A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “Oh.” Beverly took the plate, managing to convey with that one word some kind of disapproval.

  “Sorry. I didn’t have any waxed paper to cover the plate.”

  “I see that.”

  “We have plenty of desserts,” Ruthie said.

  “My favorite,” Lucybelle said, rescuing the uncovered plate of cookies from Beverly’s hands before she cited germs and dumped them in the bin.

  Vera turned and left the cafeteria. Lucybelle thought she’d gone for good and was about to rebuke Beverly and Ruthie for their rudeness when she returned with a clutch of birch branches, the leaves a deep golden. “Color for the table. But perhaps you don’t need them.”

  “Tree branches?” Beverly said.

  “They’re beautiful,” Lucybelle said. “I’ll find a container.”

  “How stupid of me to forget a container.”

  “We don’t have anything that big,” Ruthie said.

  “Sure we do.” Lucybelle took the branches and went off to hunt down a vase, but of course Ruthie was right and she couldn’t find any large enough, so she took a tall bucket from one of the labs and glued black construction paper around the cylinder. She found shears for cutting the woody stalks to the right length and then arranged them as artfully as she could. The entire operation took her nearly an hour. She felt a little foolish for fussing so extensively over Vera Prescott’s birch branches, but she was tired of Beverly and Ruthie’s negativity, and she liked the new scientist. The energy and ambiguity in that rub between her PhD from MIT and the simple expectations of her femaleness must have affected every step she took, every word she spoke, maybe even the way she breathed.

  Lucybelle carried the makeshift foliage arrangement into the cafeteria, calling out, “Ta da!” The size of the bucket and the branches themselves prevented her from seeing the women in the room until she set them down on one of the tables. That’s when she saw that both Ruthie and Beverly were sitting on the floor, as if they’d collapsed, faces in their hands. Ruthie was sobbing. Amanda sat on one of the folding chairs, her mouth open, gasping. Emily sat next to her, holding her hand, tears streaming down her face. The only woman standing was Vera, arms at her sides, her chin held up, her eyes closed, as if she were wishing away something vile and terrible.

  Lucybelle’s first thought was that the new scientist had felled the other women with some scathing remark. That was ridiculous, of course, and soon she heard the urgency in the voice of the radio announcer. The man was gulping air and choking out his words, and she felt the enormity of horror, the size of the disaster, before being able to make out details.

  “The president has been shot,” Vera told her. “He’s dead.”

  Wednesday, April 15, 1964

  Vera walked past Lucybelle’s secretary, Vivian, and her assistant, Doug, in the front part of the editorial offices. Vivian called to her back, “What can we do for you, Dr. Prescott?” but Vera ignored her.

  Lucybelle looked up to see Vera standing in her doorway. “Hello?” Flirting with this woman was as easy as being ever so slightly less than businesslike.

  “‘We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.’”

  Lucybelle couldn’t help thinking of Geneviève, and yet quoting Rachel Carson seemed vital and relevant, rather than just pompous. Lucybelle had heard Carson say those very words on the recent CBS program.

  “She died yesterday,” Vera said. “Breast cancer.”

  “Oh.” Lucybelle rose from her desk, feeling the immediate vacuum of grief.

  “I thought you might be a fan too.”

  “I am, ever so much.”

  “She’s been sick for a long while.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Yes. Not well. We have friends in common. I admire her hugely.” Vera nodded again, just once and decisively, and departed abruptly, leaving the doorway empty.

  Lucybelle didn’t know which moved her the most: Rachel Carson’s death or that Vera had come to her with the news.

  She tossed some papers into her briefcase, told Vivian she was leaving for the day, and also stopped at Beverly’s desk. “I’m working from home this afternoon.”

  “The colonel wants the Greenland statistics today.”

  “He’ll get them tomorrow.”

  “That’s not a decision for you to make.”

  “Bev. Please.”

  “Of course. I’ll figure something out to put him off. Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be in tomorrow, I promise.”

  At home Lucybelle threw open her two windows and listened to the noisy spring day. At least three different songbirds were trilling their tunes. The faint fragrance of new green tinged the silky air. She took Carson’s book in her hands and held it against her heart. The words in the book were anything but silent, and yet they predicted a silence she felt in the very cells of her own body.

  She’d lost Phyllis to alcohol, Daddy to a heart attack, Stella to the rules of love, Dorothy to shame. The little girls in Birmingham and President Kennedy had been slain. Now Rachel Carson was dead. It was too much to bear.

  Saturday, June 13, 1964

  “Hey, sugar.” Bader’s deep voice transcended telephone lines. It was as if a roar filled her apartment.

  “So you’re still alive.”

  “And kicking.”

  “I thought they fired you.”

  “It depends on who you think ‘they’ are.”

  “No riddles today. I’m tired.”

  “I’m sort of still on contract.”

  Meaning, he wouldn’t go away, that he’d work for free on the ice cores, if that’s what it took. “Why are you calling me at home?”

  “What’s the gossip?”

  “The lab is a mess.”

  “So I hear. Lucky you, though. All you have to do is unscramble their incoherent sentences and drink with the boys on Friday nights.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “But you care, so it’s more complicated than that.”

  He wanted something. What?

  “You’re dedicated,” he went on. “You can’t just do your job and let go.”

  “You’re one to talk.” She missed Bader’s intensity and focus, the way it had organized the entire lab. “Management bungles so much.”

  “As long as the military tries to manage science, you’ll have a snarl of bullshit.”

  “There’s an interesting metaphor.”

  “That’s why I need you, sugar. To untangle my metaphors.”

  “Why are you calling?”

  “What if I just wanted to find out how my favorite editor is faring?”

  “Come on, Henri.”

  “All business. That’s my girl. Okay, listen. Have you met the new scientist, Vera Prescott?”

  “She’s not around a lot.”

  “She’s just back from Greenland. They got a lot of excellent images. She needs help writing up the data, though. I think she has two outstanding papers in her from the trip.”

  “Excuse me for having to say this, but you’re not my boss anymore.”

  “I know. But she was my last stroke of genius at CRREL and I do care about my legacy.”

  “She’s in the Photo Interpretation Research Division. She has nothing to do with the ice cores.”

  “Nevertheless, I convinced the powers that be to hire her. She’s beyond capable, beyond exceptional, in her field. With one glaring deficit, and that’s where you come in. She can’t write.”

  “None of the scientists can.”

  “But she’s female.”

  “Ah.” Lucybelle got it, even if Bader didn’t fully understand his own point. To the scientists, writing was a bit like housekeeping. Their brilliant ideas just needed tidying. A woman scientist should have these skills naturally.

  “I want you to work with Prescott on the Greenland papers.”

  “And how does Prescott feel about this?”

&nb
sp; “I haven’t spoken with her yet. I wanted to get you on board first. Understand that this will have to be side work. Have her pay you.”

  Lucybelle laughed. “I’ve seen enough of the woman to know that she doesn’t want my help. Anyway, I have plenty of legitimate work.”

  “This is legitimate work. It’s your job to clean up the scientists’ papers.”

  “So why can’t she go through the same channels as all the others?”

  “I can’t believe that you, sugar, have to ask that question.”

  These moments of surprising insight were one of the reasons she liked Bader. “And you care why?”

  “I told you. I hired her. Her success is my success.”

  “That’s claiming a bit much, isn’t it?”

  “She has terrible writer’s block. She can’t even write a first draft. They’ll boot her when they find out.”

  “I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m an editor.”

  “This conversation is going on way too long. Just do it.” Bader hung up.

  Friday, July 3, 1964

  “Would you like a drink?”

  Lucybelle had already picked up her purse and jacket, made it to the door, and grasped the knob. She turned and stupidly asked, “A drink?”

  Vera might have smiled, it was hard to tell. Dusk was a couple of hours away—outside the window to her right, above the couch, a late golden light slanted through the leaves of the trees—but the woody interior of the cabin prematurely gathered darkness. Lucybelle dropped her things on the couch and stepped back across the cabin, going to the window over the kitchen table to look at the pond. Yes, she wanted to stay. And yes, that was a smile.

  “A cocktail,” Vera clarified. “You do drink.” It wasn’t even a question.

  “I’d love a drink.”

  “I have a friend in California who sends me lemons. You can’t get lemons here like these. They’re so flavorful you can eat them like oranges.”

  That seemed about right, this woman eating lemons as one would eat any other fruit.

  “I make a mean Tom Collins.”

  While Vera began work at the kitchen counter, Lucybelle looked around at the remarkable contents of the cabin. When she first arrived, they’d gone directly to the piles of paper on the kitchen table and set to work, and she hadn’t felt welcome to so much as glance at anything else in the cabin. The place had two doors to the outside, the front one leading to the road and woods and the back one leading right out to Post Pond. A third closed door presumably led to Vera’s bedroom.

  Vera put a cup of sugar in a cup of water and set this on a stovetop burner. She squeezed three lemons and poured the juice into two tall glasses. She added a healthy portion of gin to each glass, and when the simple syrup came to a boil, she put the pan in the freezer.

  “While we wait for that to cool—I don’t want to spoil the gin by heating it—I’ll show you my collections.”

  They started with the biggest feathers. “I paddled down a river in Alaska two summers ago. Magnificent trip. We were guided the whole way by bald eagles. They were everywhere. Them and the grizzlies.” Vera definitely smiled now, and Lucybelle wondered about a woman who reserved her smiles for grizzly bears.

  She had stones from a cove in Nova Scotia and coral from an atoll in the Pacific. There were crystals from the Wind River Range in Wyoming and a seal’s jaw, with a full set of teeth, from the Oregon Coast. A lovely piece of dried moss from the French Pyrenees and a shepherd’s staff from the Peruvian Andes. Glossy seed pods, in a dozen shapes and sizes, from Mexico. Lucybelle felt as if she were being shown very special objects, and yet Vera was as terse as usual. With the exception of the bald eagle feathers, each keepsake got a phrase, none so much as a full sentence.

  Lucybelle tried questions. Which river in Alaska? How far did she hike in the Wind River Range? Was the rest of the seal skeleton with its jaw? With whom did she go to the Andes?

  Vera ignored most of the questions, but twice said, “Later.”

  The word opened like a door onto a long hallway, and Lucybelle’s curiosity about what lay at its end was intense. Still, she felt an unusual patience, a pleasurable patience. She took Vera at her word. Later.

  Vera measured two tablespoons of the cooled simple syrup into each glass, added club soda, and then ice cubes. They carried their glasses, the ice chiming, outside to the back lawn where she had two Adirondack chairs facing the pond. The drink was delicious, like the lemonade from Lucybelle’s childhood, only with gin.

  “Where are you from?” Lucybelle asked. She decided to conduct an interview. Perhaps a straightforward and aggressive approach would garner some information.

  “A town in southern Illinois so small that I’ve already forgotten its name.”

  “Farm?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “At home we’d have said you’re unvarnished.”

  Vera looked almost hurt, but Lucybelle let it stand.

  “So you too?”

  “Yes. Northeastern Arkansas.”

  “Oh my. That’s worse.”

  “Come on now. A small piece of Missouri separates us.”

  “True.”

  How could one simple word of agreement feel so good? “This Tom Collins is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Surely you exaggerate.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then you’re pretty easy to please.”

  “Wrong again. I’m difficult to please, in every category, and I have a particularly fussy palate.”

  “I’m a mean cook. I’ll make you dinner sometime. You won’t be fussy.”

  The whole world dilated. The leaves glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. The sparkles on the pond seemed to burst. The breeze was a soft fabric. This opening, this pleasure, wasn’t quite welcome, as if she herself were in danger of coming asunder.

  “Bader says you’re brilliant,” Vera said.

  “He said that?”

  “He said that you understand glaciology better than some of the glaciologists.”

  “That’s my job. To communicate their work.” She was drinking her Tom Collins too fast.

  “I’m glad he appreciates you, but he’s an annoying man.”

  “I like Bader.”

  “Do you?”

  “Obnoxious as all get-out, sure, but people like him are necessary. They burrow tunnels and cut trails. And yes, definitely destroy things in their paths. But they get places they need to get to, and then others follow. His vision is unparalleled in the field.”

  “Well. The two of you have a mutual fan club.”

  “He speaks very highly of you too.”

  “Hm.” Vera sipped her drink. “Well, I appreciate him asking you to work with me. I feel rather humiliated by my poor verbal skills.”

  “You’re a geologist and geographer. Why should you be able to write?”

  “As he pointed out, you seem to be able to handle both.”

  “Hardly the actual science. Just the muck of making it intelligible in the English language.”

  “He told me you’ve never married.”

  “He said that?” And how did the conversation swerve here?

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he offer that information?”

  “That’s what I wondered.”

  What about her dead husband? Was Bader somehow testing her? And if so, why?

  “He’s a meddler,” Vera said.

  Now what did she mean by that?

  “In any case,” Vera continued. “I’m widowed.”

  Lucybelle laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I’m so sorry. That was rude of me to laugh. I . . . I can’t explain what’s funny.”

  “Well, it was many years ago. You needn’t apologize.”

  “You really were widowed?”

  “Why would I make something like that up?”

  “It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “Bader . . .”

 
“I’ll make a couple more drinks, and after that you can tell me what’s funny about my widow status.”

  She hadn’t said “my husband’s death” or even “my being a widow.” It was a “status.”

  Vera put a second Tom Collins on the arm of Lucybelle’s Adirondack chair. “What do you usually drink?”

  “Martinis. But these are much better.” She added, “Less dangerous.”

  “Dangerous.” Vera had a way of asking questions without the upturned inflection in her voice at the end. It was unnerving, as if she were discovering you rather than asking you.

  “Martinis tend to make people spill secrets,” Lucybelle said.

  “We could wait for martinis or you could just spill now.”

  “Back in 1956, when Bader hired me, he made me agree to a story about my past. I’m supposed to say that I’d been married and that my husband was killed in the war.”

  Vera gave her an indecipherable look. The gray eyes became nails. The high cheekbones plateaus. Only the mouth stayed soft, offered the possibility of forgiveness for such folly.

  “You wanted the job,” Vera finally said, but flatly, as if she were suppressing judgment.

  “Yes, I wanted the job, but actually, that was the least of it. I also wanted to be an emotionally devastated widow who wouldn’t consider another relationship.” Lucybelle smiled out at the pond, wondering why this frightening woman didn’t frighten her. “At the time, the story felt like protection.”

  “Someone broke your heart.”

  “I needed to get out of New York.”

  Vera nodded.

  “So now you see why I laughed. But you really are a widow.”

  “William and I married very young. He died of tuberculosis two years later. But that isn’t the relationship that put me in your camp.”

  “My camp?”

  “Deciding against future involvements.”

  Lucybelle felt caught in yet another lie. She hadn’t quite “decided” that, and she hadn’t exactly done that. But she was too eager to hear Vera’s story to correct the misconception right now.

  “Foolish me,” Vera said, softening even more. “I fell for another sensitive type like William. We were together for ten years.”