"I don't mind Aunt Anna," I said. "I like Aunt Anna." She was a jazzy old thing, literally banging out tunes of the Roaring Twenties on her piano.
"Well, why wouldn't you?" my mother said. "Do you want to visit her tomorrow, Jane? I'll take you with me."
Visiting Aunt Anna was a great treat. She still lived alone in a narrow brownstone in New York City, and she pinned notes to all the furniture telling her where she was and what she had to do. They said things like:
REMINDER:
Sort photos.
Cocktails.
It was always possible the note was recent, but Aunt Anna could just as easily have pinned it there five years earlier. At any rate, she would say, "Cocktails!" and clap her hands in anticipation, then dutifully begin sorting photographs in preparation.
"Gone west," she would say every once in a while, shaking her head, looking down at a picture of a sepia face in a high collar or a figure in a creased black-and-white snapshot.
Aunt Anna had a large, unpleasant black Persian cat, and would invariably say, "I have a soft, lovely black pussy," much to my brothers' amusement. And she had portraits of two of the triplets—Frederick, her father, and her uncle Francis.
I always felt a particular bond with Francis. Once, standing beneath this painting of him in his stiff black suit, I asked my mother to define the word ironic. I used to plague my mother with this question. Nothing had satisfied me up to that point. Every explanation or example seemed to me to describe something that could just as easily be called sarcastic or coincidental. The nuance of the word escaped me, and bothered me in some deep, philosophical way, until Great-Uncle Francis was invoked.
"So, what does it mean?" I asked yet again.
"Aha!" Aunt Anna cried out from another room. "Francis Barlow, captain of a fleet of merchant ships, died at sea."
I assumed at first that this was one of Aunt Anna's quaintly senile non sequiturs. But then she appeared in the doorway, looked at Great-Uncle Francis on the wall, and said, "In a pleasure yacht," and I understood.
Aunt Anna had a housekeeper, too, almost as old and dotty as she was, who came in every morning at eight and left every evening, after cocktails with my aunt, precisely at eight, though how she told the time I don't know, for every clock in the house was set to a different hour. Some of them chimed and, because they all struck the hour at different times, there was a great deal of soft musical clanging at Aunt Anna's.
"You love to go to Aunt Anna's, don't you?" my mother said.
"And I can bring Cousin Martha!" I said.
"No," she said.
"But they're related."
"The sins of the father," said my brother Fred, walking past us and up the stairs.
"Daddy has no sins," I said. "Do you?"
But my father did not answer, for he had already resumed droning on about people I had never heard of, never met, some of whom had sold part of the company and kept the money, which was why my grandfather had to go to Cuba.
"Is that why they can paint their house and get a new roof and pave the driveway and we can't?" I asked.
My father laughed.
My mother said paving the driveway was vulgar.
3
MARTHA ANNOUNCED on that very first afternoon in the Galapagos Islands that we would take our first Galapagos field trip to a beach called Las Bachas. I would tread in Darwin's footsteps! Never mind that he had not gone to the island where Las Bachas was. Darwin visited only four of the islands, where he spent a total of only three weeks. But the Galapagos were his, and now they were going to be mine as well. I was so keyed up, so intoxicated with Darwin and his islands, and at the same time so agitated by Martha, that I don't think I really distinguished between the two. Martha was to lead me in Darwin's footsteps. Or Darwin in hers.
We unpacked and then lined up like children to go down the gangplank, if that's what you really call it, to the little open motorboat. The panga would then ferry us, in two trips, to the island, which was just across a tiny bay from Baltra. I was in the second group, and while we waited for the panga to return, enormous black frigate birds coasted across the sky and we saw a baby hammerhead shark swim by.
The fresh, salty perfume of the air was exhilarating. The sun was bright and was above us, the sea was green and was below us. But I was disoriented in a profound way. I had no idea where north was no matter how many times Ethel, the tower of seventy-year-old health, pointed it out to me. I had no landmarks. The sea and the sun were an eccentric sea and sun.
We climbed down into the panga and skimmed across the Pacific Ocean to a low, dark shore. We climbed out of the panga into icy knee-deep water. I thought, I'm straddling the equator. Martha stood in the water and helped each of us out of the launch. I was last.
"There, now," she said.
I glanced at her to see if this utterance was deliberate. We had often embarked on prolonged discussions of "there, now" as children, an exclamation I had deemed redundant and, worse, senseless.
"What does it mean?" I would say.
"It means 'there, now'" was all that Martha would reply.
I checked once more, hoping to catch some flicker of a smile, some knowing look back at me, but she was already scanning the skies with her binoculars.
"Audubon shearwaters," Martha said. She pointed to a flock of dark, diving birds.
The beach curved in a tight crescent, a white flash in the black rock. The rocks, so dark, were ornamented with dozens of large and very red crabs.
Martha lowered her binoculars, and we walked silently along the wet sand toward the others.
The island itself was so unreal, so singular. It seemed all the more bizarre with Martha walking upon it.
"So," I said. I was startled by the Galapagos. There was something extreme about this little island with its glaring white beach and glaring black rocks and glaring red crabs. And I continued to be startled by Martha.
"So!" I said again. And then, "You're the guide."
I had traveled across two continents, from one ocean to another, in order to be washed up on a beach with my next-door neighbor. And she, who as a girl could not see the ineffectual nature of the phrase "there, now," did not seem to be able, as an adult, to recognize the magnitude of the miracle of our Galapagos reunion.
"Here we are in the Galapagos," I said. "Where the greatest revolution in modern thought was born."
I looked around, trying to take in the vastness of the island's isolation, which gave the place a feeling of being both very big and very small at the same time.
"Greater than Marx's," I said.
Yes, but—all that childhood sincerity, all that competitive worship, all that sarcasm, all those secrets and confessions and fashion tips—all, all for naught. Friendship betrayed, played false, delegitimized like a tyrant state, a banana republic.
"Greater than Freud's," I said.
Martha pointed out some brown noddies. The shearwaters dove into the waves rolling toward the beach, then emerged, swallowing their catch. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but what is the purpose of friendship? It seemed to me at that moment that friendship could be nothing more than a mistake, a mutation, a freak, a lusus naturae, a joke of nature—what Darwin called a sport.
"I was so surprised," Martha said. "I couldn't believe it when I saw you. I'm so glad you're here."
Well, not a mutation, I thought. Not quite that. What a desperate, irresolute organism is human consciousness. At least my consciousness was, wagging its tail, leaping for joy: its master's voice!
"Why are you here?" she added. She said it in a kindly way, and, after all, why was I there? But the question established turf so clearly. She might just as well have pissed on a tree. Human consciousness put its tail between its legs.
"My mother sent me."
"You're lucky," said my roommate, Gloria, coming up on my other side. "My mother sent me to boarding school."
"Why are you here?" I asked Martha.
"Oh, too existential,"
said Gloria. "Why is any of us here? In this great wide world? Our mothers sent all of us! Some of us had to go to Rosemary Hall, too, that's all."
She veered off to photograph some indistinguishable birds flying in the distance.
"What have you been doing all these years?" Martha said.
I told her I worked at the Culture Foundation, a weekly gathering of academics as well as various institutionally unaffiliated pillars of the intellectual and artistic community.
"Or rather," I said, adopting my best witty New Yorker attitude, "since there is no real intellectual and artistic community in New York anymore, and since the Culture Foundation was begun in order to encourage the growth of just such an intellectual and artistic community, I think of the Culture Foundation as more of an artificial body, like a Frankenstein's monster. Random, ill-fitting parts which all get together in one room once a week."
I paused to see if she had been impressed by my eloquence.
"So what do you do there?" she said.
"The mailings, the schedule of talks. Sometimes I type up their talks for them or their notes. Anything anyone wants me to do, really. They also come to be fed during these weekly gatherings, which are therefore called Lunches. I call them, send them invitations, remind them, find them chairs, greet their guests, order the sandwiches and salads. And I listen. That's the best part. It's like school without grades. If it weren't for the unfortunate salary, it would be a perfect job."
"A sort of free-floating apprentice," she said. "Just what you always wanted to be."
It was true. When I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be an apprentice. It didn't matter what kind of an apprentice. It was the idea of apprenticeship, or perhaps just the word itself, that appealed to me. And now I was an apprentice with no field, no territory, no turf, no master, even. I loved my job, for it allowed me to rub shoulders with ideas, to listen without having to retain, to gather information like flowers.
"Yes. My apprenticeship is very pure," I said.
Martha was silent awhile, then said, "It's such a great group."
"A bit vainglorious," I said, "but not too demanding about their grub. As long as there's enough." Then I realized she meant us, the Galapagos ducklings. Her group.
How does one define a group? Kingdom, class, family, genus, species. Did I leave any out? Phylum? It had occurred to me only the night before, in the five minutes before I fell asleep, that genus is generic and species is specific.
Which group was this line of tourists on a beach? And how could Martha stand it, another batch in gray suede hiking boots and floppy hats replacing the last identical batch? Telling strangers the same thing over and over, learning all their names, forgetting all their names, learning the next group's names, on and on, leading an endless parade of well-meaning nature lovers seduced by public television documentaries. She walked among us, an oddly urban figure, wiry and remorseless, as if she were looking for a cab in the rain.
"And what, I wonder, is the story behind this little number?" the dapper elderly man asked Martha. He pointed to a stringy vine crawling across the sand. He tilted his head in an insinuating way.
"He's a retired gossip columnist," Gloria whispered to me. "Jeremy Toll. Remember? 'Toll Tells'?"
"No."
"Oh, you're too young, poor thing."
There was a story to the little plant, though. It was a morning glory, a beach morning glory. Perhaps it would not have made "Toll Tells," but then again, why not? The daily struggle of this weed, the journey, perilous and unlikely, of its seed, the triumph of love, or at least reproduction—these seemed very real to us and crucial when Martha spoke.
"Martha Tells!" Gloria whispered.
Martha talked to us with an easy clarity, which seemed to come as much from her pleasure in her subject as from her actual description. The feeling of being a spectator, a voyeur of nature's wonders, evaporated. Darwin studied dinosaurs, orchids, and his firstborn's smile, not as a spectator, not as a scientist standing above and outside the realm of his subjects. He approached everything, from his account books to the bees in his garden, with a sympathetic, dignified courtesy. It was this trait, I now realize, that we all responded to in Martha. She was positively chivalrous in her studies, eloquent not by virtue of any special quality of language, but by virtue of her own unshakable, irrepressible, courtly delight.
"Look!" Martha said. She pointed to some big brown birds flying low over the water. "Blue-footed boobies."
They dropped to the water like bombs. I tried to see their blue feet, but the light was wrong.
"Will we see the circle of death?" asked the young guy from the plane. His name was Jack Cornwall. He turned to me, boyish and excited. "The boobies make a circle of guano, and the older chick pushes out the younger chick—"
"Booby primogeniture," Martha said. "No blue-footed booby nests today. Soon, though. It's a mechanism for directing resources to the strongest chick—the firstborn, usually, the one most likely to survive—rather than spreading the food too thin and ending up with three sickly chicks. It's astonishing, isn't it? How resourceful nature is."
Mirabile dictu.
"Two eggs are laid and hatched. Sometimes three," Martha was saying. "If there's a particularly abundant supply of food that year, they might all reach maturity. But that's very rare. Usually only one makes it. The oldest one. The others are for insurance."
Primogeniture. An interesting concept.
"The oldest is a little bigger and stronger right from the beginning," Martha said. "It succeeds in getting most of the food. And so it becomes bigger and stronger yet."
"I am an only child," Gloria said.
Perhaps in the remote Barlow past, there had been a question of primogeniture—the three Barlows, triplet chicks, trying to grab all the food, trying to push one another out of the family circle, a circle of death, a circle of bright bird lime. The feud could have started there. That was a perfectly reasonable place for a feud to start.
"The parents continue to look after all of their chicks, but the oldest is busy appropriating all the food. The younger chicks weaken from starvation. Finally, the oldest, plump and robust, is able to shove his frail little siblings right out of the nest. He pushes them across the white line. One step across that line and the parents no longer recognize their chicks. The oldest literally pushes them out of the family circle."
The boobies were genetically programmed to fight for their food, to push their own flesh and blood out of the nest. It was a family feud of sorts, an inherited one. The Barlow family feud had been passed along conscientiously from generation to generation, too. Perhaps it was passed along with the DNA. Long ago one brother had shoved another out of the family business, out of the circle of Cuban sugar. The feud was genetic! Martha and I had inherited it!
If this theory were valid, Martha had stopped being my friend because she had to. The family feud had reached down another generation. Martha and I were never meant to be friends. Our families, our backgrounds, forbade it. Ours was a doomed friendship, right from the beginning, as doomed as that of Romeo and Juliet. As doomed as the youngest chick in a loop of white excrement.
There was a tautological aspect to this solution—the feud deciphering the feud. But fate is tautological, isn't it? And so I allowed myself the luxury of imagining the feud reaching, inexorably, through the ages, to pluck Martha from me, to put us at opposite ends of the room, the way our seventh-grade homeroom teacher did.
Martha was telling another story. That was how the natural world confronted her, as practical and complicated and beautiful as a nineteenth-century novel—the life of a yellow, smiling land iguana unfolded in all its Trollopian detail. She continued walking along the beach, pointing out birds and silver crackly plants, her manner both casual and excited, friendly in a bossy way, as if we'd dropped in on her unexpectedly and she genuinely wanted us to stay for dinner. There was something gracious and complete about Martha, the Galapagos hostess. If she had taken out a cigarette, lit i
t with a gold lighter, and offered us martinis, she could not have been more debonair.
The group walked behind her, everyone politely trying to edge closer, to advance in the line without seeming to, to elbow ahead without offending the competing members of the group. I was no exception. When in the Galapagos, do as the species do. In one brilliant strategic shove, I nonchalantly passed all of the Cornwalls, the multigenerational family of five who stuck together and could therefore, I reasoned, be treated as a single obstacle, thus diminishing my pushy rudeness from a factor of five to a factor of one. This maneuver put me in front of Jack Cornwall (who, even on second inspection, or was it third? was quite nice-looking), and more important, it put me directly beside Martha, from which privileged position I thought about how annoyed I was. No, not annoyed, angry. Annoyed is a mosquito.
Martha looked very much the same as she had when she was sixteen. She was thinner, her skin weathered and tanned, her hair short and bleached by the sun, but the confidence, the tart delight in her own judgment that had marked her as a worthy companion from the first moment I saw her galloping an imaginary horse across her lawn, remained as powerful as ever. It struck me as almost a crime that these attributes had been denied me all these years just because their proprietor had capriciously decided not to be my friend.
As I've said, no one sympathizes when you lose a friend unless the friend has died. I felt myself wishing Martha dead at that moment, partly as a crude and direct expression of anger, partly so that everyone would properly recognize the magnitude of my loss.
"So, Martha," I said. My voice sounded more petulant than I had anticipated. "What is a species, anyway?"
What is a species, anyway, Martha? It was a challenge, a glove across the face of her leadership and scientific expertise. Drop me and leave me, like a penny, not worth the trouble of picking up, devalued and dull? Well, then, I would ask her the hard questions. I couldn't bring myself to ask any personal hard questions, but I felt that this species problem would do nicely. It had troubled Darwin. It could trouble her.
The Evolution of Jane Page 4