Kingsessing, on the Schuylkill
September 8th, 1810
HE RODE PAST EARLIER, that slip of a Sophie at his side: James. If you knew what I feel when I see him … But why shouldn’t you know? If I can imagine you, not face or your gestures perhaps but your mind and your heart, why not imagine you capable of feeling all I feel? I picture us on the bank of the river here, near the field-stone bench, exchanging confidences. I think how, when at last I find you, I will hand you these lines and you will know me.
The aunts do not even look up as he passes. The hayfields surrounding us, north and west, belong to James; the lush pastures to the south; the oats and rye and cattle and sheep, the fine stand of timber between our wedge of river-front land and the ramble of the Bartrams’ botanic gardens—his, all his. He is nearing thirty, not yet married though rumored to be looking for a wife. Wealthy, now that he’s come into his grandfather’s estate. And favored in all the other ways as well. About him there is a kind of sheen, the golden skin of good fortune.
In the room below me the aunts ignore him as they work on their Manual of Geography, a book for school-girls, they have such high hopes. Lessons composed of questions and answers, which a classroom of girls with scraped-back hair may murmur in unison:
Q. What is the climate of the Torrid Zone?
A. It is very hot.
Q. What is the climate of the Frigid Zone?
A. It is very cold.
Q. What is the climate of the Temperate Zone?
A. It is mild or moderate; the heat being not so great as in the Torrid Zone, nor the cold so severe as in the Frigid Zone.
Aunt Daphne, Aunt Jane. If they knew what I think. If they were to step outside and hail James, and if he were ill-mannered enough (which he’s never been, in his five years as our neighbor) to inquire about our unusual family, they would say they are cousins; they are not. That they are my aunts, which they are not. Not looking at his broad shoulders, the strength of his hand on his horse’s reins; not looking at the planes of his jaw or the shape of his brow, because they care for the minds but not the bodies of men, they would point out the charms of our small stone house. Three women, and everything just so. They would not say that I was born on a farm near Chester, to a family with two parents, two sisters, three brothers all dead of the yellow fever when I was an infant; the surviving brother torn from my side while a few pigs and chickens wandered bewildered through the dirt. The aunts took me in, I belong to them. They think I will live here forever with them, sharing their studies, caring for them: I will not.
Their book is to have a section on meteorology. Why there is weather. What it is. From the papers and books their friends have loaned us, I am to collate the theories of rain. What will be left of all my work, after they simplify it? Something like this, which they wrote today:
Q. What surrounds the Earth?
A. The Atmosphere; composed of air, vapor, and other gases.
Q. What can you say of the Atmosphere?
A. It is thinner or less dense the further it is from the Earth.
Q. When water dries up where does it go?
A. It rises into the air.
Q. How can water rise into the air?
A. It is turned to vapor; and then it is lighter than the air.
Q. When vapors rise and become condensed, what are they called?
A. Clouds.
Anaximenes, I tell the aunts—offering this scrap much as our cat, Cassandra, brings moles to the kitchen door and lays them at my feet—Anaximenes thought air might condense first to cloud, then to water, then to earth, and finally to stone. Why not include, I asked Aunt Daphne, this:
Q: Why are raindrops round?
A: One theory is this: Because the corners get rubbed off as they fall side by side. And because the round shape overcomes the resistance of the air; and because even the smallest parts of the world are obliged to represent and mirror the round image of the universe.
But the aunts are no more interested in these old theories than in the question of why Cassandra has extra toes on her paws. Aunt Daphne said, “Lavinia. When will you learn to keep in mind our audience?”
Yet why would the girls who will someday sit in a hot schoolroom, bored and weary with reciting these lessons, not feel the longings I feel? For the tantalizing theory, the mysterious fact—Descartes’ assumption that water is composed of eel-shaped particles, easily separated. Urbano d’Aviso’s proposition that vapor is bubbles of water filled with fire, ascending through the air so long as it is heavier than they are; stopping when they arrive at a place where the air is equally light. Why must all we write be practical?
September 13, 1810
He comes, he goes, he comes, he goes. The other one I would tell you about: Mr. Frank Wells. He is well enough favored, tall and slim, thinning brown hair, a nose as long and sensitive as a greyhound’s. A bit older than James, with printer’s hands. He has his own business and has built a house upriver from us, which I have never seen. Unlike James he likes the way I look. He comes, he goes, along with the others—botanists and geologists; a Frenchman named Rafinesque, fat about the waist, whose shirt escapes from his pantaloons and shows bare flesh as he lectures us; a shy and friendly entomologist named Thomas Say. They admire the aunts and their work and the way they have raised me. Our house of three virgins, so studious. So neat. Every hour occupied by something useful. We rise, cook, sweep, and wash, tend to the gardens and then study and study, always useful things. The aunts wear spectacles, their eyes are weary. At night they ask me to read to them. Their spirits are weary as well. Aunt Jane has spells.
“It is all too much for me,” she says. April, often. Or September, like now. When everything around us is lush and damp and hot and fertile and florid. The box-hedges send out a powerful smell and the vines trying to strangle the trees send out another, even stronger; the mockingbirds sit on the roof and sing all night; a sound you would like, as I do. Aunt Jane takes to her bed, her skin muddy and cold and her limbs unmoving, with a cloth on her eyes and tufts of cotton blocking her ears from the bird-song. She gets sick for no reason, well for no reason. One day she rises, resumes her duties, declares that she is better. In a few months it will all be too much for her again. Her friends, those studious men, shake their heads in sympathy and whisper, Melancholia.
The aunts are Quakers, and have raised me the same. On our day of rest we go to Meeting, we sit in silence, we wait with the sun streaming through the windows for the spirit to enter and move us. In that calm still place I struggle not to leap from my bench and shout—but what is the use of talking about this, when you are not here to advise me? What is the use?
September 24, 1810
James again. He nods as he rides by, once more on his way to visit Sophie. The slip of a Sophie, in her house on the hill. Half my weight and half my brains and half my wit; and a hundred times my fortune and a father, who’s a banker. Around her neck, a fine gold chain. Little rings on little fingers; little kid shoes on little feet. James could pick her up the way I might a spaniel, if we had a spaniel: the aunts do not like dogs. No doubt he has lifted her lightly into a carriage, or onto a saddle. I hear she plays the piano beautifully. In the garden I watch him passing by; I stand so he can see me and he nods. He rides on, lovely, taken.
If the aunts knew what I think. If the aunts knew what I dream. Aunt Daphne has her room and Aunt Jane hers but they bundle at night in the same bed—for comfort they say, for warmth—and they think I will settle for this.
September 8, September 13; October 1, 2, 3—what is the point of dating these words as I write them? They are for you, and when I find you, dates will mean nothing to us. You are in Ecuador, or in Cleveland; in England or Boston, the Rocky Mountains; or perhaps you are a few miles away, stripped as I was of our family name. Wouldn’t I recognize you, though? No matter how you’d changed? If I saw you at the market, or passed you on the street …
I have but the faintest memory of our last day. The aunt
s said the plague left only us alive: a little boy, barely five years old, and me, not yet turned two. Did you cry when the wagons came? When everything inside our home was burned, the bedding and furniture piled and torched but the things outside, uncontaminated, prudently saved and divided? The aunts took me, some hoes and hay-rakes, two pigs, a horse, a cart. Whoever took you, said the aunts—and how could they lose the name of that family who stopped on their journey to someplace else and, out of pity and charity, left with an extra, orphaned child?—whoever took you, also took the cow.
On September 13 I turned twenty: I am grown and what I write is mine; I may write whatever I want in any fashion. Wherever you are—perhaps you have headed out West?—you are now twenty-three. On an arid plain you may have picked up a glossopetra, shaped like the tongue of a man or a snake or a duck, and wondered if it rained from the sky on a moonless night. If you were here I would lift that triangular stone from your hand and say: This has nothing to do with the rain; this is the tooth of a shark.
A few times I have been alone with James. Once he arrived with a side of venison, a gift for the aunts, who were out. I was still a girl, perhaps sixteen; I was alone in the house. He arrived without servants and wouldn’t let me touch the meat or help him convey it to the smokehouse. As if I were a young lady, as if I had never prepared a meal or handled a bloody bundle of ribs. Even then I felt something like lightning pass between us. It has nothing to do with who we are, who we think we are; he knows nothing of me and I know only what I can see of him, his actions and possessions: the mysterious current leaping between us comes from someplace deeper. Our bodies speaking. Or maybe our souls; it has nothing to do with our minds.
Once we met in the woods, his woods, he out marking trees for felling and I walking furiously away from the aunts, filling my lungs with air; around me the wild profusion of tulip trees and witch hazel and honeysuckle, the beeches and myrtle and sugar maples, magnolias and pitcher plants. He asked if I was enjoying myself and when I stopped to answer I blushed and broke into a sweat, the hollows of my armpits weeping: all this from the sight of him, standing like a tree himself in the cool dark shadows.
And once—it is this that wakes me at night—once we were together a little longer. The aunts keep bees, not just for the honey but for what they represent. Our visitors are trotted out to the hives, shown their neatness and order, subjected to Aunt Daphne’s monologues about the virtues of bee-civilization. How the bees work as one, for a common goal; how they aid and nurture each other, raise their young, store up food for the winter; a community of females, the epitome of order. Into this model of virtue come the king-birds, who love above all else to eat bees. Once, last August, the aunts appealed to James for help and he came with a shotgun and slaughtered twenty birds. The aunts fled from the carnage, but I stayed. One bird, James said, was leading all the others; he pointed out a beautiful creature who snapped with great determination at a line of bees returning from the clover. This bird he brought down with a single shot, then retrieved it and laid it at my feet.
“May I show you something?” he said. “You’re not frightened of blood?”
“I am not,” I said.
He knelt with a penknife and slit the bird from throat to vent, plunging his hand in the craw. On a bit of smooth grass he laid handfuls of bees, shaking his head at their number. The sun was blazing bright, the air heavy with the scents of grass and clover; in that syrupy atmosphere the blanket of bees began to stir. To my astonishment half of them rose like Jonah from the whale, licked clean their rumpled golden down, and flew back to their hives apparently undamaged.
“All those,” he said with satisfaction. “In that single bird.”
I couldn’t say a word. I think he knew what I felt. A cloud passed over the sun as the bees vanished into their hive; the sky darkened and mosquitoes rose from the pond and arrowed toward us. I was looking at James, watching hypnotized as he lifted his arm and reached in my direction. Gently, firmly, he pressed his palm against my forearm, flattening the creature who had already penetrated my skin. When he lifted his hand we both stared at the streak of blood, so red against my whiteness. He was the one who blushed that time; he picked up his gun and bowed. “I am glad I could be of use to your aunts,” he said; and then he left. I wanted to lick the blood from my arm, I wanted to lick his arm. Oh, what use is this?
Mr. Wells again today.
He sat with us, we all drank tea; the aunts showed him part of the Manual. “And Lavinia?” he inquired. His hands on the papers were long and intelligent.
“She helps with every step,” said Aunt Jane.
“But also,” I said, “also I am working on something of my own.”
Aunt Daphne sniffed; Cassandra entered, bearing a grasshopper, and busied herself in tearing it apart.
“What is it that interests you?” Mr. Wells said. Which no one ever asks me.
“What you would expect,” I replied, and told him what I would tell you, if you were here. “How a cloud floats, when water is much heavier than air. How cloud particles form from vapor; and how raindrops grow from those particles. Whether the winds drive the particles together, coalescing them.”
He looked puzzled yet also, I thought, interested. “There are rains of manna and quails in the Bible,” he said. “And in Pliny the Elder, rains of milk and blood and birds and wool.”
What I wanted to say was this: It was raining the day they took us from each other.
Q. What kind of rain?
A. A light rain, a drizzling rain.
Q. You remember that?
A. It is almost all I remember. On the muddy ground our household burns without flame, the smoke rising up through the fine rain falling down. You have no face. Your figure, clad in damp homespun, disappears into a cloud.
What I said was, “Rains of fish.” The aunts, who don’t remember the rain, have no idea what asking me to collate these theories has meant. “And of frogs and hay and grain and bricks,” I continued. “But almost everyone agrees that those result from whirlwinds.”
Mr. Wells bent down to Cassandra, meaning I think to rescue the grasshopper; too late, she had left nothing but the wings. He straightened with these in his right hand. “Rains of stone,” he said, augmenting our list. “Do you know the theory of the lapidifying juice?” Aunt Daphne struggled to maintain the expression of deferential interest she feels is proper with such men.
“Through the earth’s crust moves a fluid body, or juice, that can turn various substances into stone,” said Mr. Wells, nodding in the aunts’ direction but addressing me. Really his face is very kind, almost handsome in its own way. His linen is clean, his hands as well; but on the middle finger of his right hand is a callus always stained with ink. “It is also found in the sea, and in the atmosphere, in a gaseous form: moving through these layers as blood moves through the body. In the air this lapidifying juice makes pebbles, which fall to earth.”
“I have never heard of this,” I said.
“A sixteenth-century theory,” he said, setting down the broken wings. “An attempt to account for the generation of stones, and a distinct advance on the theory of the petrific seed.”
Another phrase I had never heard. The aunts turned the conversation toward their textbook before Mr. Wells could finish his thought, but later I was able to thank him for teaching me something new.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Do you investigate the theories of snow and hail and dew, as well as rain?”
When I told him I was interested in all the hydrometeors, he made me spell and define the word. “It’s just as you would expect,” I said. “If ‘meteor’ is any atmospheric phenomenon—think of meteorology—so we speak of the aerial meteors, or the winds; the luminous meteors, such as rainbows and halos; the igneous or fiery meteors, such as lightning and shooting stars. Among the watery or hydrometeors are all those things you mentioned.”
“Now we have made a fair trade,” he said. “You have taught me something new.”
<
br /> He is kind enough, smart enough. If you were here, would you tell me what to do?
Q. What is it I feel for James?
Q. What is it James feels for me?
Q. What theory accounts for these feelings, which can come to nothing?
Q. What?
In the garden Mr. Wells held out a sheaf of papers. “From my Charleston cousin, William Wells,” he said. “He practices medicine in London now, and in his spare time studies nature. He is writing an essay on the dew.”
Perhaps you are in London as well, perhaps you are leading the life I long for, rich in friends and good conversation, the universe unfolding before you. I smoothed my skirts against the bench, aware that Mr. Wells was watching me as he talked about dew as rain that falls very slowly, particles of water moving toward the objects that attract them. He stuttered and looked down at his lap, at the papers in his lap.
“Does dew come from the earth, or from the air?” he read from his cousin’s notes. “Does it rise or fall? What is the source of the cold that condenses the vapor? At first I thought that the deposition of the dew might cause the cold we observe on those objects. But I have come to realize that the cold precedes the dew.”
He turned to another page. “My cousin did an experiment,” he said. “Which we might try to repeat.”
We gathered uncarded wool from the aunts’ stores, and on the balance they use to weigh mordants and pigments for dyeing, we weighed out two equal amounts. One sample we spread in a loose circle on the grass. Inside a long, thick-walled piece of clay drainage pipe, set on end so that it was open to the darkening sky, we spread the other sample in a circle the same size. The aunts watched, unimpressed but polite. They have borrowed many books from Mr. Wells.
Servants of the Map Page 9