October 1949
It wasn’t the presence of dead, beautiful things that broke her; nor was it those glass eyes, pair after lightless pair. It wasn’t even the fact that her father would have worshipped this place, would have stood in the octagonal rotunda, hat pressed to heart, shy and devout as a pilgrim; she had only to close her eyes to see him there, sun—swirled with galaxies of dust—falling like snow through the domed ceiling’s oculus. No, what did it, knocked the breath from her body, were the labels, humble white rectangles in glass display cases, each offering its tiny, hard-won piece of truth: the common and binomial names of the bit of life next to it—iridescent beetle; dried fern; moth, fat bodied, wings decked with eyes—and the date and location of its finding.
It was October. In March, her father had suffered his first stroke. His neighbor, Gladys Polk, had found him lying on his side on the shore, his sketchbook ruined, his slack right cheek pressed into the spring thaw mud, and Edith had left her nursing job in Pittsburgh to move back into the little house in Connecticut, near Long Island Sound. He’d had the second stroke in June, more ravaging than the first. In mid-August, he had died, not peacefully. And yes, it was the end of suffering, the end of weakness, drooling, spoon feedings, and—so much worse than all the rest—his wild-eyed, fruitless clawing after words and memories, but, to her shock, the end of all this brought Edith nothing but intractable pain. She imagined she felt like a person struck by lightning. Worse than the grief was her shame that she couldn’t even be relieved for him, a state of affairs that didn’t last only because, eventually, nothing was worse than the grief. It became everything, every waking minute (if she could be said to be awake) of every day, an arid, tearless, terrible mourning.
She never left the house, slogging from room to room through the thick fog of quiet. Sometimes, it choked her, physically, the absolute lack of her father’s footsteps, his voice, although really the house was hardly quieter than during all the years they had lived in it, just the two of them. A slow-moving, deliberate, soft-spoken man with a hungry mind. A child who shadowed him, asking questions.
He had been a high school biology teacher, a good one, but she’d always known his heart wasn’t in the classroom. It was in the marshes and woods surrounding their house, in mosses and skeletons, nests and tracks, calls and songs. They could spend an hour watching dragonflies, the hovering and darting, the sudden exquisite hairpin turns, her father explaining in a near whisper how each of the four wings is controlled by separate muscles. He taught her how to use the net, the killing jar, how to spread and pin and label. Schmitt boxes with hinged lids were stacked in every room, meticulously organized.
Every bit of it felt holy, but it was the labeling she most cherished. She stayed still while he wrote, her breath held in a prayer that his hand would be steady, the tiny printing clean and clear. She recognized these moments for what they were: love, what else but love. Love in the painstaking handwriting. Love in his recitation of the Latin names and her solemn echoing of them, their own private call-and-response. Love, too, in walking through the woods, squatting side by side at a tidal pool. Love—oh, so much—in his teaching her how to put together a crow’s skeleton, the reverent naming of the parts, her fingers handling the precious, hollow bones.
One day in September, a month after she’d buried him, Edith failed for an hour to inflate her lungs properly, as if she’d used up all the air in the house, so she tore open the front door and reeled out into the daylight, heart banging, chest burning, thoughts unspooled. An hour’s walk along the shoreline—every stone and reed and bird track an affront, the sheen on the water brutal as a punch—and she knew without doubt that it was possible to die of grief.
Acting on pure instinct, she ran back to the house and cleaned it from top to bottom, a task that took a week. She organized and packed away her father’s papers without reading them, her father’s clothes without so much as pressing a shirt to her cheek. The refrigerator alone—ripe with rotting food—took hours. Scrubbing left her hands raw and cramped, her knees black and blue, but it reminded her that she was a body instead of just a ransacked heart and a flailing brain, and if she did not exactly want to live, she at least wanted to stay alive, to walk upright, keep the blood fanning its steady current through her veins. Not to be dead just yet was as far as her hope could reach. But it was something.
That night, Edith called Doris Cole, a nurse she knew who had taken a job at a hospital in Washington. Edith did not particularly want Washington or Doris, but all that mattered was getting away. She didn’t want a job, either, at least not immediately. She would sell her father’s house, her only inheritance, and everything in it. She would donate to her father’s school the Schmitt boxes with their carefully labeled specimens. If she could share rent with Doris and if she lived as frugally as she usually did, she calculated that her money could tide her over for at least six months. She imagined walking streets with names she’d never heard; she imagined anonymous edifices, monuments, milky stone and plate glass. No coppery water’s-edge smell, no cordgrass or cattails or cormorants. Despite her indifference to Doris, when Edith heard her familiar chirpy voice on the phone saying, yes, good gracious, come, affection for the woman seized her so that she could barely eke out a thank-you.
Once there, Edith avoided the Potomac as best she could, glad that the famous cherry trees wouldn’t tempt her, having relinquished their clouds of blossom to the Tidal Basin mud months earlier. Skirting the monuments, which struck her as forbidding, she immersed herself in art, something her father had never cared for, some days wandering distractedly through the galleries, catching mere color and shape with her peripheral vision, other days standing before a single painting for so long she seemed to enter it, the world around her dimming, the conversation blurring to hum. Although her father had never taken her to church, she felt most moved by the religious paintings: Mary’s deep blue robes and whisper-frail hands in Van Eyck’s Annunciation; the peacock perched like an angel on the stable roof, a kneeling man touching, with heartbreaking gentleness, the tiny foot of Christ in the Adoration of the Magi tondo.
But after two weeks, despite her better judgment, the Natural History building drew her irresistibly. Even so, she scrupulously kept to the unfamiliar. Stegosaurus skeleton like a giant puzzle. Lions and giraffes, looking startlingly alive, that Teddy Roosevelt had brought back from his African expedition. The great fossil whale, Basilosaurus, suspended from the ceiling in the Hall of Extinct Monsters.
And then, despite all her carefulness, to be undone by little white rectangles in glass cases.
When her knees buckled, he caught her. It was no cinematic swoon; she did not arch like a willow branch or rest lightly in his arms like a bouquet of lilies. She went down hard and sudden, and he hooked her under the armpits—so roughly it left bruises—just before she hit the floor. If she had had the capacity for anything but sorrow, she would have been mortified by the sounds she’d made, primitive and raw and racking, as if every pent-up sob from the last month had torn itself free from the center of her body. He half carried, half dragged her to a bench, and she turned toward him and shuddered against his chest, her fists gripping and ungripping the fabric of his shirt. His arms went around her as automatically as a mother’s, but he didn’t stroke or pat or press her to him. He simply held, until her weeping stammered, guttered, and went out, finally, all at once, like a flame; then, he let go.
She drew away, leaned backward against the bench, and laid the backs of her hands against her closed eyes. When she could speak, she meant to apologize, but what came out instead was, “What a way to begin,” a fact that would only mortify her later that evening and that she would chalk up to being shaken and confused. Joseph would always insist that she knew, somehow, on some gut level, and she would argue that, with all her vast inexperience, she was the last person to instinctively recognize love. Still, it was odd.
But there in the museum, Joseph didn’t point out the oddness or tell her not to think twice about falling into his arms like a sack of rocks. He handed her his handkerchief and said, “I think we should go see the Lincoln Memorial,” and maybe because she was too exhausted or too startled or maybe—as Joseph forever believed—it was because she acknowledged—without knowing why or how—the inevitability of them, she said, “Well, yes, all right. I haven’t seen it yet.”
In the cool, pale, columned space, with Lincoln watching over them, noble as God, but still touchingly human with his crooked tie and open coat, like a man resting for a moment on a park bench or in an armchair, she found her grief rearranging itself, moving to the edges of her mind enough for her to begin to speak, more calmly than she could have imagined possible even an hour ago. She talked about her father, his life and death, and Joseph listened.