Ship Fever (8 page)

“Robert!” Catherine says. “You had good luck?”

Robert nods. Both his hands are tightly wrapped around the sack's neck, and when Catherine reaches out for it he says, “You hold this tight, now. They'll be wanting to fly.”

“You did a good job,” Catherine says. “Let me get your money. Sarah Anne, why don't you take the sack?”

Sarah Anne slips both her hands below Robert's hands and twists the folds of cloth together. “I have it,” she says. Robert releases the sack. Immediately she's aware that the sack is alive. Something inside is moving, leaping, dancing. Struggling. The feeling is terrifying.

“Thank you, Robert,” Catherine says. Gently she guides him out the door. “You've been very helpful. If you remember to keep our secret, we'll ask you for help again.”

By the time she turns back to Sarah Anne and takes the sack from her, Sarah Anne is almost hysterical.

“Nothing can satisfy but what confounds,” Catherine says. “Nothing but what astonishes is true.” Once more Sarah Anne is reminded of her friend's remarkable memory. When Catherine is excited, bits of all she has ever read fly off her like water from a churning lump of butter.

“All right now,” Catherine says. “Hold the netting in both hands and pull it over the tub—that's good. Now fasten down the sides, all except for this little section here. I'm going to hold the mouth of the sack to the open part of the netting, and when
I say the word I'll open the sack and you drop the last lip of the netting into place. Are you ready?”

“Ready,” Sarah Anne says. Her heart beats as if she has a bird inside her chest.

“
Now,
” Catherine says.

Everything happens so fast—a flurry of hands and cloth and netting and wings, loops of string and snagged skirts. Two swallows get away, passing so close to Sarah Anne's face that she feels the tips of their feathers and screams. But a minute later she sees that they've been at least partly successful. In the tub, huddled on the board and pushing frantically at the netting, are two birds. Steely blue, buff-bellied, gasping.

“They're so unhappy,” Sarah Anne says.

“We must leave them,” Catherine says. “If the famous Doctor Linnaeus is right, in our absence they'll let themselves down into the water and sleep, either on the surface of the river sand or perhaps just slightly beneath it.”

“And if he's wrong?”

“Then we'll tell him so.”

The day passes with excruciating slowness, chopped into bits by Juliet's rigid timetable: family breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, long and complicated meals. After breakfast Juliet requires the company of Sarah Anne and Catherine in her dressing room, although Sarah Anne knows that Juliet is fond of neither of them. After tea, Christopher expects the women to join him in the library, where they talk and read the newspapers. Sarah Anne and Catherine have not a minute to themselves, and by supper they're wild-eyed with exhaustion and anticipation.

The next morning, when they slip out again before breakfast, the board over the tub is bare. Sarah Anne unfastens the netting, removes the dripping board, and peers down into the water. The
swallows lie on the sand. But not wrapped serene in a cocoon of wings; rather twisted and sprawled. She knows before she reaches for them that they're dead. Catherine knows too; she stands ready with a penknife. They've agreed that, should the swallows die, they'll dissect one and examine its structures of circulation and respiration. They'll look for any organ that might make hibernation under water possible; any organ that might prove them wrong.

They work quickly. There isn't much blood. Catherine, peering into the open chest cavity, says, “It is very difficult to work without proper tools. Still. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. And there is no doubt that Linnaeus is wrong.”

A four-chambered heart inside its pericardium; small, rosy, lobeless lungs. From the lungs, the mysterious air sacs extend into the abdomen, up into the neck, into the bones. There is no sign of a gill-like organ that might allow the bird to breathe under water. Sarah Anne is quite faint, and yet also fiercely thrilled. They've done an experiment; they've disproved an hypothesis. She says, “We will write to Linnaeus today.”

“I think not,” Catherine says. “I think it's time we made other plans.”

What plans were those? Of course Christopher noticed that Mrs. Pearce returned to London in early October; he noticed, too, when Sarah Anne left Burdem Place a few weeks later for what she described as an ‘extended visit' with her friend. All through November Christopher didn't hear from his sister, but he had worries of his own and thought nothing of her absence. In December, when he was in London on business, he stopped by Mrs. Pearce's house to find that her servants had been dismissed and her house was empty. Only then did he realize that his sister and her friend were simply gone.

Everyone had theories about their disappearance: Collinson,
Ellis, all the men. Foul play was suspected by some, although there was no evidence. But this is what Christopher thought, during the bleak nights of 1765 while Juliet was writhing with childbed fever, and during the even bleaker nights after her death, while his tiny son was wasting away. He imagined Sarah Anne and Mrs. Pearce—and who was Mrs. Pearce anyway? Where had she come from? Who were her people?—up before dawn in that London house, moving swiftly through the shadows as they gather bonnets, bags, gloves. Only one bag apiece, as they mean to travel light: and then they glide down the early morning streets toward the Thames. Toward the Tower wharf, perhaps; but it could be any wharf, any set of stairs, the river hums with activity. Ships are packed along the waterfront, their sails furled and their banners drooping; here a wherry, there a cutter, darts between them and the stairs. Some of the ships are headed for India and some for Madagascar. Some are going to the West Indies and others to Africa. Still others are headed for ports in the North American provinces: Quebec or Boston, New York or Baltimore.

Christopher believes his sister and her companion have boarded one of the ships headed for America. Once he overheard the two of them waxing rhapsodic over Mark Catesby's
Natural History,
talking in hushed tones about this land where squirrels flew and frogs whistled and birds the size of fingernails swarmed through forests so thick the sunlight failed to reach the ground. Catesby, Sarah Anne said, believed birds migrated sensibly: they flew to places where there was food.

Pacing his lonely house, miserable and broken, Christopher imagines the ship slowly moving down the Thames toward Dover and the Channel. There's a headwind and the tides are against them; the journey to Dover takes three days. But then the wind shifts and luck arrives. They fly past Portsmouth and Plymouth and Land's End, into the open ocean. The canvas billows out from the spars; the women lean against the railings, laughing.
That was the vision he had in mind when, a few years later, he sold both Burdem Place and the brewery and sailed for Delaware.

He never found Sarah Anne. But the crossing and the new world improved his spirits; he married a sturdy young Quaker woman and started a second family. Among the things he brought to his new life were two portraits—small, sepia-toned ovals, obviously copies of larger paintings—which surfaced much later near Baltimore. And if the faded notes found tucked in the back of Christopher's portrait are true, he made some modest contributions to the natural history of the mid-Atlantic states.

Sarah Anne's portrait bears only the date of her birth. Her letters were discovered in the mid-1850s, in the attic of a distant relation of the husband of Linnaeus's youngest daughter, Sophia. The British historian who found them was editing a collection of Linnaeus's correspondence, and from the handwriting and a few other hints, he deduced that “S.A. Billopp” was a woman, creating a minor furor among his colleagues. Later he was able to confirm his theory when he found Sarah Anne's journal at the Linnaean Society, jumbled among the collections left behind at Burdem Place. The last entry in Sarah Anne's journal was this, most likely copied there soon after she and Mrs. Pearce made their experiments with the swallows:

Collinson loaned me one of his books
—An Essay towards the probable Solution of this Question, Whence come the Stork, etc; or Where those birds do probably make their Recess, etc.
(London, 1703)
—
with this passage marked for my amusement:

“
Our migratory birds retire to the moon. They are about two months in retiring thither, and after they are arrived above the lower regions of the air into the thin aether, they will have no occasion for food, as it will not be apt to prey upon the spirits as our lower air. Even on our
earth, bears will live upon their fat all the winter; and hence these birds, being very succulent and sanguine, may have their provisions laid up in their bodies for the voyage; or perhaps they are thrown into a state of somnolency by the motion arising from the mutual attraction of the earth and moon.
”

He meant to be kind, I know he did. I cannot bear this situation any longer. Catherine and I are meeting in town to discuss the experiment she's proposed.

Selling the house was remarkably easy. Zaga didn't tell her stepchildren what she was doing, and she didn't consult Joel's lawyer or his accountant. A few months after Joel's funeral, she sold the house for much less than her real-estate agent advised. Once she had a closing date she sold most of the furniture as well. She'd chosen every piece of it herself, except for the family heirlooms; she'd decorated each of the rooms and designed the kitchen in which she'd cooked the meals that had stunned Joel's friends but never truly made them like her. Joel had built the house for her, and she knew he'd assumed she would stay there. But in his absence the silent rooms seemed intolerable.

At night her dreams wound through blizzards and mountains she couldn't recognize. During the day she cleared out the house alone. Her stepchildren were nearby—Alicia lived in Meadowbrook and Rob in downtown Philadelphia—but they had hardly spoken to her since their father's death and she knew they wouldn't have offered to help even if they'd known about the sale. Vans came for the large pieces and men from the art museum crated the paintings Joel had bequeathed to them; room by room Zaga cleaned and wrapped and boxed. On the Wednesday evening before her forty-fourth birthday, she tackled Joel's walk-in closet. In the back, behind the overcoats, she found a carton of souvenirs from their trip to Chile in 1971.

A vicuna shawl, soft and light, bought in Santiago; two knitted ski caps Rob and Alicia had worn; a brochure showing the yellow hotel dwarfed by the mountains behind it. There were snapshots, which she vaguely remembered taking, of Joel and the children posed on the ski slopes in gaily colored outfits. And there was one picture of herself, which she'd never seen before, looking very young and miserable in the hotel lounge.

“For your baby,” Dr. Sepulveda had said, on the snowy day when he'd captured her. A lifetime ago, and yet she remembered this perfectly clearly. “Someday you can show this to your child and tell him—or her, maybe you will have a little daughter?—how he was with you even here.”

The envelope folded around the picture was addressed to Zaga in a spiky, European hand that could only have been Dr. Sepulveda's. She had never seen it; Joel must have intercepted it and then hidden the photo to spare her. If a letter had come with the photo it was lost.

On her first day in the Andes, the liquid and brilliant sky had made Zaga wildly euphoric. The peaks surrounding the Hotel Portillo were clean and white. The frozen lake gleamed like an eye below her room, and the top of Mt. Aconcagua rose in the distance like a moon. The slopes were dotted with skiers dressed in pink and green and blue, and although she couldn't ski and was afraid of heights and had never been athletic, the thin air made her feel at first that she could do anything.

The headache, the stiff neck, the burning cheeks and icy fingers came on the second day. When she tried to rise from her bed she threw up, and by mid-morning, when the children came in, she was as sick as she'd ever been.

They stood in the doorway, Rob and Alicia: Joel's children, not hers, red-cheeked and insubordinate and already dressed in their ski clothes. Joel had told them that they were not to go
out alone until he'd had time to show them around. He was forty-two and panted each time he moved quickly. His children breathed easily and looked at Zaga with interest but no sympathy.

“Zaga's sick,” Joel said, and Alicia said, “No kidding,” and moved closer to the bed. Although she was only fourteen, she was three inches taller than Zaga and weighed thirty pounds more. There were long streaks bleached into her hair, from the hours she'd spent beside the pool, and her figure was so flamboyant that she made Zaga feel like a twig.

“You can't come skiing?” Rob asked Joel. He was twelve, Alicia's height already, and so strong that Joel had given up wrestling with him.

“Your stepmother's sick,” Joel repeated. “No one's going anywhere until we get her fixed up.”

Rob and Alicia exchanged a look. “We'll just go downstairs then,” Alicia said. “Have some breakfast. Okay?”

Zaga leaned over and threw up again, diverting Joel's attention. The children moved out of the doorway but not, Zaga learned later, out of earshot. And so when Joel, holding Zaga's head over the wastebasket, said “Do you think it's morning sickness?” Alicia apparently heard every syllable.

All day Zaga lay in bed, dizzy and nauseated and only—vaguely aware of Joel's comings and goings and of the scene Rob and Alicia made when Joel found them. They'd stormed off to the slopes without Joel and returned unrepentant, hours later. In the lounge, where Joel finally caught up with them, they had said the idea of a baby disgusted them.

“It's
so
gross,” Alicia had said. Rob, ever practical, had apparently said only, “Where's it going to sleep?”

Joel imitated Alicia's disgusted squeal and Rob's nervous rumble as he described the scene to Zaga. “They'll come around,” he said. “It's natural for them to feel this way—now they have proof that we sleep together.”

Zaga had trouble smiling back at him, and by the time the hotel doctor arrived she was very weak.

“Dr. Sepulveda,” he said. His face was lean and tanned and his hair fell back in a smooth black wave. He leaned over and rested his hand on her forehead. “You are feeling poorly?”

His short white jacket buttoned to one side and was starched and crisp. “Can you tell me your symptoms?” Lightly accented English, perfectly correct. Because Zaga couldn't speak, Joel told the doctor about the dizziness, the vomiting, the headache that spiked down the back of Zaga's neck and pierced her eyes.

“Yes?” Dr. Sepulveda said. He took her pulse and her temperature, looked in her throat and listened to her chest. Joel told him that Zaga was three months pregnant, and Dr. Sepulveda nodded and ran his fingers gently over her belly.

“You have
soroche,
” he told her. Then he looked up at Joel and repeated the word. “
Soroche.
Altitude sickness. That's all.”

“That's it?” Joel said. “No virus? There's nothing wrong with the baby?”

“The baby has nothing to do with this. She has all the classic symptoms.”

He gave her two injections and then he left. An hour later she stopped throwing up; he returned the next morning and gave her two more shots and by nightfall she was almost well. The next day she dressed herself, after Joel and Alicia and Rob had gone out for the day. Then she began waiting for her time in Portillo to end.

Zaga knew she hadn't gotten what the house was worth, but at the closing, even the amount left after the broker's commission still took her breath away. She moved into a furnished apartment while she decided what to do. For nineteen years Joel had fussed about his health, but he'd never really been sick and she'd made no plans for a life without him.

He meant to retire young, he'd told her, during a quiet moment stolen from his sixtieth birthday party. They could travel again. Not the sort of family vacations they'd had for years, to Florida, Mexico, Maine—but a real trip, just the two of them. He didn't say, “We could go back to Portillo,” but she knew it was on his mind. She'd thought about that: Portillo again, the way it was meant to be. Six days later a weak spot on the wall of his aorta had opened like a window.

Afterwards, when she'd woken each morning and found the undisturbed blankets beside her, his absence had seemed impossible. At dusk she'd strained her ears for the sound of his car pulling into the crescent driveway, and sometimes she'd called out his name in the empty rooms. But her first move eased her grief unexpectedly, and her second relieved her even more. Downtown, near the art museum, she found a lovely old building that had just been converted to condominiums. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, overlooking the Schuylkill River: high ceilings, beautiful moldings, smooth oak floors. It cost so much less than the Merion house that she felt virtuous and thrifty.

Morning coffee in the sunny kitchen; a quiet browse through the papers and then a shower and some shopping or a walk. No meals to make, no garden to weed or guest room to rearrange. No guests. For nineteen years she had entertained Joel's friends and business associates; she had been famous for her parties and Joel had been proud of her success. Their closest moments had been spent on the sofa, going over menus and guest lists or rehashing the high points of a party just past, and she had never told him she knew that his friends still compared her unfavorably with his first wife.

Now she spent days alone in her new place and felt no desire to call anyone. She walked to Rittenhouse Square. She haunted the antique shops on Spruce and Lombard and then spent hours moving knicknacks here and pillows there. Silence, idleness,
solitude. Where was Joel in all of this? Sometimes she walked the few blocks to the art museum and gazed at the statues or strolled through the hall in which the collection of Joel's grandfather's paintings hung.

Joel had taken her here on their fourth or fifth date, but he hadn't said a word about his family. He had let her admire the paintings and read the polished plaque in the front of the room. “Any relation?” she remembered asking, when she saw the identical last names—thinking of course not, or at most someone distant; laughing, joking. “My grandfather,” he said, and only then had she realized how surely she was in over her head. She thought how her grandmothers might have done laundry for his family, and she dreaded what Joel might think of her father, who shed his clothes after work in the basement and then showered in a grimy stall, washing off layers of dust and mortar before entering the scrubbed and parsimonious upper floors.

But Joel had already told her he loved her by then. She was gentle, he said. And so flexible—she was as happy lying around in his old pajamas, eating muffins and reading the papers, as she was when he took her out to fancy nightclubs. She sang while she cooked. The rich, complicated meals she fixed, based on her grandmothers' recipes, made his eyes moist with pleasure.

In a bar off Rittenhouse Square, he courted her with recollections of his first visit to Portillo. He told her how, during the summer after he finished college, he'd found a spot on a freighter headed for Chile. He'd made his way to Santiago; then up the Andes and to the hotel, where he'd joined some old acquaintances. Just a handful of skiers, he said, back in those good old days. She could recall doing a quick calculation in her head as he spoke, and realizing that she'd been five at the time.

Endless white snowfields, he'd said, his hands moving in the smoky air. Daring stunts; condors soaring over the rocks. And although he was middle-aged and filled with the hectic despair of the newly divorced, his stories made him seem young. He
was
young, he said. He had married right after his trip to Portillo and had two children quickly. His wife had dumped him so she could discover herself.

“She wants to paint,” he'd said bitterly, over a meal that Zaga made him: roast veal with fennel and garlic? Pork braised with prunes? “Watercolors,” he'd said. “So she's got the house in Meadowbrook, which I'm still paying the mortgage on, and the kids are with her, and I'm stuck here.”

‘Here' was an airy two-bedroom apartment with an enormous kitchen, nicer than anything Zaga could afford. She was nothing like his first wife, Joel said, and she took this as a compliment. She was drawn by his stability, his solidity, the radiant success with which he managed his outward life. She was touched by his inability to cook or clean and by his obvious need for her. He reached across his sofa after their first visit with her family, and he lifted a strand of her hair and said, “Did you get this from some beautiful Lithuanian grandmother?”

She took this to mean that he accepted her background, and her. He bought her new clothes and then, in the galleries where he purchased paintings, introduced her as if he were proud. Two years later, when the huge house in Merion was almost done, she was thrilled when he proposed a delayed honeymoon in Portillo. Joel had been shaped by the Andes, she thought; perhaps the mountain air could transform her into someone from his world.

Then Rob and Alicia, unexpectedly abandoned by Joel's ex-wife, sailed into their lives like a three-masted ship from a foreign country. Their arrival changed the focus of the trip but made it seem even more important. By the time Zaga discovered she was pregnant, the plans were too far along to change without disappointing everyone.

Those early days came back to her one afternoon, over a lunch of salmon and asparagus salad in the museum café. She realized that she had not seen any of Joel's paintings anywhere.
She went back to the hall where his grandfather's collection hung, thinking Joel's bequests might have been mingled in. Then she walked more carefully from room to to room. Nothing. The next day she called the museum and made an appointment to meet the woman in charge of new acquisitions. The woman had an office so softly blue and gray that Zaga felt as if she'd been set inside a cloud.

There were some small financial difficulties, the woman murmured. She crossed her long, narrow legs and regarded her excellent shoes. Of course the museum was enormously grateful for the bequest. But so few people, outside the art world, understood the expenses involved with such a gift: cataloging, cleaning, reframing, lighting—her voice drifted off and so did her gaze, leaving Zaga to fill the empty space.

“You have an endowment, surely?” Zaga said. Joel had taught her a good deal and his friends had taught her more.

“Of course,” the woman said. Her voice hovered between the purr she would have used with Joel and the bite she would have used on Zaga, had Zaga not been married to Joel. “But these are difficult times, and our budget is constantly being trimmed…”

“Would a donation be useful?” Zaga asked. She felt a thrill as she said that. Joel had always made the big donations; of course he had, the money was his. But now Joel was gone and the money was hers.