Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  She liked the work; she was good at it and pleased when Owen praised her: but it was too painful to explain to him that, even writing all the time and as fast as she could, she could barely pay the rent, and she was sometimes short with Sam. Nor had she wanted to mention that Sam repaid her with temper tantrums, shrieking with anger when she tried to work on weekends, until finally her parents, after several worried visits, had convinced her to move back to Philadelphia—which move she’d presented to Owen as a pleasant choice. No mention after that, of course, of the way Sam at first ignored his teachers and balked at his grandfather’s attempts to discipline him; nor about the molding he cracked around the dining room door or the scene he caused, a few months later, that ended with a broken vase and a cut on his scalp. And so, thus, no need to express her huge relief when, after a while, something happened—a teacher was kind, his body changed when he turned eight, who knew?—and he settled down. And no need to admit, except in the most positive and praising terms—Sam has grown very studious and stays late at school almost every day, working on special projects with his teachers; you’d recognize him instantly as Michael’s son—that now, instead of hanging around her, scowling and demanding her attention, he was completely courteous but as distant as Jupiter.

  A SERIES OF short magazine articles on the night sky in winter kept her from tackling the chapter she should have been writing, and she felt herself falling farther and farther behind. Behind what? her mother asked, reasonably enough, when she found Phoebe fretting at the window. The same unambitious and pleasant publisher had handled each of her books, approving her rough outlines and then leaving her alone until she returned with a tidy pile of pages, which he exchanged for a check. It was hard to explain that the self-imposed schedule she’d laid out so carefully was as real to her as the demands of her mother’s garden.

  Weary of her own excuses, she was also embarrassed by the way she’d left Lodge’s lecture, bolting from a disagreeable idea in the same way that Lodge himself, confronted with the evidence that his beloved ether might be in jeopardy, had fled the meeting in London. At the library, where she went to catch up with the astronomical journals, she instead took out a pile of his books. She read swiftly, voraciously, taking notes. What was she hoping to find? She could not have answered, she was glad no one asked. Nor could she have explained why she expanded those notes into pages describing material that she and Michael, years ago now, had once discussed. She wrote:

  The whirling machine, the massive metal structure bolted into the bedrock beneath the lab: it’s difficult for a modern reader to imagine without inspecting the illustrations from Lodge’s 1893 paper, “A Discussion Concerning the Motion of the Ether near the Earth.” Here you may see the steel discs, a yard in diameter, perched on the central pillar like an oversize hat on a woman’s head. In a separate drawing is the optical frame, complete with mirrors, telescope, and collimator; a third illustration shows the whole assembly in action, a man standing beside the pillar, frighteningly close to the discs and caged by heavy timbers supporting the optical apparatus. It looks like a sketch for Mr. Wells’s Time Machine, an utterly improbable device on which Sir Oliver Lodge made the experiments he has called the most important of his life.

  During the 1890s, he performed a series meant to supplement the Michelson-Morley experiments, which he felt could not be right. Electromagnetic waves, including light, moved through the luminiferous ether; a wave must have something to wave in, and the ether, whatever its mechanical structure, was the needed medium. That medium must be detectable, flowing past the rapidly orbiting earth as a kind of wind, but the two scientists in Cleveland had failed to find it. Their results suggested that a layer of the ether must be carried along by the earth, but that hypothesis offered another set of problems. To test it, Lodge designed his pair of huge steel discs, clamped together with an inch of space between them, rotating at high speed while light traveled round and round between them with and then against the discs’ motion, which might determine if rapidly moving matter could drag the ether with it. The machine was enormous, and very expensive. All the experiments failed. But he continued to define and extend the properties of the ether in his 1909 book, The Ether of Space, and still defends his concepts despite the absence of confirmatory evidence.

  The Smithsonian’s copy of that book was one of the last that she remembered Michael reading, and indeed the instant she opened the library’s cheaper edition, poorly bound and smelling of pipe tobacco, she saw the gilt apples along the spine of the red morocco volume Michael had held. Clearly written, she remembered him saying; parts quite useful but canceled out by the odd sentences dropped here and there: If any one thinks that the ether, with all its massiveness and energy, has probably no psychical significance, I find myself unable to agree with him. He’d pushed the book aside, then, not derisively but with a dismissal final enough to keep her from reading it.

  Nor would she now; she pushed it, palm flat as Michael’s had been, away. What did she want from this, why did she care?What she’d written was already both too detailed for her book, and not detailed enough for a proper article. Yet that evening, back at her parents’ home, she tried again, meaning to convey some sense of Lodge’s fame as a teacher and scientist:

  Sir Oliver Lodge, long a preeminent physicist, is only slightly less well-known than Marconi. At an early age he decided that his main business was with what were then called “the imponderables”—the things that worked secretly and have to be apprehended mentally. So it was that electricity and magnetism became the branch of physics that most fascinated him. Once, in London, at the height of his fame as a lecturer on popular science, policemen had to rearrange the traffic patterns outside the Royal Institution so that the cabs delivering his eager audience could fit in the street. Another time, giving a lecture and demonstration on “The Discharge of a Leyden Jar,” he was as astonished as the audience to see the coating on the walls flashing and sparking in sympathy with the waves being emitted by the oscillations on the lecture table. From the basement came a man, shaken and pale, to report that the gas and water pipes were similarly sparking.

  She stopped when her mother, walking the house restlessly long after she should have been in bed, leaned over her shoulder and read the last lines.

  “I like the sparks,” she said, resting her fingers on Phoebe’s forehead.

  As if the sparks explained how a man could move from the drudgery of his family’s clay and chemical business to the heights of science, and then to an ardent belief in the possibility of communing with the dead. Or how a leading researcher into electromagnetism and the nature of light could end up being the most famous opponent of a radical new theory. If Einstein was right—but he was only possibly right; which meant Lodge was possibly not wrong, or at least not wrong about the ether, although utterly wrong about the spirits in the ether … Phoebe squirmed beneath her mother’s hand.

  “That’s—for your book?” her mother asked.

  “Not exactly,” Phoebe said. “Maybe. I don’t know. I went to hear him …”

  “I know,” her mother said. “Odette mentioned.” She traced the outline of Phoebe’s forehead with two fingers, as if the friction might extract a clearer sentence. “Let me make you some tea.”

  Phoebe, pulling away, pushed her mother’s hand toward the newspaper, open to yet another of the frequent pieces about Lodge. “Here,” she said. “I’m not the only one who’s curious about him.”

  The article, which her mother scanned quickly, offered an impression of Lodge as he’d appeared soon after his arrival in New York. A typical Victorian, the reporter had noted, “of the tradition of Darwin and Huxley, who still reads his Wordsworth and Tennyson, who still appreciates the poet’s wonderment in those days at the marvels of science.”

  Three more columns followed, all meant, Phoebe thought while her mother finished, to drum up interest in Lodge’s forthcoming lectures. His next scheduled talk was actually to be on “The Ether of Space”—his s
pecial area of expertise, and the material she most needed to review. Owen had gone to the meeting in London, to hear the results of the Einstein experiment. Maybe she should go to this in the same spirit and listen to Lodge expound what he really knew, taking from it what she needed. Wasn’t science based on weighing evidence for oneself?

  Surprising herself, she said, “I should try to hear this next lecture. I think I’ll ask Sam to come with me.” She imagined his quiet, sturdy presence at her side, his quick intelligence; he’d see things she didn’t, and he wouldn’t be easily distracted or upset. “He might find it interesting. And I could use the company.”

  “Since when,” her mother asked, moving away, so rich herself in friends and colleagues that she might not have meant her question to pierce Phoebe, “do you want company?”

  IT WAS TRUE that she and Sam seldom did things together anymore—he kept to himself, as she did, and he was busy, as she was herself—but to Phoebe’s secret delight he said the trip sounded fun; she’d only brought him twice before to New York. Together they took the train and shared the sandwiches Phoebe’s mother packed for them; together they rode the subway to the towering Woolworth Building and there took the elevator up and up, braving the last little climb on the spiral stairs for the sake of the view from the observatory. The entire island lay before them, the East River and the ships moving out into the harbor, Brooklyn stretching away to one side and New Jersey on the other. Pigeons wheeled and sank and rose again, seagulls floated on curved wings, radio waves poured invisibly from the windows. Marconi himself, Phoebe told her son, had sent a wireless message from his office across the ocean, announcing the opening of this building.

  Sam leaned against the railing and pointed north, saying, “Look at the park! Look at the rivers! You can see the museum!” When he laughed and tugged his coat from her hands, she realized she’d been clutching it as if he were a toddler about to pitch over the side.

  He teased her about that for the rest of the afternoon, as they ducked in and out of bookshops and took the subway back uptown. After a quick bowl of soup they headed to the theater, where they found seats high in the balcony, and Sam inspected the crowd streaming into the orchestra seats and up the stairs. Around them, coats migrated into seats and hats moved onto laps, until a curtain opened on Lodge’s tall, white-haired figure, bowing into the wave of applause and then, as Phoebe studiously readied her steno pad and mechanical pencil, beginning to speak.

  Sam brushed her arm with his—an accident? Turning to him, watching him, she missed Lodge’s opening lines. Usually, when she reached to straighten Sam’s collar or fix his hair, he stood so still it was as if he was willing himself not to flinch. But he bumped her elbow with his again, gently, almost playfully, as he had when he was small. “Thank you for bringing me,” he whispered. “This is interesting.”

  Sam was glad he was here, Sam was interested; she focused her attention on the talk. What had she already missed? The ether, Lodge was saying, far from being beyond all comprehension, was in fact the most substantial thing in the universe. Why then had we taken so long to discern it? Just because it is so universal. If we were fish living at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by water, so far from the surface that we had no sense of anything but water; if we were moving in water, breathing water—what is the last thing we would discover? The water itself. So it had been with the ether of space.

  Now Phoebe listened intently; she could use this. “Hold your hand near a fire,” he said, “put your face in the sunshine, and what is it you feel? You are now as directly conscious as you can be of the ethereal medium. True, you cannot apprehend the ether as you can matter, by touching or tasting or even smelling it; but it is something akin to vibrations in the ether that our skin and our eyes feel. The ether does not in any way affect our sense of touch and it does not resist motion in the slightest degree. Not only can our bodies move through it, but much larger bodies, planets and comets, can rush through it at a prodigious speed without showing the least sign of friction. I have myself designed and carried out delicate experiments to see whether whirling discs of iron could to the smallest extent grip the ether and carry it round, with so much as a thousandth part of their own velocity. The answer is, no. Why, then, if it is so impalpable, should we assert its existence? May it not be a mere fanciful speculation, to be extruded from physics as soon as possible?”

  So far, so good; she was glad to see the whirling discs again, but then … her hand was writing, words flowing smoothly and rapidly, but her mind had stopped catching hold. Was it that what he was saying didn’t make sense, or that she wasn’t concentrating? Action at a distance cannot take place, with the exception of mental action, or telepathy—she looked down at the paper; had he just said that?—and the actions of gravitation, magnetism, and electric force require some intervening medium. The nature of that medium is mysterious, but it might be thought of as a jelly-like substance filling all space.

  “A body cannot act where its influence is not,” her pencil wrote, but her wayward mind pictured a giant jellyfish, pulsing faintly, stretching in all directions. The pictures were always wrong; only the mathematics conveyed the truth. “Another and perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that one body can only act on another through a medium of communication. When a horse pulls a cart, it is connected by traces; when the earth pulls the moon, it is connected by the ether; when a magnet pulls a bit of iron, it is connected by its magnetic field, which is also in the ether.”

  Here he reached below the podium, brought up a candy box striped in yellow and green, and set the box on a table beside him. “Would it be magic,” he said, reaching for his cane, “if, by waving this, I caused the box to move?”

  Sam was staring raptly at the stage—as indeed was the entire audience. Lodge passed his cane through the air, two feet above the box. The box slid sideways on the table.

  “Hey!” Sam said, leaning so far forward that his chin would have brushed the hair of the woman sitting in front of him, had she herself not been leaning over the balcony rail. His own hair was a beautiful color in this light. Lodge raised the cane above his head and the box rose from the table.

  After the exclamations from the audience subsided, he smiled modestly and lowered the cane. “When you see action of this kind,” he said—the box settled back down—“always look for the thread.”

  What a showman. The thread was invisible at this distance, but he caught it between the cane and the box and suggested, by a tugging gesture, how it was connected.

  “Always look for the medium of communication,” he said. “It may be an invisible thread, as in this conjuring trick; it may be the atmosphere, as when you whistle for a dog; or it may be a projectile, as when you shoot an enemy. Or, again, it may be ether ripples, as when you look at a star. You cannot act at a distance without some means of communication; and yet you can certainly act where you are not, as when by a letter or telegram you bring a friend home from the Antipodes. A railway signalman can stop a train or bring about a collision without ever touching a locomotive. A conclave of German politicians could, and did”—his voice rose here, making Phoebe look up from her pad—“operate on innumerable families in England and slaughter their most promising members without the direct action of a finger.”

  She felt a small tremor, as if that finger had moved, miles away, through the water in which she floated. “No one wants to be deceived,” he continued. “All are eager for trustworthy information about both the material and the spiritual worlds, which together constitute the universe. The ether of space is the connecting link. In the material world it is the fundamental substantial reality. In the spiritual world the realities of existence are other and far higher—but still the ether is made use of, in ways which at present we can only surmise.”

  Her pencil stopped, but he did not. She could feel him gathering up his thoughts, preparing for some final argument.

  “Last May,” he continued, “when astronomers measured the bending o
f a ray of light around the sun during an eclipse, they obtained data that when measured made Einstein’s theory of gravitation appear to triumph. But what is the meaning of this triumph? Is it the death knell of the ether?”

  Before Phoebe could frame an answer, Lodge surged on. “Must we now think in terms of four or even five dimensions to explain this warp or curvature of space? In my opinion, we ought clearly to discriminate between things themselves and our mode of measuring them. The whole relativity trouble arises from ignoring absolute motion through the ether, rejecting the ether as our standard of reference and replacing it by the observer.”

  The whole relativity trouble—that simple phrase made Einstein’s theory seem a piece of trickery as foolish as the thread. Caught in the smooth stream of words, Phoebe could question his logic only when she split her attention in two and set one part struggling against the flow. Yet even as she was giving up—he was now discussing the relationship between matter and the ether—he said something that made her write faster.

  “Undoubtedly the ether belongs to the material universe, but it is not ordinary matter. It may be the substance of which matter is composed. If you tie a knot in a bit of string, the knot is composed of string, but the string is not composed of knots. The knot differs in no respect from the rest of the string, except in its tied-up structure; it is of the same density as the rest, and yet it is differentiated from the rest. In order to cease to be a knot, it would have to be untied—a process which as yet we have not learned how to apply to an electron.”