Ship Fever (5 page)

There he sat, in his sleigh in the kitchen, surrounded by the dead. “Are you laughing, Papa?” Sophia said. “Are you happy?”

His apostles had gone out into the world like his own organs: extra eyes and hands and feet, observing, gathering, naming. Someone was stroking his hands. Pehr Forskal, after visiting Marseilles and Malta and Constantinople, reached Alexandria one October and dressed as a peasant to conceal himself from marauding Bedouins. In Cairo he roamed the streets in his disguise and made a fine collection of new plants; then he traveled by Suez and Jedda to Arabia, where he was stricken by plague and died. Months later, a letter arrived containing a stalk and a flower from a tree that Linnaeus had always wanted to see: the evergreen from which the Balm of Gilead was obtained. The smell was spicy and sweet but Forskal, who had also tutored Carl Junior, was gone. And Falck, who had meant to accompany Forskal on his Arabian journey, was gone as well—he had gone to St. Petersburg instead, and then traveled through Turkestan and Mongolia. Lonely and lost and sad in Kazan, he had shot himself in the head.

Outside the weather had changed and now it was raining. The pupil: Falck or Forskal, Osbeck or Rolander—
Rotheram, who had fallen ill several years ago, whom Sophia had nursed, who came and went from his house like family
—said, “I hate to move you, sir; I know you're enjoying it here. But the rain is ruining the track. We'll have a hard time if we don't leave soon.”

Rolander? There was a story about Rolander, which he had used as the basis for a lecture on medicine and, later, in a paper. Where had it come from? A letter, perhaps. Or maybe Rolander had related it himself, before his mind disintegrated completely. On the ship, on the way to Surinam, he had fallen ill with dysentery. Ever the scientist, trained by his teacher, he'd examined his feces and found thousands of mites in them. He held his magnifying glass to the wooden beaker he'd sipped from in the night, and found a dense white line of flour mites down near the base.

Kahler lashed himself to the mast of his boat, where he remained two days and two nights without food.

Hasselquist died in the village of Bagda.

Pehr Kalm crossed the Great Lakes and walked into Canada.

In Denmark, someone stole Rolander's gray seeds, almost as if they'd been truly pearls.

Generic names, he had taught these pupils, must be clear and stable and expressive. They should not be vague or confusing; neither should they be primitive, barbarous, lengthy, or difficult to pronounce. They should have significant metaphorical or historical associations with the character of the genus. Another botanist had named the thyme-leaved bell-flower after him:
Linnaea borealis.
One June, in Lappland, he had seen it flourishing. His apostles had died in this order: Ternström, Hasselquist, Lofling, Forskal, Falck, and then finally Kahler, at home. His second son, Johannes, had died at the age of two, between Hasselquist and Lofling; but that was also the year of Sophia's birth. Once, when Sophia had dropped a tray full of dishes, he had secretly bought a new set to replace them, to spare her from her mother's wrath.

His apostles had taken wing like swallows, but they had failed to return. Swallows wintered beneath the lakes, or so he had always believed. During the autumn, he had written, they gather in large groups in the weeds and then dive, resting beneath the ice until spring. An English friend—Collinson, Peter in his own tongue but truly Pehr, and also dead—had argued with him over this and begged him to hold some swallows under water to see if they could live there. Was it so strange to think they might sleep beneath the water above which they hovered in summer? Was it not stranger to think they flew for thousands of miles? He knew another naturalist who believed that swallows wintered on the moon. But always there had been people, like his wife, who criticized his every word.

He had fought off all of them. The Queen had ennobled him: he was Carl von Linné now. But the pupils he'd sent out as his eyes and ears were dead. During his years in Uppsala he had written and lectured about the mud iguana of Carolina and Siberian buckwheat and bearberries; about lemmings and ants and a phosphorescent Chinese grasshopper. Fossils, crystals, the causes of leprosy and intermittent fever—all these things he had known about because of his pupils' travels. Over his bedroom door he'd inscribed this motto: “Live blamelessly; God is present.”

A group of men had appeared to the left of the fire. Lofling, Forskal, Falck he saw, and also Ternström and Hasselquist. And another, whom he'd forgotten about: Carl Thunberg, his fellow Smalander.

Thunberg was back, then? Thunberg, the last he had heard, was still alive. From Paris Thunberg had gone to Holland. From Holland he had gone to the Cape of Good Hope, and then to Java and finally to Japan. In Japan he had been confined to the tiny island of Deshima, isolated like all the foreigners. So desperate had he been to learn about the Japanese flora that he had picked daily through the fodder the servants brought to feed the swine and cattle. He had begged the Japanese servants to bring him samples from their gardens.

Of all his pupils, Thunberg had been the most faithful about sending letters and herbarium specimens home. He had been scrupulous about spreading his teacher's methods. “I have met some Japanese doctors,” he'd written. “I have been teaching them botany and Linnaean taxonomy. They welcome your method and sing your praises.” He had also, Linnaeus remembered, introduced into Japan the treatment of syphilis by quicksilver. He had left Japan with crates of specimens; he'd been headed for Ceylon. But here he was, sharp-featured and elegant, leaning on the mantelpiece and trading tales with his predecessors.

“The people are small and dark and suspicious of us,” he was saying. “They find us coarse. But their gardens are magnificent, and they have ways of stunting trees that I have never seen before.”

“In Palestine,” Hasselquist replied; “the land is so dry that the smallest plants send roots down for many feet, searching for buried water.”

“The tropics cannot be described,” Lofling said. “The astonishing fertility, the way the vegetation is layered from the ground to the sky, the epiphytes clumped in the highest branches like lace…”

“Alexandria,” Forskal said. “Everything there is so ancient, so layered with history.”

“My health is broken,” Falck said; and Kahler said, “I walked from Rome almost all the way to Sweden.”

In Lappland,
Linnaeus said silently,
a gray gnat with striated wings and black legs cruelly tormented me and my most miserable horse.
His apostles did not seem to hear him.
A very bright and calm day,
he said.
The great Myrgiolingen was flying in the marshes.

“We'll go home now, Papa,” the tall woman said. “We'll put you to bed. Won't you like that?”

Her face was as radiant as a star. What was her name? Beside her, his apostles held leaves and twigs and scraps of blossoms, all new and named by them with their teacher's advice. They were trading these among themselves. A leaf from a new succulent for a spray from a never-seen orchid. Two fronds of a miniature fern for a twig from a dwarf evergreen. They were so excited that their voices were rising; they might have been playing cards, laying down plants for bets instead of gold. But the woman and the other pupil didn't seem to notice them. The woman and the other pupil were wholly focused on helping Pehr the coachman push the sleigh back outside.

The woman opened the doors and held them. Pehr and the
pupil pushed and pulled. The crisp, winy air of the afternoon had turned dank and raw, and a light rain was turning the snow to slush. Linnaeus said nothing, but he turned and gazed over his shoulder. The group gathered by the fireplace stepped back, displeased, when Pehr returned and doused the fire. Thunberg looked at Linnaeus and raised an eyebrow. Linnaeus nodded.

In the hands of his lost ones were the plants he had named for them:
Artedia,
an umbelliferous plant, and
Osbeckia,
tall and handsome;
Loeflingia,
a small plant from Spain;
Thunbergia
with its black eye centered in yellow petals, and the tropical
Ternstroemia.
There were more, he couldn't remember them all. He'd named thousands of plants in his life.

Outside, the woman and the pupil separated.
Sophia? Sophia, my favorite.
Sophia bundled herself into the borrowed sleigh in which she'd arrived; the pupil wedged himself into Pehr's sleigh, next to Linnaeus. In the dark damp air they formed a line that could hardly be seen: Pehr's sleigh, and then Sophia's, and behind them, following the cunning signal Linnaeus had given, the last sleigh filled with his apostles. Pehr huddled into his coat and gave the signal to depart. It was late and he was weary. To their left, the rain and melting snow had turned the low field into a lake. Linnaeus looked up at his pupil—
Rotheram? Of course it was him: the English pupil, the last one, the one who would survive him
—and tried to say, “The death of many whom I have induced to travel has turned my hair gray, and what have I gained? A few dried plants, accompanied by great anxiety, unrest, and care.”

Rotheram said, “Rest your head on my arm. We will be home before you know it.”

When they met, fifteen years ago, Jonathan had a job teaching botany at a small college near Albany, and Ruby was teaching invertebrate zoology at a college in the Berkshires. Both of them, along with an ornithologist, an ichthyologist, and an oceanographer, had agreed to spend three weeks of their summer break at a marine biology research station on an island off the New Hampshire coast. They had spouses, children, mortgages, bills; they went, they later told each other, because the pay was too good to refuse. Two-thirds of the way through the course, they agreed that the pay was not enough.

How they reached that first agreement is a story they've repeated to each other again and again and told, separately, to their closest friends. Ruby thinks they had this conversation on the second Friday of the course, after Frank Kenary's slide show on the abyssal fish and before Carol Dagliesh's lecture on the courting behavior of herring gulls. Jonathan maintains that they had it earlier—that Wednesday, maybe, when they were still recovering from Gunnar Erickson's trawling expedition. The days before they became so aware of each other have blurred in their minds, but they agree that their first real conversation took place on the afternoon devoted to the littoral zone.

The tide was all the way out. The students were clumped on the rocky, pitted apron between the water and the ledges,
peering into the tidal pools and listing the species they found. Gunnar was in the equipment room, repairing one of the sampling claws. Frank was setting up dissections in the tiny lab; Carol had gone back to the mainland on the supply boat, hoping to replace the camera one of the students had dropped. And so the two of them, Jonathan and Ruby, were left alone for a little while.

They both remember the granite ledge where they sat, and the raucous quarrels of the nesting gulls. They agree that Ruby was scratching furiously at her calves and that Jonathan said, “Take it easy, okay? You'll draw blood.”

Her calves were slim and tan, Jonathan remembers. Covered with blotches and scrapes.

I folded my fingers, Ruby remembers. Then I blushed. My throat felt sunburned.

Ruby said, “I know, it's so embarrassing. But all this salt on my poison ivy—God, what I wouldn't give for a bath! They never told me there wouldn't be any
water
here…”

Jonathan gestured at the ocean surrounding them and then they started laughing.
Hysteria,
they have told each other since. They were so tired by then, twelve days into the course, and so dirty and overworked and strained by pretending to the students that these things didn't matter, that neither of them could understand that they were also lonely. Their shared laughter felt like pure relief.

“No water?” Jonathan said. “I haven't been dry since we got here. My clothes are damp, my sneakers are damp, my hair never dries…”

His hair was beautiful, Ruby remembers. Thick, a little too long. Part blond and part brown.

“I know,” she said. “But you know what I mean. I didn't realize they'd have to bring our drinking water over on a boat.”

“Or that they'd expect us to wash in the ocean,” Jonathan
said. Her forearms were dusted with salt, he remembers. The down along them sparkled in the sun.

“And those cots,” Ruby said. “Does yours have a sag in it like a hammock?”

“Like a slingshot,” Jonathan said.

For half an hour they sat on their ledge and compared their bubbling patches of poison ivy and the barnacle wounds that scored their hands and feet. Nothing healed out here, they told each other. Everything got infected. When one of the students called, “Look what I found!” Jonathan rose and held his hand out to Ruby. She took it easily and hauled herself up and they walked down to the water together. Jonathan's hand was thick and blunt-fingered, with nails bitten down so far that the skin around them was raw. Odd, Ruby remembers thinking. Those bitten stumps attached to such a good-looking man.

They have always agreed that the worst moment, for each of them, was when they stepped from the boat to the dock on the final day of the course and saw their families waiting in the parking lot. Jonathan's wife had their four-year-old daughter balanced on her shoulders. Their two older children were leaning perilously over the guardrails and shrieking at the sight of him. Jessie had turned nine in Jonathan's absence, and Jonathan can't think of her eager face without remembering the starfish he brought as his sole, guilty gift.

Ruby's husband had parked their car just a few yards from Jonathan's family. Her sons were wearing baseball caps, and what Ruby remembers is the way the yellow linings lit their faces. For a minute she saw the children squealing near her sons as faceless, inconsequential; Jonathan later told her that her children had been similarly blurred for him. Then Jonathan said, “That's my family, there,” and Ruby said, “That's mine, right
next to yours,” and all the faces leapt into focus for both of them.

Nothing that was to come—not the days in court, nor the days they moved, nor the losses of jobs and homes—would ever seem so awful to them as that moment when they first saw their families standing there, unaware and hopeful. Deceitfully, treacherously, Ruby and Jonathan separated and walked to the people awaiting them. They didn't introduce each other to their spouses. They didn't look at each other—although, they later admitted, they cast covert looks at each other's families. They thought they were invisible, that no one could see what had happened between them. They thought their families would not remember how they had stepped off the boat and stood, for an instant, together.

On that boat, sitting dumb and miserable in the litter of nets and equipment, they had each pretended to be resigned to going home. Each foresaw (or so they later told each other) the hysterical phone calls and the frenzied, secret meetings. Neither foresaw how much the sight of each other's family would hurt. “Sweetie,” Jonathan remembers Ruby's husband saying. “You've lost so much weight.” Ruby remembers staring over her husband's shoulder and watching Jessie butt her head like a dog under Jonathan's hand.

For the first twelve days on the island, Jonathan and Ruby were so busy that they hardly noticed each other. For the next few days, after their conversation on the ledge, they sat near each other during faculty lectures and student presentations. These were held in the library, a ramshackle building separated from the bunkhouse and the dining hall by a stretch of wild roses and poison ivy.

Jonathan had talked about algae in there, holding up samples of
Fucus
and
Hildenbrandtia.
Ruby had talked about the littoral
zone, that space between high and low watermarks where organisms struggled to adapt to the daily rhythm of immersion and exposure. They had drawn on the blackboard in colored chalk while the students, itchy and hot and tired, scratched their arms and legs and feigned attention.

Neither of them, they admitted much later, had focused fully on the other's lecture. “It was
before,
” Ruby has said ruefully. “I didn't know that I was going to want to have listened.” And Jonathan has laughed and confessed that he was studying the shells and skulls on the walls while Ruby was drawing on the board.

The library was exceedingly hot, they agreed, and the chairs remarkably uncomfortable; the only good spot was the sofa in front of the fireplace. That was the spot they commandeered on the evening after their first conversation, when dinner led to a walk and then the walk led them into the library a few minutes before the scheduled lecture.

Erika Moorhead, Ruby remembers. Talking about the tensile strength of byssus threads.

Walter Schank, Jonathan remembers. Something to do with hydrozoans.

They both remember feeling comfortable for the first time since their arrival. And for the next few days—three by Ruby's accounting; four by Jonathan's—one of them came early for every lecture and saved a seat on the sofa for the other.

They giggled at Frank Kenary's slides, which he'd arranged like a creepy fashion show: abyssal fish sporting varied blobs of luminescent flesh. When Gunnar talked for two hours about subduction zones and the calcium carbonate cycle, they amused themselves exchanging doodles. They can't remember, now, whether Gunnar's endless lecture came before Carol Dagliesh's filmstrip on the herring gulls, or which of the students tipped over the dissecting scope and sent the dish of copepods to their deaths. But both of them remember those days and nights as
being almost purely happy. They swam in that odd, indefinite zone where they were more than friends, not yet lovers, still able to deny to themselves that they were headed where they were headed.

Ruby made the first phone call, a week after they left the island. At eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, she told her husband she'd left something in her office that she needed to prepare the next day's class. She drove to campus, unlocked her door, picked up the phone and called Jonathan at his house. One of his children—Jessie, she thinks—answered the phone. Ruby remembers how, even through the turmoil of her emotions, she'd been shocked at the idea of a child staying up so late.

There was a horrible moment while Jessie went to find her father; another when Jonathan, hearing Ruby's voice, said, “Wait, hang on, I'll just be a minute,” and then negotiated Jessie into bed. Ruby waited, dreading his anger, knowing she'd been wrong to call him at home. But Jonathan, when he finally returned, said, “Ruby. You got my letter.”

“What letter?” she asked. He wrote to tell me good-bye, she remembers thinking.

“My
letter,
” he said. “I wrote you, I have to see you. I can't stand this.”

Ruby released the breath she hadn't known she was holding.

“You didn't get it?” he said. “You just called?” It wasn't only me, he remembers thinking. She feels it too.

“I had to hear your voice,” she said.

Ruby called, but Jonathan wrote. And so when Jonathan's youngest daughter, Cora, later fell in love and confided in Ruby, and then asked her, “Was it like this with you two? Who started it—you or Dad?” all Ruby could say was, “It happened to both of us.”

Sometimes, when Ruby and Jonathan sit on the patio looking out at the hills above Palmyra, they will turn and see their children watching them through the kitchen window. Before the children went off to college, the house bulged with them on weekends and holidays and seemed empty in between; Jonathan's wife had custody of Jessie and Gordon and Cora, and Ruby's husband took her sons, Mickey and Ryan, when he remarried. Now that the children are old enough to come and go as they please, the house is silent almost all the time.

Jessie is twenty-four, and Gordon is twenty-two; Mickey is twenty-one, and Cora and Ryan are both nineteen. When they visit Jonathan and Ruby they spend an unhealthy amount of time talking about their past. In their conversations they seem to split their lives into three epochs: the years when what they think of as their real families were whole; the years right after Jonathan and Ruby met, when their parents were coming and going, fighting and making up, separating and divorcing; and the years since Jonathan and Ruby's marriage, when they were forced into a reconstituted family. Which epoch they decide to explore depends on who's visiting and who's getting along with whom.

“But we were happy,” Mickey may say to Ruby, if he and Ryan are visiting and Jonathan's children are absent. “We were, we were fine.”

“It wasn't like you and Mom ever fought,” Cora may say to Jonathan, if Ruby's sons aren't around. “You could have worked it out if you'd tried.”

When they are all together, they tend to avoid the first two epochs and to talk about their first strained weekends and holidays together. They've learned to tolerate each other, despite their forced introductions; Cora and Ryan, whose birthdays are
less than three months apart, seem especially close. Ruby and Jonathan know that much of what draws their youngest children together is shared speculation about what happened on that island.

They look old to their children, they know. Both of them are nearing fifty. Jonathan has grown quite heavy and has lost much of his hair; Ruby's fine-boned figure has gone gaunt and stringy. They know their children can't imagine them young and strong and wrung by passion. The children can't think—can't stand to think—about what happened on the island, but they can't stop themselves from asking questions.

“Did you have other girlfriends?” Cora asks Jonathan. “Were you so unhappy with Mom?”

“Did you know him before?” Ryan asks Ruby. “Did you go there to be with him?”

“We met there,” Jonathan and Ruby say. “We had never seen each other before. We fell in love.” That is all they will say, they never give details, they say “yes” or “no” to the easy questions and evade the hard ones. They worry that even the little they offer may be too much.

Jonathan and Ruby tell each other the stories of their talk by the tidal pool, their walks and meals, the sagging sofa, the moment in the parking lot, and the evening Ruby made her call. They tell these to console themselves when their children chide them or when, alone in the house, they sit quietly near each other and struggle to conceal their disappointments.

Of course they have expected some of these. Mickey and Gordon have both had trouble in school, and Jessie has grown much too close to her mother; neither Jonathan nor Ruby has found jobs as good as the ones they lost, and their new home in Palmyra still doesn't feel quite like home. But all they have
lost in order to be together would seem bearable had they continued to feel the way they felt on the island.

They're sensible people, and very well-mannered; they remind themselves that they were young then and are middle-aged now, and that their fierce attraction would naturally ebb with time. Neither likes to think about how much of the thrill of their early days together came from the obstacles they had to overcome. Some days, when Ruby pulls into the driveway still thinking about her last class and catches sight of Jonathan out in the garden, she can't believe the heavyset figure pruning shrubs so meticulously is the man for whom she fought such battles. Jonathan, who often wakes very early, sometimes stares at Ruby's sleeping face and thinks how much more gracefully his ex-wife is aging.