The Ramblers

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  When she gets off the train, she’s carried by a tide of Black Friday strangers into the station. She clutches the letter, fantasizes for a moment about letting it go to be trampled by all these feet. She looks up at the clock.

  All of these people swarming under one clock, one time. So much life. Noise. The mosaic of faces, of heartbreak and happiness, of apathy and ambition, of history and future. She stands for a moment in the midst of it, people whizzing by, brows furrowed, bags swinging, the sound almost too much to bear.

  She needs to be alone to read this letter. Somewhere tucked away and safe. Smith is at the apartment. Henry is at the hotel. She looks around, focuses on her breath. It suddenly hits her. She knows where she will go.

  3:08PM

  “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  Clio stands on Central Park West and looks up at the façade of the American Museum of Natural History. She enters through the security entrance under the stairs, flashes her badge to the guard and fights through the hefty holiday crowds to get to the elevator. This is one of the busiest days of the year and the place is wall-to-wall with visitors. She waits a while for the elevator and then squishes on and rides it to the fifth floor.

  She hasn’t been here for weeks and this always feels strange; for years now, she’s come here almost every day when she’s not in the field. She often comes on weekends even, logging endless hours doing her research, writing articles and grants, overseeing her grad students. After undergrad biology work at Yale, she came to start her PhD at Columbia and got a graduate-student affiliation in the ornithology department. Her dissertation was on the evolution of hummingbirds, their phylogenetic relationships and historical biogeography in relation to the formation of the Andes.*

  Looking back, she can’t believe how perfectly it all came together, that she was able to do work she loved and live so close by with Smith, who was not just a friend but almost a sister. The years piled up, blurred by, and Clio worked hard to finish her PhD and do a postdoctoral fellowship, before moving on to teach and become a curator.

  She uses her key to enter the private ornithology hall and heads to the collection. It’s quiet and dim; no one is around today and she has the place to herself. As she enters the chilly space, which smells of mothballs, she feels an immediate wave of calm roll over her. It’s meant to feel like a library and it does; it reminds her of the stacks at Yale.

  She’s spent so many hours here in the past thirteen years. It’s the largest bird collection in the world, numbering nearly one million specimens, including skins, skeletons, alcoholic preparations, eggs, nests, and tissue samples for molecular biochemical studies. They also have a large number of type specimens and rare or extinct species. The specimens here represent all continents and oceans and nearly 99 percent of all species.

  All those years of head-down research, losing herself in data and questions, working with and among so many with interests like hers, studying higher-level phylogenetics of birds, studies of speciation and species status, and the description of patterns of geographic variation.

  She walks to her own specimens, gingerly pulls out one of her steel trays and looks at them, all the tiny hummingbirds she’s collected over many years, those miraculous little bodies, the study skins with the small white labels attached, with her careful notes.

  She takes out her first bird, holds it in the palm of her hand, stares at the little body, lifeless and beautiful, and thinks back to her first field trip as a collection assistant. This was the first bird she killed with her own two hands. She asphyxiated the creature through thoracic compression, or “squeezing,” by pinching the bird’s rib cage very hard between her thumb and forefinger. The memory of this moment remains sharp, imbued now with new, tragic meaning. This little bird and her mother died in the same way. The only difference: her mother held her own wings down.

  She sits on the cold linoleum floor. She looks around even though there is no one here but her and these little birds. She grips the envelope, sealed and unmarked, and brims with hope, a foolish and staggering hope, that this is it. The Note. The Explanation. The Final Good-bye.

  She runs her finger under the flap, pulls out the single, folded page. She opens it and there they are, her mother’s words. Her heart gallops in her chest and her throat tightens as she begins to read.

  Dearest Clio.

  She cries. Fittingly, it’s a jumble. A jumble of brilliance and madness, love and gloom. There is no date. No real indication at all of when her mother wrote this letter. It must have been a while ago because her handwriting was still relatively smooth; in the end, she was too hazy, too shaky, to write. This is not closure. Here, there are no final answers, but she does have these words, words from the woman who brought her into the world. Seven words in particular stand out:

  You will be a mother one day.

  A sentence. A simple sentence that’s not simple at all. A sentence that grabs her.

  And you will understand, it will make sense, AHA, AHA, you will say, yes, yes, you will be a mother one day, and see what it’s like to crack open with hope and worry and desire and pain and most of all love. But it’s not simple. It’s hellos and good-byes, nevers and forevers, and go away and come back, please come back. . .

  She reads it again and again, tears streaming down her face, thousands of lifeless birds her abiding witnesses. She pulls out her phone and texts Henry.

  Clio: Finishing up some work at the museum. Will head to the hotel in 10 min or so.

  Before leaving the museum, she stops by her wood-paneled office on the fifth floor. When she unlocks the door and walks in, she trips over something. A package. She picks it up, studies the return address. She smiles, realizing what it is. She tears it open, pulls out the card on top.

  Ms. Marsh, I’ve been trying to call you to arrange delivery and discuss care of the enclosed cuttings, but your assistant said I could go ahead and send these. If you plant them now, they should make a decent seedling by Christmas. Please call me if you have any questions. Bob Leland.

  Clio reaches her hand inside and feels the dampness. She smiles. They’re here.

  She walks over to her desk. A tidy stack of papers sits as she left it and she begins to flip through them. They are papers about recent hummingbird fossil discoveries, a possible new species, a comprehensive Smithsonian review of the special and unique features of the hummingbird skeleton, a paper describing the mites found in hummingbirds and an article about hummingbird entrapments in spiderwebs. She thinks of all the work she and her team must do with the new specimens they found in the Andes, how in the past she would have wasted no time diving into this work.

  But not today.

  She stands to go, more eager than ever to see Henry.

  5:37PM

  “I have a surprise for you too.”

  Clio exits the museum and walks uphill along the concrete path, past the subway entrance. When she reaches the street, she feels her phone buzz. A text.

  Henry: Look toward Teddy.

  She turns and casts her gaze up at the big equestrian statue at the entrance, the statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback. Next to the onetime governor of the state and twenty-sixth president, ardent naturalist and visionary conservationist, Henry sits waiting. She walks toward him, climbs the steps. He holds two big salted pretzels, one in each hand. He hands her a pretzel and empties a pocket full of mustard packets. She takes a large bite and feels now how hungry she is. It’s almost evening and she hasn’t eaten anything since her father’s eggs this morning. They sit and eat side by side on the long steps leading to the museum, Central Park across from them, fat chunks of salt scattering around them.

  “How long have you been here?” she says.

  “A while,” he says, kissing her cheek. “Doesn’t matter. God, did I miss you.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Did you get some good work done?” he says.

  “She wrote me a letter, Henry,” she blurts out, looking at him.
/>   His eyes widen. “She did?”

  Clio nods. “I’m not sure when. Probably years ago. I’m not even sure I understood what she wrote, but she wrote me a letter, Henry.”

  Clio smiles and he pulls her to his lap. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t ask what it said, how she is feeling. It’s as if he knows that she doesn’t want him to pry, that what she needs is to be held. They eat their pretzels.

  “I was thinking we could have a low-key night,” he says. “Tomorrow’s the wedding, so maybe a burger and beer at the Dublin House like old times?”

  “Sounds perfect,” Clio says. And it does.

  They sit for a while longer and then he takes her hand and leads her down the steps. They walk west, dodging people and strollers and dogs. At Columbus and Eighty-First, the Christmas tree stand is already up. A scruffy, bearded guy in plaid waits, arms crossed, in front of a dusty blue van.

  “Mum was enthralled by Christmas,” Henry says, a twinkle in his eye. “She collected all these fragile glass ornaments and we’d break a slew of them every year and she’d lose it. She’d put a tree up as soon as it was November.”

  Clio smiles. “Which explains the early-bird tree at the hotel. Eloise used to buy her first tree this weekend every year. The weekend after Thanksgiving. She’d scope out the ugliest little runt she could find.”

  At this, Henry smiles. It feels nice to open up. When they approach the hotel, she and Henry wave at the bellhop who’s carrying a family’s luggage in from a taxi. Henry grabs Clio’s things and runs them inside. He returns, smiling, rubbing his hands. “Shall we?” he says. “I’m oddly excited for our evening.”

  She is too. She places her hand in Henry’s as they walk the length of the block toward the little pub. She fixes her gaze on the neon yellow and red Celtic harp that hangs outside. It flickers and glows. They climb the small set of steps and enter the slender, wood-paneled taproom, which, according to Henry, hasn’t closed for a single day since Prohibition.

  Mike, the chatty and charming white-haired bartender, greets them fondly, and they settle into two stools at the bar. “What’ll it be for yous two?”

  “Two Smithwicks and two cheeseburgers, please,” Henry says.

  Mike handles the food order for them even though most patrons must use their cell phones to call the number printed on the little menus to place their orders.

  Henry points to the phone booth and dips into a history lesson. “There used to be a dumbwaiter there,” he says. “Story goes that Mum’s father knew Carway, the bloke who first rented this place in 1921. Prohibition started a year before, so from the outside they kept it looking like a home, but they had arrangements with local authorities; this whole level was a bar and upstairs was a restaurant, and there was a kitchen in the back. My man Carway here bought the whole building in the thirties and put up the famous harp. That brilliant blinking light was the first thing sailors saw when they docked at the Boat Basin, and this joint opens at eight a.m. every day but Sunday because some people need a nip or two before heading to work.”

  Clio looks around, appreciating the history of the place, but more the man who’s so passionately sharing it. The pub is not full, but they are not alone. There are other patrons and many of them speak with Irish accents.

  Henry wipes his eyes and sits up straighter on his stool. “So, my dear.” He taps her gently on the nose. “You’ve barely told me a thing about your trip.”

  There’s so much to tell him. About the early mornings sipping coffee by the mist nets, untangling non-hummingbirds and setting them free. About their trips into town to buy chocolate ice cream and check e-mail at the dusty little Internet café. About all of the exquisite species they had a chance to see close up.

  She pulls out her phone and shows him the photos she took, photos that are incredible and yet still don’t do justice to the beauty of the birds themselves. She flips through, pointing out some of the birds they saw at various elevations, rattling off their exotic names. Tyrian Metaltail. Buff-winged Starfrontlet. Mountain Velvetbreast. Sparkling Violetear. And of course the Ecuadorian Hillstar.

  “And what did your research tell you? I’m embarrassed to say that I still don’t have a clue what you were doing there,” he says.

  “Do you really want to know?” she says, sipping her beer.

  “I do,” he says.

  And she believes him.

  “Well, we are exploring some angles of the work pioneered by an ornithologist named Christopher Witt and a geneticist named Jay Storz, and what we are examining is that there are all of these hummers that fare far better with the altitude than we humans do, and we are looking into why. On a gram-to-gram basis, hovering hummingbirds burn ten times as much energy as a very fit human, so the question is why these little creatures thrive in the Andes when we can barely breathe there. It turns out that hummingbird species living at high altitudes have evolved hemoglobin with enhanced oxygen-binding properties so they can thrive in oxygen-poor environments. If the research pans out, and I really think it will, this will be one of the most breathtaking examples of parallel evolution. It’s exciting.”

  “Parallel evolution, huh?” Henry says, laughing. “It’s as if you’re speaking in a foreign language, I’m afraid.”

  Clio smiles. “Let me put it more simply: these little creatures are evolving so they can live in extreme environments.”

  His eyes are focused and it’s plain that he’s thinking hard. “That’s quite wonderful.”

  “I’m impressed that you’re not glazing over like most people do when I talk about this stuff.”

  “I’m not most people, Clio.”

  “No,” she says, grabbing his knee, “you’re not.”

  “Hearing you talk about your work is an incredible turn-on, if you must know.”

  “Noted,” Clio says. “The upsetting thing, though, is what this all means for conservation. The escalator-to-extinction hypothesis is that global warming is forcing some species to migrate even higher in search of cooler climates, but the concern is that certain species might die out before adapting.”

  “Shit,” Henry says. “What do we do? Maybe we should run off to the Andes and build ourselves a little hotel at four thousand meters above sea level and all profits will go to saving the hummingbirds.”

  Clio laughs. “Now you’re talking.”

  All of this feels so good. Telling him about work that matters so deeply to her. Laughing with him. Sitting next to him in a charming old city pub. She looks at him, really looks at him, studies his smile. It is the smile of the man she loves, the man she wants nothing more than to know. It’s still a bit of a mystery why he’s here at nearly fifty, why he hasn’t settled down before now. Surely, he has his own stuff, his own memories, his own fears. In time, she will learn about all of it, and there is no rush. This is the way it works. No one emerges from childhood totally unscathed. You do the best you can. And, if you are lucky, you find someone to do the best you can with.

  “My mother said something in her letter that I can’t stop thinking about,” Clio says, suddenly pensive, the taste of beer on her tongue, her head blissfully light.

  “What’s that?”

  “She said you will be a mother . . . She imagined me as a mother, Henry.”

  Henry grins. “Are you saying that you’re entertaining the notion?”

  Clio shrugs. “I think I might be saying that.”

  She still doesn’t know whether a mother is something she can, or wants to, take the leap to be, but it’s a leap she’s thinking about now, and that’s something, an enormous something.

  Mike refills their beers. Clio takes a big swallow and puts her hand on Henry’s knee.

  Be Obscure Clearly.

  A few hours and a few beers later, back at the hotel, Clio reads these three words, which are etched on the glass shower door of the hotel bathroom, traces them with her index finger. They are E. B. White’s words. Once, Clio thought these words were cryptic and pretentious, but she feels di
fferently now. These words speak to her now. Be obscure clearly. This is what she’s done, she’s embraced obscurity, not in an effort to deceive, never in an effort to deceive, but in an effort to give things a chance.

  She steps into the shower. The hot water feels good on her body. She shampoos her hair, applies conditioner to the ends, examines the bottle in her hand. It is Henry’s conditioner, organic. The price tag is coming off, but she can see that it cost thirty-something dollars. How has she slipped into the world of thirty-dollar hair products?

  Clio hears something. She sees Henry standing there, the silhouette of his frame through the fogged shower door. He opens it and steps in. It is the same body she’s seen hundreds of times now, a body she’s all but memorized, but suddenly it’s deliciously foreign and new. He puts two fingers under her chin and lifts her face, looks into her eyes, wraps himself around her, steals a bar of soap from the shelf. Cleans her again, the redundancy welcome, needed somehow. Traces slow circles around her small breasts, between her legs. Her mind empties to nothing. She reaches for him. He lifts her, slips himself inside.

  After, through the sound of the water and their mingled breath, she hears his words. The words she needs to hear.

  “I love you so much,” he says.

  Out of the shower, they stand, side by side, toweling off. At the twin sinks, they get ready for bed.

  He turns toward her. Pulls her into him, and she rests her head on his chest. His heartbeat is steady and strong. She listens.

  “Will you come back to the museum with me? I need to get something.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” she says, her pulse quickening. She’s going to do this. She doesn’t want to wait.