Servants of the Map (11 page)

“The ankle’s not broken,” a young doctor finally said. “But it’s badly sprained.”

“So he’s all right?” Bianca kept saying. “He’s all
right
?” Unable to calm herself, she sat as if paralyzed while the doctors drew a curtain around Krzysztof and went to work.

Krzysztof emerged with his lower leg encased in two rigid plastic forms, each lined with a green plastic air-filled pod. Velcro straps clamped the shells around him, as if his ankle were an oyster. A boy young enough to be his grandson had given him two large pills in a white pleated cup, which resembled in miniature the nurse’s cap worn by a woman he’d loved during the war; the woman’s name had vanished, as had the pain, and his entire body felt blissful. Bianca carried the crutches, and a sheaf of instructions and bills. She opened the van’s side door and tried to help as two men lifted Krzysztof from the wheelchair and draped him along the back seat.

All the way back to Constance’s house Bianca drove slowly, avoiding potholes and sudden swerves. “Are you all right?” she asked every few minutes. “Is this hurting you?”

Drowsily he said, “I have not felt so good in years.” Actually this long narrow seat was more comfortable than the vast bed in his hotel. The jacket Bianca had folded into a pillow beneath his head smelled of her; the whole van was scented with her presence. On the floor, just below his face, he saw nylon shoes with flared lumpy soles, socks and shirts and reeds and a bird’s nest, a canvas sack and a withered orange. Behind his seat was a mat and a sleeping bag. “Do you sleep in here?” he asked.

“I have—but not these last weeks. I’m so sorry, I never meant—I can’t
believe
this happened.”

“My fault,” he said. “Entirely. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“Everyone else will,” she said bitterly. “Everyone.”

Should she bring him straight back to his hotel? But she had to stop at Constance’s house, let Constance and the others decide what was best for him. Perhaps Constance would want to have him stay with her. It was past eleven, they’d been gone for hours; and although she’d had plenty of time to call from the hospital, the phone had seemed impossibly far away. Now the only honest thing to do was to show up, with her guilty burden, and admit to everyone what had happened. Behind her, Krzysztof was humming.

“Talk to me,” he said. “It’s lonely back here. All I can see is the back of your head.”

“Those bison,” she said. “Are they anything like our buffalo?”

“Similar,” he said. “But bigger. Shaggy in the same way, though.”

“I heard this thing once,” she said. “From a friend of my mother’s, who used to visit the winery when Rose and I were little girls. He was some kind of naturalist, I think he studied beetles. Once he said, I think he said, that the buffalo out West had almost gone extinct, but then some guy made a buffalo refuge in Montana and stocked it with animals from the Bronx Zoo. Like your mother did, you see?” For a minute her own mother’s face hovered in the air.

The van slowed and made a broad gentle curve—Constance’s circular driveway, Krzysztof guessed. “In Polish,” he said dreamily, “the word for beetle is
chrzaszcz.”

Bianca tried to repeat the word, mashing together the string of consonants in a way he found very sweet. How pleasing that after all she’d paid attention to his stories. Their slow progress through the afternoon and evening had culminated properly among the deer, and all of it had been worthwhile.

“We’re here,” she said. “Boy, this is going to be
awful
—just wait for a minute, I’ll tell everyone what’s going on and we’ll see what to do.”

She turned and touched his head, preparing to face her sister.

“Don’t worry,” he said gently. “I’ll tell everyone I asked you to take me for a drive. I had a lovely evening, you know. I’m very glad to have met you.”

Neither of them knew that out back, beyond the rubble of the party, large sturdy bubbles had been forming for hours at the lip of the bamboo fountain, to the mystification of everyone. They did not see the bubbles, nor the inside of the house, because Rose and Constance came flying out the front door to greet the van. Terrified, Bianca saw. And then, as she prepared the first of many explanations, the first clumsy attempt at the story she’d tell for years, with increasing humor and a kind of self-deprecation actually meant to charm in the most shameful way, she saw their faces change: that was rage she saw, they were enraged.

In an instant she’d thrown the van into gear again and stomped on the gas. Krzysztof said, “Where …?” and as they lurched back onto the road, leaving behind Constance and Rose and the fountain and the lanterns, the squabbling scientists, the whole world of science, she said, “Back to your hotel, you need to be in your own bed.”

Back, Krzysztof thought. Back to the airport, back to England, back across the ocean and Europe toward home; back to the groves of Bialowieza, where his mother might once have crossed paths with Biancas grandfather. Might have escaped, like him; might have survived and adopted another name and life during all the years when, in the absence of family or friends, her only son shuttled between his laboratory and his little flat and the rooms of the women who one by one had tried and failed to comfort him. Back and back and back and back. Where had his life gone?

He thought
back
but Bianca, her foot heavy on the accelerator,
thought
away.
From Rose, their mother, their entire past, books and papers and stories and sorrows: let it sink into the ocean. She had her wallet and her sleeping bag and her running shoes and her van; and she drove as if this were the point from which the rest of her life might begin.

Kingsessing, on the Schuylkill
September 8th, 1810

H
E RODE PAST EARLIER
, that slip of a Sophie at his side: James. If you knew what I feel when I see him … But why shouldn’t you know? If I can imagine you, not face or your gestures perhaps but your mind and your heart, why not imagine you capable of feeling all I feel? I picture us on the bank of the river here, near the field-stone bench, exchanging confidences. I think how, when at last I find you, I will hand you these lines and you will know me.

The aunts do not even look up as he passes. The hayfields surrounding us, north and west, belong to James; the lush pastures to the south; the oats and rye and cattle and sheep, the fine stand of timber between our wedge of river-front land and the ramble of the Bartrams’ botanic gardens—his, all his. He is nearing thirty, not yet married though rumored to be looking for a wife. Wealthy, now that he’s come into his grandfather’s estate. And favored in all the other ways as well. About him there is a kind of sheen, the golden skin of good fortune.

In the room below me the aunts ignore him as they work on their
Manual of Geography,
a book for school-girls, they have such high hopes. Lessons composed of questions and answers, which a classroom of girls with scraped-back hair may murmur in unison:

Q. What is the climate of the Torrid Zone?

A.
It is very hot.

Q. What is the climate of the Frigid Zone?

A.
It is very cold.

Q. What is the climate of the Temperate Zone?

A.
It is mild or moderate; the heat being not so great as in the Torrid
Zone, nor the cold so severe as in the Frigid Zone.

Aunt Daphne, Aunt Jane. If they knew what I think. If they were to step outside and hail James, and if he were ill-mannered enough (which he’s never been, in his five years as our neighbor) to inquire about our unusual family, they would say they are cousins; they are not. That they are my aunts, which they are not. Not looking at his broad shoulders, the strength of his hand on his horse’s reins; not looking at the planes of his jaw or the shape of his brow, because they care for the minds but not the bodies of men, they would point out the charms of our small stone house. Three women, and everything just so. They would not say that I was born on a farm near Chester, to a family with two parents, two sisters, three brothers all dead of the yellow fever when I was an infant; the surviving brother torn from my side while a few pigs and chickens wandered bewildered through the dirt. The aunts took me in, I belong to them. They think I will live here forever with them, sharing their studies, caring for them: I will not.

Their book is to have a section on meteorology. Why there is weather. What it is. From the papers and books their friends have loaned us, I am
to collate the theories of rain. What will be left of all my work, after they simplify it? Something like this, which they wrote today:

Q. What surrounds the Earth?

A.
The Atmosphere; composed of air, vapor, and other gases.

Q. What can you say of the Atmosphere?

A.
It is thinner or less dense the further it is from the Earth.

Q. When water dries up where does it go?

A.
It rises into the air.

Q. How can water rise into the air?

A.
It is turned to vapor; and then it is lighter than the air.

Q. When vapors rise and become condensed, what are they called?

A.
Clouds.

Anaximenes, I tell the aunts—offering this scrap much as our cat, Cassandra, brings moles to the kitchen door and lays them at my feet—Anaximenes thought air might condense first to cloud, then to water, then to earth, and finally to stone. Why not include, I asked Aunt Daphne, this:

Q: Why are raindrops round?

A:
One theory is this: Because the corners get rubbed off as they fall side by side. And because the round shape overcomes the resistance of the air;
and because even the smallest parts of the world are obliged to represent and mirror the round image of the universe.

But the aunts are no more interested in these old theories than in the question of why Cassandra has extra toes on her paws. Aunt Daphne said, “Lavinia. When will you learn to keep in mind our audience?”

Yet why would the girls who will someday sit in a hot schoolroom, bored and weary with reciting these lessons, not feel the longings I feel? For the tantalizing theory, the mysterious fact—Descartes’ assumption that water is composed of eel-shaped particles, easily separated. Urbano d’Aviso’s proposition that vapor is bubbles of water filled with fire, ascending through the air so long as it is heavier than they are; stopping when they arrive at a place where the air is equally light. Why must all we write be
practical?

September 13, 1810

He comes, he goes, he comes, he goes. The other one I would tell you about: Mr. Frank Wells. He is well enough favored, tall and slim, thinning brown hair, a nose as long and sensitive as a greyhound’s. A bit older than James, with printer’s hands. He has his own business and has built a house upriver from us, which I have never seen. Unlike James he likes the way I look. He comes, he goes, along with the others—botanists and geologists; a Frenchman named Rafinesque, fat about the waist, whose shirt escapes from his pantaloons and shows bare flesh as he lectures us; a shy and friendly entomologist named Thomas Say. They admire the aunts and their work and the way they have raised me. Our house of three virgins, so studious. So neat. Every hour occupied by something useful. We rise, cook, sweep, and wash, tend to the gardens and then study and study, always useful things. The aunts wear spectacles, their eyes are weary. At night they ask me to read to them. Their spirits are weary as well. Aunt Jane has spells.

“It is all too much for me,” she says. April, often. Or September, like now. When everything around us is lush and damp and hot and fertile and florid. The box-hedges send out a powerful smell and the vines trying to strangle the trees send out another, even stronger; the mockingbirds sit on the roof and sing all night; a sound you would like, as I do. Aunt Jane takes to her bed, her skin muddy and cold and her limbs unmoving, with a cloth on her eyes and tufts of cotton blocking her ears from the bird-song. She gets sick for no reason, well for no reason. One day she rises, resumes her duties, declares that she is better. In a few months it will all be too much for her again. Her friends, those studious men, shake their heads in sympathy and whisper,
Melancholia.

The aunts are Quakers, and have raised me the same. On our day of rest we go to Meeting, we sit in silence, we wait with the sun streaming through the windows for the spirit to enter and move us. In that calm still place I struggle not to leap from my bench and shout—but what is the use of talking about this, when you are not here to advise me? What is the use?

September 24, 1810

James again. He nods as he rides by, once more on his way to visit Sophie. The slip of a Sophie, in her house on the hill. Half my weight and half my brains and half my wit; and a hundred times my fortune and a father, who’s a banker. Around her neck, a fine gold chain. Little rings on little fingers; little kid shoes on little feet. James could pick her up the way I might a spaniel, if we had a spaniel: the aunts do not like dogs. No doubt he has lifted her lightly into a carriage, or onto a saddle. I hear she plays the piano beautifully. In the garden I watch him passing by; I stand so he can see me and he nods. He rides on, lovely, taken.

If the aunts knew what I think. If the aunts knew what I dream. Aunt Daphne has her room and Aunt Jane hers but they bundle at night in the
same bed—for comfort they say, for warmth—and they think I will settle for this.

September 8, September 13; October 1, 2, 3—what is the point of dating these words as I write them? They are for you, and when I find you, dates will mean nothing to us. You are in Ecuador, or in Cleveland; in England or Boston, the Rocky Mountains; or perhaps you are a few miles away, stripped as I was of our family name. Wouldn’t I recognize you, though? No matter how you’d changed? If I saw you at the market, or passed you on the street …

I have but the faintest memory of our last day. The aunts said the plague left only us alive: a little boy, barely five years old, and me, not yet turned two. Did you cry when the wagons came? When everything inside our home was burned, the bedding and furniture piled and torched but the things outside, uncontaminated, prudently saved and divided? The aunts took me, some hoes and hay-rakes, two pigs, a horse, a cart. Whoever took you, said the aunts—and how could they lose the name of that family who stopped on their journey to someplace else and, out of pity and charity, left with an extra, orphaned child?—whoever took you, also took the cow.