Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  Dismayed, he turned back to the nieces. The girl closest in size to him, Caroline, patted the blanket. “You’re new here,” she said, as he sat beside her. “Where are your parents?”

  “Back home,” he muttered. Only when she turned to take a muddy stick from one of the twins did he realize that she was the girl who, the first time he’d seen the aeroplane fly, had been watching from a spot lower down on the hill. Then he made more of an effort, adding, “In Detroit. Where are yours?”

  “At home,” she said. “Up the road. Sometimes Aunt Henrietta takes us out for a day, to give my mother a rest.” Imagine, he thought, using Miss Atkins’s first name! “She’s sick a lot,” Caroline continued. “And we’re so many—” She gestured vaguely at her sisters.

  “Are you all like your aunt?”

  One twin was feeding grapes to the other, a process Caroline watched closely. Indeed, this seemed to be her job; her aunt was talking intently to Taggart while her older sister strolled away with a young man wearing a plaid cap. “Sorry,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “You know—so interested in cows and fish and plants and everything.”

  “Oh, that.” With a delicate little shrug, she said, “Some of us are, some of us aren’t. Marion”—her tall sister was now laughing with her companion—“isn’t interested at all. I’m not either, really. But Elaine is”—Elaine was reading a book, he saw then, although she seemed young for that. “It’s too early to tell about the twins. Are you like your uncle?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He knew he wasn’t like his father, although they shared deft hands, a gift for understanding machines, and a quickness with figures. But Taggart had those traits as well. His father drank until he was stupid and disappeared, returning enraged by everyone but particularly, peculiarly, by his son. Was he like his uncle, then? He enjoyed the grafting and pollinating and the handling of the animals. But the abstract ideas didn’t interest him at all, and the charts and theories bored him.

  “Halfway, maybe?” he said to Caroline. “I’m not that interested in the farm experiments, but I really like the flying machines.”

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? The first time I saw one up in the air—did you see the Red Wing take off from the lake in March?”

  He shook his head. “I wasn’t here then.” How unfair that he’d missed not only all that Beryl had seen, but this too!

  “The wings were red silk,” she said, “and it had runners on the bottom. The builders loaded it on the steamer and brought it to the edge of the ice—it had already melted at this end—and lots of us walked along the shore until we reached the launching place. The men held on to it while the engine warmed up and when they let go it chattered down the ice for a bit, then rose up and …”

  She described every detail rapturously, her face lit up even as her hands retrieved sandwich crusts cast aside by the twins, dolls dropped, shoes pulled off, and suddenly he found himself paying complete attention to her.

  WHILE THEY TALKED, rising occasionally to chase after one or another of the twins, feeding them and Elaine from the picnic hampers, the hours passed, the temperature rose, the wind increased, and the clouds piled up, flipped on their backs, tumbled over each other. The boys Constantine swam with thundered by in a herd, ignoring him. The crowd grew more and more restless as G.H. and the mechanics—“There’s my father,” Beryl said, pointing out a short, bowlegged man before turning back to Ed—kept stepping outside the tent to check the clouds and test the wind, to shake their heads and step back inside. Taggart and Ed walked over several times and returned, looking grave but still convinced the flight would take place. People left, but others arrived and the grounds were still crowded when, early in the afternoon, the rain began to fall. Miss Atkins, cleverly, had brought a large piece of oilcloth that she strung from the tree to a pole Ed made from a sapling. The winery opened its doors and many on that side of the field ducked inside until the cloudburst ended.

  The sun came out, but then it was windy. Then the wind dropped but the clouds gathered ominously again. Miss Atkins caught a fat beetle flying heavily under the oilcloth and showed it to Constantine and the girls. A June bug, she said; it flew with its thick outer wings, which were called elytra, stuck out stiffly while the little underwings whirred below: rather like the busy propeller beneath the stiff wings of the aeroplane, which was how it had gotten its name. Constantine tried to look interested—it was sort of interesting—but Caroline laughed affectionately and patted the back of her aunt’s hand. The dirigible man passed by, also the men experimenting with the ornithopter and the helicopter. A handsome young man in a white suit came over to talk to Taggart and Ed, who introduced him to Miss Atkins but not to the rest of them; after he left Miss Atkins said he was a famous plant explorer who’d helped his father-in-law design a massive tetrahedral-celled kite.

  All afternoon the crowd milled about, each swirl and shuffle bringing new people past their little plot: some of Taggart and Ed’s old professors from Cornell; men from the experimental station at Geneva; automobile makers from Rochester and Syracuse; reporters from Buffalo and Albany and New York. Constantine, now firmly cast in the role of Caroline’s helper—he’d watched after his own younger sisters at home for so long that he couldn’t help interfering with these—eavesdropped on their conversations as he dabbed jam from Agnes’s hands and removed Alice’s wet socks after an incident with a puddle. He heard gossip about the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, which they’d so far declined to exhibit in public, and which launched from a track instead of rolling along on wheels. Twice more it rained, but only briefly, and still almost everyone stayed. Had there ever been such a long afternoon?

  Elaine fell asleep over her book, the twins dropped their heads onto Caroline’s lap, and Constantine gave up and stretched out on his back, looking up at the square of cloth and the bugs flying heavily back and forth. The cloth was the sky and the bugs were aeroplanes, crossing in stately procession so far above that from up there he was the tiniest particle, indistinguishable from the others in the field. Did he fall asleep? He couldn’t remember. At one point he overheard Taggart and Henrietta Atkins discussing their families, one of them his.

  “I invited my sister to come for the summer, with all the children,” Taggart said. “But she wouldn’t, she’d only send …” and Miss Atkins said, “My sister’s just as bad with her husband.” But maybe he only dreamed that, the way he dreamed himself as a June bug bumbling through the trees. Then, somehow, it was nearly six o’clock.

  Taggart had gone home to do the milking, taking Beryl with him, and returned talking quietly with her; the wind had died down and the sky had cleared; men were pushing the June Bug from the tent! It was both larger and smaller than he’d imagined, the wings very long—six Taggarts end to end, he guessed; maybe seven—but the pilot’s seat smaller than a kitchen chair, the nose not much longer than the pilot’s outstretched legs, and the tail section, which two men were attaching now, no more than a shape outlined by skinny poles. Some men ran off to measure out a kilometer—a little more than half a mile, Miss Atkins said, which was easier to imagine than Taggart’s conversion—over the muddy fields. Before long G.H. settled in between the curved cloth wings, which from Constantine’s angle looked like an open mouth in the process of swallowing a man. Someone spun the long wooden propeller and the engine caught with a familiar noise. Someone pulled away the blocks. Those holding on to the wires and the bamboo frame opened their hands simultaneously and the machine clattered along the dirt, picking up speed until it rose into the air, soaring over the clover and the potatoes and the vines. Ten feet above the ground, twenty, then thirty—

  “Too steep!” someone called, and Constantine, running after the flying machine, could see G.H. struggling to bring the nose down. Before a minute had passed the June Bug landed bumpily, far short of the finish line, on wheels half the size of those on Constantine’s bicycle. He trotted alongside the swarming men as they pushed the machine bac
k to the official starting line. The tail section had drooped, the mechanics decided; they removed it, reattached it correctly, and pronounced it ready to fly again.

  The sun had dipped in the meantime, pulling shadows like taffy over the field. Taggart and Ed joined Constantine, and then Miss Atkins came over with all five nieces.

  “Home!” a twin—Agnes, Constantine thought—demanded crankily.

  “Soon,” Miss Atkins promised her. “But first you have to see this, something marvelous is going to happen.”

  And then, with all of them watching, and the cameras snapping and rolling, the aeroplane did take off again, this time rising smoothly and leveling and then flying as easily as a real June bug over the fences and stakes, making a gentle curve as it soared past the marker—Constantine, running behind it, heard the excited cheers of the spectators there—and continuing on before settling in a field twice the needed distance away.

  THAT NIGHT THERE were celebrations, and on the following day G.H. and all his helpers, along with the visiting Aero Club members, were feted with a banquet and a steamboat cruise on the lake. Later, articles and photographs showed up in the newspapers and then in the weekly magazines. In one, Constantine saw Ed and Beryl standing together; in another Taggart and Ed; in a third, himself and Caroline, staring openmouthed at the bow-winged bit of magic flying by. In the photos they were part of a crowd, noticeable only to themselves, but in fact the visitors had long since disappeared, leaving behind the beets and sheep and corn and cows, the frizzled fowl and the apple tree top-grafted so many times that it now bore twenty apple varieties and several sorts of pear. The plants and animals still needed everything they always needed, every day, and with Taggart and Ed occupied by the aerial crowd, Constantine was so busy that two weeks passed before he stepped into the pond again to check the fish.

  The sky was an even, soft gray that day, so windless that clouds of tiny flies hung in the air as if set on a shelf, and the water was shallower than it had been during even the hottest June days. Gingerly he crossed the new rim of soft silt and watched his feet disappear in the murky water. Quiet, quiet. He trailed his net back and forth with no expectation of anything unusual. When he pulled it up, two fish, dully pale, almost translucent, with nothing but blank, scaled skin where the eyes should have been, were caught in the fine mesh. Ghost fish, nightmare fish. He stared at them so long they began to gasp. Then, trying not to touch them, he dropped the net and ran to the barn, where Taggart and Ed were tinkering with a gear meant to improve the connection between an aeroplane’s front landing wheel and the rudder.

  “They’re still alive, then!” Taggart said. He set down a wrench, hopped on his motorcycle, and buzzed off, returning a few minutes later with Miss Atkins riding behind him. By then Constantine was back at the pond along with Ed, avoiding the hovering clumps of flies and eager to show off what he’d found.

  “It’s a miracle they haven’t been eaten yet by some other creature,” Miss Atkins said, apparently thrilled. She patted Constantine’s arm as she spoke. “And a miracle you didn’t scare them off. I thought they’d be especially good at sensing any movement.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t help disturbing the water with my net.”

  “You were lucky, then,” she said. She’d already put on her cotton pants, and now she rolled her skirt around her waist and stepped into the water armed with her own net. “Shall we try again? If we could see them, and see if they’ve changed …”

  Not a word about what he should have done, suddenly so obvious: stow the fish in one of the traps before rushing off to find the adults. How could he have been so foolish? He flushed as Miss Atkins swept the water, bringing up minnows, catfish, newts, twigs, a swallow’s corpse, a slimy horn, everything but the blind fish, who might never have existed, or never been caught by him.

  “Maybe if you try?” she said, handing the net to him.

  Obediently he stepped into the water and swept. If he were one of those fish, he’d be on the other side of the pond by now, hiding behind a root or sheltering in a hollow, every place invisible to him. The boy was a movement, his net was another; the boy was a set of vibrations that would reveal—what did he seem like, to the fish?

  As Miss Atkins turned toward him, startled, and both Taggart and Ed shouted his name, he lay down in the water, head submerged and eyes tightly closed, concentrating on what he could feel and hear. Small currents, slight changes in temperature. Sounds, more than he’d imagined. Of course the fish could sense him coming. So too could his uncle; last week, when he’d asked if he could stay in Hammondsport and earn his keep by doing chores, go to school with Miss Atkins and train to work with the mechanics on engines for the motorcycles or even for the flying machines, Taggart hadn’t been surprised at all. His face had gone completely smooth and whoever had been about to join them at the weighing station—Ed or Beryl, he couldn’t be sure from the footsteps—had stopped and backed away.

  “Your mother needs you,” Taggart had said. Which meant that they’d talked, brother and sister, more than Constantine knew. And that Taggart might know something about his father’s rages and the way that, on those boiling summer days when the sun refused to set in the sky, the wind refused to blow and the clouds wouldn’t form, when the apartment steamed and smelled as badly as the inside of the sweltering factory, his father turned on him. No one, his father said, could blame him for having a few drinks in a cool bar: and who was Constantine to look at him that way? What happened afterward was bad enough that, even his first summer at Uncle Harry’s, he guessed why his mother had sent him away. But when the heat broke his father’s rages abated, and then his mother needed him around. To help with the girls, he’d assumed. But also, Taggart had said, “It changes things, when you’re there.”

  If he went home, his uncle had said, for just a while longer, until he finished high school and his sisters were older, he could come back to Hammondsport then and live at the farm and work wherever he wanted. Or maybe his mother and sisters would come as well. Either way would be wonderful. Faintly—he had years ahead of him, years and years in which to explore everything here—he heard Miss Atkins calling his name.

  The Ether of Space

  (1920)

  There was a lot of chitchat, to start. Some the usual—Owen’s health, the weather in London, a tactful acknowledgment of the tenth anniversary of Michael’s death—but some not: Owen’s sister was heading to Russia with a group of Quaker relief workers, his nephew was working for her old teacher at Cornell, his paper on variable stars would be published in the spring. But where was the crucial news?

  Across the ocean, at her desk in her bedroom in her parents’ house in Philadelphia, Phoebe Wells Cornelius scanned the pages of her friend’s letter impatiently. Last March, after the fighting had stopped, some British astronomers had quickly organized an expedition to view the eclipse. At two different stations along the path of totality, despite clouds in the Gulf of Guinea and a distorted mirror in Brazil, they’d photographed stars in the neighborhood of the sun. The results had been presented in November, at a meeting in London that Phoebe had been in no position to attend, and since then—nearly two months; it was already January, not just a new year but a whole new decade—she’d been waiting for Owen to supplement the sketchy, sensational newspaper articles with some firsthand observations.

  We were all squeezed into the meeting room at Burlington House; the pews were packed and there were people standing behind the last row and in the anteroom. The usual eminences from the Royal Society and the Astronomical Society—J. J. Thomson, Fowler, Lodge, Silberstein, Jeans, etc.—but also the philosopher Whitehead, several reporters, and many I didn’t recognize: about 150 of us, so many the room was steaming despite the wintry day. Dyson spoke first, summarizing the work of the expeditions and then describing the photographs in the most enthusiastic terms, despite the lack of data. He claimed there was no doubt that they had confirmed Einstein’s prediction: the sun’s gravitati
onal field had been shown to bend the rays of starlight in accordance with his law of gravitation.

  But Dyson’s words don’t really explain it—it was more the tone, the feeling in the room. I wish you’d been there. Half of us sighed as the other half gasped, some thrilled and some appalled and some split between the two; the older members were really upset. I could feel—well, I’m not sure what that was. Something that shook me. I took notes as fast as I could, trying to get not only the Astronomer Royal’s tabulated values but Dr. Crommelin’s description of conditions in Brazil during the eclipse and Professor Eddington’s comments on the difficult weather. I noticed that Eddington had discarded many observations, but we’ll see what’s really there when the full report is published a few months from now. I do believe that Einstein’s theory is correct, but I’m not sure these results support it as definitively as they’re claiming.

  The report on the meeting in the next day’s Times was typically muddled regarding the mathematics and said nothing, after these years of denouncing all things German, about the oddity of celebrating the work of a German scientist. In fact an article on the same page announced the King’s call for two minutes of silence during the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice. I went with my sister to the cenotaph that day, and when eleven struck and the guns went off, the crowd fell silent. The traffic stopped too, and the trains, and the Tube, people stood still in the shops, stood up at their desks—I wept like everyone else and thought: I’ve never seen anything like this. Although later, I realized that, at Burlington House, I’d had a similar sense of being present at a—what do you call these? A discontinuity, a rift? In one case torn by grief and in the other by wonder.