Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  William put the drawer back in the cardboard box, then looked up in alarm at the sound of a crash. Heads turned. What was that?

  The heads turned back again. It was just Dr. Farfrae’s husband, tramping in late, knocking over a tray of wineglasses.

  Hal Shaw glanced at the intruder, who was making a noisy business of cleaning up the mess, arguing with the porter and dabbing at the spilled wine with his wife’s scarf—what a discourteous bastard. Then Hal looked back at Dubchick and forgot about Dr. Farfrae’s husband. He began thinking instead about hero worship. Hal Shaw admired William Dubchick, Dubchick admired Darwin, Darwin had admired Humboldt, and probably Humboldt had modeled himself on some earlier explorer, like Captain Cook. Reverence had no end.

  William was still warming to the subject of Darwin’s crabs. He held up a sealed bottle. “Most of Darwin’s specimens were sent home in jars of spirit like this one. Then they were dried out here in England. Unfortunately we have found only 110 lots of the 230 crabs he listed in his specimen book. Where are the rest? It is one of our mysteries.”

  William put down the jar and asked for questions. Hands were raised. He answered punctiliously, a little distracted by the muttering of John Farfrae in the background. The man was tugging at his wife’s arm, and it was clear that she was resisting.

  Poor Dr. Farfrae—she was obviously losing the argument. Her shoulders sagged. William kept his eye on her as she followed her husband into the arcaded corridor, then left the museum by way of the main door. Abruptly William called for an end to the questions and stepped down from the platform. Everyone clapped.

  Hal Shaw applauded too, glancing aside at Professor Dubchick’s daughter. Oh, God, she was pretty. Why didn’t pretty girls wear veils like women in Muslim countries? They were attractive nuisances, like unfenced swimming pools. You could fall into that cheek, that throat, and drown. He watched her clergyman boyfriend bow over her and say goodbye. He didn’t hear Oliver Clare say, “Please, Freddy, give me an answer soon.”

  The lecture was over. Homer Kelly’s drowsiness had returned. He yawned and looked at his wife. “Thank God, Keble’s right across the street. Let’s go. I’m dead on my feet.”

  Mary yawned too. “It’s nature’s revenge because we went so far so fast. If we’d paddled a canoe across the Atlantic or flown in a hot-air balloon, she wouldn’t exact this kind of punishment.”

  “She? Who’s she?”

  “Mother Nature, of course.”

  Homer wasn’t listening. As they walked across the street, he made a confession. “Oh, God, Mary, something embarrassing happened in there just now.”

  Mary looked at him in surprise. “Surely you weren’t embarrassed about shouting ‘Jabberwocky’ at all those distinguished strangers?”

  “No, no, not that at all. It was something else. Do you know what I said to that fuzzy entomologist who was wearing two pairs of glasses? He said something polite about the pleasure of meeting newcomers from the United States, and I said—oh, I’m so ashamed—I said, Rather! Jolly good! I did, I really did.”

  “Was it a joke? Surely you were joking?”

  “No, no, it just welled up. I couldn’t help myself. Oh, God, it’s so humiliating.”

  Mary laughed, and pulled him back out of the way as a car plunged past them insanely on the left side of the street.

  “It comes from reading all those English novels,” said Homer. “People probably don’t even say those things anymore—rather and jolly good.” He looked up gloomily at the patterned bricks of Keble College, rising above them, tier upon tier. “The entomologist looked at me strangely, as if I were insulting him in some way. Of course I apologized at once.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God farther off.

  Emma Darwin

  Oliver Clare left the museum in an anguish of doubt and confusion, thinking about Freddy. As he took a wrong turn and walked slowly up Parks Road, the warm breeze tossing the leaves sounded confused too, as if the trees, like Oliver, didn’t know, they just didn’t know. They too were waiting for an answer.

  With his eyes on his advancing feet, he paid no attention to the colleges left and right—the great lawn of Trinity, the fanciful view of Wadham, and all the concentrated architectural wonders between the Broad and the High—the Clarendon, the Sheldonian, the Bodleian, the Bridge of Sighs, All Souls, the Radcliffe Camera and the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

  Oliver had long since given up hankering after the spires and domes of Oxford. After failing to win a place, he had refused his parents’ advice and chosen for himself a small theological college in London.

  His mother regretted what he had missed. “If he’d gone to a regular university, it would have given an edge to his piety,” she told his father. “As it is, he’s not been tried, not brought to judgment.”

  “Brought to judgment?”

  “Oh, you know, he hasn’t been given a real testing. The ridicule of his peers, their belligerent logic, their arguments from unbelief. If only he could have been knocked down and rolled over a few times by a bunch of skeptical fellow students, it would have toughened his faith.”

  “If it didn’t destroy it altogether,” said Oliver’s father shrewdly.

  This afternoon Oliver had been knocked down and rolled over by that redheaded American who had accused the Creator of cruelty. All that talk about disemboweling and—what was the other thing?—bloodsucking. That was what vampire bats did, they sucked blood.

  Well, it wasn’t new to Oliver Clare. He had wrestled with the sharp truths of science before. He thought he had made his peace. Oliver was an up-to-date Anglican priest, not one of your old mossbacks who relied on Scripture for every article of faith. Yesterday someone on the street had handed him a fundamentalist pamphlet, The Truth and Authority of Scripture, and he had tossed it away.

  Oliver walked stiffly down the High Street and summoned up the evidence for his belief. It was all around him. Look at the roses still blooming in the Botanic Gardens, and the graceful willows swaying over the Cherwell, and—Oliver lifted his eyes to the tower of Magdalen—there was always some glorious work of man (that is, man or woman) to reverence as a gift from God.

  His brain became more and more muddled as he thought about saintly deeds. Since all men were brothers (and sisters too, of course) under the fatherhood of God (well, the motherhood too, naturally), it was their belief in God that inspired concern for those less fortunate than themselves. Animals might be cruel and suck blood or whatever, but God had lifted humankind above all that. Men and women had been made in the image of God, and therefore the spirit of God was reflected in their souls.

  Then Oliver woke up. What was he doing on the High? He hadn’t been paying attention. Turning in his tracks, he made a rush for Cornmarket Street, feeling perked up. His arguments had convinced him all over again. Especially the fact of human goodness, the way people showed compassion instead of cruelty, the way they helped the poor and served those less fortunate than themselves.

  Less fortunate than themselves? God help him! Oliver’s spirits had risen, but now they plummeted as he thought about his own congregation. How on earth was he going to handle the eleven o’clock service next Sunday morning? The eleven o’clock called for a sermon, and last Sunday’s had been a disaster, because the children had disrupted it so violently. There was no nursery care in Oliver’s small parish, and the mothers had no way of leaving their kids at home. Suffer the little children, he told himself, but the experience of last Sunday had been terrible.

  Wincing, he reminded himself that the poor souls you were trying to help didn’t have to be good themselves. If they were good already, they wouldn’t need you, would they?

  With his mind in a tangle, Oliver turned into Cornmarket Street. At once his meditations on human goodness were cut short by the hiss of air brakes. There had been an accident. People were swarming across the street to see the p
oor woman who lay in front of the bus, and what was that thing rolling off to one side, landing in the gutter? Not an empty pushchair? Good God, it wasn’t a dead woman and a dead baby lying there on the street? Not a dead baby too?

  Oliver turned his back in horror, and ran all the way home.

  The accident was bad enough, but as he panted up St. Barnabas Street and unlocked the front door of the house where he rented a room, another thought occurred to Oliver Clare. At once it struck cold into his lungs and sent a shaft through his stomach. On the steep carpeted stairs he had to stop and grasp the railing.

  “Are you all right, dear?” said his landlady, looking up at him from her doorway.

  “Oh, yes, thank you, Mrs. Jarvis,” said Oliver, beginning to climb again. “I’m quite all right.”

  Margo Shaw held the jar Professor Dubchick had used in his lecture to show Darwin’s method of preserving specimens. “Am I supposed to return this damn thing? Look, I lugged it out at the professor’s magisterial command.” She thrust it at her husband. “You take it back.”

  Hal took the jar unwillingly. Margo had been hired to keep a sharp eye on the level of spirit in the jars of specimens in the two storage rooms, the Vertebrate Spirit Store and the Invertebrate Spirit Store. She was also blessed with the task of cleaning skeletons and fossil bones. As a woman with a degree in biology from Sweet Briar, she resented the lowly nature of her job.

  “A dogsbody, that’s all I am,” she told Hal. Then, imitating the British accent of one of the women zoologists, she simpered, “Oh, Mrs. Shaw, would you be so good as to take this to the storeroom? Now, remember, Mrs. Shaw, Invertebrate, not Vertebrate!”

  Hal winced, recognizing the voice of Helen Farfrae. His wife was wickedly clever at mimicry.

  Margo fumed. “As if I didn’t know a coelenterate from a reptile!”

  “But it’s important,” said Hal, trying to keep his temper. “What you’re doing, I mean. If the specimens dry out, they might be ruined.”

  “Well, they’ll have to get along without me for a few days. You too. I promised your Aunt Peggy we’d visit her tomorrow.”

  “Oh, right.” Hal cradled the jar in his arms and considered. “It’s okay. I need to get some stuff from the house. Books I left there a long time ago. And it will be good to see the old dear again.”

  Margo’s triangular face managed to look both inquisitive and acquisitive at the same time. “Someday it will be yours, all yours. And then we can sell it for heaps of money. So you’ve got to butter up the dear old thing. It’s so funny, your uncle from Topeka marrying a rich Englishwoman. How old is she, anyway? God, she looks a hundred and two.” Margo adopted a quavering voice diabolically like Aunt Peggy’s. “Oh, dawling Hal, you’re too sweet. And how chawming Margo looks in that ravishing gown!”

  Sickened, Hal turned away and headed for the Invertebrate Spirit Store.

  Instantly Mark Soffit was after him. After the reception Mark had lingered, hanging around in the courtyard while the caterers cleared away the serving tables and collected empty wineglasses from the pedestals of the stone scientists. One wag had balanced a glass on the hand of Galileo.

  Mark was looking for a new sponsor. His hopes for the partisan interest of Professor Dubchick had vanished, and he told himself it didn’t matter, because Dubchick was too old anyway—God, he was really out of it. He was supposed to be writing a book, but some mineralogist at the reception had passed along to Mark his doubts that it would ever be finished.

  Professor Shaw, on the other hand, was still young, and it was obvious that he was moving in on Dubchick’s territory, taking over. Mark took aim at Hal Shaw and fired the gun of his self-interest. “Oh, Professor Shaw, I was hoping to talk to you.”

  Agreeably Hal slowed his footsteps and invited Mark to accompany him to the Invertebrate Spirit Store. By the time they had negotiated a labyrinth of back halls and small stairways, Mark had explained that he was a Rhodes scholar, anxious to associate himself with the latest advances in evolutionary studies. He had hoped to be assigned to Professor Dubchick as a pupil, but that had fallen through. Perhaps Dr. Shaw could persuade Mark’s college to assign him as Mark’s tutor?

  When Hal unlocked the door of the storeroom, Mark pushed in behind him, treading on his heels. Hal felt crowded in more ways than one. He told Mark he would look into it, and then he led him from one bank of shelves to another. After putting away the jar, he explained the precious nature of the other bottled specimens.

  He picked up one and showed the label to Mark. “Copepoda: Calanoida. You see, it’s a Darwin specimen.” Hal stared at the crab in the jar and forgot about Mark Soffit as he imagined Charles Darwin on an island off the coast of Chile, lifting out a single crab from a great purple cloud of crustaceans, infinite numbers pursued by flocks of Famine Petrels.

  “How the hell did all those specimens get lost?” said Mark. “The ones Dubchick was talking about. Was it carelessness on Darwin’s part?”

  “No, no, he was the soul of carefulness.” Hal put the jar tenderly back on the shelf. “It was Bell’s fault, I guess. Darwin gave all his crabs to Thomas Bell to identify, and then Bell never got around to it. He sold them to Professor Westwood, who gave them to the museum, and somehow during the transfers a bunch of them fell between the cracks.”

  “Well, then, maybe it was carelessness here in the museum,” said Mark hopefully. “Maybe they’re miscatalogued. Maybe they’re in some drawer nobody’s looked at in a hundred years. I mean, after all, this place is pretty musty.”

  “I’ve often wondered that myself,” said Hal. “Ever since I came here last June, I’ve imagined opening up some old cabinet and coming upon a treasure trove. But things are too well cared for around here. It’s not musty at all.”

  “No?” Mark didn’t believe it. Inwardly he vowed to worm his way into every attic and closet and open every drawer. The place was a maze of little rooms and back halls. Anything could be hidden away and forgotten.

  And in the process he would find out what everybody was up to, he’d learn who was really going places. Not like poor old Dubchick, who didn’t know one end of an electron microscope from the other. It was rumored that the old man still liked to get out there in the jungle and look wild animals in the eye, and probably swing from tree to tree.

  CHAPTER 6

  Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so well used to queer things happening.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  As a married couple, the Kellys should have been given a house for the Michaelmas term. But Homer’s appointment had been made very late, in an enthusiastic burst of phone calls across the Atlantic. By that time all the faculty houses had been assigned to other people. So instead of a house they had been given a small set of rooms in the Besse Building, right in the middle of Keble College on Liddon Quad.

  Mary busied herself with unpacking, whistling softly, while Homer collapsed on the bed in a stupor and fell asleep at once. He was promptly deep in Wonderland. And there was the dodo—not the extinct bird complete with feathers, like the one in Tenniel’s picture, but the pitiful seventeenth-century remnant of one of the last living birds, the fragments from the glass case in the museum. The skull and bony foot floated above Homer’s head in the branches of a tree.

  “You’re just like the Cheshire-Cat,” said Homer politely, initiating a conversation. “I can only see part of you.”.

  The dodo sighed, and stretched out its pathetic foot. “These pieces of me are all there is. I live in dread of disappearing altogether.”

  “Well, of course,” said Homer, pointing out a painful truth, “you are extinct, after all.”

  “Oh, I know I’m extinct, I know, I know,” whimpered the dodo. “But at least this much of me survives.” Then to Homer’s surprise it cried out in alarm, “Oh, oh, what’s happening? I’m vanishing! Help, help!”

  It was true, the dodo was fading, becoming fainter and fainter. Finally, with a pathetic c
ry, it vanished. There was nothing left but a tossing bundle of leaves.

  Homer’s dream went on and on after that, becoming more and more disconnected and absurd, but when he woke up an hour later, all he could remember was the fantastic exchange with the dodo.

  Mary had finished her shower. Naked, she pranced around the room looking for her underwear. Homer sat up in bed and said anxiously, “What do you suppose they do for security in the museum? I wonder if all those exhibits are really safe.”

  Mary ransacked the drawers of the dresser. “Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Isn’t it mostly a teaching museum? Not a collection of irreplaceable objects? If somebody stole the skeleton of the giraffe, they could probably find another one somewhere.”

  Homer was scandalized. “But what about the dodo? There aren’t any more dodos! That dodo is it.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Homer. I guess if it disappeared, it would be more extinct than ever.” Mary hopped on one foot, pulling on her trousers. “I mean, not just a fond memory, but utterly and absolutely gone.”

  So from then on Homer felt a special protective concern for the welfare of the dodo belonging to the Oxford University Museum.

  While Oliver Clare ran home to his rented room on St. Barnabas Street and Homer Kelly lay dreaming about the dodo, William Dubchick and his daughter Freddy walked home from the museum to their house on Norham Road. They could have taken one of the little Park and Ride buses on the Banbury Road, but it was just as easy to walk.

  Their house was a typical North Oxford brick Victorian. Comfortable and spacious, it was a mixture of homeliness and ostentation, with touches of Gothic grandeur. There were tall pointed windows and a few set pieces of stained glass. A carved armorial bearing rose above the mantel in the sitting room, honoring nobody in particular. William’s wife had called it generic Arthurian. For the past hundred and fifty years this house and its neighbors had provided the security of varnished woodwork and a patriarchal hearth to a multitude of married dons. Now many of the larger houses had been broken up into flats or turned into schools.