Ship Fever (6 page)

They never reproach each other. When the tension builds in the house and the silence becomes overwhelming, one or the other will say, “Do you remember…?” and then launch into one of the myths on which they have founded their lives. But there is one story they never tell each other, because they can't bear to talk about what they have lost. This is the one about the evening that has shaped their life together.

Jonathan's hand on Ruby's back, Ruby's hand on Jonathan's thigh, a shirt unbuttoned, a belt undone. They never mention this moment, or the moments that followed it, because that would mean discussing who seduced whom, and any resolution of that would mean assigning blame. Guilt they can handle; they've been living with guilt for fifteen years. But blame? It would be more than either of them could bear, to know the exact moment when one of them precipitated all that has happened to them. The most either of them has ever said is, “How could we have known?”

But the night in the library is what they both think about, when they lie silently next to each other and listen to the wind.
It must be summer for them to think about it; the children must be with their other parents and the rain must be falling on the cedar shingles overhead. A candle must be burning on the mantel above the bed and the maple branches outside their window must be tossing against each other. Then they think of the story they know so well and never say out loud.

There was a huge storm three nights before they left the island, the tail end of a hurricane passing farther out to sea. The cedar trees creaked and swayed in the wind beyond the library windows. The students had staggered off to bed, after the visitor from Woods Hole had finished his lecture on the explorations of the
Alvin
in the Cayman Trough, and Frank and Gunnar and Carol had shrouded themselves in their rain gear and left as well, sheltering the visitor between them. Ruby sat at one end of the long table, preparing bottles of fixative for their expedition the following morning, and Jonathan lay on the sofa writing notes. The boat was leaving just after dawn and they knew they ought to go to bed.

The wind picked up outside, sweeping the branches against the walls. The windows rattled. Jonathan shivered and said, “Do you suppose we could get a fire going in that old fireplace?”

“I bet we could,” said Ruby, which gave both of them the pretext they needed to crouch side by side on the cracked tiles, brushing elbows as they opened the flue and crumpled paper and laid kindling in the form of a grid. The logs Jonathan found near the lobster traps were dry and the fire caught quickly.

Who found the green candle in the drawer below the microscope? Who lit the candle and turned off the lights? And who found the remains of the jug of wine that Frank had brought in honor of the visitor? They sat there side by side, poking at the burning logs and pretending they weren't doing what they were doing. The wind pushed through the window they'd opened a crack, and the tan window shade lifted and then fell back against the frame. The noise was soothing at first; later it seemed irritating.

Jonathan, whose fingernails were bitten to the quick, admired the long nail on Ruby's right little finger and then said, half-seriously, how much he'd love to bite a nail like that. When Ruby held her hand to his mouth he took the nail between his teeth and nibbled through the white tip, which days in the water had softened. Ruby slipped her other hand inside his shirt and ran it up his back. Jonathan ran his mouth up her arm and down her neck.

They started in front of the fire and worked their way across the floor, breaking a glass, knocking the table askew. Ruby rubbed her back raw against the rug and Jonathan scraped his knees, and twice they paused and laughed at their wild excesses. They moved across the floor from east to west and later from west to east, and between those two journeys, during the time when they heaped their clothes and the sofa cushions into a nest in front of the fire, they talked.

This was not the kind of conversation they'd had during walks and meals since that first time on the rocks: who they were, where they'd come from, how they'd made it here. This was the talk where they instinctively edited out the daily pleasures of their lives on the mainland and spliced together the hard times, the dark times, until they'd constructed versions of themselves that could make sense of what they'd just done.

For months after this, as they lay in stolen, secret rooms between houses and divorces and jobs and lives, Jonathan would tell Ruby that he swallowed her nail. The nail dissolved in his stomach, he'd say. It passed into his villi and out to his blood and then flowed to bone and muscle and nerve, where the molecules that had once been part of her became part of him. Ruby, who always seemed to know more acutely than Jonathan that they'd have to leave whatever room this was in an hour or a day, would argue with him.

“Nails are keratin,” she'd tell him. “Like hooves and hair. Like wool. We can't digest wool.”

“Moths can,” Jonathan would tell her. “Moths eat sweaters.”

“Moths have a special enzyme in their saliva,” Ruby would say. This was true, she knew it for a fact. She'd been so taken by Jonathan's tale that she'd gone to the library to check out the details and discovered he was wrong.

But Jonathan didn't care what the biochemists said. He held her against his chest and said, “I have an enzyme for you.”

That night, after the fire burned out, they slept for a couple of hours. Ruby woke first and watched Jonathan sleep for a while. He slept like a child, with his knees bent toward his chest and his hands clasped between his thighs. Ruby picked up the tipped-over chair and swept the fragments of broken glass onto a sheet of paper. Then she woke Jonathan and they tiptoed back to the rooms where they were supposed to be.

Imagine an April evening in 1762. A handsome house set in the gently rolling Kent landscape a few miles outside the city of London; the sun just set over blue squill and beech trees newly leafed. Inside the house are a group of men and a single woman: Christopher Billopp, his sister Sarah Anne, and Christopher's guests from London. Educated and well-bred, they're used to a certain level of conversation. Just now they're discussing Linnaeus's contention that swallows retire under water for the winter—that old belief, stemming from Aristotle, which Linnaeus still upholds.

“He's hardly alone,” Mr. Miller says. Behind him, a large mirror reflects a pair of portraits: Christopher and Sarah Anne, painted several years earlier as a gift for their father. “Even Klein, Linnaeus's rival, agrees. He wrote that a friend's mother saw fishermen bring out a bundle of swallows from a lake near Pilaw. When the swallows were placed near a fire, they revived and flew about.”

Mr. Pennant nods. “Remember the reports of Dr. Colas? Fishermen he talked to in northern parts claimed that when they broke through the ice in winter they took up comatose swallows in their nets as well as fish. And surely you remember reading how Taletini of Cremona swore a Jesuit had told him that the
swallows in Poland and Moravia hurled themselves into cisterns and wells come autumn.”

Mr. Collinson laughs at this, although not unkindly, and he looks across the table at his old friend Mr. Ellis. “Hearsay, hearsay,” he says. He has a spot on his waistcoat. Gravy, perhaps. Or cream. “Not one shred of direct evidence. Mothers, fishermen, itinerant Jesuits—this is folklore, my friends. Not science.”

At the foot of the table, Sarah Anne nods but says nothing. Pennant, Ellis, Collinson, Miller: all distinguished. But old, so old. She worries that she and Christopher are growing prematurely old as well. Staid and dull and entirely too comfortable with these admirable men, whom they have known since they were children.

Their father, a brewer by trade but a naturalist by avocation, had educated Christopher and Sarah Anne together after their mother's death, as if they were brothers. The three of them rambled the grounds of Burdem Place, learning the names of the plants and birds. Collinson lived in Peckham then, just a few miles away, and he often rode over bearing rare plants and seeds sent by naturalist friends in other countries. Peter Kalm, Linnaeus's famous student, visited the Billopps; Linnaeus himself, before Sarah Anne was born, once stayed for several days.

All these things are part of Sarah Anne's and Christopher's common past. And even after Christopher's return from Cambridge and their father's death, for a while they continued to enjoy an easy exchange of books and conversation. But now all that has changed. Sarah Anne inherited her father's brains but Christopher inherited everything else, including his father's friends. Sarah Anne acts as hostess to these men, at Christopher's bidding. In part she's happy for their company, which represents her only intellectual companionship. In part she despises them for their lumbago and thinning hair, their greediness in the presence
of good food, the stories they repeat about the scientific triumphs of their youth, and the fact that they refuse to take her seriously. Not one of them has done anything original in years.

There's another reason, as well, why she holds her tongue on this night. Lately, since Christopher has started courting Miss Juliet Colden, he's become critical of Sarah Anne's manners. She does not dress as elegantly as Juliet, or comport herself with such decorum. She's forward when she ought to be retiring, he has said, and disputatious when she should be agreeable. He's spoken to her several times already: “You should wear your learning modestly,” he lectures.

She does wear it modestly, or so she believes. She's careful not to betray in public those subjects she knows more thoroughly than Christopher. Always she reminds herself that her learning is only book-learning; that it hasn't been tempered, as Christopher's has, by long discussions after dinner and passionate arguments in coffeehouses with wiser minds.

And so here she is: learned, but not really; and not pretty, and no longer young: last month she turned twenty-nine. Old, old, old. Like her company. She knows that Christopher has begun to worry that she'll be on his hands for life. And she thinks that perhaps he's mentioned this worry to his friends.

They're fond of him, and of Burdem Place. They appreciate the library, the herbarium, the rare trees and shrubs outside, the collections in the specimen cabinets. They appreciate Sarah Anne as well, she knows. Earlier, they complimented the food, her gown, the flowers on the table and her eyes in the candlelight. But what's the use of that sort of admiration? Collinson, who has known her the longest, was the only one to make a stab at treating her the way they all had when she was a girl: he led her into quoting Pliny and then complimented her on her learning. But she saw the way the other men shifted uneasily as she spoke.

Despite herself, she continues to listen to the men's conversation.
Despite her restlessness, her longing to be outside in the cool damp air, or in some other place entirely, she listens because the subject they're discussing fascinates her.

“I had a letter last year from Solander,” Ellis says. “Regarding the November meeting of the Royal Society. There, a Reverend Forster said he'd observed large flocks of swallows flying quite high in the autumn, then coming down to sit on reeds and willows before plunging into the water of one of his ponds.”

“More hearsay,” Collinson says.

But Pennant says it might be so; either that or they slept for the winter in their summer nesting holes. “Locke says that there are no chasms or gaps in the great chain of being,” he reminds them. “Rather there is a continuous series in which each step differs very little from the next. There are fishes that have wings, and birds that inhabit the water, whose blood is as cold as that of fishes. Why should not the swallow be one of those animals so near of kin to both birds and fish that it occupies a place between both? As there are mermaids or seamen, perhaps.”

No one objects to the introduction of aquatic anthropoids into the conversation. Reports of them surface every few years—Cingalese fishermen swear they've caught them in their nets, a ship's captain spots two off the coast of Massachusetts. In Paris, only four years ago, a living female of the species was exhibited.

Collinson says, “Our friend Mr. Achard writes me that he has seen them hibernating in the cliffs along the Rhine. But I have my doubts about the whole story.”

“Yes?” Pennant says. “So what do you believe?”

“I think swallows migrate,” Collinson says.

While the servants change plates, replace glasses, and open fresh bottles of wine, Collinson relates a story from Mr. Adanson's recent
History of Senegal.
Off the coast of that land in autumn, he says, Adanson reported seeing swallows settling on the decks and rigging of passing ships like bees. Others have
reported spring and autumn sightings of swallows in Andalusia and over the Strait of Gibraltar. “Clearly,” Collinson says, “they must be birds of passage.”

Which is what Sarah Anne believes. She opens her mouth and proposes a simple experiment to the men. “The swallow must breathe during winter,” she says, between the soup and the roasted veal. “Respiration and circulation must somehow continue, in some degree. And how is that possible if the birds are under water for so long? Could one not settle this by catching some swallows at the time of their autumn disappearance and confining them under water in a tub for a time? If they are taken out alive, then Linnaeus's theory is proved. But if not…”

“A reasonable test,” Collinson says. “How would you catch the birds?”

“At night,” she tells him impatiently. Oh, he is so old; he has dribbled more gravy on his waistcoat. How is that he can no longer imagine leaving his world of books and talk for the world outside? Anyone might gather a handful of birds. “With nets, while they roost in the reeds.”

Collinson says, “If they survived, we might dissect one and look for whatever internal structure made possible their underwater sojourn.”

He seems to be waiting for Sarah Anne's response, but Christopher is glaring at her. She knows what he's thinking: in his new, middle-aged stodginess, assumed unnecessarily early and worn like a borrowed coat, he judges her harshly. She's been forward in entering the conversation, unladylike in offering an opinion that contradicts some of her guests, indelicate in suggesting that she might pursue a flock of birds with a net.

What has gotten into him? That pulse she hears inside her ear, the steady swish and hum of her blood, is the sound of time passing. Each minute whirling past her before she can wring any life from it; hours shattered and lost while she defers to her brother's sense of propriety.

Upstairs, finally. Dismissed while the men, in the library below, drink Christopher's excellent wine and avail themselves of the chamberpot in the sideboard. Her brother's friends are grateful for her hospitality, appreciative of her well-run household; but most grateful and appreciative when she disappears.

Her room is dark, the night is cool, the breeze flows through her windows. She sits in her high-ceilinged room, at the fragile desk in the three-windowed bay facing west, over the garden. If it were not dark, she could see the acres leading down to the lake and the low stretch of rushes and willows along the banks.

Her desk is very small, meant to hold a few letters and a vase of flowers: useless for any real work. The books she's taken from the library spill from it to the floor. Gorgeous books, expensive books. Her brother's books. But her brother doesn't use them the way she does. She's been rooting around in them and composing a letter to Linnaeus, in Uppsala, about the evening's dinner conversation. Christopher need never know what she writes alone in this room.

Some years ago, after Peter Kalm's visit, Sarah Anne's father and Linnaeus corresponded for a while; after expressing admiration for the great doctor's achievements this visit is what she first mentions. Some flattery, some common ground. She discusses the weather, which has been unusual; she passes on the news of Collinson's latest botanical acquisitions. Only then does she introduce the subject of the swallows. She writes:

Toward the end of September, I have observed swallows gathering in the reeds along the Thames. And yet, although these reeds are cut down annually, no one has ever discovered swallows sleeping in their roots, nor has any fisherman ever found, in the winter months, swallows sleeping in the water. If all the great flocks seen in the
autumn dove beneath the water, how could they not be seen? How could none be found in winter? But perhaps the situation differs in Sweden.

You are so well-known and so revered. Could you not offer the fishermen of your country a reward, if they were to bring to you or your students any swallows they found beneath the ice? Could you not ask them to watch the lakes and streams in spring, and report to you any sightings of swallows emerging from the water? In this fashion you might elucidate the problem.

She pauses and stares at the candle, considering what she observed last fall. After the first killing frosts, the swallows disappeared along with the warblers and flycatchers and other insectivorous birds deprived of food and shelter. Surely it makes sense that they should have gone elsewhere, following their food supply?

She signs the letter “S.A. Billopp,” meaning by this not to deceive the famous scholar but simply to keep him from dismissing her offhand. Then she reads it over, seals it, and snuffs her candle. It is not yet ten but soon the men, who've been drinking for hours, will be expecting her to rejoin them for supper. She will not go down, she will send a message that she is indisposed.

She rests her elbows on the windowsill and leans out into the night, dreaming of Andalusia and Senegal and imagining that twice a year she might travel like the swallows. Málaga, Tangier, Marrakech, Dakar. Birds of passage fly from England to the south of France and from there down the Iberian peninsula, where the updrafts from the Rock of Gibraltar ease them over the Strait to Morocco. Then they make the long flight down the coast of Africa.

A bat flies by, on its way to the river. She has seen bats drink on the wing, as swallows do, sipping from the water's surface. Swallows eat in flight as well, snapping insects from the air. Rain is sure to follow when they fly low; a belief that dates from Virgil, but which she knows to be true. When the air is
damp and heavy the insects hover low, and she has seen how the swallows merely follow them.

In the dark she sheds her gown, her corset, her slippers and stockings and complicated underclothes, until she is finally naked. She lies on the floor beside her desk, below the open window. Into her notebook she has copied these lines, written by Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala, in 1555:

From the northern waters, swallows are often dragged up by fishermen in the form of clustered masses, mouth to mouth, wing to wing, and foot to foot, these having at the beginning of autumn collected amongst the reeds previous to submersion. When young and inexperienced fishermen find such clusters of swallows, they will, by thawing the birds at the fire, bring them indeed to the use of their wings, which will continue but a very short time, as it is a premature and forced revival; but the old, being wiser, throw them away.

A lovely story, but surely wrong. The cool damp air washes over her like water. She folds her arms around her torso and imagines lying at the bottom of the lake, wings wrapped around her body like a kind of chrysalis. It is cold, it is dark, she is barely breathing. How would she breathe? Around her are thousands of bodies. The days lengthen, some signal arrives, she shoots with the rest of her flock to the surface, lifts her head and breathes. Her wings unfold and she soars through the air, miraculously dry and alive.