A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Have you read Silver Chief? It’s a really good book about a dog who is half wolf. He lives on his own in the Arctic. I was trying to finish it last night, but Dad caught me under the covers with my flashlight.

  Please write soon.

  Love, Lucy

  Ask not. What a ridiculous thing to have a child write. So much of her life she’d believed that getting what she wanted was impossible. So often she’d asked not. For god’s sake, Ask! Ask!

  She pulled an ice cube tray out of the freezer and dropped three cubes in a glass. She poured in a healthy measure of gin. She drank and smoked, listening to the crows in her elm tree and thinking of the ones that had circled high in the white hot sky above her healing pen in Pocahontas. They’d been her first glimpse of the beyond. She’d envied their shiny black-winged escape.

  Now it was her turn.

  The very day after she and Vera had given notice, the colonel announced the closure of Camp Century. The Greenland ice sheet moved like a great beast across the top of that landmass, and no amount of manmade engineering could stop it from pulling away the ceilings and tearing down the walls of the city under the ice. Camp Century was collapsing and needed to be evacuated. Project Iceworm had fizzled. No missiles were ever launched or even brought on site. The ice cores had, in the end, won the day. Lucybelle poured more gin on the withered ice cubes and lit a fresh cigarette. She raised her glass to the crows: good riddance to the whole idea of hiding in defense, fearing what might come flying over the pole. No more.

  They wouldn’t sell the cabin at the pond yet. They’d leave one of their cars there while they took the trip out West. The Grand Canyon! Taos and Albuquerque! Vera insisted that they would camp, but Lucybelle planned on taking lots of cash, hoping for the occasional motor court. They’d stay with Vera’s friends in California, the ones with the lemon tree, who were already scouting jobs for both of them. They’d fly back and share the remaining car until they were ready to leave New Hampshire for good. The rest was still unknown, but they’d definitely go to Paris in the spring. Or, if one or both of them already had a job by then, they’d go in the summer. They would go, though, that much they’d agreed was not negotiable. They would go to New Mexico and Paris.

  The anticipation of that train she was about to ride into the future of her happiness was almost impossible to endure. She got up and took down Willa Cather’s Shadow on the Rock. She had two more days off, plus the weekend. She’d reread the Cather in preparation for their trip. Maybe Vera would want to read it aloud together. She also took down Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Daddy’s gift to her so many years ago. Inside Hamlet she found the notes she’d taken about her Halloween taxicab ride with Stella, and inside The Merchant of Venice she found an old letter from Phyllis. She hadn’t heard from her in years. Georgia would be nine years old, the same age as her niece Lucy.

  As she started to push the thick Shakespeare volume back onto the shelf, she noticed that paperback, Whisper Their Love, which she’d hidden in the dark recess at the back of the bookshelf. She withdrew the book and placed it on her coffee table.

  Tomorrow she’d see Vera and L’Forte. They’d make dinner and then make love. They’d stay up too late, go into work sleepy, and it wouldn’t matter, not much.

  She poured herself another gin.

  Postscript

  Berkeley, California, 2016

  Early that morning of September 29, 1966, a fire consumed much of Lucybelle’s apartment. According to her death certificate, she died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Our lives overlapped for only nine years. I remember adoring her; she was kind, funny, and elusive.

  The call came long before dawn, too early to be a neighbor or a friend. I heard my parents’ voices, speaking not in hushed morning tones but agitated ones, followed by my father’s footsteps plodding down the hall and into the bathroom. Then came the awful sounds of a grown man who doesn’t cry, crying. My mother hustled to the kitchen to make coffee and eggs, attempting to hold our household of seven together in the face of crisis. We sat and ate. She told us the news.

  I remember the strange light in the days that followed, as if even the air had been hollowed out and left for dead. And yet it wasn’t one of us who had died, so the absence was this dark place lurking just outside the circle of my immediate family. A single woman, well past the marrying age, my namesake, suddenly gone. With one exception, we didn’t talk about her death again until I started writing this book. We barely talked about her life, though I listened avidly for stories, pulling the tidbits close: her alleged sickliness as a child and the sunshine pen built by my grandfather; she and him being the only two who ever checked out The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the Randolph County Library; her passing the bar exam without going to law school; her unusual buoyancy in water. What I’ve learned in researching and writing this book is that her family didn’t know anything about her life past those Arkansas years.

  Lucybelle’s fire has blazed in my imagination ever since that early morning phone call. So often I’ve considered the dreadful details: Was she awake or asleep when she died? Did she struggle to get out a window or door? Was she in bed, and if so, did her bed burn? Was she in bed alone? Is there anything left of her life? How could I not imagine the flames?

  I did try to find out more, especially after I came out at the age of eighteen, just ten years after her death, and it occurred to me that she too might have been gay. That’s when my older sister said she vaguely remembered a companion named Vera. Everyone in the family remembered a dachshund. When I asked my mother to tell me more about Lucybelle, she replied that she was “extremely bright and extremely independent,” that she wouldn’t let men hold doors open for her, and that “if you’re asking if she was . . . like you . . . she probably was, though I’m sure she never acted on it.”

  My mother also told me that Lucybelle started the fire herself by falling asleep with a cigarette in her hand, and that my grandmother did not believe that story. My grandmother had claimed at the time that this was impossible: Lucybelle didn’t smoke. Her boss had replied that he couldn’t recall ever seeing her without a cigarette in her hand. Apparently, she was an amazing keeper of secrets. She would stay with us for days at a time and never smoked. She must have been miserable, jonesing for a cigarette the entire visit. Neither she nor her clothes ever smelled of smoke. Had she really been a smoker?

  I’ve considered so many scenarios, including that the fire that killed Lucybelle wasn’t an accident. It seems nearly absurd that, as an adult, she would have hidden her smoking from us. It also strikes me as assertively unkind that her boss would have been so aggressive in telling the family what a “chimney” she had been. There are many other details in her story, especially surrounding her death, that just don’t make sense. I remain open to other interpretations of her death, and yet, in the end, my judgment falls to the accident version. I still ache to know the full truth.

  There is so very much we don’t know, can’t know, in doing historical research. Emma Donoghue writes, in the afterword of her collection Astray, “When you work in the hybrid form of historical fiction, there will be Seven-League-Boot moments: crucial facts joyfully uncovered in dusty archives and online databases, as well as great leaps of insight and imagination. But you will also be haunted by a looming absence: the shadowy mass of all that’s been lost, that can never be recovered.”

  What broke my heart most as the years went by was the possibility of there being someone out there, a woman perhaps, who mourned Lucybelle. Someone I could know, someone who would tell me who she had been.

  As it turned out, there was. By the time I found her, she too was already dead.

  In the meantime, my occasional bouts of questions to my father yielded no further information. And so, decades passed and I resigned myself to never knowing the real person who was my namesake.

  Then came the walk at the Berkeley marina with my friend Carol Seajay. I was telling her the scant story of Lucybe
lle because in helping my parents move into a retirement home, I’d found that intriguing photograph of her. She’s sitting on the giant aboveground, horizontal root of a tree, wearing trousers, her elbows resting on her spread-apart knees. In her hands is an apple. She’s looking at the camera with what appears to be defiance. Someone—Lucybelle?—had written the word “showdown” on the back of the photo.

  Carol said, “Google her.”

  And I thought, computers were invented in roughly 1945, the Internet in the late 1980s, a good twenty years after Lucybelle’s death. Why would there be anything online about this thin, smart, kind, and funny midcentury woman who grew up on a farm in Arkansas? So far as I knew, she’d been born and, forty-three years later, been sucked back into the ether.

  Still, as soon as I got home that night, I typed “Lucybelle Bledsoe” into my browser. Up popped an article about her that had been published in a recent Routledge volume called The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century. I was completely floored that she’d done work important enough to merit a full-page entry in such a book. Moreover, I had not had any idea that she had made her living as a science writer, as do I. She’d worked for a government agency called the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment, which in 1961 became the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, organizations intrinsically linked to today’s Division of Polar Programs, which had sent me to Antarctica two times. I would eventually discover that some of her work contacts know my work contacts.

  The second and only other Internet entry I found about Lucybelle was an obituary in the Journal of Glaciology. The fact alone that she had an obituary in that journal took my breath away. I had just two years earlier published a book called The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic about my own obsession with ice and its properties. I was currently immersed in writing my very icy novel, The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica, subsequently published in 2010. I am deeply interested in the polar regions, have visited both ends of the earth several times. These ice caps, so profoundly linked with my own imagination, apparently comprised Lucybelle’s lifework as well.

  Her obituary in the Journal of Glaciology states:

  During the period of time she was associated with SIPRE and CRREL, she personally edited almost every report printed in both the internal report series and outside journal-publications. In developing a style and setting the standards for these reports, she was the unlisted co-author of hundreds of reports and informal teacher of many scientists.

  Her editorial work extended far beyond grammatical corrections and adherence to style. She could spot incorrect equations, slipshod terms and desultory sentences. One of her unique talents was her ability to recognize faulty logic even on very technical matters. Many researchers (both young and old) have seen their raw, sometimes confused manuscripts transformed into beautifully simple, well-presented reports. She was always willing to be of service to others with no thought for personal prestige.

  It also says, “Too often we, as authors of scientific reports, take for granted the careful work of good technical editors and seldom do we give them the proper credit which they so rightly deserve. So it was with Lucybelle Bledsoe. Although you will not find her name listed as author or co-author of any research papers, she has been a full-time worker in the field of glaciology for the last ten years. We believe that she contributed a great deal to the field of glaciology.”

  So began my research in earnest.

  First I tried to find James Bender, the coworker who’d written the obituary. I found twenty-two age-appropriate James Benders in Zabasearch and sent off my queries to each and every one. I began receiving responses, by e-mail and by postal mail, all of them kind, some wishing me well, none being the right James Bender. Once I received an empty, unsealed envelope, addressed in my own hand to myself. It was haunting. I never did find James Bender; perhaps he is dead.

  I went back to my elderly father. I pressed my questions once again, now armed with her employment history. He was as surprised as I was about her entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science. He remembered “some foreign guy with an accent” that he had met in her apartment once, a man with “a big and irascible personality,” a man who figured large in her work and who “demanded they get all the attention.” Thankfully, I wrote down every word my father said because his incomplete sentences and thoughts often seemed meaningless. Later, through interviews with Lucybelle’s coworkers, and after finding articles on the history of polar ice cores, I learned that the irascible man was Swiss-born Henri Bader, a civilian scientist who refused to salute his military bosses and who is credited with pulling the first-ever ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica, the beginning of climate change research.

  After the 1966 success in Greenland, Bader and his team moved on to Antarctica where in January 1968 they reached the bottom of the ice and withdrew a 2,164-meter core. These ice cores reveal a complete profile of the late-Pleistocene and Holocene climate cycle, showing all the climate events, their frequency, and the changing environmental conditions up to the present day, including new and precise information about the concentration levels of greenhouse gases. Bader’s achievements are considered highly significant both because of his technical accomplishment in figuring out a way to drill through the shifting glacial ice caps, and for the major scientific score of obtaining for the first time ever a continuous ice core, representing more than 120,000 years of climatic history. Because of his work, the vast databases of earth’s history contained in the northern and southern ice caps became accessible to human investigation. The data stored in these cores are still being studied today.

  Henri Bader was also the conceptual father of the International Geophysical Year, a multinational project of cooperative science, the effects of which are still rippling throughout scientific knowledge. I’m fond of the fact that my birth, in 1957, coincided with the International Geophysical Year.

  I also asked my father, yet again, about Lucybelle’s personal life. He told me the story of her giving up her New York apartment to a roommate who was getting married, and how that had infuriated their father because she’d found the apartment in the first place. Why would she just walk away? my father and grandfather wanted to know. I suspected a love drama.

  My father also told me that Lucybelle had been writing a novel, maybe together with her roommate, he wasn’t quite sure. Nothing came of it, he thought. I quietly wondered how he would know if anything came of it, any more than my mother would know if she had “acted on” her lesbianism. The “maybe together with her roommate” intrigued me.

  Then, warmed up, my father offered a final provocative yet tenebrous story. “A few years ago,” he couldn’t remember exactly how many but I’m guessing quite a few years ago, a man called him. The man said he was the ex-husband of Phyllis, Lucybelle’s New York roommate, and that he was in trouble. My father’s words: “Her friend’s husband was in the CIA. Husband of Lucybelle’s roommate and she was very bitter. Case of a sex problem, discovered he was gay. A little bit off his rocker. He was scared someone hated him and that someone might hurt him.” He asked if my father would help him, and Dad said that he would. He never heard from the man again.

  Who knows what is significant, if anything, in this story, but what it made me think about was how homosexual men and women often married in the fifties and sixties, in the attempt to make a workable life. I used these stories in inventing my character Fred.

  The actual story is quite strange. How did this man get my father’s phone number in Portland, Oregon? And why would he call the brother of his ex-wife’s former roommate (or lover)? What did his fear about being gay, being possibly blackmailed, have to do with Lucybelle? Not to succumb to conspiracy theories, but I do occasionally at three in the morning ask myself if this incident is in any way related to Lucybelle’s death. My father is not a teller of tales: every detail he related would
have been exactly as it came to him. Unfortunately, the above quote is the sum total of his remembered knowledge on the matter.

  For the record, I made several attempts at getting Lucybelle’s Freedom of Information Act files but was told there was nothing to get. Actually, they did send me a few sheets of paper: my own letters, ones I’d written recently to various individuals and agencies, inquiring about her work and fluency in Russian.

  I read lots of McCarthy Era history, including everything I could find on Camp Century. To the best of my knowledge, Project Iceworm never developed, no missiles were ever kept in Camp Century or anywhere else under the Greenland ice cap. Camp Century itself, situated 140 miles northeast of Thule Air Base, closed in 1966 because it was being destroyed by the movement of the glacial ice. Today the relics of that experiment are buried deep in the snowcap, which is rapidly melting. Perhaps one day in the future, artifacts from that great experiment—books, aluminum tubes, the barber’s scissors, reels of film—will begin emerging from their frozen time capsule.

  Meanwhile, once I knew where Lucybelle had worked, I began contacting everyone I could find who had worked with her. My letters and e-mails startled some of her contemporaries; after all, from their points of view, it seemed as if they were receiving correspondence from someone they thought fifty years dead. On my end, the experience of receiving letters about my aunt, finally after years and years of longing to know her, was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. Every single person I talked to told me three things about her personality: that she was intensely private, never shared details about her personal life; that she was a particularly warm and kind person; that she had a wonderfully dry sense of humor. When I asked who her friends were, they told me the office manager, the office manager’s friend who was a secretary, and the librarian, all single women “who usually ate lunch together.” The office manager, according to one of my interviewees, was “a real martinet.” I had to look the word up: a rigid disciplinarian; one who demands absolute adherence to forms and rules. My contact said she “ran a tight ship,” for which they were all grateful. His tone and his choice of words brought another word to mind: bulldyke.