he retreated out back, between the house and the river and behind the Repository, planting samples in oblong plots and noting every characteristic of the seedlings.
But all that was over now. He put the boot away and returned to bed. In Africa, his father had said, are a tribe of people who have no heads, but have mouths and eyes attached to their chests. Sleep eluded him yet again and his lists bobbed behind his lids. In Germantown and along the Wissahickon, people sent him socks and marmalade and then dreamed of this expedition. Vicarious travelers, sleeping while he could not and conjuring up a generic exotic land. Lavinia had friends like this, for whom Darwin’s Tierra del Fuego and Cook’s Tahiti had merged with Parry’s Igloolik and d’Urville’s Antarctica until a place arose in which ice cliffs coexisted with acres of pampas, through which Tongan savages chased ostriches chasing camels. Those people sent six candles encased in brown paper but couldn’t keep north and south straight in their minds, placing penguins and Esquimaux in the same confused ice and pleating a continent into a frozen sea.
None of them grasped the drudgery of such a voyage. Not just the planning and buying and stowing but the months sitting idly on the decks of a ship, the long stretches when nothing happened except that one’s ties to home were imperceptibly dissolved and one became a stranger to one’s life. No one knew how frightened he was, or the mental lists he made of all he dreaded. Ridiculous things, ignoble things. His bunk would be too short or too narrow or damp or drafty; his comrades would snore or twitch or moan; he’d be overcome by longing for women; he’d never sleep. Sleepless, he would grow short-tempered; short-tempered, he’d say something wrong to Zeke and make an enemy. The coarse food would upset his stomach and dyspepsia would upset his brain; what if he forgot how to think? His hands would be cold, they were always cold; he’d slice a specimen or stab himself. His joints would ache, his back would hurt, they’d run out of coffee, on which he relied; a storm would snap the masts in half, a whale would ram the ship. They’d get lost, they’d find nothing, they’d fail.
Giving up on sleep, he lit a candle and reached for his journal. On his earlier voyage this had been his constant, sometimes sole, companion, but tonight it let him down. Pen, inkpot, words on white paper; an inkstain on his thumb. He couldn’t convey clearly the scene at the wharf. He gazed at his first messy attempt and then added:
Why is it so difficult simply to capture what was there? That old problem of trying to show things both sequentially, and simultaneously. If I drew that scene I’d show everything happening all at once, everyone present and every place visible, from the bottom of the river to the clouds. But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everything’s shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I could show it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it. As if I weren’t there. The river as the fish saw it, the ship as it looked to the men, Zeke as he looked to young Ned Kynd, the Toxies as they appeared to Captain Tyler: all those things, at once. So someone else might experience those hours for himself.
Irritated, he put down his pen. Even here, he thought, even in these pages meant only for his own eyes, he wasn’t honest. He’d left out the first mate’s self-important strut; the appalling sight of his own hands, which amid the onions had suddenly looked just like his father’s; and the sense that they were all posturing in front of each other, perhaps for the benefit of the green-coated boys. He rubbed at the stain on his thumb. Nor was it true, or not wholly true, that he wanted to paint the scene as if he weren’t in it. He did want his own point of view to count, even as he also wanted to be invisible. Such a liar, he thought. Although chiefly he lied to himself. He’d wrapped himself in a cloud. Beyond it the world pulsed and streamed but he was cut off; people loved and sorrowed without him. When had that cloud arrived?
STILL THEY WEREN’T ready to leave. Captain Tyler banished Zeke and Erasmus the next afternoon, while the men tore out and then rebuilt the bulkheads in the hold. The sledges hadn’t fit after all, in any configuration; the wood took more space than planned and the measurements on Zeke’s sketch had turned out to be wrong. A clock ticked in Erasmus’s chest: two days, two days, two days. They could leave no later, they were already late, the season for arctic navigation was short and the newspaper reporters and expedition’s donors were ready to send them off on Thursday. Did he have enough socks? The right charts, enough pencils?
He was wild with anxiety and stuck here at home, with Zeke and Lavinia and her friend Alexandra Copeland. They were in the front parlor, all four of them working. Maps and charts and drawings spread everywhere. Without explanation he rose and ran to the Repository, which he ransacked in search of Scoresby’s work on the polar ice.
He rolled the ladder along the shelves; the book was gone, yet he couldn’t remember packing it. And couldn’t bear the thought of explaining why it had suddenly seemed so crucial. The wry face Alexandra had made as he bolted embarrassed him. Yet her presence had been his idea—Lavinia couldn’t stay alone, with only the servants for company, and she hadn’t wanted to join Linnaeus or Humboldt. “A companion,” he’d proposed. “Who’d like to share our home, in return for room and board and a modest payment.”
Lavinia had chosen Alexandra, who’d accepted a pair of rooms on the second floor. When Linnaeus and Humboldt, unexpectedly generous, offered work hand-coloring the engravings they were printing for an entomology book, Alexandra had accepted that as well and made herself at home. Now there was no escaping her; sometimes she even followed him into the Repository. But she was good for Lavinia, he reminded himself. The way she pulled Lavinia into her work was wonderful. He took a breath and headed back.
At the parlor doorway he paused to watch his sister, who was frowning with concentration and shifting her gaze from the original painting pinned above her desk to the engraved copy she was coloring with Alexandra’s help. Caught up, he thought, as she’d never been helping him with his seeds. The plates showed four tropical beetles. The sun lit the brushes, the water jars, and the ruffled pinafores so dabbed with gold and rust and blue that the beetles seemed to have leapt from the plates to the women’s legs. “Has anyone seen my copy of Scoresby?” he asked.
“I’ve been reading it upstairs,” Alexandra said. She touched her brush to the paper, leaving three tiny golden dots. “I didn’t know you needed it.”
Erasmus, admitting his foolishness, said, “It’s not as if I have room for one more thing.”
“I’ll get it.” As Alexandra put down her brush and moved away, Lavinia called for tea and leaned over the table on which Erasmus and Zeke had spread their papers: rather too close to Zeke’s shoulder, Erasmus thought. As if she were pulled by the fragrance of Zeke’s skin; as if she did not have the sense to resist the almost farcical beauty that made women stare at Zeke on the street and men hum with envy. It pained him to watch her betrayed by her body’s yearnings. To him she was lovely, with her wide hazel eyes and rounded chin, now charmingly smudged with blue. Yet he suspected that to the gaze of others—perhaps even Zeke—she was merely pleasant-looking. She seemed to know that herself, as she knew that among her monthly meetings of earnest young women, gathered to discuss Goethe and Swedenborg and Fourier, she was valued more for her sensibility than for her brilliance. One by one those women had married and disappeared from the meetings, leaving behind only Alexandra and her. Once, when he’d been voicing his concerns about Zeke, she’d said, “I know I love him more than he loves me. It doesn’t bother me.” Then had flushed so darkly he’d wanted to pick her up and pace her around the floor, as he’d done when she was an infant and needed comforting.
As Lavinia traced their planned route with her index finger, past Devon and Cornwallis and Beechey Island, where Franklin’s winter camp had been found, then south along Boothia Peninsula and King William Land, Erasmus thought how maps showed only two things, land and water. To someone who hadn’t traveled, their journey over that arctic map might seem a simple
