawls under the table and sits there cross-legged, the peas in her lap. These incidents when her mother strikes her fill Lina with anger—she wants to hit back, to claw and scratch, but knows she must not—and also a strange embarrassment and sadness. She does not look at her mother now.

  Then voices are raised in the street. From under the table Lina watches her mother wipe her face and gather her bulk and cross the room to the door that leads to the courtyard, opening it a crack. Between her mother’s feet, Lina sees the bantams outside rush the doorway and set up a clamor that joins the clamor of human voices. Cold air, bright and sharp with the smell of smoke, slides across the floor. Her mother’s skirt disappears. Lina hears her quick footsteps cross the courtyard.

  In the fireplace, the flames chuckle and murmur. The room is smoky, Lina realizes. Her eyes tear.

  When the church bells begin to ring, bells in steeples all across Hanover, it seems, Lina does not know if the sound is one of celebration or warning. All the bells’ voices raised together at once make a mighty noise. We are here, we are here! But alone under the table, she feels far away from whatever is taking place in the streets, joyful dancing or preparations to flee. Will someone remember to come get her, if everyone decides to leave? Will William run home from the parade grounds and find her here?

  She thinks about the animalcules and atoms. Surely the shaking was the cause—or the result?—of their restlessness. The animalcules are everywhere, trapped in everything. She thinks of what would be left behind—only the empty skins of things?—if the animalcules finally broke their bonds and escaped. She imagines all the objects of the world collapsed, limp as discarded stockings.

  W
illiam says that through careful investigation every natural mechanism in the world may be understood. On his example, Lina pokes the horse’s fresh manure with a stick, observes the trapped steam rise into the cold air. She lies in the hayloft and watches the yellow dog give birth to a litter of pups, each in its wet blue sack. She fogs the window to see the damp flower of her breath bloom and contract against the glass.

  She likes it when William takes her down to the river to show her his catch, the action of the trout’s gills, its gaping mouth as he clenches the fish in his fist. He admires her collections, picking through the items with her when she takes him by the hand and shows them to him: beechnuts and sticky black walnuts, hawk and pigeon and chicken feathers, pretty pebbles. She keeps her things in the stable, wrapped in an old cloth so her mother will not sweep them up, complaining of Lina’s filth. The forests around Hanover are rich with fallen nuts and gigantic ferns, their fronds nippled all over beneath her exploring fingers. The grass beside the river is filled with nests and sometimes eggs. If she could, she would stay out in those places all day.

  Could one investigate the behavior of the animalcules now? If she had a microscope like van Leeuwenhoek, could she see what the animalcules are doing, chattering among themselves, perhaps, readying for another siege?

  She feels both fear and relief when her mother returns after a few minutes. From under the table she watches her mother’s advancing baby stomach and the movement of the broom as her mother sweeps up the shards of broken teacup. She listens as her mother sets the instruments to rights in the next room, as she goes heavily upstairs and then returns. Pieces of the brown bowl and ewer go past in her mother’s arms. The door opens, and Lina hears the sound of broken crockery dumped on the rubbish heap in the courtyard.

  Then her mother steps inside and closes the door.

  “Caroline,” her mother says. “Come out from under there.”

  Lina does not want another slap. She wishes her mother would take her and hold her against the mound of her stomach. Sometimes, if she plays at being a little goat, butting her mother gently, her mother will stroke her head.