Bright and Distant Shores (23 page)

Adelaide drank her third cup of coffee and returned to her typing. She had just finished correcting an ill-worded missive about the upcoming Saturday lecture series whose topics included
How Plants Travel, The Beetles of Chicago and Vicinity,
and
A Visit to Queen Charlotte Islands
. The subtitle to this last lecture could have been
How George Dorsey Sacked a Bag of Native Bones and Was Subsequently Arrested by Local Authorities
. He was down in the bone room, preparing his osteological loot for
display, and would emerge some hours from now in a mumbling fog. Maybe she was just having a bad day. She took Owen's letter out, smelled the envelope for hints of pressed flowers, and propped it under her desk lamp. She could see the place where Owen had rested the ink nib after writing her name. If she waited until lunchtime, she might take it onto the west steps and sit overlooking the stand of elders or take it up to an unused alcove and sit beneath a slighted display of Persian chain mail. These were her favorite spots for removing herself from the museum's piddling rivalry. But lately Dorsey had been taking mid-afternoon strolls by the bronzed Roman bathtubs—was he plotting his ascent?—and she couldn't afford to run into him up there.

She spooled a catalogue card into the typewriter:

Accession: 25
Object Number: 13124
World Area: North America
Country: Greenland
Description: sledge, etc.

It was the
etc.
on the last line that was giving Dorsey so much grief. The winding-up of the fair and the frenzy to inventory the masses of newly acquired objects had led to a cataloguing system that was both vague and incomplete. Hundreds of description entries simply read:
implement
. After his promotion, Dorsey had walked among the cataloguers and said: “But what kind of implement? Was it used for skinning or sewing or cooking? When we visit the library do we find a catalogue card that says
a story about a milkmaid's life in rural England
or does it say
Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Hardy, Thomas
?” At one point, fresh off the witness stand in the Luetgert sausage-murder trial, Dorsey had walked among them, hands butterflying behind his back, and had actually declared, “I hear something heroic in the clicking of those Remingtons, ladies.” Adelaide could think of a dozen causes more
heroic than revamping the museum's card catalogue—the neighborhood programs of Hull House, for example, or the Audubon Society's anti-bird-on-the-hat campaign.

She typed another card:

Accession: 25 Object Number: 13859 World Area: North America Country: Greenland Description: harpoon head

Did they use harpoons to catch whales in the South Seas?

She took up Owen's letter and walked out into the corridor, slipping the envelope into her pocket. She made for the ladies' restroom but, when she was sure no one was watching, climbed the stairs and passed quietly into a wing containing Etruscan objects of earthenware and bronze. She stood by a bone-and-ivory funeral couch that had been excavated from a tomb at Orvieto. A handful of coral sand and a dried frangipani dropped from the envelope when she opened it.

My Dearest Adelaide,

I began this letter not a day out of California, writing it in loose-leaf sections, and it soon became a rot of words and tangents. So I'm beginning again and plan to dispatch this version to a mail steamer in Suva. If winds and boilers and tides are favorable, then you'll be reading this within a month. I can hardly wait to hear from you. We are now westering out from the placid Honolulu Bay where we spent close to a week. The ship is watered and fueled and the men have seen to their business on dry land. While they killed off the days and nights in taverns and houses of ill repute, I consigned a few artifacts—fishing hooks made from human bone, stone lures, mortars and pestles. The
men came back to the ship looking as if they'd returned from battle. I sometimes feel as if my work collecting among the savages of the South Seas could be done on board. The crew and captain are a rowdy lot. Captain Baz Terrapin has a penchant for former inmates and rough lads from the steel mills of San Francisco. He's really something. Cantankerous doesn't even begin to describe it. Lewd, calculating, womanizing, creative and barbaric with the mother tongue, burlesque—I'm not positive about this last word but you can call me out on it with your pocket dictionary. I expect you are deeply immersed in activities at the museum and hope that the savage curators aren't making you slave at those catalogue cards all day and night. Keep your eyesight for those chapbooks on the cable car! And then there are the Sunday concerts at Hull House and tutoring the illiterate immigrants and such is a life filled with virtue. I sometimes hardly believe you wish to marry me. My kindness toward others consists of avoiding them when I'm feeling surly. Much to learn from you in the years ahead. Hope the marriage preparations are going well and not turning you into a nervous wreck or one of those formidable lace-hunters on State Street. I'll be honest, the thought of meeting your father intimidates me. In that daguerreotype you have by your bed, he resembles an English vicar with a case of burning gout. You'll forgive my jesting as a kind of sea sport. As I sit here in the shade of the topgallant sail, the wind finally gusting out of the east, I'm watching a pair of seamen argue about the virtues of homemade bitters as prevention against syphilis. Despite the blather within earshot, the scene is worthy of a watercolorist. The sky is the color of pewter and iron and the ocean is a moiled dark green.

You'll remember the curious Jethro Gray from our farewell at the train station. Here is another ephemera—
or do I mean enigma?—who can only be described as unwonted. In the span of a week he managed to have a banker's son pull a pistol on him on the train and to have every mariner, the captain included, decry the gilded day he was born. He seems unable to get along with ordinary men. His privilege, the way he disports himself, the stammering face and flinching hands, all of them get the hackles up and make for discord wherever he ventures or speaks. Things came to a head when he challenged a stocky Irish kid to a boxing match and managed to win with a king punch. Since then he has won the men's silent and begrudging respect. They don't like him much better but appreciate his combat. They leave him to his manhunt for nature's curios—tropical birds of scarlet plumage, blue parrotfish, enormous jellyfish, flying insects, lizards. He spent the whole time in the Sandwich Islands with his magnifying glasses and pillboxes and nets and he's taking up too much of the hold and I've barely begun to collect a thing. It smells like a briny zoo of dead animals down there, which is exactly what it has become.

I have, however, charted a trading route, a jagged horseshoe that cuts through the islands from east to west and north again. We'll supply at Suva in Fiji before heading for the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, perhaps north to German and Dutch New Guinea from there. There might be a few sundry islands thrown in for good measure. Fortunately I made notes during the previous voyage and I see now that it was a kind of preparation.

I know of your reluctance that I should be at sea but I firmly believe this is the trip that will allow me to make the transit into middling society. I can't shake your father's hand knowing that my sole property is an inherited junkyard on the South Side. With the contracted payment
we can afford to take a mortgage on a modest house in a good neighborhood. I picture grass in the backyard instead of crushed stone and pig iron. What do you think of that? I might even trade the Chinese junk of a bed frame for mahogany or teak. You've made every display of tenderness and understanding toward my position and I will always be grateful for that. But I want something for myself as well. My father smoked the cigars of a wealthier man, always assuming his hard work would vault him upward, that if he smoked the right brand then the shoes and hat and house would follow. That didn't come to pass and I don't intend to leave this world by the same reckoning. Some of the objects on my cargo list will be difficult to obtain but I feel up to the task. There must be a reason why I hoarded all those things from a time before my voice broke. Whether supernatural will or the material grappling of a wrecker's son, I can't speculate, but I do know my life comes to this enterprise with a sort of natural ease. I am gifted at this trade, have an eye for detail, see the way a stone implement can be a storehouse of a man's soul and hopes, but also his hellgate visions. Forgive the metaphysics; as you know, I am not much for religion, though rest assured I would gladly baptize all of our twelve children (six of each sex would be fine) as long as we could name them all after ships: Enterprise, Republic, Constitution, Beagle, Endurance, Fram—and those are just the girls' names! All joking aside, I pray you'll have the patience to endure this disposition for the remainder of our days. Voyages such as these will be enough to float us for years at a time. I promise to be more at home than anywhere else.

With deepest affection—

Owen

Adelaide reread choice selections. She particularly liked the phrases
every display of tenderness, forgive the metaphysics
and
I promise to be more at home than anywhere else
. If she were going to catalogue this letter according to Dorsey's new system it might have read:

Accession: 25
Object Number: 13860
World Area: Pacific
Country: between Hawaii and Fiji
Description: letter from fiancé in which he refers to future
wedding plans and jitters, chides himself humorously, makes
oblique promises, uses several words incorrectly but nonetheless
charmingly

She folded the letter, emptied the palmful of sand back into the envelope. Already composing a response in her mind, she hurried down the stairs, noticing from a wall clock that it was almost eleven. She'd been gone for half an hour and her stomach lurched when she saw Dorsey standing by her desk, a grim look on his face.

“I'm not feeling well,” she said curtly.

He held a hand over his stomach in distress. “We've been looking for you everywhere, Miss Cummings,” Dorsey said. “A Western Union boy came looking for you.”

Adelaide walked toward her desk, edging the letter behind her back.

“I signed for it,” Dorsey said, pointing with the back of his hand.

Adelaide took up the cable, and in her mother's frugal entreaty felt her life recede:

YOUR FATHER STOP PLEASE COME HOME STOP

T
he island of Djimbanko was unclaimed territory, lying in the ferrous-blue straits between the New Hebrides and New Caledonia. It was too barren for yam gardens and the population too motley to be of lasting interest to the Anglicans, Presbyterians, or Lutherans. It was a trading outpost, black market, way station, and island brothel. For decades it had been a sanctuary for escaped convicts from the French and British colonies and for kanakas banished from their own islands. It was populated by lepers, syphilitic Spaniards, exiled shamans, Malay pirates, Indonesian jewel smugglers, beachcombers, highland pygmies. Courtesy of the island's founding fathers—a band of British mutineers—the language was a strange mix of pidgin and eighteenth-century alehouse slang. The whores were
blowsabellas,
the pygmies
mini-kins,
and
crinkum
was the sort of venereal shanker that drove men into the smoking mouths of volcanoes.

The island contained several French families who had escaped the failed expedition of the Marquis de Rays in 1880. The nobleman and self-proclaimed King of New France had enticed hundreds of followers from Marseille to Port Breton, where they were expecting a coral-garden utopia but instead found little fresh water and sandy soil. A bishop on board blessed the sea and hung a portrait of the marquis next to the Virgin Mary and the journeyed believers died in droves of hunger, typhoid, malaria, and despair. The land of the new empire was so inhospitable that the New Ireland natives had long ignored it and thought the Frenchmen were gods sent back from world's end to suffer in eternity.

There were still tattered copies of
La Nouvelle France
floating around Djimbanko. It was the utopian newspaper that circulated in French churches and spoke of Melanesian cathedrals and aubergine gardens and which now lined parrot cages and stuffed pillowcases. Its masthead said it was printed in the Pacific colony of the devout but in fact it was printed in a Marseille warehouse and continued to appear long after the last pilgrim had died, escaped, or been rescued, and long after the Marquis de Rays had been arrested in Spain for fraud.

Several French escapees of this failed religious expedition now held sway over Djimbanko's attractions. A family of Manouche gypsies ran a small native sideshow and petting zoo. It was an entertainment designed for visiting ships and took place the first Saturday of the month outside hurricane season. There was a makeshift bamboo arena with an acrobatics display by the eldest daughter, a gymnast and high-wire artist. She tumbled and twirled batons while her younger brothers juggled flaming torches, led wallabies on catches of twine so that drunk sailors could put shillings in their joey pouches. One of the brothers played a clarinet with broken keywork before a pit of venomous snakes while another lined up the highland pygmies with their broad noses and girlish voices and made them dance to a Russian waltz.

Terrapin had promised such whimsy and exotic delights to his men, told them he could vouch for the nubile whoring on the island. The crew was due a luff-day before Owen Graves took the ship southwest and north for a torrent of trade in every malarial port and tumbledown yamhouse. But the sailors would have to earn their reward by scrubbing the
Cullion
until she smelled like chalk. Ever since the equatorial crossing, Terrapin had been on a cleaning binge, lighting brimstone fires to clear out the fug and towing the men's foul laundry astern with the naturalist's dredge net of bolting silk. Lately the ship had taken a fetid turn—cockroaches, red ants, centipedes, spiders, house crickets, horseflies, and mosquitoes on the fly, scurry, and crawl. There were rats as
big as alley toms living in the hold and they were hungry enough to eat hobnails. When seamen put their boots on in the morning there was a fine sod of mold growing on the toe hub. Everyone suspected that the vermin were breeding in the gloomy lair of Jethro's laboratory—in the darkened theater behind a row of scientifical books, perhaps, or in a tub of albumen extracted from the eggs of native birds. It was a filthy practice, Terrapin told his men, this poaching and pickling and offal-gathering.