Easter Island

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  But he develops a habit of borrowing Alice’s nightgowns, bursting from her tent in a flutter of white, skipping and twirling like a silent banshee, cheered and frenzied by their campfire laughter, his ankles eventually swallowed by the spirals of his white cotton wake, plunging him headlong into the sand. Elsa wonders some nights if they should be more concerned about the boy—what would his parents think? Is it safe for him to ride his pony alone in the dark? Why does he seem so free to roam about? But she has no way of asking what is proper, and the boy seems determined not to speak. So she lets the questions slide to the back of her mind. For now he delights them. And in this new place so far from home, Biscuit Tin, though probably no more than nine, is their only friend.

  In their second month Edward decides to begin work at Rano Raraku, themoai quarry four miles southeast of their camp. This, the volcanic crater from which the statues were carved, holds the greatest interest for him. Scores of unfinishedmoai are stuck in the rock inside the crater; on the outer grassy slope, dozens more stand at all angles, frozen, it seems, on their way somewhere else. First he wants to measure and catalogue each statue. After that, he intends to excavate.

  Throughout the day, Elsa lies in the long grass, a parasol pitched by her side, drawing the elongated profile of each stone face—the sloping noses, the square chins, the dangling earlobes. Edward walks the hillside numbering the base of eachmoai with chalk and entering it in his log. “Thirty-five feet, Elsa! It must weigh over fifty tons!” Sometimes he calls out more elaborate descriptions—Oval carving, suggestive of an egg, on the posterior of 87A—which she notes in her log.

  It is convenient, while he and Elsa examine the statues, to leave Alice and the boy to play. At the base of the crater, beneath a makeshift canopy, Alice spends days on end trying to teach him bezique, then tries to teach him about birds. But there are no hawks and terns to show him—of this Alice complains endlessly.

  Themoai are more numerous than expected. Some lie tucked away in the rock, overgrown with pale grass. Some sprout like wild shoots of stone. Others are buried almost to their heads. “I’d guess there are over two hundred,” says Edward.

  “It’s eerie,” says Elsa. “Them abandoned like that. And all the statues around the coast. Fallen.”

  “There must have been a tremendous seismic event here,” says Edward. “Not a single statue remains upright.”

  “It would be devastating to work so hard to build these things and then have them all collapse.”

  “An event strong enough to tumble these statues must have ravaged the island. A tidal wave? It would have wiped out all crops, all livestock. Any volcanic activity would have ruined the soil. And then there is, of course, the secondary emotional and mental response. Events like that, natural disasters, become omens to primitive societies. When one lacks a scientific explanation or understanding, a horrible event like that can seem like the anger of the gods, inter alia.”

  “I’d like to know what it would have been like to live here. To know only this island. To imagine us here, right now, without our memory of England.”

  “But we cannot imagine ourselves without certain memories. The ‘we’ imagining will always have the memory.”

  “Of course. But it’s still possible to think of yourself as living in a different place, a different time. To simply imagine what it might be.”

  “Yes, I think I understand.”

  “I just wonder if our place and time is really a part of us, if it’s attached to us. . . .”

  They talk like this until sunset, measuring and sketching and conjecturing. Then they mount their horses and return to the camp, which is now fully arranged.

  Cooking dinner is managed as quickly as possible. Flies and mosquitoes swarm the campfire, plunging dizzily into any open pot; soups and stews grow speckled with the small black bodies. Once, as she prepares a chicken for dinner, Elsa counts twenty flies on her arm. She is rapidly adjusting to this daily battle with insects. One night, a thumb-size red cockroach drops onto her face in the tent. After that, the drowsy black flies seem manageable.

  At twilight, they all clamber into Alice’s tent—if Biscuit Tin is still lurking, he is duly propped on his pony and given a treat for the way home—and read aloud for an hour—fromThe Life and Voyages of Captain James Cook orAmurath to Amurath, a book by the famous British adventurer Gertrude Bell about her journey through Mesopotamia.

  “You see, my dear,” says Edward, “a woman can often have extraordinary insights into foreign cultures. Who knows? You could be the very next Miss Bell!”

  But there is no need for him to say it—the thought has already occurred to her, returning to her nightly as they read Bell’s book. Could Elsa write about their trip? Their work? She is, after all, in a place where no other Western woman has set foot. But Bell went to Oxford, her fate spun from the silken threads of age-old aristocracy, while Elsa has spent her life with books borrowed from employers’ shelves, lingering outside the doors of lecture halls at her father’s university. But the possibility of a memoir fills her with new vigor. As they read in the lamplit tent, listening to moths clacking and fluttering at the light, to the distant rush of surf, her mind fastens on the idea ofher own work on the island,her notebooks, what might someday be a book by Elsa Pendleton Beazley. But she must, then, find her own research. Something other than the quarry—that belongs to Edward.

  The chapter finished, the book closed, the lantern’s fast flame sacrificed to the moon’s soft radiance, they say their good-nights. Elsa and Edward return to their tent—Elsa now spends every night there. Sometimes, Alice creeps in while they are asleep, collapsing on the floor beside Elsa’s cot, or nestling beside her, whispering “stove, stove.” And once or twice, Elsa awakens to find Alice clinging to Edward’s half-naked form. On these occasions she nudges Alice and pries her off.

  But one night, when Elsa can no longer shake from her mind what Edward said to her on the eve of their arrival—I know I am not what a girl your age dreams of—when the memory of his shame becomes too much for her, when his nightly assurances that she has her own separate cot and that he would be pleased to turn away as she undresses seem a generosity unearned by her, in the dark tent she tiptoes to his cot, seats herself on the edge, and quietly offers herself to him.

  That Alice has heard or seen anything of the intimacy Elsa doesn’t think possible. But Alice must sense something. Something, from the sour look on her face the next morning when Elsa ducks into her tent, she doesn’t like.

  After this, Alice’s visits cease.

  12

  The day after she slid the Whitman poem beneath Professor Farraday’s door, Greer arrived in class to find written on the chalkboard:

  True or False?

  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

  And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

  And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest . . .

  “A question has been provoked by one Walt Whitman, poet of the people,” Thomas said, his pointer tapping the board. “Is a leaf of grass the journey-work of the stars?”

  He read the entire poem aloud, pausing between lines, and when he’d finished sat behind his desk, put his feet up, and clasped his hands behind his head. “I think it would be best if we composed our own little poem in response.” Thomas appointed a student to transcribe what turned out to be six stanzas on grass species that produced toxic hydrocyanic acid, and on pismire colonies that took slaves. The students were amused; Thomas had a reputation for combativeness and to them this was a punch line they had long awaited. Here was the man who’d won Princeton’s Linnaeus Prize as a freshman, had published three papers pioneering fossil pollen analysis before he’d even left graduate school. The man who in 1953, at thirty-three years old, organized the world’s first palynology conference. This poem, the students knew, would enter Professor Farraday folklore, and they were happy to be part of it. But Greer sat
silently in her chair, amazed anyone could so rigidly deny the possibility of a benevolent intent, or some cosmic perfection, behind nature. At the end of class, as she was midway up the steps, Thomas called to her.

  “Miss Sandor, the poem, of course, displays excellent command of language—even I am not immune to lyricism—but little command of, well, the nuance of science. After all, if we don’t defend science, who will? I thank you for the challenge.”

  She turned to face him. His nose was large, almost beaklike, but it balanced, in a pleasing way, his wide-set eyes. He was forty-two, and a hint of silver dusted his thick sideburns. Otherwise his hair was dark brown, and noticeably uncombed. He wasn’t handsome in the traditional sense, but his face seemed the natural expression of inner intelligence, as though each feature had risen like a mountain from his mind, the nose, the eyes, the wide forehead all manifestations of his internal energy.

  “Professor Farraday. What makes you think I have any interest in that poem?”

  “I don’t believe in a grand design, but I am fully aware of the patterns of daily life. Only women,” he said, twirling a piece of chalk like a miniature baton, “slip poems under doors. And you’ve noticed, I’m sure, that you’re the only woman in my class.”

  “Oh, I’ve noticed.”

  He was clearly waiting for more, but Greer turned away without anything further. As she pulled open the door of the lecture hall, she could feel his stare pursue her, the footsteps of his curiosity.

  Greer had of course realized, from the very first lecture, she was the only woman. And, further, that she was one of only six women getting a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Wisconsin. This fact had been recognized by everyone—the women, the men, the faculty. And in response to this situation, the loudest and most outgoing of the group—Mildred Ravener—had called a meeting of the women. On a crisp September day, Greer sat on the Union Terrace with Alice Beemer, Gerty Smith, Elaine Ferguson, and Jo Banks, eating bowls of the university’s homemade ice cream. They talked about their interest in botany, their childhoods, and the difficulties they had faced as woman scientists. Greer listened to each one, and, when her turn came, offered the only anecdote that sprang to mind.

  “I was proving that bees were attracted to violets by virtue of their color, not smell, by placing an inverted test tube over the violet, and then monitoring the flight path of the bee. Of course, the bees flew straight into the tip of the test tube, where the color dominated, not to the base, where smell escaped. But my teacher got stung trying to judge the experiment, and Joshua Kleimer won for taking apart his mother’s refrigerator. And labeling all the parts. The end. Five dollars if you can guess what he was doing last time I saw him.”

  “Professionally, you mean? Or what he was actually doing?” asked Gerty Smith. Gerty Smith was married to a dentist.

  Greer sighed. “Appliance repair.”

  “So what grade was this?” asked Mildred Ravener.

  “Third,” said Greer.

  Greer knew this wasn’t the sort of anecdote they were looking for—the others had been pawed by teachers in dark corridors, had been told by their parents that science would ruin their hearts and their wombs. Mildred Ravener described the time her father shoved all her science books in the stove, set them aflame, then replaced them with a gift-wrapped pile of cookbooks. (“You see, ladies, he considered this an act of love.”) Two months later, he replaced the microscope she’d saved for years to buy with a Singer sewing machine. Mildred had, by her own account, many “feelings of resentment toward the other members in her family unit.” She was an obsessively articulate, deeply religious woman who believed communication could resolve all conflicts. Each week she wrote her parents a letter—the same one, it seemed—explaining her love of science. And each week, no reply. Still, she had faith she would be understood, that one day, in her mailbox, she’d find the long-awaited envelope.

  Greer’s father, however, had always been encouraging; he was the reason she’d become a scientist. So she felt she had little in common with the group. The only woman Greer really liked was Jo Banks—she was a few years older than the rest, had a quick mind and a knack for identifying pollen. Jo never seemed to lose the bronze sheen she had acquired in the Caribbean, where she had lived for several years working as a scuba-diving instructor, and where she had had some kind of life-altering spiritual experience with a barracuda, which she alluded to often but never explained. She had six brothers—Jeb, John, Jack, Judd, Jessie, and Jeremiah—whom she referred to as though everyone else knew them (“Judd hates vanilla too”). But she spoke of her parents only once, and that was to say that her parents never spoke of her. “They don’t like you in science?” asked Mildred. “No,” said Jo. “They like me in science.” And that was the end of it. Jo Banks was unnervingly comfortable with the act of silence. She sat, she watched, she nodded; and when she talked, she spoke her mind, concisely. But she was extremely good-humored. She was the one who came up with the nickname for Professor Farraday’s lab: The Philodendron. And then for him: Jackass in the Pulpit. Both plants produced exclusively male flowers in their first season, and only after several seasons produced a small number of female flowers confined to the bottom of the stalk. Jo had taken Thomas’s class the year before Greer, and warned her:

  “Nod, smile, tell him you like his ties. He can be a prick, but he’s the hotshot of the department. His angiosperm research is groundbreaking. Just remember, when he starts in on atheism, look really interested.” Jo widened her eyes, arched her eyebrows, let her mouth hang open—her parody of interest. She had thick brown bangs and always wore her hair in a ponytail, which she now tightened. “Remember. This guy doesn’t need to be lecturing first-years. He teaches because heenjoys it. Sick, huh? So play along. Try to lean forward in your seat—he loves that shit. You want him on your team.”

  But Greer had wondered if she had cut him from her team with her poem.

  “Holy shit,” Jo said when Greer told her what had happened. They were drinking beer at Jo’s apartment, and Jo had just pulled out two cigars. “Last year, a guy tried a deistic stunt like that and right in the middle of the lecture Jackass told him to gather his stuff, to leave and go sit in church instead. You left him a Whitman poem and he didn’t seem pissed?”

  “He seemed amused.”

  “Here, take the end off, like this.” Jo bit off the tip.

  “Yum,” Greer said, spitting the end into the conch shell Jo held out.

  “Amused. Uh-oh. Call the papers. I think Jackass in the Pulpit is interested.”

  Greer paused; this had already occurred to her.

  “Oh, shit.You’re interested.”

  “I shouldn’t be.”

  “Well, he is an ass.”

  “An intelligent ass.”

  “A mildly accomplished ass. I’ll concede that.”

  “At least he’s not married.”

  “He sounds pure dreamy now. Stop before I fall in love.”

  “Well, he’s almost twice my age.”

  “And that never happens.”

  “I know it happens. It happens all the time. That’s why it’s less interesting. It’s a cliché.”

  “Are you really looking for something non-cliché?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jo settled into her couch and considered her cigar. “Cuba. We could go to Cuba and get real cigars. I’ve always wanted to live abroad. And what we really need is to get involved with some kind of revolution. We could be generalissimos. God, we would make great generalissimos. Or at least I would, but you’re a pretty fast learner. We could wear fatigues. Berets. Maybe keep the earrings and the curls. Now,that’s not cliché.”

  Greer stretched out on the carpet, staring at the mildew stains on the ceiling. “Well, Castro’s not half bad-looking.”

  “My God, you have odd taste. Number one rule of being a generalissimo, Greer, you cannot have the hots for the head guerrilla generalissimo.”

  “Fidel happens to be pr
ime minister now. That’s very respectable. And in my communist dictatorship, there will be special adjustments made for romantic relationships.”

  “That’s not a communist dictatorship, that’s a commune.”