Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  Oliver was shocked when I told him I’d never been to a service in Christ Church Cathedral, even though it’s the seat of the Bishop of Oxford, and the cathedral is right there in Tom Quad. Now I know why I’m always running into him—it’s not just me he’s come for, it’s the cathedral, and the bishop, and the glory of finding himself among all the top clerics of Oxfordshire. He’s terribly fond of bishops. I think he yearns to be one himself.

  But it does seem strange, the way he hangs around the cathedral when he’s got a perfectly good church of his own. He’s even changed the hours for services in his parish so that he won’t miss anything in the cathedral.

  This afternoon he made me go with him to vespers. And of course the choir looked charming, marching in procession up the nave, their robes swaying, their mouths opening and shutting in that miraculous way, and all those harmonious noises coming out. I confess I get a little tired of the same chants repeated over and over. Of course it’s dreadful of me to say a thing like that, because Evensong is sacrosanct. The tourists come in droves and sit there reverently, then fly home and roll their eyes in rapture and tell all their friends they heard Evensong in Oxford Cathedral, and their friends swoon with envy. The spiritual experience of a lifetime! (But I’ll bet even the tourists, if you could plumb the very depths of their hearts, get a little tired of all those musical repetitions of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost.)

  Afterwards Oliver introduced me to the bishop, who happened to be there that day, sitting on his throne near the communion table, demonstrating his majestic rule over the diocese of Oxford. Oliver worships the bishop. He’s trying to persuade him to make him a canon in the cathedral, or a verger or a sacristan or an acolyte or something, only the bishop always says no. Today I thought His Grace seemed a little absentminded. He hurried off rather fast, and then we were all alone in the sanctuary, and Oliver showed me the throne. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He stroked the arms and patted the cushion, and for a minute I thought he was going to sit down on it, but of course that would have been blasphemy.

  Then we had coffee and some really delicious cinnamon buns at a place across the street, and Oliver was radiant, and he told me about his hopes of becoming a more significant person in the church. He wants to be like his ancestor, the Bishop of Warwick (the one Snatched by Untimely Death). He wants to start a movement of revitalization and fill all the churches in England with overflowing congregations, because now it’s mostly a few little old ladies in sweaters and thick stockings.

  Well, I admit I was charmed by his earnestness, but I had to speak to him frankly and ask him why he didn’t fall in love with someone more pious and devout, not the daughter of a scientist.

  “Oh,” said Oliver, gulping his coffee, “but you don’t understand! This is a modern movement. We’re eager to recognize the achievements of science and incorporate its discoveries into our concept of the divine.”

  “I see,” I said, taking a big bite of my cinnamon bun, which was choked with raisins and oozing with frosting. But I didn’t see.

  I do wonder a little at the way Oliver hangs around the cathedral. He’s never taken me to his own church. I’ve never even seen it!

  I wonder why?

  CHAPTER 26

  Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death … the production of the higher animals … directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life.

  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

  On the roof of the Ashmokan Museum:

  “Hand me the broomstick.”

  “My God, Stuart, people can see us from the street. I’ll lose my job if they find out I let you in.”

  “Now for the string. Good. And the umbrella.”

  “Christ, Stuart, it looks fabulous.”

  In the Kellys’ sitting room in the Besse Building:

  Homer got up and blundered around the bedroom, getting dressed, trying to read from the Origin at the same time, muttering to himself, wondering why one species didn’t completely annihilate all the rest, like an army of ants pouring across a forest floor, destroying everything in its path, or a kudzu vine blanketing a county. He was distracted by the thought that the real army was death itself, advancing over the face of the earth, annihilating everything without mercy. Creatures might run from its approaching regiments, and turn and twist, only to find another battalion cutting them off at the pass.

  “Death and extinction,” he said aloud, summing up everything neatly, “that’s what drives evolutionary change, not life.” He dropped the book, picked it up again, and riffled the pages. “Look here. Just look at this chart.”

  Mary was in a hurry. “Oh, Homer, never mind. I’ll read the book myself. You don’t have to keep telling me about it. It’s like hearing the plot of a film I haven’t seen.”

  “Oh, sorry, but you’ve got to see this diagram. It makes everything so clear.” Homer pushed the book under his wife’s nose. “Do you see all these horizontal lines?”

  “Yes, of course I see those horizontal lines.”

  “Well, they’re a thousand generations apart. You see? The whole diagram covers fourteen thousand generations. It shows the process of variation and change and the extinction of most species and the survival of a few through time, do you see? Dead ends, most of them are dead ends. They last only a thousand generations or so, and then they perish like the dodo.”

  “It makes a sort of tree, doesn’t it?” said Mary, doing her best to share Homer’s enthusiasm.

  “Oh, right, right! That’s what he said!” Homer flipped the pages, wrenching his disintegrating paperback this way and that. “Where is it? Is this it? No, that’s not it. Oh, here it is. Listen to this.” Homer grasped Mary’s arm, because she was reaching for her coat. “So it has been with the great tree of life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications. Beautiful, isn’t that beautiful?”

  “Yes, Homer dear, I’m sure it is beautiful, but I’ve got to leave. I have an appointment with Helen Farfrae. We’re planning a picnic at Hampton Court. I told her I hadn’t ever been to London, and she said why didn’t we make a lot of little journeys here and there, and I think that’s wonderful, don’t you?”

  “Of course some people say,” said Homer, brandishing the book at her, “that the tree image is all wrong, that it’s more like a bush.” Half the pages of Homer’s copy of The Origin fell out on the floor, and at once he got down on his knees to pick them up, still raving. “Because it isn’t just a matter of one more perfect species emerging from another. But Darwin doesn’t say that anyway, as this diagram makes perfectly clear. Did you see it? Did you really see it?”

  Mary flung open the door and ran down the stairs.

  On Saturday they went to Hampton Court. It turned out that a lot of people in the Zoology Department had never been to Hampton Court, even though it was a popular tourist attraction, and some of them agreed to come along. Margo and Hal Shaw were coming, and so was William Dubchick, along with his daughter Freddy and her clergyman boyfriend Oliver Clare. Even the Rhodes scholars were coming, Mark Soffit and Stuart Grebe.

  Helen made dozens of sandwiches. Mary used the hot plate in the small sitting room at Keble to hardboil two dozen eggs.

  William brought up a basketful of wine from the basement of the house on Norham Road. Freddy made a cake. Nothing was forgotten—the bottle opener, the salt, the plastic glasses, the paper plates and napkins, the knives and forks. And the day was fine, sunny and warm for October.

  Stuart Grebe was one of the drivers. Once again he had borrowed his roommate’s old Rover. “You want to come with me?” he said, grinning at Homer.

  “Oh, no thank you, Stuart.” Homer looked around for an escape. “I think we’re going with somebody else.”

  “Oh, too bad,” said Stuart. “I was hoping to tell you about a little problem I’m having with the proctors.”

  “Oh, no, Stuart, not
again. What is it this time?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Like, a couple of us got up on the roof of the Ashmolean and put an open umbrella in Apollo’s hand. You know that statue up there on top? I mean, he really needed something. His arm just sticks up there and looks really stupid, so we gave him the umbrella, and then he looked absolutely terrific, you know, sort of predestined, as though the sculptor’s inspiration fizzled out before he was really finished. I mean, the idea of the umbrella was probably right there on the edge of his mind, only he couldn’t quite focus it, he was seeking and seeking, trying this and trying that, so then he put down his hammer and burst into tears, which is sad, because he would have been so proud if he could have seen the triumphant completion of his original concept. You should have seen it, Dr. Kelly. I mean, everybody laughed like anything, only then we got caught.”

  “Oh, my God, Stuart, what do you want me to do?”

  “Well, I sort of thought you could, like, talk to them or something.”

  Homer groaned. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  When the drivers and passengers were sorted out, Homer and Mary Kelly and the Shaws managed to go with Helen Farfrae, Freddy and Oliver were driven by Freddy’s father, and Mark Soffit reeled down the road with Stuart Grebe in the borrowed Rover, shouting at Stuart and clutching the dashboard.

  At Hampton Court they drifted apart. Some took the stately-home tour, and some visited the great conservatory with its ancient grapevine. Homer and Mary Kelly were attracted to the maze.

  Mary was soon lost. She wandered here and there, not caring. Homer discovered at once that he had an unfair advantage. Standing six-feet-six, he could see over the tops of the hedges. By concentrated inattention, he managed to avoid doing so. Meandering freely, choosing pathways at random, he became more and more excited—because the maze was just like Darwin’s chart. The dead ends were extinctions. The right way through was like the long-term survival of Darwin’s species A, which lasted through fourteen thousand generations, while B, C, and D died out along the way. “Uh-oh,” Homer said to himself, as he was blocked once more, “another extinction.”

  He could hear someone in the next aisle sounding puzzled. Looking over the top of the hedge, he saw Freddy Dubchick at a fork in the maze, wondering which way to go.

  “I’m lost,” she said, laughing up at him. “But don’t tell me. I’ll find my own way.” Gamely she set off to the right.

  “You’re heading for extinction,” warned Homer, but Freddy hurried on.

  She turned left, then right, then backed up and tried the other way. At the next bend she ran into Hal Shaw. He turned and saw her, and then, impulsively, he held out his arms. Freddy flew into them. Stupefied with joy, he pulled her closer and closer, and they melted rapturously together.

  At the next dead end, Homer looked over the hedge and saw Margo Shaw and Mark Soffit. They were arguing. “This way, I think,” said Margo, pointing grandly to the left.

  “I just came from there,” said Mark. “It must be this way,” and he pointed to the right.

  Homer left them to find the way out. At once, without cheating by looking over the hedge, he saw the final opening in the labyrinth, and grinned in triumph. He was not extinct, he was Species A, surviving into the present day. Then, turning the last corner, he stopped short and backed up.

  Freddy Dubchick and Hal Shaw were in each other’s arms, passionately kissing and kissing, and murmuring I love you, and kissing again.

  Sticky wicket, thought Homer, plucking a cricket expression from the pages of British literary history. He backed up around the corner again, and at once collided with Oliver Clare. “Wait a second,” he said to Oliver, holding out a warning hand, “this is the wrong way.”

  Oliver looked at him gloomily, and pushed past him. There was a pause, during which Homer could hear only the voices of Hal and Freddy, repeating in their mutual gladness, “Oh, Hal, my darling, my darling,” “Oh, Freddy, Freddy.”

  He could hardly bear to look at Oliver’s grim face when he came back around the corner. Avoiding Homer’s eye, Oliver stumbled away in the direction of the labyrinthine center of the maze.

  Homer stayed put, waiting for the lovers to finish their embraces. He wanted to leave by the proper exit, not become extinct and give up his survival status as a member of the fourteen thousandth generation. But, oh God, they were still billing and cooing. When would they be done?

  At last the loving murmurs stopped. Homer peered around the corner. Hal and Freddy were walking through the opening in the hedge a few feet apart, heading for the conservatory.

  They too were survivors unto the fourteen thousandth generation. They had climbed to the top of the branching tree. Not that it was likely they would survive together. The fact that Shaw was firmly attached to his wife would surely mean an extinction of the Hal-Freddy connection, but who could tell? A change in the climate, some vast movement of populations from one side of the mountain to the other, the retreat of a glacier—in other words a tidy little divorce—might advance their joint survival.

  Homer looked over the tops of the hedges once again as he left the maze. He could see Mary plodding doggedly in the right direction and Oliver Clare becoming extinct in a particularly tricky dead end.

  CHAPTER 27

  After describing a set of forms as distinct species, tearing up my MS., and making them one species, tearing that up and making them separate, and then making them one again … I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished.

  Charles Darwin, letter to Joseph Hooker

  It was Monday morning. In the courtyard of the museum it was too early for squads of schoolchildren to flock around the bones of the iguanodon and the bison and the two little elephants. The exhibits in the glass cases waited to be looked at. The anglerfish gazed at his little joke, the mock lure at the end of his bristling fishline, the quetzal displayed the long blue feathers of his tail, the penguin stared blankly at the giant brain coral across the way.

  Around them the stone scientists stood silent, lost in reverie, having nothing to say to one another. If Leibnitz and Newton had struck up a conversation, it would have been a wretched argument, The calculus is mine, not yours! But neither said a word. Newton was mesmerized by his apple, Leibnitz stared skyward at the City of God, that perfect commonwealth of minds.

  Upstairs in the Zoology Office, Helen Farfrae dropped new metal labels into the mysterious specimen jars:

  Freshwater crab, Cambaridae?

  (10 genera, 264 species)

  Possibly Darwin 239

  Rio de Janeiro, May, 1832.

  Some kind of Grapsus?

  (40 genera, 340 species)

  Is this Darwin 326?

  Bot Island, Monte Video,

  July, 1832.

  She was waiting for Mary Kelly. They were setting out on another excursion, going by themselves instead of organizing an expedition. Mary was glad to have a knowledgeable guide, Helen was grateful for a new friend. When she heard a knock at the office door, Helen called out, “Come in,” and stood up, reaching for her coat.

  The door opened slowly, and Oliver Clare stood gloomily in the corridor, looking at her. “Oh,” said Helen in surprise, plopping back down in her chair, “hello, Oliver.”

  “I’m looking for Freddy. Have you seen her?”

  His voice was hollow. His shoulders sagged. His beauty was as amazing as ever. Helen looked at him and counted up his separate splendors, his golden curls, his perfect features, his tall well-shaped frame. Oliver was rumored to come from a distinguished family. They weren’t peers of the realm exactly, but their bloodline was supposed to be exalted. Were aristocrats more beautiful than ordinary mortals? Probably they had their pick of mates, and therefore natural selection would tend to produce offspring who were progressively more gorgeous—baronets handsomer than earls, dukes more good-looking than baronets, kings and queens so dazzling they would knock your eye out. But of course they weren’t, and
they didn’t. It was a nice theory, but obviously false. Except in Oliver’s case.

  These Darwinian thoughts shot through Helen’s mind in a fraction of a second. “No,” she said, “I haven’t seen her. Did you try her college? She lives at home with her father on weekends, I think.”

  But of course Oliver knew that. Helen felt intensely sorry for him. It was painfully obvious that he was being abandoned by cruel, adorable young Freddy Dubchick. It was common knowledge that Freddy was experimenting dangerously with someone else’s husband.

  “Yes, I’ve already tried those places.” Oliver seemed to be struggling to find something else to say. Helen wondered why he didn’t leave, and she cast about for a friendly remark. But he dredged up something on his own. “I read about you in the paper.”

  “No, surely not.”

  “A while ago, after the night watchman fell. You know.”

  “Oh, that.” Helen remembered her despair when Johnny thrust the Oxford Mail under her nose and shook it and shouted at her, This is what comes of staying out all night. She had almost made up he mind, right there and then, she had almost decided—but she had lost her nerve. “That was weeks ago.”

  “I know, but Freddy showed it to me yesterday.” Oliver looked at her sadly. “I don’t often read the paper.”

  Helen made a feeble joke. “Of course not. The daily news doesn’t matter to a clergyman.” Her laugh was hollow. “You live in eternity, after all.”

  “What?”

  Helen waved her hand, dismissing her own silliness.

  “You heard someone,” said Oliver. “It was in the paper.”

  “Heard someone? Oh, you mean—Why, yes, it was very strange. And then I saw him on the roof, the glass roof. He was climbing like a monkey. Or like one of those mountain climbers who go up the sheer faces of cliffs.”