Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  “You kept those even as little boys?” Perhaps Lavinia had kept one too. Or perhaps she’d simply watched her world shrink and shrink, while her brothers’ worlds expanded.

  “Always,” Erasmus said. “It was part of our father’s plan for educating us. We must read French and German and Latin, and learn how to draw accurately. We were to keep notebooks of all our observations, illustrated ourselves.”

  “I’d love to have seen those,” Alexandra said, thinking of her own sketchbooks. In Browning’s house she’d had only a cubicle off the parlor to herself, and almost no privacy. Always, though, she’d had a small locked trunk of her own. In it she’d kept—still kept, the trunk was under her bed—the sketchbooks in which she drew herself and her sisters, and whatever else came to hand.

  “Look under E in the bookshelves,” Erasmus said. “I believe you’ll find them there. If you’d bring them to me . . .”

  She pushed the rolling ladder into place. Between a book about ferns and a description of the invertebrates of the Orinoco River region she found five buckram-bound books with red spines and no titles.

  “I started the first when I was ten,” he said, when she returned with them. “The last ends the day before I left on the Exploring Expedition.” He opened one. “See? This is what we did.”

  She peered at a drawing of a wasp’s nest. The whole nest, from the outside; an interior view after a side had been cut away; larvae and full-grown wasps in various positions. The drawings, done in black ink with a light wash, were clumsy but vivid, labeled in a boyish, somewhat crooked hand.

  “That’s from when I was twelve,” Erasmus said. “Copernicus’s are much nicer, he was always the real artist in the family. Linnaeus’s and Humboldt’s are more orderly, and the drawings are probably better, but they’re less detailed—keeping the notebooks was always a chore for them, they never liked it as much as I did. Even when I was a boy, I was sure I wanted to be a naturalist.”

  “They’re charming,” Alexandra said, with her hand poised to turn the page. “May I?”

  Erasmus nodded, and she flipped through the volume: bones, fish, birds’ organs, worms, spiders, pupae, lichens. Suddenly she had tears in her eyes. Lying there so worn and beaten, Erasmus had seemed old to her since his return although there was less than fifteen years between them; he was forty-two, she thought. His hair had thinned and faded; he’d lost weight and his face was drawn, with deep lines on his forehead. His attitude of defeat had aged him further. But in these pages she could see the hopeful boy he’d been.

  “That Exploring Expedition,” he said. “Everything that happened after we got home, it broke something in me. But this voyage was like another chance.”

  For a minute he spoke about Dr. Boerhaave—all they’d collected, their good conversations, all they’d shared—and Alexandra felt a pang of envy.

  “I was going to write a book about the arctic,” he concluded. “Perhaps a wonderful book.”

  “You could still do that.”

  Erasmus shrugged. “No one wants to hear about our expedition. The big failure, the big anticlimax. With Zeke dead and the brig abandoned, what is there to say? What is there to write about that Dr. Kane hasn’t already covered?”

  “But a natural history of the arctic,” Alexandra said. “Not a travel book, not a book of memoir and adventure like Dr. Kane’s, but something about the area’s botany and zoology?”

  “That’s what I meant to do, really,” Erasmus said. “But all my specimens are gone, and Dr. Kane printed those long compilations of plants and animals in his Appendix. All I have left are the lists I brought home, and some notes in my journal. And my friend’s journal, I have that too.”

  He didn’t offer to show her these, Alexandra noticed. She could look at his childhood notebooks but not at what was most important to him, not what he’d done recently.

  A FEW DAYS later she entered the Repository to find the tin box open and Erasmus reading something with a mottled cover. Heaped on the bed beside him were Agassiz’s books about fossil fish, and near those the worn journal that Lavinia had once pressed into Zeke’s hands. Alexandra expected Erasmus to bury the books in the bedclothes, as he’d done before when she interrupted his secret researches. But he left everything open this time, drawing back his hands as she approached.

  “You see what I do?” he said. “This is what I do with my time these days. I paw through my own journal”—here he touched the green volume—“Zeke wasn’t using this, he let me have it.” With his other hand he touched the speckled volume. “Then I read in here. This belonged to my friend. I was just looking at a passage he’d written about some fossil fish, and I was comparing his description with Agassiz’s plates—these books were Dr. Boerhaave’s too, I can hardly believe I managed to get them home. Do you know them?”

  “Only by reputation,” Alexandra murmured. “You didn’t have a copy here.”

  “The plates are extraordinary,” Erasmus said. “Copernicus can do things like this, but I never could.” He flipped through the pages for a minute and consulted Dr. Boerhaave’s journal. “My friend was acquainted with Agassiz,” he told Alexandra. “They met when Agassiz was visiting the Scottish Highlands, looking at the fossil fishes in the Old Red Sandstone. He was recollecting that trip, and he mentioned a fish I was trying to find—here.”

  He pointed out a chromolithograph of an odd-looking creature, all spines and overlapping plates. Alexandra gazed at the subtle hues and textures. “That’s gorgeous,” she said. “Really remarkable. Work like this—it makes me see how important illustration can be, how it’s truly one of a naturalist’s tools.”

  “It is,” Erasmus said. “With accurate drawings, one can compare specimens from all over the world without having to rummage in the cabinets of museums and individual collectors. It’s as if I’m holding the fossil right here in my hands.”

  “I heard Agassiz lecture when he visited Philadelphia,” Alexandra said. “Fascinating.”

  “I did too!” Erasmus said. “But you must have been only a child.”

  “Not quite—I was fifteen or sixteen.”

  They smiled at each other, and then Alexandra remembered the stories her sister Emily had told her. “What Agassiz is doing now,” she said, “he’s such an interesting thinker, and yet—have you read the essay he contributed to Nott and Glidden’s Types of Mankind?”

  “I haven’t,” Erasmus said. “It came out just as Zeke and I were getting ready to leave, and I never had time to look at it.”

  “You should,” Alexandra said. “You’ve been among the Esquimaux yourself now, you’d be a better judge. He extends his argument about separate, successive creations of life in different geographical centers to man. The races of man correspond to the great zoological regions, he says, and perhaps they’re autochthonoi, like plants, originating where they’re found. Eight primary human types, each originating in and inhabiting a specific zoological province—one of his types is Arctic man, your Esquimaux. He seems almost to be arguing that his types are separate species.”

  “I . . .” Erasmus said. He paused for half a minute. A white moth fluttered before him, released from a cocoon behind the books. “It’s wonderful to have you around, for me to have someone to discuss books and ideas with. I appreciate all the time you spend with me. But . . .”

  To Alexandra’s horror, tears slid down the bony slopes of his nose.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered. “I’m so tired, still. I don’t know what I think about anything, and Lavinia hates me and I miss Dr. Boerhaave so much—how can I know what I think about some foolishness Agassiz has written? All I can think is that he was my friend’s friend, and that my friend is lost, everything is lost.” He reached up, closed his hand around the moth, peered at it, and then released it.

  Alexandra turned toward the window while he recovered himself. Across the garden Lavinia’s window was visible, the blinds drawn although the sky was still light. Whenever she urged Lavinia to rise, Lavinia turne
d her head and said, “How can you understand? You were always so clever, you can do anything. But without Zeke, what am I? Zeke was the only one who really loved me.”

  “You should write your book,” she said, turning back to Erasmus. “It’s the best way to honor Dr. Boerhaave. And Zeke, and the whole expedition.”

  “How?” Erasmus said. “With what? All my specimens are gone.”

  “Thomas Say had all his notebooks stolen on his first western trip. His notes on the Indians, all his descriptions of animal species, everything. But he still managed to keep working.” She picked up his journal. “May I?”

  It was better than she could have hoped; on almost every page, among the descriptions and narrative passages, were sketches of birds and bones and cliffs, a tusk found in a creek.

  “Say was still a young man when he died,” Erasmus said, following the movements of her hands. “He died before he lost hope.”

  She reached for Dr. Boerhaave’s journal: more sketches, in more detail. “Dr. Kane had nothing more than such notes and sketches when he got home,” she said. “But from them all the paintings for his book were made and then engraved.”

  “I’m no artist,” Erasmus said glumly. “Copernicus is the one who can paint.”

  “I’m not bad at drawing and painting.” Alexandra looked down at her capable hands. “With your sketches, with you correcting everything, telling me the colors and what details you remember, I might be able to make something reasonable.”

  As if he could not stop the process, Erasmus’s eyebrows knotted and his lips curled, blowing out a little derogatory puff of air. Alexandra dropped the journal and turned from him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to imply, it’s just—what do you really know about this?”

  Alexandra seized Dr. Kane’s Arctic Explorations, opening the second volume to one of her engravings. Before she could think about what she was doing, she stuck it under Erasmus’s nose. “I did this, or most of it. And this.” She turned to another plate. “And this, and the background to this, and this seal . . .” In her hurry she tore the tissue overlying one of the plates.

  She described Mr. Archibault’s injured wrists and their secret sessions. “No one knows,” she said, smoothing the edges of the tissue back together. “No one can ever know, Mr. Archibault would lose his job and your brothers would be furious, you can’t tell anyone. But I could help you, if you weren’t so stubborn . . .” She could help herself as well, she thought. Together they might work on a project she could claim partly as her own.

  “You worked on his book?” Erasmus exclaimed. “How could you betray our family like that?”

  Bewildered, she pressed the volume to her chest. “Your own brothers directed the engraving for the plates.”

  “That was business!” Erasmus said. “They had no idea Zeke and I were in the same area as Dr. Kane. They thought I was dead, they didn’t know I was coming back.”

  “And how would I have known that?”

  “Would you just leave?” Erasmus said.

  He turned his back and pulled his pillow over his head. After he heard the door close he fell asleep—he slept so much now, he couldn’t help it—and he woke thick-headed, with the sun beginning to color the sky. He reached for his journal and wrote:

  Dr. Kane’s narrative of the First Grinnell Expedition was a boy’s romp, an adventure story—but this new book is so good I can’t bear to look at it. If he and I had become friends, if I’d gone on his expedition rather than Zeke’s; but he didn’t even consider me. Everyone has passed me. Maury’s published his Physical Geography of the Sea, supporting Kane’s findings about the open polar basin. Ringgold’s already written up some of his work from the North Pacific Expedition: another expedition that might have included me. He found small shelled animals on the bottom of the Coral Sea, two and a half miles down—a very important discovery, proving that there’s no azoic zone. No place where the great weight of water prevents a plumb line from passing, creatures from living. My father used to tell me that, below a certain depth, nothing could sink and drowned bodies and wrecked ships floated far off the bottom in layers related to their weight. That’s what I feel like myself. As if I’m floating below the surface, above the bottom, suspended in fluid as thick as mercury. Why hasn’t Lady Franklin written me back?

  AFTER THAT QUARREL, Alexandra avoided him and spent more time with Lavinia. They’d seen each other tired, crabby, partially dressed; sullen, excited, impatient, broken: although Lavinia was difficult to be around these days, Alexandra thought of her as another sister. The sight of Lavinia’s uncoiled hair, matted around her shoulders, pained her. So did the scraps of paper drifting around Lavinia’s bed: letters pleading that people find Zeke’s body, rescue Zeke’s relics, discover new seas in the name of Zeke. None of which would ever be sent. The sight of her brothers made her weep, the doctor annoyed her, and nothing Alexandra said seemed to help. Sitting useless by Lavinia’s bed, Alexandra thought of calling on Browning. Everyone in their neighborhood turned to him; despite a certain humorlessness he had a rare talent for comforting the bereaved and once had soothed a widow who’d locked herself in her attic after losing her children in a skating accident. Berating herself for not thinking of this before, she asked for his help.

  For the next few weeks, Browning visited Lavinia frequently, gliding dark-suited up to her room with his Bible and a handful of other books. Although Alexandra wasn’t privy to their conversations she could see how much they helped. Lavinia stopped writing letters and began to come downstairs for a few hours each day; she dressed and ate and took some interest in the workings of the household. What had Browning said? With his guidance she’d begun to pray again, Lavinia revealed. As she had as a girl; it comforted her. When Linnaeus and Humboldt proposed a family Christmas dinner, she agreed.

  “I can’t make the arrangements,” she said. “But if Alexandra is willing . . .”

  “Of course,” Alexandra said. “It would be my pleasure.”

  “Let’s have both families, then,” Lavinia said. “Ours, and yours—would your brother come, do you think? I would like that.”

  Alexandra chose the menu, consulted with the cook, directed the housecleaning and supervised the decorating of the tree. The house was beautiful and no one minded how much she spent. On Christmas day they gathered around the huge mahogany table, with all the leaves inserted and chairs borrowed from every room. Linnaeus and Lucy and their daughter; Humboldt and Ellen and their little son; Alexandra’s sisters, Emily and Jane; Browning and Harriet and Nicholas, who was almost three. Harriet, expecting another child in January, sat in an armchair with a pillow behind her back. Lavinia sat at the foot of the table, presiding over all that Alexandra had arranged. Alexandra sat to her right, where she might remind Lavinia unobtrusively of some forgotten dish or ritual. Far away, at the head of the table, was Erasmus in his wheeled chair. A turkey at one end, a ham at the other; white porcelain dishes of vegetables steaming beneath their covers; relishes and sauces and gravies and condiments; a forest of stemware, a sea of silver.

  The candles sparked a confusing network of reflections from the shining surfaces, and during Browning’s long prayer Alexandra saw flames in wine and faces in spoons. “So much has been taken from us,” Browning said. “Yet so much remains.” Then something about thanking the Lord for the bounty before them and the family remaining to them, and a long loop through the Lord’s mysterious ways. How hard it is, Browning said, to accept the accidents that befall us. The ferry exploding on the river, which had taken from him and his sisters their parents; the childbed fever that had taken Mrs. Wells from her children when they were still so young—we have these losses in common, he said. They bind our families. As does this accident in the unknown regions of the north. Zechariah is gone from us, but we are grateful for the return of Erasmus.

  Throughout all this, Alexandra saw, Lavinia stared straight ahead. Straight at Erasmus, her right hand tucked in her lap while he
r left turned a silver spoon back to front, front to back, the reflections melting, re-forming, and melting again. When Browning said, “Amen,” Lavinia said softly, “I forgive you.” Everyone knew she was speaking to Erasmus. “I understand that you did your best.”

  “I did,” said Erasmus. His end of the table was so far from hers. “I did everything I could.”

  There was a precarious moment of silence. Then Nicholas tipped over a dish of pickles, Humboldt’s little William laughed delightedly, Harriet began to scold her son and was stopped by Browning’s quiet hand on hers. Dinner passed, almost festive, everyone chattering while Lavinia and Erasmus regarded each other and Alexandra thought, Have they made up, then? Between them she’d felt pulled so thin that light might shine through her lungs. Perhaps Browning had repeated to Lavinia the words he’d spoken after their own parents’ deaths—how, in a family with no parents, they must each stand as guardians and protectors of one another.

  They ate and drank, plates came and went; Lavinia directed the servants convincingly. “I’m so glad you could do this,” Alexandra said. “This is wonderful.”

  “You did most of the work,” Lavinia replied. There were gray circles beneath her eyes, and she wasn’t eating. But that she was here at all was a miracle.

  Somewhere else, at other Christmas dinners, people were discussing Dr. Kane and his book, the continuing searches for Franklin, the arctic in general: anything to avoid the discussions of politics and slavery that fractured families and friends. But here the topic on which everyone else fell back was also forbidden, and they struggled, and talked about books. Jane and Lucy found common ground in The Wide, Wide World, agreeing that they both still coveted the mahogany desk given to the novel’s heroine in its most famous scene.

  “That little ivory knife,” Jane said, “and the four colors of sealing wax, and the pounce box and the silver pencil!”

  With a pang Alexandra thought of Jane’s bare bedroom in Browning’s house, and the gate-legged table that served as her desk. Harriet, who also had no desk of her own, brought up a few more cherished scenes. And Emily added, “Men make fun of it, I know you all do. You like tales of adventure, in which the hero truly explores that wide world. But the novel is about tyranny, really; the tyranny of family and circumstances, and how one survives when running away isn’t an option. Which it never is for women like us.”