Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “The Vineland Women’s Caucus organized the 1868 presidential vote to protest the prevailing argument of the time, that women wouldn’t be interested in voting even if they were allowed. It made national news.”

  “Wow. Was this the first place that happened?”

  “As far as we know, yes.”

  “That’s amazing, honestly.” She leaned close to study the photograph. “So this could be the first authentic image of women voting in the United States.”

  “Yes, we think it is.”

  “Are you keeping the original someplace safe? I mean, fireproof, climate controlled?”

  Hawk’s pale eyes grew sad and Willa saw she’d unintentionally ouched him back. “Our budget is next to nothing. We’re one of the oldest historical societies in the country, dating back to the founding of Vineland. But people don’t have much interest anymore and our endowments have dried up. I try, but I’m one person. The paper archives are a mess. A lot of our material is upstairs stored in beer cartons, to tell you the truth.”

  “Jeez. That’s kind of terrible. You’ve got some treasures here.”

  Zero endowment for Vineland’s crucial archives didn’t bode well for Willa’s gold-digging prospects. “I’m interested in all of this,” she said. “I’d love to do a feature about Landis and the utopian ideal. But today I’m on an errand that’s kind of specific.”

  Hawk rose above his despair. “I’m good at specific,” he said.

  “Then I’ll give you a street address: 744 Plum Street. Big brick house with double chimneys, one down from the corner of Sixth. Can you tell me anything about it?”

  “Such as?”

  “This is fishing in the dark. I’m hoping for some kind of historic significance.”

  “You’re interested in the possibility of historic registry, then.”

  “I’m interested in grants that might go along with historic registry. The house is loaded with antique charm but it’s in bad shape. We’d love to find somebody interested in paying us to keep it from falling down.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place, a few decades too late. As I said, this town has gone soft on historic pride. But never say die. Let me think.” He stared at Willa with odd intensity. Suddenly he was all hers.

  “Come with me,” he said abruptly, turning and walking toward the door from which he’d first appeared. Stunned, she followed him into a long, narrow room lined on both sides with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Hawk went ahead of her, pulling down ledgers and slim file boxes as he talked over his shoulder.

  “We don’t have anything like an exhaustive listing, but we have photos of every house in town that was built before 1900. Do you think yours is that old?”

  “Absolutely.” Willa had no idea.

  “Unfortunately that material is not well organized yet. A lot of it is in boxes. It would be tedious, but you could go through piles of photographs to see if you find your house. Assuming it’s still recognizable and not wrecked by one of those savage architectural updates. Or another approach would be to go through these directories.”

  “Telephone directories?” Willa wondered when these had passed over from obsolete to historic. She couldn’t remember when she’d last used one.

  “No. Housing directories. Before telephones. We have almost every year from 1866 to the late 1870s. Landis published these annual listings giving homeowners’ names, occupations, and addresses. The idea was to encourage social visits. So you could look through these to see if anybody important has ever lived in your house.”

  “As opposed to now,” she said, but the man was really not going to smile.

  “Unfortunately these listings are organized alphabetically by residents’ names, not by address. You’ll just have to scan pages to try and find it. What’s the address again?”

  “Seven forty-four East Plum.”

  He turned and looked at Willa.

  “What?” she asked. “Is that the magic number?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not making any promises but let me just look something up.”

  She walked around a long table and stood behind him, watching over his shoulder—she had no idea for what—as he flipped through an ancient directory. The pages were browned at the edges like a well-done sugar cookie.

  “She’s not here.” He closed the little paper booklet and checked its cover. “Eighteen seventy-eight, she’d moved by then. I knew that. Let’s go back to the early seventies.”

  “Who?”

  “Mary Treat. I’m not promising anything but I know she lived on Plum, early on. Before she moved to her own place on Park. I have in my mind it was in that block between Sixth and Seventh, just down from Plum Hall.”

  “Mary Treat?”

  “The scientist. I told you about her.”

  Willa racked her brain and came up with Landis, Susan B. Anthony, and the grape juice guy. “Tell me again.”

  “She was a scientist and writer, extremely well known in her time. One of the most outspoken American advocates of Darwin and evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century.”

  “You did mention that. She was pen pals with Darwin. You’re saying she lived in my house?”

  “I’m saying she might have lived in your house. I’m sure we can nail down the exact address because we have all of her papers. She died without heirs, so everything was donated here.”

  “If you had everything,” Willa pointed out, “you’d have letters from Charles Darwin.”

  “Oh, we do. Would you like to see?”

  Willa stood gobsmacked while Christopher Hawk disappeared into upper reaches of Vineland arcana. In less than five minutes he was back with a box. He sat down at the long table and extracted a legal-size manila folder whose tiny typewritten label said: “Darwin Letters Mary Treat.” Willa took a seat beside him and opened the folder.

  “Ho-ly …”

  The sight of Darwin’s handwriting gave her a chill. This letter was not a copy. She must have seen reproductions of his signature because the angular letters were instantly recognizable. Original Charles Darwin correspondence archived in a beer carton. Willa looked from the pale, proud moon of Hawk’s face to the letter in her hands and shivered at the Miss Havisham of it all. Here was the cake.

  *

  “I swear, Iano. Charles freaking Darwin.”

  Iano stopped again to adjust the baby in the denim sling criss-crossing his chest. They’d spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out this infant carrier before Willa stooped to reading the instructions. It seemed unnecessarily complicated; likewise the chic diaper bag Willa carried over her shoulder had far too many pockets labeled with icons for diapers, pacifier, and so forth. But soon they had him more or less correctly swaddled against Iano’s rib cage and the baby seemed content, so long as they kept moving along the sandy trail. The air was cool and smelled of salt.

  “I thought it was Robert,” Iano said.

  “What?”

  “Charles Robert Darwin. Or was it Francis?”

  “Damn it, you’re supposed to be amazed.”

  “I’m amazed. I was amazed when you told me yesterday. I’m waiting for the part about Charles Darwin living in our house during his heretofore unknown New Jersey period. And the British National Trust sending over a jolly crew of workmen to make us a new roof and foundation.”

  “And Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can practically taste the British cement.”

  “So who was this woman? The heretofore unknown New Jersey Darwin Paramour?”

  “God, Iano. Can’t a female be a colleague? Even in the nineteenth century?”

  “I’m adding some human interest to your grant proposal.”

  “Nice try, but I don’t think so. I read a pile of his letters. Not unless they had a secret love code encrypted in Latin names of plants.”

  “Dearest Monomos discolos, I long to classify your diafromia.”

  “Your Latin names sound k
ind of Greek.”

  Iano shrugged. “I was improvising.”

  Willa pitied all human beings whose spouses didn’t make them laugh. Just a couple of hours yesterday with the humorless Mr. Hawk had sapped her will to live. “The British National Trust,” she said. “Now there’s a thought.”

  “I think Great Britain is about as broke as we are.”

  “Well of course. That would go without saying.”

  They stopped for another sling adjustment. “It feels like he’s going to slither out the bottom,” Iano said, fiddling with the straps. Willa waited, eyeing the denim contrivance and wondering what it was worth on the open market. They’d finally started mining the lode of baby paraphernalia Zeke had brought along with his move from Boston, after weeks of feeling these goods were somehow untouchable. Nearly all of it was loot from a power baby shower Helene’s colleagues had thrown on her last day of work, everything still in the original boxes. Willa felt guilty about the thank-you notes unsent, though she knew that was her old-fashioned breeding. Plus ridiculous, given the full freight of Helene-related regrets.

  The path led them along a weedy margin between a forest and a small, marshy lake. Willa hated not having brought Dixie along, but Dixie these days was having trouble getting herself around the block. A baby was enough for today. They were spending it at Cape May, the southernmost tip and reputed tourist highlight of South Jersey. Without any real plan they’d wound up there after packing the diaper bag and driving for the coast on impulse, at Iano’s suggestion. Willa mentioned having heard of a place called the Pine Barrens, and he’d asked, Seriously? He steered her instead toward a happier-sounding picnic on the beach. Once there, they discovered wind plus sand equals painfully sandblasted skin, so they’d opted for this more baby-friendly hike on an inland path. It didn’t really matter. Willa knew the only point was to get her out of the house. She’d been having panic attacks since the day another ceiling fell, this time in the upstairs room they’d planned to use as a nursery. Presently the baby’s bassinet rotated among Zeke’s, Tig’s, and his grandparents’ bedrooms, depending on which of them most needed an unbroken night’s sleep. He still cried a lot in the daytime but mostly slept after dark now, so long as he got his nighttime bottles around midnight and four.

  It was Tig who announced they were all avoiding the obvious—that Dusty needed a place of his own in this house—and marched upstairs with a screwdriver to assemble the crib that had been stored in the third-floor room since the day they’d moved in. Tig who moved the rest of the boxes and attic junk into other parts of the house, then hauled a dresser up the stairs and filled it with the clothes and toys the child had scored from his mother’s well-heeled friends. She began painting a mural on the walls. Every day after her shift at the restaurant she disappeared up there for hours, the bass line of her music and a turpentine smell wafting down the stairs, until one day Willa climbed up to investigate and was stunned by her daughter’s vision. It was a rainforest. Bright macaws nestled in the elbows of trees, monkeys dangled from branches, jungle cats lurked in shadows eyeing the nesting birds. Tig with green-spattered dreadlocks resembled a joyful kindergartner. Willa noticed an ominous vining of fine cracks across the ceiling plaster, but didn’t mention it.

  It gave way in the middle of a sunny Saturday: they heard the crash, ran upstairs, and found Tig’s cosmos shattered for no good reason. There had been no wind, no storm, no cloud in the sky. Tig put away her paints and seemed to withdraw from the household after that. This weekend she was working double shifts at the restaurant, leaving Willa and Iano on the hook for babysitting. Zeke was off in Boston for a week of meetings with his partners and their new investment clients.

  And Willa was falling frequently into cold sweats as she tried to stave off images of disaster. Zeke in a highway accident, the baby dead from SIDS. When these attacks came at night Iano sat up in bed holding her hand, peering at her face, asking if this was more of the menopause or something else. It was the something else, for which no words were quite enough. Unprovoked losses one after another—her mother, jobs, savings, Helene, the ceiling—had stripped Willa of the useful illusion that everything would be fine. It amazed her now to watch people walking through life with their ludicrous trust.

  Iano didn’t know she’d been meting out a hoard of pricey pharmaceuticals left over from the glory days of good health insurance in Virginia: Xanax, Ambien, a few tabs at the bottoms of many random bottles (months or years past expiration) that she’d hastily packed instead of throwing away as officially advised. She dreaded the end of this secret supply, had even eyed the leftover tranquilizer from Dixie’s veterinarian. Happy was the day she found the untouched bottle of Valium that Iano had been prescribed to help with a tooth extraction. Valium, on Iano, what a waste. She’d come here today for his sake, not hers. To please their beloveds some women faked orgasm; Willa faked composure. He thought a change of scenery would help, and couldn’t quite grasp that her problem wasn’t the scenery or the venue, it was the whole darn show.

  He stopped in the path and Willa moved close beside him, their toes nearly touching the pond’s edge as they watched a pair of white swans gliding very close by on the dark, still water. The creatures looked strange in their wild setting, not ornaments in a city park but real animals with algae stains on their scarlet beaks and an unmistakable “back off” vibe. Abruptly they curled their long necks in a coordinated motion like synchronized swimmers, dropping their heads to horizontal just above the water, staring up darkly at the pair of human intruders with the strapped-on young.

  “They remind me of supermodels,” Iano said.

  “I was thinking the same thing. Willowy and gorgeous. And they’d kill you for the chance to eat a good meal.”

  A couple of birdwatchers approached from down the shore, identifiable by their matching pockety vests and binoculars. Willa and Iano had encountered many of their tribe today, some of them eager to share sightings, using a mystifying language of “neotrops” and “sharpies.” Others noted the absence of binoculars and left them alone. Just by chance, Willa and Iano were there on the biggest birding weekend of the Cape May year: an enthusiastic Michigander had finally clued them in. This peninsula was the jumping-off point for most of the migratory birds from New England to upper Canada, millions of them, all headed south. Every year, but especially in this one with its two big storms, birds congregated en masse while they waited for good weather and the gumption to launch themselves out. Willa was amazed. She’d never given a thought to these little lives hurtling themselves over the dark ocean, their tiny brains still big enough to dream of a warm jungle on the far side of a god-awful journey.

  The couple now approaching had no-nonsense haircuts and such similar builds that Willa couldn’t distinguish the male and female of the pair until they were at pretty close range. The lavender camp shirt should have been a clue, she eventually realized. They stopped for a moment to join in the swan admiration.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” the man said.

  “My wife was just saying they are her spirit animals,” Iano offered. Willa subtly sucked in her cheeks and crossed her eyes at him.

  “That’s good news for you,” the woman said. “They mate for life. They migrate together and everything, hard times and all.”

  “Dear lady, that is good news. You’ve made my day.” Iano flashed his chili-pepper beam and Willa watched the poor woman melt. For years to come she would remember the handsome guy who flirted with her on the trail at Cape May.

  “Cute kid,” the husband said, wagging his white caterpillar eyebrows at the child in the sling. The baby had been so quiet Willa had momentarily forgotten their charge. Dear God, what if she really forgot one day and baked him in the parked car or something? He was never this quiet. She felt an edge of panic and tried not to think. Thinking made everything worse. “Boy or girl?” the man asked.

  “A boy,” Willa and Iano answered in unison.

  “Oh, he’s just looking a
ll around!” the woman said. “What’s his name?”

  Willa and Iano exchanged a discreet grimace. Willa blurted, “George.”

  “Georgie porgie, pudding and pie!” The woman crooned. “You three have a wonderful day.” The pair pushed on. The dear lady would always remember the handsome guy in Cape May who was carrying a baby. No female fantasy was ever devised to top that one.

  They probably weren’t fully out of earshot when Iano hooted, “George!”

  “It’s not too late. We could get him to answer to George, before Zeke is on to us.”

  “I’m game.”

  They turned their backs on the petulant swans and walked on, leaving the lake and entering a forest of shrubby, waxy-leaved trees. The path narrowed to one slim lane, and Iano walked behind her.

  “What kind of a name is Aldus, anyway?” she asked.

  “Saxon.”

  “Well, I presumed. That’s not exactly what I was asking. I meant, who names a child Aldus?” She laughed. “I ask the man who named his child Antigone.”

  “Antigone is a good name. It fits her. One day she’ll grow into it, you’ll see.”

  “You mean our daughter will someday find the Attic tragedy life where it all makes sense? God help us. I always thought the original Antigone was a whiner, to tell you the truth. ‘My brother got murdered, waah waah waah.’”

  When Iano offered no defense, Willa stopped in the path and turned around to stare at him. “Did you ever even read Antigone? I can’t believe I’ve never asked.”

  Iano smiled evasively.

  “You! Greek classics poseur.”

  “It’s a name, moro. She’s not the only one, that famous whiner.”

  “Actually, I think she probably is the only one.” Willa walked on. “So Aldus, anyway. What the heck.”

  “It means ‘from the old house.’”

  This got a rise out of Willa that sent her into a coughing fit. “Now isn’t that just perfect,” she said, once she could breathe. “Only I’m sure you made it up.”

  “I didn’t, I swear. I looked it up.”