Servants of the Map (8 page)

… I have so much to tell you, Clara. And no more time today; what will you think, after all these months, when you receive such a brief letter? Know that I am thinking of you and the girls, no matter what I do. I promise we’ll do whatever you want when I return: I know how much you miss your brother, perhaps we will join him in New York. I would like that, I think. I would like to start over, all of us, someplace new. Somewhere I can be my new self, live my new life, in your company.

Next to my heart, in an oilskin pouch, I keep the lock of Elizabeth’s hair and your last unopened letter to me, with your solemn instruction on the envelope:
To be Opened if You Know You Will Not Return to Me.
If the time comes, I will open it. But the time won’t come; I will make it back, I will be with you again.

This comes to you with all my love, from your dearest

Max

L
ATER THE SQUAT WHITE
cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the way down; the swellings above and below reminded him of bodices and rounded skirts. Perhaps he viewed the lanterns this way because the girls guiding him down the flagstone steps and across the patio were themselves so doll-like. Amazingly young, amazingly smooth-skinned. Sisters, they’d said. The tiny dark-haired one who’d appeared in the hotel lobby was Rose; the round-cheeked one driving the battered van, with her blond hair frizzing in all directions, was Bianca. Already he’d been clumsy with them.

“You are … are you Dr. Humboldt’s daughters?” he’d asked. The sun was so bright, his eyes were so tired, the jumble of buildings and traffic
so confusing. The step up to the van’s back seat was too high for him, but neither girl noticed him struggling.

The small one, Rose, had laughed at his question. “We’re not related to Constance,” she’d said. “I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the institute.” The blond one, who called to mind his own mother sixty years earlier, pulled out of the hotel driveway too fast and said nothing during the short drive to the Humboldts’ house. He feared he’d hurt her feelings. For the last decade or so, he’d been subject to these embarrassing misidentifications, taking young scientists for children or servants when he met them out of context. They all dressed so casually, especially in this country; their faces were so unmarked—how could anyone tell them from the young people who chauffeured him about or offered trays of canapes at parties? But these girls he should have known, he’d probably met them earlier. Now, as he stepped down into the enormous back garden and moved toward the long table spread with food and drink, the girl called after a flower veered toward a crowd gathered by the pool and left him with the girl he’d affronted.

“Dr. Wojciechowicz?” she said, mangling his name as she steered him closer to the table. “Would you like a drink or something?”

Reflexively he corrected her pronunciation; then he shook his head and said, “Please. Call me Krzysztof. And you are Bianca, yes?” He could not help noticing that she had lovely breasts.

“That’s me,” she agreed dryly. “Bianca the chauffeur, Rose’s sister,
not
related to the famous Dr. Constance Humboldt. No one you need to pay attention to at all.”

“It’s not …” he said. Of course he had insulted her. “It’s just that I’m so tired, and I’m still jet-lagged, and …”

Could he ask her where he was without sounding senile? Somewhere north of Philadelphia, he thought; but he knew this generally, not specifically. When he’d arrived two days ago, his body still on London time, he had fallen asleep during the long, noisy drive from the airport.
Since then he’d had no clear sense of his location. He woke in a room that looked like any other; each morning a different stranger appeared and drove him to the institute. Other strangers shuttled him from laboratory to laboratory, talking at length about their research projects and then moving him from laboratory to cafeteria to auditorium to laboratory, from lobby to restaurant and back to his hotel. The talk he’d given was the same talk he’d been giving for years; he had met perhaps thirty fellow scientists and could remember only a handful of their names. All of them seemed to be gathered here, baring too much skin to the early July sun. Saturday, he thought. Also some holiday seemed to be looming.

“Do forgive me,” he said. “The foibles of the elderly.”

“How old
are
you?”

Her smile was charming and he forgave her rude question. “I am seventy-nine years of age,” he said. “Easy to remember—I was born in 1900, I am always as old as the century.”

“Foibles forgiven.” She—
Bianca,
he thought.
Bianca
—held out her hand in that strange boyish way of American women. Meanwhile she was looking over his shoulders, as if hoping to find someone to rescue her. “Bianca Marburg, not quite twenty-two but I’m very old for my age.”

“You’re in college?”

She tossed her hair impatiently. “Not
now.
My sister and I were dreadful little prodigies—in college at sixteen, out at nineteen, right into graduate school. Rose already has her Ph.D.—how else do you think she’d have a postdoc here?”

Would he never say the right thing to this bristly girl? “So then you … what is the project you are working on?” Americans, he’d been reminded these last two days, were always eager to talk about themselves.

“So then I—I should be in graduate school, and I was until two months ago but I dropped out, it was seeming stupid to me. Unlike my so-successful sister Rose, I am at loose ends.”

She moved a bowl of salad closer to a platter of sliced bread draped with a cloth, then moved it back again. “Which is why I’m driving you around. Why I’m here. I’m sort of between places, you know? I got a temp job typing for an Iraqi biophysicist—see the short guy near the volleyball net? He hired me because I can spell ‘vacuum.’ I’m staying with my sister until I get enough money together to move. I might go to Alaska.”

“That’s nice,” Krzysztof said helplessly.

“Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested. Go talk to the other famous people. Constance collects them, they’re everywhere.”

She huffed off—furious, he saw. At him? In the battered leather bag that hung from his shoulder he felt the bottle he’d carried across the ocean as a special gift for his hostess. But his hostess was nowhere to be seen, and no one moved toward him from either the pool or the round tables with their mushroomlike umbrellas. Already the top of his head was burning; he was all alone and wished he had a hat. Was it possible these people meant to stay in the sun all afternoon?

Bianca made a brisk circuit through the backyard, looking for someplace to settle down. There was Rose, leaning attentively toward Constance’s camel-faced husband, Roger, and listening to him as if she were interested. Entirely typical, Bianca thought; Rose submitted herself to Roger’s monologues as a way of pleasing Constance, who was her advisor. Constance herself was holding court from a elegant lawn chair beneath an umbrella, surrounded by graduate students and postdocs—but Bianca couldn’t bear the way Constance patronized her, and she steered wide of this group. She considered joining the two students Constance employed, who were trotting up and down the steps bearing pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; at last week’s reception, though, Constance had rebuked her for distracting the help. The knot of protein
chemists at the volleyball net beckoned, Rick and Wen-li and Diego stripped of their shirts and gleaming in the sun, but she’d slept with Diego after that reception, and now they weren’t speaking. Perhaps Vivek and Anisha, easing themselves into the shallow end of the pool just as Jocelyn, already cannonball-shaped, curled her arms around her legs and launched herself into the deep end with a splash?

No, no, no. Vivek was charming but Jocelyn, impossible Jocelyn, was already whaling down on her young squire. Everywhere Bianca looked there was laughter, chatter, the display of flesh—much of it, Bianca thought, better left hidden—flirtation and bragging and boredom. A standard holiday-weekend party, except that all of these people were scientists, and many were famous, while she was neither. And had, as Rose reminded her constantly, no one to blame for this but herself.

Off by the fragrant mock orange tree, she spotted the institute’s two resident Nobel laureates side by side, looming over the scene in dark pants and long-sleeved shirts. She drifted their way, curious to see if they were clashing yet. Arnold puffed and plucked at his waistband; Herb snorted and rolled his eyes: but they were smiling, these were still playful attacks. Last week, during Winifred’s seminar on the isozymes of alpha-amylase, she’d watched the pair shred Winifred in their boastful crossfire. Arnold, sitting to her left, had favored her with a smile.

“Nice to see you gentlemen again,” Bianca said.

The men stared at her blankly, Arnold’s left foot tapping at the smooth green grass.

“Bianca Marburg,” she reminded them.

“From Jocelyn’s lab?” Arnold said now.

“Rose Marburg’s sister,” she said, grinning stupidly.

Herb frowned, still unable to place her. “Didn’t I see you … were you
typing
? For Fu’ad?”

She held her hands up like claws and typed the air.
“C’est moi”
she said. What was she doing here?

“Ah,” Arnold said. “You must be helping Constance out. It’s a lovely party, isn’t it? So well organized. Constance really amazes me, the way she can do this sort of thing and still keep that big lab working … ”

“But that last pair
of
papers,” Herb said. “Really.”

Bianca fled. From the corner of her eye she saw the man she’d driven here, that Polish émigré, physical-chemist turned theoretical structural-biologist, Cambridge-based multiply medaled old guy, standing all alone by the bamboo fountain, watching the water arc from the stem to the pool. Pleasing Constance inadvertently, she thought; Constance fancied her home as a place conducive to contemplation and great ideas. Krzysztof raised his right hand and held it over his head, either feeling for hair that was no longer present or attempting to shade his array of freckles and liver spots from the burning sun.

Quickly Bianca traversed the yard and the patio, slipped through the glass doors and across the kitchen, and ran upstairs to the third and smallest bathroom. The door closed behind her with expensive precision: a Mercedes door, a jewel-box door. On the vanity was a vase with a Zenlike twist of grapevine and a single yellow orchid. She opened the window and lit up a joint. Entirely typical, she thought, gazing down at Krzysztof’s sweaty pate. That Constance and Arnold and Herb and the others should fly this man across the ocean to hear about his work, then get so caught up in institute politics that they’d forget to talk to him at their party. Had it not been for the lizardlike graze of his eyes across her chest, she might have felt sorry for him.

Krzysztof crouched down by the rock-rimmed basin and touched a blade of grass to the water, dimpling the surface and thinking about van der Waals forces even as Constance rushed to his side, burbling and babbling and asking if he was ill. When he assured her that he was fine, she asked about Cambridge, and then if he’d like a swim—but of course not, he should come sit here; he knew everyone, didn’t he? She helped him
into a long, low, elaborately curved chair, webbed with canvas that trapped him as securely as a fishnet. She couldn’t have meant to let him languish there; that would have been rude, she was never rude. She must not have known that he couldn’t rise from this snare unaided. Nor could she have known, as the faces bent toward him politely for a moment and then turned back to their animated conversations about meetings he hadn’t attended, squabbles among colleagues he didn’t know, that he’d forgotten almost all their names and was incapable of attaching those he did remember to the appropriate faces and research problems.

The sun had moved, was moving, so that first his knees, then his thighs and crotch were uncomfortably roasted. This was the throne room, he saw. This cluster of chairs, perched where an adrenal gland would be if the pool were really a kidney: himself and Constance, Arnold, Herb, Jocelyn, and Sundralingam. All the senior scientists. Directly across the pool the junior researchers stood in tight circles, occasionally glancing his way; the postdocs and students were gathered at the farthest end of the pool, where a group of bare-torsoed, highly muscled young men tended a grill that sent up disturbing smoky columns.

He made columns in his mind: faces, names, research projects. Then he tried and failed to match up the lists. The girl named Rose walked by and smiled at him. Although he smiled back eagerly she continued to walk, past him and between a pair of those low white cylinders standing among the glossy mounds of hosta like dolls in a dark wood. He knew he’d fallen asleep only when his own sudden, deep-throated snore woke him.

The sun had dropped and the sky had turned a remarkable violet-blue; perhaps it was seven o’clock. A few people still swam in the pool, but most were out, and mostly dressed, and the smell of roasting fowl filled the air. On the patio people milled around the grill and the table with paper plates in their hands. Bottles of wine, bottles of beer, dripping glasses, ice; he was, he realized, very thirsty. And past embarrassment,
although the chairs near him were empty now, as if he’d driven everyone away. Somehow he was not surprised, when he rolled sideways in an unsuccessful attempt to pull himself from his lounge chair, to see Bianca, cross-legged on the grass, watching over him.

“Have a nice nap?” she asked.

“Lovely,” he replied. She seemed happy now; what had he missed? “But you know I
cannot
get up from this thing.”

The hand she held out was not enough. “If you would,” he said, “just put your hands under my arms and lift …”