She shook her head, not in negation but dismay. “I probably take too much pride in what I know, because I’ve had to teach all of it to myself. I appreciate your praise, but you overestimate. My colleagues are as remote to me as archangels. When I write Mr. Riley I set his little portrait here with the hope of feeling less alone on my beachhead.”
“The desert isle of Vineland.”
“Yes. How different it must be for you. I rejoice for you, Mr. Greenwood. A new school building! The president at your dedication, and a whole town standing up for you and your pinafored young scientists. They are lucky girls.”
“If only you knew. I’m also stranded on a lonely beachhead. My employer Mr. Cutler is hostile to the genuine teaching of science.”
She looked at him. Then drank a long draught of tea and cocked her head as if listening to his words again in her mind. Then looked at him squarely. “You mentioned hostility to Darwin, when we spoke before. Do you now mean to say the principal is hostile to science entirely? What is your evidence?”
“I submit my lesson plans and he overrules all but the most mundane exercises in rote memory. Experimentation alarms him. Modern scientific theory enrages him, discussion of Darwin particularly but not only this. The suggestion of taking pupils outdoors to study nature, he treats as blasphemy.”
“Outdoors. To the Pine Barrens?”
“It would be wonderful. But to this point my proposals have been only very modest little adventures. Walking to the forest north of Park Avenue to collect seeds and nuts and bring them back for classification with taxonomic keys. Perhaps evaluate our finds for the relative abundance of species. Plant the seeds to observe life cycles. These proposals all were devoutly rejected.”
“As blasphemy, you say.” Mrs. Treat considered it. “If he sees this school as a sort of church, what are its doctrines?”
“Discipline and moral education, his two-headed monster. Surely you know he travels the country lecturing on his Twin Pillars of Pedagogy. Landis and his freethinkers must have been proud of the fat rabbit they snared, getting Cutler here as principal of their high school.”
“Yes. Snaring the famous lecturer called up more headlines in the Weekly than a month of barn fires.”
“I confess I was a little slow to grasp how the blood of Vineland pulses to the beat of Landis.”
Mary frowned. “The man is like his hero Phineas Barnum, with the gilded offices in Manhattan Island. He only loves a circus.”
“He certainly has my mother-in-law in his thrall. Even his dog shows and baby contests bring her to ecstasy.”
“Your employer is a part of the dog show.” Mary shook her head. “Discipline, and moral education. These are matters personal to the scholar. Discipline is a habit one brings to a study, and not the study itself. Is that not so?”
“Madam, I wish I knew. I can only tell you Cutler feels direct observation is undisciplined behavior. Discipline is found in turning the eyes inward to the soul, finding truth through God and intuition rather than reason.”
“Oh, blast these transcendentalists. Your pupils are hardly more than children. What will they find inside their poor little souls but hoop-and-stick and a preoccupation with puddings?”
“One wonders. But while they wait for it, we are to keep them occupied with slavish memorization of the utopian poets.”
“Hellas and Arcadia. These men think we need only declare ourselves Adam and Eve to recover all the fruits of Eden. Whereas an actual study of fruit pests does not interest them. I speak from experience.” Mrs. Treat looked satisfactorily peeved. “What poems does your employer recommend to promote the study of science?”
“He concedes a shortage of these, but he is forcefully opposed to rationalists. All the worse if they are rational and foreign.”
“Well, forevermore. What is science without rational observation? Where is truth?”
“He says it is not the place of someone in my subordinate position to decide what is true. Let alone encourage my pupils to look for it among the beetles and acorns.”
“Of course the scientist’s position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.”
“Remarkable,” Thatcher repeated, feeling a lightness he hadn’t known outside Boston. Mary emptied the teapot into their cups, carefully giving herself the dregs.
“Did you happen to attend the dedication of the school?” he asked.
She waved a hand, shook her head. “I don’t fare well with hubbub.”
“Would you like to know what my sister-in-law observed in President Grant?”
“A man who would prefer to be on his own farm, culling his cattle.”
“Something close to that. I think she will make a scientist one day, our Polly. But you didn’t see him. How did you know?”
“I read the newspapers. One recognizes a kindred disposition.”
“And now he is president, poor man. Whither he goest, there will go hubbub.”
She grinned. “Mr. Greenwood, twice you’ve crossed my threshold and twice brought a balm for failing spirits. We haven’t even spoken of my little fern, or your books. Let us have a look.” She took the books he handed her. “Please take pity on me and finish this egg cake. I’ve had it for more teas and breakfasts than I’d like to count. Egg cake is Selma’s new crowning glory, and I can’t bear to tell her a horse can founder on glory.”
“Would you please call me Thatcher?”
She looked up from Flora Novae-Zelandiae.
“If I’m presuming, forgive me,” he said. “I have been in the world without friends for too many months.”
“Thatcher. What sorcery do you know? I’ve been driving the librarians to madness asking for Hooker’s new Flora.”
“Mary, I thank you. I will have the cake.”
7
The Cake
At the corner of Seventh and Landis, Willa forced herself to keep pushing her rubber boots through the waterlogged street. Mud was not the problem. The idea of walking in the door of the brick building she could see down the block: that was the problem, a reluctance that made no sense. As a journalist she had cold-called senators and Nobel Prize–winning scientists and the mother of an astronaut who died in a shuttle explosion. Not much could be worse.
She cut across to the other side of Seventh to avoid another windfall of tangled tree limbs on the sidewalk. The end of September had brought two giant storms, the thrashing tails of hurricanes brewed up over the Atlantic that came in oversize and early. People’s idle talk of the weather had gone quiet, as if it might bring bad luck, while the TV forecasters discussed categories of storm surge and wind speeds previously unseen. Even this far inland, New Jersey was still recovering from Hurricane Sandy, which in its time, a few years back, had been called the storm of the century. How foolish it seemed now to label anything “of the century.” This one was still a teenager with an anger-management problem and a long future ahead.
Willa stopped at the wrought-iron fence to study a little wooden house in front of the Vineland Historical Society. This would be one of the stip houses, relocated to this spot; an interpretive sign declared it the first house built in Vineland. Some claim, she thought, considering all the wigwams and shelters of runaway slaves that must have melted back into the forest before the land barons got there. This little chalet looked chipper for its years, compared with Willa’s house, which was melting into history on the fast track. For both the recent storms the authorities had ordered all residents to get off the streets, shutter their windows, and hole up in an interior room: shelter in place. But her home was dubious shelter. The first storm breached the roof and sent water pouring down what they’d ironically named the Servants’ Staircase. Willa declared it a loss and sealed its entry doors with duct tape.
The second storm was worse. In the middle of the night they’d awakened to a
crash and run upstairs to find a collapsed ceiling in shards over every inch of Willa’s office: floor, desk, lampshade, books. It felt personal. She stood in tears while Iano picked dirty white chunks of plaster out of her computer keyboard and printer. They covered the desk with a plastic sheet to keep it dry until morning, when she would move her sad little stake on professionalism to a corner of her bedroom.
She’d told Iano it was unrealistic to expect someone else’s money to fix their house, but today she was swallowing her pride. The plan was to root out an architectural pedigree that might lead to a loan or grant, even though she was pretty sure she was chasing down a blind alley. She was reluctant to start the chase, because after this door slammed she’d have none left.
The front door of the Vineland Historical Society had an Open sign turned out in its warbled antique-glass window, and walking across its threshold felt like time travel. Willa let that corny notion come and go as she wiped her boots on a brushy doormat and let her eyes adjust. A plate rail running around the top of the room held a bewildering assortment of vases and trinkets, and every wall was crowded with dark portraits of some town father, all of them bearded, wearing hats. No: one town mother among them, wearing a high-necked dress that looked painful and the sad-eyed face to prove it.
A gramophone with its black petunia bell sat on a table among fancy porcelain urns. It was one of those museums, the folkloric community hodgepodge. What to do with Grandpa’s arrowhead collection when we clean out the house? The Historical Society! Here it could share a glass case with some grandmother’s tarnished silver service. Through a patina of dust and filtered light her gaze jumped from one display case to another. One was filled with long, linked chains made of glass. How did glass chains make sense, unless for tying up glass dogs? Willa’s head swam. The big room had a high ceiling and might have felt airy if it weren’t crowded with display tables and little room-like set pieces of furniture from various decades. One corner was arranged as a nineteenth-century office with an ornate rolltop desk and a small printing press. Willa’s eye caught and came back to a red-velvet-upholstered armchair constructed of what seemed to be cow horns, some weird throne of bygone vanities. She felt time collapsing around her like a falling ceiling. Her sole desire was to turn around and walk out the door.
“Hello.” A man stepped out of an office. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. Yeah. I’m …” She struggled, distracted by his appearance. “I’m new to town, we moved here this summer. Curious about history, of course. I have a few things I’ve been wanting to research.”
He strode forward and thrust out a tiny white hand. “Christopher Hawk. I’m here most days of the week.”
“Willa Knox. I’m a journalist.”
“From what publication?”
“Freelance, at the moment. I’ve worked for a few.”
Mr. Hawk stood about five feet tall and wore a clean, extremely dated three-piece suit. His white hair was shoulder-length but tidy, his white beard neatly trimmed, and his skin so nearly transparent Willa wondered if he might have a pigment disorder.
“Knox,” he repeated. “Willa like the author?”
Willa smiled. People rarely made the connection. “Yes. My mother was a Cather fan. She led kind of an Àntonia life.”
His eyes narrowed slightly at these motley credentials. “Would you like the Cook’s tour, or help with finding something specific? Or would you rather I just leave you to poke around?”
He sounded youthful. She gave the white hair a second look, wondering if it was deceptive. The clothes were definitely old but maybe the man wasn’t, if he had albinism. His features were taut and perfectly unwrinkled, like those of a human carved of wax. She pulled her eyes off Christopher Hawk and they sailed right back to the chair made of cow horns. “Thanks, I might need some guidance.”
“That chair belonged to Charles Landis. I assume you know the basics there.”
“Of … cowboy furniture design?”
He didn’t smile. “Captain Landis had exotic tastes. That was a Victorian aesthetic. The discovery of the world’s frontiers reflected in the home. Primitives and oddities were the rage.”
“Tell me about Landis.”
He drew back in a faint wince, as if she’d said, Remind me again about George Washington. “Charles Landis was the founder of Vineland.”
“Right, I’ve heard. Land developer and utopian visionary.”
“Exactly.”
“So he set up this place as a planned community? When was that?”
“He bought the land in 1861. Surveyed it, laid out the roads on a grid, brought in the railroad, and started a newspaper to put out the word. His dream was a self-sufficient colony of agriculture and intellectual enterprise. Fruit growers and freethinkers flourishing side by side.”
Willa smiled. “How’d that work out for him?”
“Very well, in fact. We have his book, The Founder’s Own Story. Obviously it’s his version of events.”
“Obviously.”
“We have a deep archive here, including every copy of the Vineland Weekly and other local newspapers dating back to their first issues. Also artifacts and the personal papers of a lot of Vineland’s prominent citizens over the years.”
“Great,” Willa said, trying not to betray her thinking about the curatorial technique here. Organization aside, the place was damp and dusty, probably hot and damp in summer, prone to mildew.
“The full-length portrait you see over there is Landis as a young man. In the one on the left he’s twenty years older.”
Willa studied the famous autocrat, with his ruddy cheeks and odd flop of hair. A little tawdry looking for a land baron, she thought, but the standards of a particular time were hard to gauge. People hadn’t always bathed, for example. Mr. Hawk was still ticking through his inventory. “That landscape in the gold frame hung in his original office on Landis Avenue. The dress and shawl on the mannequin belonged to his wife. The curios on that table were collected on one of his trips overseas.”
Willa understood she’d flipped a switch on the Landis gusto, and wondered what this man did in here all day when he lacked an audience. He gave off a whiff of Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations—the old lady still in her wedding dress fifty years after getting jilted, wafting around her cobwebby house with the caved-in remains of the nuptial banquet on the table. She fought off an image of this pale man rolling out a mummified wedding cake.
“Was Vineland so different from other towns of the time?” she asked.
“Very different. Landis believed human improvement was a cooperative venture. Everyone who purchased property agreed to certain stipulations for establishing residence within a year and improving the land according to his system of public adornment.”
“The shade trees and all that jazz.”
“Shade trees, setbacks, shrubbery, and so forth.”
She smiled. “The happy Victorian dream. Unlimited growth that never gets out of bounds or turns ugly.”
“Beauty was only the beginning,” he said, pretty snippily for a docent, she thought. Though she knew she was baiting him. “He introduced a modern system of education open to all races, a hundred years before US schools were integrated.”
“Really. That’s impressive.”
“Yes it is. He was very forward thinking. His work agreements made land accessible to poor and immigrant farmers, while he also set up progressive societies to attract some of the most prominent intellectuals and reformers of the time.”
“Such as?” She couldn’t decide whether to keep egging him on or back away slowly.
“It’s a long list. The inventor William Daggett. Thomas Welch, inventor of unfermented grape juice. Mary Treat, one of the best-known woman scientists of the nineteenth century, who corresponded with Darwin. Quite a lot of suffragists. Susan Pearson, even Victoria Woodhull for a period of time.”
“Whoa, back up. Inventor of unfermented grape juice?”
“Thomas B. Wel
ch. The bottling plant was an important industry here in Vineland.” Hawk pointed his open hand at a museum case full of grape juice artifacts. “Before Welch, nobody had ever thought of bottling unfermented wine.”
“And why would they? The fermented stuff being, you know.” Willa grinned. “Good enough for Jesus and all.”
“Temperance was crucial to the vision,” he said coolly. “Landis considered his alcohol ban a protection for families and the industrious habits of his new settlers.”
“Seems like it might put a damper on the free thinking, though.”
Still he refused to smile. “Within the first decade Vineland had eighteen public schools, including one of the first high schools in the country. Three private seminaries, fourteen churches, Masonic and Odd Fellows societies, a public library, and a hall built on Plum Street to host one of the country’s most exciting public lecture series.”
His complete humor blindness was nudging her toward the back-away option, but it wouldn’t be easy now. He was launched.
“Susan Fowler and Mary Tillotson were early promoters of the Dress Reform movement. Tillotson spent time in the Vineland jail for wearing trousers. The Vineland Equal Rights Association hosted Susan B. Anthony here in 1868, which was the year the women of Vineland voted in the presidential election.”
“I don’t think so. That’s pre–Nineteenth Amendment by around fifty years.”
“They used a separate ballot box, set up next to the official one. It’s over there.”
Chastened by his look, and conscious of her muddy boots, she walked over to the exhibit, a slotted box covered in green velvet. An antique photo on the wall behind it showed bonneted women shouldering through a crowd of men on what appeared to be an election day of nineteenth-century vintage.
“There’s no way their votes would have counted in that election. Did they know?”
“A common mistake in thinking about the past is to assume people were more childlike than we are now.”
Ouch. Willa wondered how often this prickly gent mingled with the public. She conceded his point, however.
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