Only Annie had met his eyes in that theater, he thought as he woke. Only Annie—as only Annie knew if Zeke’s stories were true. He’d gone to the exhibition hoping her behavior might give him a clue; hoping, perhaps, that she’d interrupt the flow of Zeke’s words and say, “But it wasn’t like that.” Instead she’d performed in silence, gazing across the hall at him.
For a week he tried to resist what he knew he should do. He visited Copernicus, who had settled into his new place and begun another painting, this one of Lancaster Sound in mid-July. Into the vista he was crowding everything Erasmus had described to him, the whales and belugas and seals and walrus churning through the water, the fulmars and guillemots whirring and diving, the murres and kittiwakes guarding their eggs from the foxes. Everywhere life, vibrant and massed, and the streaming, improbable light.
“I should go to Baltimore,” Erasmus said.
“What can you do for them?” Copernicus said. “No matter how much you disapprove, you can’t stop Zeke—everyone loved his talk, he’s having a huge success. And he needs the money now.”
He added a blue shadow to the flank of a beluga. Erasmus found the painting beautiful, but he kept seeing Annie in that landscape and soon he left.
He tried to work. He tried not to think, over the weekend, about Zeke and Annie and Tom in Baltimore; when the newspaper reported another huge crowd he tried not to see Annie’s face. He went to the engraving firm on Monday and met Alexandra at the pair of desks placed back to back, which Linnaeus and Humboldt had grudgingly granted them. Six square feet for her and six for him, in the dead space in the center of the storage room. The light was terrible. From the pages of Dr. Boerhaave’s journal, and the sketchier notes of his own, he was trying to build a description of some peculiar fossils they’d found before winter had confined them to the ship. A jawbone that seemed almost crocodilian; leaf casts resembling gingkos. Alexandra was drawing one of these.
“How could such a fossil be in that place?” she asked. “Where now there are no trees?”
“I don’t know,” Erasmus said, looking from his dead friend’s sketches to his new friend’s drawing. “It must have been warm there once. At Tierra del Fuego, years ago, I saw the fossil remains of a whale on top of a mountain.”
“You could argue,” Alexandra said, “that it was left behind by the Noachian Deluge. That these leaves ended up in the arctic the same way.”
“You could,” he said. “If you didn’t believe any of the geological evidence Lyell’s assembled. All of which suggests that the earth and these fossils are millions of years old.”
In England, he knew, even as Lyell and Darwin and Hooker discussed the mutability of species and the nature of geological change, a respected clergyman had put forth a theory that the surface of the earth had never changed, and that life forms never altered or developed. He said, “A man in London argues seriously that when the act of creation took place, the earth sprang into being complete with all its fossils and other suggestions of an earlier life. It’s a test, this man says. Another version of the tree in paradise. God hid the fossils in the rocks to tempt us into questioning the truths revealed in the Bible. Supposedly the fossils aren’t even the relics left by the Flood but just—I don’t know, just decorations.”
“Do you believe that?” Alexandra said. She picked up one of the leaf casts and regarded the symmetrical veins.
“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” he replied. “About anything. In Germany, there’s a man who says the fossil-bearing rocks fell to earth as meteorites. And so the fossils represent beings from other worlds.” He looked down at the loops and whorls of Dr. Boerhaave’s writing, and then closed the journal and stood.
“I can’t stay here,” he said. His father had coaxed him into joining Wilkes’s expedition; Zeke and Lavinia had lured him north; Ned had dragged him away from the Narwhal; Alexandra had steered him toward his book. But this one small decision might be his. “I have to talk with Annie. If Zeke’s forcing her somehow to perform like this—I’m going to go to Washington. Maybe she’ll tell me what Zeke really did up there. Maybe I can make him cancel the rest of the tour.”
HIS TIMING WAS bad—as always, he thought. Off by a year, a month, a day; in this case by just a few hours. He hadn’t allowed for his new feet, which slowed every stage of his journey. He couldn’t have predicted that the biggest bank in Philadelphia would close its doors and that depositors anxious to get to other banks would be crowding every form of transportation. And he’d forgotten what Washington was like in September, so hot and humid that the Potomac seemed to have risen into the atmosphere. There were pigs in the streets. Mud, and people shouting; everywhere the litter of construction and the long faces of men whose financial dreams were ruined. He followed a trail that led from a newspaper advertisement to a handbill to a poster to the new Smithsonian building. When the carriage let him off he confronted a mass of stone, wings and a cloister, battlements and a host of towers. He made his way to the main entrance and found himself in the Great Hall.
The beautiful display cases being built in the galleries behind the rows of columns caught his eye, as did the mounds of crates near the finished cases, but he moved past them toward the stairs at the hall’s far end. People streamed at him, busily talking; hundreds of people who passed the tall windows and were lit by beams of muddy, late afternoon light, shadowed by the columns, and then set gleaming again. A river moved against him, parting with murmurs of apology. He was carried forward by a fantasy that he’d stand beside Zeke and, after pulling Annie and Tom to safety, tell his version of the story. Just once, in these august surroundings, he’d justify himself and Dr. Boerhaave and Ned, all of them, everyone.
The staircase looked like a waterfall. He fought his way up the inside railing, knowing all the time where this river of people must have its source but praying he was wrong. At the rear of the apparatus room, a few people trickled past him; he slipped past the hydroelectric machine and the pneumatic instruments, the Fresnel lens and the big battery. He drew a deep breath and passed through the wide door into the lecture room. The room was empty. The oval skylight above the speaker’s platform shone down on an empty podium. The curved rows of seats spreading out in the shape of an open fan were empty; the horseshoe-shaped gallery above was empty as well. A poster attached to a pillar announced Zeke’s lecture: 4:30 to 6:30 P.M., in this room, on this day. It was just past six now, yet somehow he’d missed it.
Where was Zeke? Where were Annie and Tom? The room was as big as a theater and held perhaps fifteen hundred seats; he could imagine Zeke’s voice resonating from the smooth plaster walls as Annie and Tom went through their paces under the skylight’s false sun. He sat for a minute and caught his breath, before making his way back downstairs again. Now the Great Hall was empty as well. Bewildered, unsure where to go next, he moved slowly. At the end of the hall nearest the stairs, the galleries were empty. Farther on, neat stacks of wood and panes of glass, sawhorses and boxes of workmen’s tools sat between each pair of columns. Then he passed rows of half-built cases, rising in three tiers from floor to ceiling but without their glass doors or hardware; beyond them were a few rows of finished cases. A Negro carpenter adjusting a door on one of these looked up at him.
“May I help you?” he asked. “If you’re having trouble walking . . .”
Erasmus looked down at his feet. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “It just takes me a little longer.”
“Take all the time you want,” the carpenter said, tapping the brass hinge. “So many people at that lecture, you were smart to wait until the room emptied out.”
“I missed the lecture,” Erasmus said, and moved on. Zeke and Annie and Tom could be anywhere, he thought. At any hotel, at anyone’s home. He stared blankly at a mountain of crates, considering what to do next. Then realized what he was looking at.
Back home he’d read in the newspaper that Congress had appropriated money to build these cases, which were meant to house speci
mens from the expeditions of the last two decades. The centerpiece, he’d read, was to be the collection from his old Exploring Expedition. Stuffed in the Patent Office for fifteen years, mislabeled and poorly displayed, the specimens were to find a home here. He’d been thinking about other things when he read that; it had hardly registered, although once this would have been the most important news in the world. Now it didn’t seem to matter where the things on which he’d wasted his youth ended up.
On the crates were labels, apparently meant to go on the doors of the cases once they were filled. He bent over one and read it wonderingly.
Case 71.
Collections made by the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the Feejee Islands . . . Cannibal Cooking Pots.
The Feejees are Cannibals. The flesh of women is preferred to that of men, and that part of the arm above the elbow and the thigh are regarded as the choicest parts. So highly do they esteem this food, that the greatest praise they can bestow on a delicacy is to say that it is as tender as a dead man.
Vessel for mixing oil . . . Fishing Nets of twine, from the bark of the Hibiscus . . . Flute of Bamboo, and other musical instruments . . . Paddles . . . Mask and Wig worn in dances . . . War Conch, blown as the sign of hostilities . . . Fishing Spears . . . War Clubs . . . Feejee Wigs . . . Native Cloth, worn as a turban on the head . . . Feejee Spears . . . Feejee drum made of the hollow trunk of a tree.
He leapt back as if he’d been burned. He both could and couldn’t remember those objects, and the young version of himself who’d helped gather them. Two members of the Expedition had been killed by those Feejee Islanders. He hadn’t taken part in the retaliatory raid, but he’d known what was happening. From the ship he’d seen the smoke from the burning villages and heard the rifle fire. Wilkes had argued that man-eating men deserved any punishment he might inflict, and although Erasmus had hated Wilkes’s harsh ways with the native peoples, in this case part of him agreed. But that had been before Dr. Rae returned from the arctic with the first news of Franklin’s fate, and those hints of mutilated corpses and human parts found in the British cooking kettles. Before Joe told him about the British boot.
He moved uneasily among the other crates. There were signs describing corals and crystals, cuttlefish and prawns: Notice the Sea Mushroom, one directed. How could he notice anything, with the objects locked inside their crates? He tried to imagine the ranks of display cases finished and gleaming: each case numbered, each shelf labeled, each item on each shelf tagged. How many miles of shelving, if he put every shelf from every tier of every case end to end? On those shelves would be thousands—tens of thousands—of specimens. Snakes and fossils and shards of wood, canoes and skulls and feathers and slippers all jumbled together. Stuffed dogs, stuffed fish. Exotic birds, gannets and toucans: The Booby is so stupid that he will sit still and be knocked on the head.
When all the specimens were arranged, this would be the largest collection in the country. Everything the biggest, the only, the best. Already there was a meteorite here, squatting dumbly behind two crates: The largest specimen in the country, obtained at Saltillo. When found it was being used as an anvil. It is thought to be of lunar origin. Behind it, the sign on another crate: Human Skulls from the Feejee Islands, New Zealand, California, Mexico, North American Indians &c. One of the skulls is of Vendovi, the Feejee Chief and Murderer.
Erasmus imagined Zeke striding past these crates with Annie and Tom and a crowd of followers, ignoring everything that didn’t touch directly on him. He hadn’t been so different himself when he was Zeke’s age. Vendovi, whom he’d only glimpsed briefly, had killed one of the expedition’s seamen and then been taken hostage by Wilkes in return. He and Erasmus had been on different ships, and Erasmus had hardly thought about him; hardly noticed when Vendovi was carried ashore at New York, to die the next day in the hospital. How had that person turned into a skull, and how had the skull landed here?
None of these skulls, none of those days, had entered into the version of the Exploring Expedition he’d recounted to Dr. Boerhaave when they’d first met. Perhaps he’d been ashamed even then. All the skulls but Vendovi’s had come, he was almost sure, from burial grounds; other men on other ships had gathered them. Not he. Was it worse to capture a Feejee chief and let him die in a strange land than to tear an Esquimau woman from her home and exhibit her to curious strangers? Vendovi’s death pained him now, but then he’d hardly noticed it. He’d gawked at the Feejee Islanders as if they were apes. As Zeke gawked at the Esquimaux, but with less enthusiasm and a colder eye. One more sign caught his eye:
Case 52.
The identical dress worn by Dr. E. K. Kane, the celebrated American Arctic Explorer, and brought by him to this Museum. We quote the following from the account of his travels:
“The clothing or personal outfit demands the nicest study of experience. Rightly clad, he is a lump of deformity, waddling over the ice, unpicturesque, uncouth, and seemingly helpless. The fox-skin jumper, or kapetah, is a closed shirt, fitting very loosely to the person, but adapted to the head and neck by an almost air-tight hood, the nessak. Underneath the kapetah is a similar garment, but destitute of the hood, which is a shirt. It is made of bird skins, chewed in the mouth by the women until they are perfectly soft, and it is worn with this unequalled down next the body. More than 500 auks have been known to contribute to a garment of this description. The lower extremities are guarded by a pair of bear-skin breeches, the nannooke. The foot gear consists of a bird-skin sock, with a padding of grass over the sole. Outside of this is a bear-skin leg. In this dress, a man will sleep upon his sledge with the atmosphere at 93 degrees below our freezing point. The only additional articles of dress are, a fox’s tail held between the teeth to protect the nose in a wind, and mitts of seal skin well wadded with sledge straw.”
What was this doing here? The one thing Zeke might have noticed, even envied; Erasmus could see now why Zeke had come here on his honeymoon trip. Why he’d found it so crucial to curry favor with the Smithsonian’s officials and scientists and to give his lecture not in one of Washington’s theaters but in the glorious lecture room above.
This was Zeke’s chance, his time to shine. In July another expedition had left England in search of Franklin and his men: Captain McClintock, aboard the Fox, headed with Lady Franklin’s support for Boothia and King William Land. He meant to complete the search that Zeke had started but bungled—and if he succeeded, all Zeke’s feats would be eclipsed except for his retrieval of Annie and Tom. They were his Sioux Indians, his two-headed infant in a jar. Zeke, Erasmus understood, had a tiny slot of time in which to make his name, a window between Kane and McClintock.
Erasmus poked at the crate, but it was solidly built and he could see nothing inside. He tapped it lightly with one of his sticks; then he hit it more strongly. By the time a hand clamped down on his shoulder he was braced on one stick and whacking with the other, as if he might shatter the thick pine boards and find his own life trapped inside.
“You must stop that,” the carpenter said. “Right now. What’s wrong with you? Are you ill?”
His skin was black, much darker than Annie’s. Erasmus could think of no excuse. Weakly he said, “I had a fever earlier this year. I think it’s come back.”
“It rises off the river,” the carpenter said. “It’s running all over the city. The arctic woman and her son were so sick they had to stop the exhibition before it was done.” He led Erasmus to a low box and said, “Sit down for a minute. Calm yourself.”
“You saw them?” Erasmus said.
“Not the exhibition,” the carpenter said. “But I saw the explorer come in with them, and I saw them leave. Four of the scientists who work here were carrying her. Another had her little boy.”
“Do you know,” Erasmus said, “did you happen to hear—where did they go?”
“To one of the towers, I think,” the carpenter said. “Where the young men stay. The assistant scientists—they’re just boys, some of them. When they are
n’t out in the field the director lets them stay in the empty rooms up in the towers. All day they sort and label their bones and then at night they drink too much and slide down the bannisters and run footraces here in the hall. They make a mess of things. I’ve told the director he can’t expect me to work like this but he refuses to discipline them, even though last week they broke one of my doors . . .”
“Could you take me there?” Erasmus asked.
“I don’t speak to those men.” The carpenter fingered one of Erasmus’s sticks, as if checking the quality of the work. “And I won’t go near their rooms. But I’ll tell you how to get there.”
ERASMUS RESTED AT every landing, pinching his nose against the odor of sewer gas that seeped through the walls and permeated the staircase. He was in the largest of the main building’s towers, a narrow rectangular oven that soaked up the sun’s heat. On each landing paneled doors confronted him. These led, he supposed, to hot boxy rooms, and in those rooms were—what? Fervent young botanists and paleontologists, heaps of dusty equipment, spare books; concerns he couldn’t imagine. He wished the carpenter had been more explicit. He heard laughter above him, and climbed another flight.
The three men he glimpsed through a half-open door were arguing too passionately to see him. Fossil dogs, fossil wolves; for a second Dr. Boerhaave’s voice seemed to float across the surface of their discussion. Large groups of plants and animals share a common morphology, a unity of plan. These plans exist as ideas in the mind of God, who expresses them differently from age to age. Individual species may disappear, but the blueprints persist, with variations; variant forms of the Form. A wiry man in his early twenties leaned forward and said, “Cuvier doesn’t even contest the existence of man during the epoch of the giant mammals.”
“The question,” said the red-haired man next to him, “is whether the associated human bones should be assigned equal antiquity with the dog bones found among them, and the hippopotami and extinct bears . . .”
Voyage of the Narwhal Page 32