The Seal Wife (19 page)

He opens the tobacco tin and reaches inside to straighten the dent that he made, sets it on the shelf. The woman rises from where she’s sitting on the bed. She stands before the stove for as long as it takes for him to replace the blankets, the pillow at its head. Then she walks to the door and she opens it.

She holds it open until he gathers his things and leaves.

A LONG PUNISHMENT, but, he supposes, not longer than he deserves. Despite the fact that she won’t open the door, neither to let him in nor to accept any conciliatory gift, Bigelow finds comfort in her presence—she’s there, in her house. Every day he checks and sees that she hasn’t left. On occasion, she even meets his gaze through the window. She looks at him, unblinking, for whole seconds before she turns away.

And the days grow longer; this alone makes him optimistic. En route to her house he feels the rush of birds overhead, returning, flying so close to the ground that their wing beats set the air shuddering around him.

It’s just a matter of time before she takes him back. He cannot imagine any other outcome, and while he waits, he is building a new kite. He has what he needs—spars, muslin, wire, notebooks filled with calculations, his field book recording details of all but the last flight—and undertakes the project as a distraction. A copy, he thinks when he begins, an exact replica. He can reinvent what he lost.

But as he sits drawing at his table, Bigelow has a sudden, new idea. What if the cells were not square but triangular? What if, between two grand triangles . . . Bigelow starts with a fresh, unmarked page.

An hour passes, and another. Geese cry out, and when someone knocks he doesn’t lift his head. Upstairs, a bird must have hit a windowpane. After all, visits to his station house are few.

Where was he? A central deck, between the two triangles, on which to mount equipment. If he increases the distance between the two cells, then—

“Hello?” A man’s voice calls out. Another knock, louder.

Bigelow stands stiffly from his chair. He tucks his shirt into his trousers with ink-stained hands. When he opens his door, the man before him has already removed his hat.

“Davison,” he says, and he holds out a hand. His shirtsleeve, just visible inside that of his coat, is fastened with a cuff link, and Bigelow, who doesn’t care about such accessories, notices the gleaming stud, a thing he hasn’t seen since his arrival in the north, not even on an undertaker.
Cuff link.
He says the words silently to himself, hearing their strangeness.

“Secretary to Mears. Engineering Commission.” Davison looks past Bigelow into the station house, the drafting table with its piles of drawings. “You’re the kite operator,” he says.

Bigelow steps back from the doorway, inviting him inside. “I’m . . . I work for the Weather Bureau.”

Davison nods. “You flew the kite. The box kite.” With his hat, he gestures in the direction of the town. “They said this is where you live.”

Gone,
Bigelow is about to tell him, but instead he answers, “Yes.”

“We need aerial photographs.” Davison pulls out the one chair from where Bigelow tucked it under his table. He sits, leaning forward, an elbow on each knee. “We have the camera. Aluminum body. Weighs only four pounds. One exposure at a go. Then you have to reel it back in. Change the plate.

“What we need is this, we need survey photographs. Topographical, for the port. Deepwater port. There’s five sites proposed, and we need to pick the right one. Need to see as much as we can. From above.” Davison stands and walks once around the table, looking at the drawings. He picks one up, studies it, replaces it on top of the others. Then he looks at Bigelow. With his hands shoved in his pockets, he rocks back and forth on his heels.

“Commission’s looking for an experienced operator. Someone who can fly a camera over the water. We had a fellow lined up, fellow with a biplane, but the wind’s not right. He backed out.” He shrugs. “The camera equipment’s not complicated. Automatic shutter. But getting it into position—that’s the trick. Timing device activates the shutter. Gives you as long as you need to get it where you want it. Hour. Half hour. You set it.” Davison points out the door. “Photographs of the town, the creek, the inlet. All the environs.”

“Environs.” Bigelow repeats the word. A word like a cuff link, gleaming in his station house, calling attention to itself. He says nothing more, and the man, Davison, seems to interpret this as reluctance.

“Commission’ll advance you more than enough to cover expenses,” he offers, and as if he’s already paid Bigelow for the privilege, he picks up the whole sheaf of drawings. But he doesn’t look at them. His eyes are on Bigelow.

“How much?” Bigelow asks.

Davison replaces the drawings on the table. “Five hundred up front. Another fifteen hundred when we get the photographs. Satisfactory photographs,” he adds.

Bigelow nods, mouth shut, determined not to betray any surprise.

“Two thousand total,” Davison says, to emphasize. And Bigelow puts out his hand, the hand with the scars.

“When?” Davison asks, grasping the hand, not letting go. His palm is dry and hot. “How soon?”

Bigelow points at the table, his drawings. “I’m building a new kite. Better than the last one. Easier to control. Certainly at the altitudes you’d want for survey photographs. That’s what, four, five thousand feet?”

Davison shrugs.

“But it will take—I don’t know—a month. Two.”

Davison lets him go. “June?”

“Maybe. The sewing’s what’s slow.”

“Five hundred dollars,” Davison says. “Up front.” He puts his hand in his pocket as if about to produce the money. But then he leaves it there. “Hire someone,” he says.

“Maybe.”

“June?” Davison asks again, and Bigelow nods.

“I’ll have an agreement drafted. You can stop in the commission office on Monday to sign. Take a look at the camera. Collect your advance.”

From the station window, Bigelow watches Davison walk back toward town, his shadow so long it spills off the road. Then he puts on his coat and hurries after him, running where the man had walked.

At the woman’s house he knocks at the door and then, when she doesn’t answer, comes around to her window, cupping his hands to see past the reflection of his own face.

“Marry me,” he calls to her, and she looks up from what she holds in her hands, her dress, dripping over the filled tin tub. Her braid, so black against the white of her underclothes.

“Marry me!” he says again, loud enough that anyone passing by could hear his words.

BIGELOW SPENDS A DAY, and then another, at his desk, doing the math, pages of calculations to determine the advantages of an equilateral over a right triangle, and then, having settled on equilateral, pages more to decide the placement of the keel spar, the optimal distance between the two cells. He gives the ground floor of the station house over to the building of small-scale test models, for which he uses newsprint rather than fabric lifting surfaces, the entire room littered with bits of string and sticks and paper—paper everywhere, some pieces filled with notations, others snipped into shapes, stuck with glue to the surface of his table, his floor, the soles of his boots.

It’s just a matter of time, he thinks, before she opens her door to his knock. Before she takes a gift from his hands and invites him inside.

Each afternoon, he makes a detour past her house. He stops and he knocks, he waits and he listens, he leaves a rabbit on the step and goes around to her window and peers through. Sometimes she looks at him; sometimes she doesn’t.

But she accepts his gifts; or at least she doesn’t leave them lying on the ground. She doesn’t clean the marks left by his hands, his forehead, and even his mouth, from the spotless glass pane.

And on the day she sees a kite in his hands, a model ready to test on the bluff, she gets out of the chair. She comes closer to get a better look.

Bigelow steps back, away from the window. He lets a little of the line out, and the kite sails over his head. She watches, close enough now to press her cheek to the glass. Then she comes around to the door; he hears the latch as it gives.

The kite is ten yards out, flying over the street, and he offers her the line. He takes her hand and closes her fingers around it.

“This is nothing,” he tells her.

She watches it with one eye closed against the glare. Bright enough on this spring afternoon that ice thaws underfoot. Minutes before, as he walked to her house, puddles were dull, gray, still slushy. Now they mirror the sky. The difference of one degree.

“Just wait until I take you with me,” he says. “Up the bluff, with a real kite. A big one.”

He stands behind her as she flies the model, reaches around to loosen her hold, let it out a few more feet.

When she lets him in, he sets the kite down, but it doesn’t stay put. A draft blows in from under the door, and it slides along the planks with a whisper. Bigelow has to use a chair to trap it in the corner, far enough from the stove that he needn’t worry. He can leave it and follow her to bed.

Unbutton his trousers and push up her skirt, anxious to be inside her, afraid of wasting even a minute on foreplay. Because what if she changes her mind?

JUNE 21. Solstice. The sun will never set on this warm day.

She lets him take her hand as they walk up the hill. Flowers break underfoot. He listens as their steps fall in and out of rhythm.

In a lifetime, only a handful of days like this one. The sky unfolds, and the wind cooperates. And the new kite—a hundred times prettier than the one he lost. Seams perfect, because she has sewn them.

He looks at her, standing by the shed, her face tipped up, loose strands blowing from her braid. She puts her hands up to shade her eyes.

With him she sees how it is: the leap into the heavens, the sun striking the white cells, the inlet’s water spread like a glittering endless cape.

The kite scatters a flock of swallows, climbing.

What will he show her from a perspective of four or five thousand feet, from the vantage of the clouds?

A grid of houses, and hers among them. His station and his flags. The shed on the bluff, and next to it the reel. The bays of Cook Inlet. The scribbled path of the creek.

Three tattooed lines.

Two bodies in a bed.

A man walking track.

A rain of blue-and-white china.

The trumpet of a gramophone.

The wet black eye of a seal.

Cracks of light from between the warped boards.

God exhaling clouds of geese.

Copper siphon.

Column of mercury.

Each hour hanging like a pelt from her hands.

Taken together, one image laid over another, they will make a book of maps.

The outlines of a life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Gretchen Ernster, Joan Gould, Colin Harrison, Courtney Hodell, Jessica Kirshner, Kate Medina, Christopher Potter, Jennifer Prior, and Amanda Urban.

The equations on pages 133–34 are adapted from Lewis Fry Richardson’s
Weather Prediction by Numerical Process,
published by Cambridge University Press in 1922. The box kite described in this work of fiction is inspired by those built by Lawrence Hargrave, whose late–nineteenth-century kite experiments in New South Wales, Australia, contributed much to aeronautical science.

In researching the early years of meteorology, the author is especially indebted to
Weather Forecasting in the United States,
published by the Weather Bureau in 1916; to those issues of the
Monthly Weather Review
published (also by the Weather Bureau) between 1913 and 1916; to Henry Helm Clayton’s 1923 text,
World Weather;
to Donald R. Whitnah’s
A History of the United
States Weather Bureau;
and to Mark Monmonier’s
Air Apparent.

THE SEAL WIFE

A READER’S GUIDE

Kathryn Harrison

To print out copies of this or other Random House Reader’s Guides,
visit us at
www.atrandom.com/rgg

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Kathryn Harrison has been hailed as a master of “spare narrative.” Why might the prose of
The Seal Wife
be characterized as “spare”? Discuss examples or particular passages that highlight this quality of Harrison’s writing. What effect does this style have on the novel as a whole, or on your ability to imagine the time and place in which it is set?

In
The Seal Wife
, Harrison explores the relationship between physical and emotional suffering. Bigelow is subject to the harsh Alaskan climate, to which he is unaccustomed, as well as to the simultaneous and profound effects of an unexpected obsession. How do these aspects of Bigelow’s inner and outer lives interact? How does Harrison express the theme of suffering—its causes and consequences—through other characters in the novel?

What effect does Bigelow’s realization that the Aleut is not unable to speak, but rather is unwilling, have on her overall characterization? Does this understanding affect or alter your sense of the dynamics of their relationship? If so, how?

Over the course of the novel, speech (and the lack thereof) becomes a prominent thematic thread. The Aleut allows Bigelow into her home and her bed, but never speaks, though he does so “more volubly to her than . . . to anyone else.” At what other points in the book, and through which characters, is the theme of speech explored? What might Harrison be trying to convey through her use of speech as a link in Bigelow’s relationships, especially with women?

Despite the noteworthy dearth of women at Bigelow’s Alaskan outpost, he engages in relationships with several throughout the book. Describe the novel’s key female characters, and discuss the nature of Bigelow’s relationship with each. In what ways are these women different? Similar? How does Bigelow change or grow as a result of these relationships?

The various types of power dynamics between men and women—Bigelow and the Aleut, Getz and Miriam, and so on—are at the core of
The Seal Wife
. Describe and discuss some of the important male/female relationships in the book. What conclusions can you draw at novel’s end about Harrison’s ideas regarding sex and power? In many of the relationships through which the theme of sex and power emerges, there is a direct correlation between speech and power. How do the various qualities of gender, sex, speech, and power interact throughout the book?

As much attention as is paid to Bigelow’s inner obsession with the Aleut, equal attention is paid to his professional passion for charting the weather, his obsession with “recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people.” How do Bigelow’s passions correspond to each other? In what ways are they parallel, and in what ways might they be directly related? What effects do these consuming obsessions have on Bigelow? How do they affect his ability to relate to others, understand himself, and achieve his goals?

When the heavy sun appears, rolling sullenly along the horizon,
it reveals landscapes of unutterable splendor, ice glazing every
twig, turning gravel to diamonds, garbage to ransoms. . . .
But what he described as grandeur in last year’s letters to his
mother and sister now strikes him as threatening, the inlet’s
water black and violent, heaving under a mantle of splinteredice.

In such passages, Harrison uses richly metaphorical language to describe the Alaskan landscape as seen through Bigelow’s eyes. While such descriptions provide a vivid sense of setting, they also provoke questions of physical realism versus emotional perspective. How might Bigelow’s literal vision of his surroundings be a reflection or projection of his inner state at any given moment in the book? Find and discuss a few passages throughout the novel that illuminate this relationship. How does Harrison’s depiction of the landscape change in relation to Bigelow’s emotional evolution? What other “realistic” aspects of Bigelow’s surroundings (other characters, professional pursuits, and so on) provide a mirror for his inner narrative?

Discuss the title of the novel. In terms of its mythic implications, what might it convey about the story and its characters? A parallel is drawn throughout the book, particularly at its end, between the Aleut and a captured seal. What implications does this comparison have for the outcome of Bigelow and the Aleut’s relationship and story? How might the Aleut’s consistent qualities of self-possession and self-awareness be reconciled with the implied conclusion?

Bigelow seems to have achieved a sense of balance and resolve by the end of the novel, a composure at the other extreme of the emotional spectrum from the air of obsession that permeates the book. Discuss the arc of Bigelow’s character development. What does his emotional evolution imply about the relationships between his emotional and professional pursuits? How does he use potentially self-destructive feelings and behaviors to achieve creative success and emotional balance? How do you feel about the end of the novel?