Ship Fever (10 page)

“How are you doing?” he asked her. “How do you like your new place?” As if her efforts to mother him had worked, as if they were actually close. He told her how his job was going and then said he had a friend who very much wanted to meet her. His name was Nicholas Bennett; Joel had known him and had thought the world of him. Nicholas had something he wanted to discuss with Zaga. Would she see him? She said she would.

A week later she met Nicholas for lunch in the museum cafe. He was tall, as he'd said over the phone, and lean and dark-haired; he was younger than Zaga, with interesting planes between his cheekbones and the crisp line of his jaw. When she spotted him at his table in the corner he rose to greet her.

Over a salad of ripe pears and Roquefurt he offered his condolences and told her how much he'd admired Joel. For an hour she waited to learn why he'd wanted to speak to her, but instead the conversation eddied pleasantly around Joel and common acquaintances and the situation at the museum. “You were right,” Nicholas told her. “To give them the funds. Joel would have wanted those paintings hung properly.” Zaga had two glasses of Chardonnay and when Nicholas asked her about
her family she told him more or less the story she'd told Dr. Sepulveda years ago.

Nicholas said, “Really?” and smiled at her. His teeth were white and charmingly uneven. By the time he finally, casually, mentioned what must have been his real purpose in seeing her, she had entirely lost sight of the fact that he wanted something. The light coming in through the high, arched windows was gentle and everyone else had left the café. Nicholas was absurdly young, he was barely thirty. She was not so much attracted to him as she was warmed and flattered by the image of her younger self she saw in his eyes. He explained how he'd recently purchased the rights to an excellent new drug.

He was starting up a company to market it, he said. A few people, some savvy investors, would be helping him get started; once the drug hit the market and the stock went public the profits would be staggering. As she listened to him, she thought how she still had too much money sitting in dead investments instead of building something new and vital. By the time the first tired museum-goers had wandered in for afternoon tea, she had convinced Nicholas to let her invest with him.

“I couldn't let you do that,” he said at first. “There's some risk involved, I'm not sure Joel would have approved.” He was bashful, reluctant; he dragged his feet and nearly blushed.

“Joel's dead,” she said. “It's my decision.” Even then, she may have understood what was bound to happen.

He brushed her hand and said, “I wouldn't feel right.”

“Please,” she said. “I insist.”

That night, alone in her clean bed, she dreamed of Dr. Sepulveda. In his white shirt and silk scarf and elegant pleated pants he led her outside the hotel and around the lake, where they met three mules loaded with blankets and food and cooking utensils and hardware. There was a mare with a bell around her neck, but she was not for riding: she was the
madrina,
Dr. Sepulveda explained, the steady mother who led the mules. Dr. Sepulveda
wrapped Zaga's feet in enormous boots and then led her to a pass between the peaks.

The two of them stepped quietly in the wake of the surefooted mules, the mules followed the horse with the bell, the horse followed a silent man whom Dr. Sepulveda did not introduce. Up they went, and up and up, moving effortlessly through the lightly falling snow. They crossed a snowfield interrupted by columns of ice, and they passed a horse frozen head down in one of those columns with its hind legs stretched stiffly skyward. From behind the column, dressed in the hide of an animal, Jemmy Button appeared. Three condors dotted the sky between him and Aconcagua.

The horse represented her inheritance, Zaga decided when she woke. Frozen, useless; she had done the right thing in freeing it up. Dr. Sepulveda had told her a story of how Darwin had seen such a horse and described it in his journal, but she could no longer remember how the horse had come to its fate.

Six months later, when Nicholas's company went under, Zaga was left with so little that she could no longer afford the maintenance fees for her lovely condominium. “I was investing the money for the children,” she told her siblings. “I wanted them to have more for college.” If they knew she was lying, they didn't call her on it. By then they were treating her as carefully as if she were sick.

She rented her condominium to a pair of brokers she could hardly tell apart, and she moved into the first floor of a three-story row house within walking distance of two of her brothers and not far from the house where she'd grown up. Marianna, after her initial rage, found the apartment for Zaga; she also found Zaga a job as a receptionist for a pediatric dental practice.

The waiting room there was always full and Zaga learned that she was good with children—much better than she would
have thought after her experiences with Rob and Alicia. The children called her by her first name and drew stars on her hands with felt-tipped pens. She hung the drawings they made for her on the wall above her desk.

At night, when the office emptied and the dentists drove off in their new cars toward the area she'd abandoned after nineteen years, she walked home through the crowded neighborhood. Her family began, slowly and tentatively, to invite her to Sunday dinners and birthday parties and confirmations and school plays. When they took her aside, one by one, they all asked the same questions.

“How did you lose Joel's money?” they asked. “What could you have been thinking?”

She could not explain that it had nothing to do with thought. It was the buzz, the rush, the antic joy of flinging her old life to the winds. She was abashed by her final loss, adrift and upset—and yet there was also the fact that she had not felt so content in years. Every trace of the life Joel had given her was gone, and she had nothing left to live on but her wits. She knew that what her family really longed to know was why she couldn't have given the money to them.
I would have,
she wanted to say.
If I'd known what I was doing.
But even their resentment could not shatter her sense of relief. Even her stepchildren couldn't make her regret what she had done.

Rob and Alicia came to visit her four months after she'd moved into her new apartment. It took them that long to agree on a day when they could both find the time, and when they arrived they were hot and exasperated and two hours late.

“We got
so
lost,” Alicia said as she flounced in the door. “Unbelievable, these streets—how does anyone find their way around here?”

She was thirty-four, still flamboyant, now completely blond. She set down her purse and walked through Zaga's rooms, which
ran in a row from front to back: the kitchen just inside the door, then the living room, then the bedroom. The bathroom was off the kitchen and had no shower, only an old, deep tub with a rubber nozzle that Zaga used for rinsing her hair. Alicia stared at everything in the three small rooms—weighing, Zaga thought. Judging, as she always had—and said, “Do you really have to live like this?”

“Alicia,” Rob said, but Alicia would not be stopped. She wandered across the linoleum, from the old gas stove to the window propped open by a book, and when she looked at Zaga her puzzlement seemed genuine. “What happened to all the good furniture?” she said. “What happened to everything?”

Zaga explained that she'd sold much of it and left the rest in the condominium for her tenants, but she could tell that Alicia did not believe her.

“Are you living like this just to make us feel guilty?” Alicia said.

“
Alicia,
” Rob said again. But then he looked around glumly and added, “You ought to sue that bastard.”

Zaga refrained from reminding him that he had sent Nicholas her way, and that, after she'd given Nicholas the first check, Rob had called her and had seemed pleased and horrified in approximately equal parts. Now he said, “I wish you hadn't trusted him so much.”

He had, Zaga knew, lost a fair amount with Nicholas himself. But in his eyes she read his conviction that she had lost everything. In his townhouse he hid his TV and VCR in a nineteenth-century French armoire that had passed to him through more generations of family than she could bear to remember. He was searching the room for some trace of his father and failing to find the smallest thing, and she couldn't explain to him that the objects she'd shed were no more meaningful than the donations the British missionary society had sent to Tierra del
Fuego with Jemmy Button and his companions. Still, occasionally, she thought about the equation Dr. Sepulveda had seemed to suggest between Jemmy's life and her own.

Beaver hats and white tablecloths and soup tureens and pants; a complete set of dishes painted with flowers and little trays for tea. How FitzRoy's crew had laughed when they'd opened those crates on Tierra del Fuego! And how strange it had been, Dr. Sepulveda said, when the boat's crew returned to visit Jemmy the first time. The dishes were smashed, the vegetable garden trodden into the mud. The fancy clothes had been torn into strips that waved gaily from heads and wrists.

“I heard you're working,” Alicia said.

“For some dentists,” Zaga replied. She offered nothing more. She had planned to bring them with her to a family barbecue, but after a few more minutes of awkward conversation they exchanged a glance and then made excuses and left. She changed her clothes and went to Marianna's by herself.

“They got to my place late,” she explained to Marianna. “Then they had to leave early.”

Marianna was holding Timothy's youngest daughter in her lap, watching the rest of the children spread mustard on sausages and potato salad on paper plates. “Why'd they bother coming at all?” she asked.

Zaga remembered how miserable she had been in Portillo, caught in the hot beam of Rob's and Alicia's eyes. What had she expected to find in that place? Ease and elegance, manners and wisdom, a past she could share with her husband. She had never considered how isolated she would be. But Joel had been out on the slopes with his children, and when he returned he alternated between describing their thrilling runs and pressing Zaga to come outside. She didn't feel well enough, she'd said. Whenever she'd alluded to her pregnancy, Rob and Alicia had looked at the walls, the floor, the snow.

“It's good that you're pregnant,” Dr. Sepulveda had said. Was that the afternoon he took the picture, or another, earlier one when she asked about his wife and he said quietly that she was dead? In the lounge, when she'd been driven to ask him her last question and he'd responded with one of his own, she'd refused to answer him. She'd risen and said goodbye and left the hotel without seeing him again. But before that, he had said, “A baby with Joel's money and your looks and character, born into Joel's world—a child like that might do anything.”

But she had lost the baby. Afterwards, she had wanted to move; her grief had been outrageous, excessive, and she'd told Joel that the sight of the house where she'd lost their child was unbearable to her. She had been hysterical. She had blamed the long flights, the altitude of Portillo, the injections with which Dr. Sepulveda had cured her of
soroche.
She had blamed Joel for the pleasure he'd taken in skiing and Rob and Alicia for the way they'd stared at her barely thickened waist.

She had written to Dr. Sepulveda, remembering his pointed tales but forgetting the image of her he held captive in his camera.
What did you mean by those stories
? she'd scrawled.
What am I supposed to do?

He never answered, or she believed that he'd never answered. For years she'd imagined him baffled by her failure to understand that the link between her and Jemmy Button was specious, only a surface resemblance: Jemmy had had no choice. But she had always seen that, as clearly as she could see her lost child in the toddler Marianna held in her lap. She had simply not known what to do with the knowledge.

Marianna, still annoyed about Rob and Alicia's absence, said, “Why do you even bother with them when they treat you like this?”

Zaga watched her youngest brother put together a kite for his son and then struggle to launch it. “I don't know,” she
answered. “Joel would have wanted me to.” It seemed impossible to admit that all the years she'd spent with them had not forged a connection strong enough to survive Joel's death.

Joel had led her through their house after she lost their baby, pointing out the peach curtains she'd hung in Alicia's room, the built-in desk she'd had made for Rob. The children's mother was staying in France, he said. She wasn't coming back. Then he asked her if she couldn't be happy raising Rob and Alicia as their own. “It's too late,” he said. “I'm too old to go through this again.” Tired and heartsore she'd bent to his wish, the way one of her grandmothers might have bent to life in her new country. No one had consulted Alicia or Rob.

The kite had a body of lightweight blue nylon and a red tail that spun like a pinwheel. “Bird,” said the baby in Marianna's lap, pointing at the kite as it rose. A string of children trailed Zaga's brother, his two grade-schoolers mingled with the toddlers produced by her oldest brother's son. It seemed impossible that she should have a brother who was a grandfather. Impossible that everyone in this family had children but her and that all of them could grow up without her help.

There was no breeze that night. The sea, lit by the full moon, shone smooth and silver; the Southern Cross turned above the ship and below it squid slipped invisibly through the depths. Between sky and sea lay Alec Carrière, sprawled like a starfish in his hammock and imagining how the treasures packed in the holds were about to change his life.

Beetles and butterflies and spiders and moths, bird skins and snakeskins and bones: these were what he'd collected along the Amazon and then guarded against the omnivorous ants. Mr. Barton, his agent back home in Philadelphia, had sold Alec's first specimens for a good price, and Alec expected this shipment would finally set him free to pursue his studies in peace. He was a few months shy of twenty-one, and dreaming a young man's dreams.

Until he'd sailed for the Amazon, he'd worked in a shop making leather valises, not far from the tavern his parents ran in Germantown. But like the young English collector he'd met in Barra, near the flooded islands of the Rio Negro, he'd been saved from a squalid and unremarkable life by a few kind men and a book. With his uncle's ornithology text in his pocket he'd wandered the banks of the Wissahickon, teaching himself the
names of birds and imagining wild places. His brother Frank had taught him to shoot, and behind the outhouse he'd prepared his first clumsy skins and mounts. Even then he'd known that other naturalists had taught themselves their trade. Others had risen from just such humble beginnings, and he'd seen nothing extraordinary in his ambitions.

Once every few months he went into downtown Philadelphia to visit the Academy of Natural Sciences, where a few of the members corrected his malformed preparations and taught him what they could. His interests spread from birds to other species. Titian Peale showed him an excellent way to pin and display his moths. Two of the Wells brothers, Copernicus and Erasmus, taught him how to prepare skeletons. All this gave Alec great pleasure but annoyed his father; by the time he was sixteen his father was pressing him to abandon this childish hobby and take his work more seriously. He almost gave up. But in 1850 Peale made him a gift of William Edwards's small and wonderful book,
A Voyage Up the River Amazon.

When Alec read it a door seemed to open. What was there to keep him in Philadelphia? Edwards had been only a few years older than him when he'd set off; Alec was strong and healthy and his three brothers could look after their parents. And he had a most earnest desire to behold the luxuriant life of the tropics. Mr. Barton, a natural history auctioneer whom he'd met at the Academy, assured him that all of northern Brazil was little known, that Edwards had brought back only small collections, and that Alec might easily pay the expenses of his trip by gathering birds, small mammals, land-shells, and all the orders of insects. Among the wealthy, Mr. Barton said, glass cases filled with tropical creatures arranged by genus or poised in tableaux were wildly fashionable. And so few specimens had reached North America from the Amazon that high prices were guaranteed.

With the brashness of youth Alec wrote to Mr. Edwards
himself, who provided him with letters of introduction to several traders. Then he packed his things and used his small savings to book passage on a merchant ship. His father was angry with him; his mother wept. But he saw miracles.

The mouth of the Amazon was like a sea, and could be distinguished from the ocean only by its extraordinary deep-yellow color. The Rio Negro was as black as the river Styx. Jet-black jaguars and massive turtle's nests, agoutis and giant serpents; below Baião, a crowd of Indians gathered, laughing and curious, to watch Alec skinning parrots. Driven to gather as much as he could, Alec shrugged off the heat and the poor food and the fevers that plagued him intermittently. His persistence was rewarded in Barra, where Alfred Wallace greeted him like a brother.

Wallace wasn't famous then. Except for the light that burned in him and lit a similar flame in Alec, he was just another collector, exceedingly tall, with a thatch of yellow hair and clothes as shabby as Alec's own. On the day they met the sun dropped like a shot bird, and in the sudden tropical night they compared skins and guns.

Alec was lonely, and glad for the company after months among Indians whose language he couldn't speak. He talked too much the night he met Wallace, he knew he did. But although Wallace was a decade older, wracked with fever and ready to leave for home after three hard years in the jungle, he never laughed at Alec's chatter or made him feel less than an equal. He showed Alec the blow-pipes his Indian hunters used, and the bitter vegetable oil with which he coated the ropes of his specimen-drying racks. Alec showed him the glorious umbrella-birds he'd captured in the flooded forest of the
igapo.
Standing by the side of this long, lean, wasted man, Alec took pleasure in his own youth and compact sturdiness; how his hands, next to Wallace's fine bones, were all broad palm and spatulate thumb. Around them the toucans yelped and the parrots chattered and
the palms went
swish, swish
in the evening breeze. They ate fish and farinha and turtle. Later they traded stories about the books that had saved them. When Alec learned that Wallace was no gentleman scientist but was, like Alec himself, solely dependent on selling specimens to pay his way, he felt an immediate bond.

After they parted, Alec collected with even more fervor. Now the results lay snugly packed below him, and as the ship rocked sluggishly he was imagining how he'd drive up to his parents' tavern, dressed in a new suit and laden with more money than they'd ever seen.

They would be thrilled, Alec thought. As would everyone who'd helped him. How surprised the Wells brothers and Titian Peale would be, when Alec made them gifts of the especially amazing butterflies he'd set aside for them! And then the hush inside the Academy, as he lectured to the men who'd taught him. Holding up a perfect skin from one of those rare umbrella-birds, he would point out the glossy blue tufts on the crest-feathers. “When the bird is resting,” he would say, “the raised crest forms a deep blue dome, which completely hides the head and beak.” The men would give him a desk, Alec thought, where he might catalogue his treasures. And he might marry, were he to meet someone appealing.

He was happy; he was half-asleep. Then the cabin-boy ran up to Alec's hammock and shook him and said, “Mr. Carrière! The captain says to come immediately. There seems to be a fire!” And Alec, still dreaming of his wonderful future, stumbled from his cabin with only the most recent volume of his journal and the clothes on his back.

The scene on deck was pure chaos: smoke rising through the masts, a sheet of flame shooting up from the galley, crew members hurling water along the deck and onto the sails. Captain Longwood was shouting orders and several of the men were unlashing the boats and preparing to lower them, while others hurriedly gathered casks of water and biscuit.

“What's happened?” Alec shouted. “What can I do?”

“Save what you can!” Captain Longwood shouted back. “I fear we may lose the ship.”

Even as Alec headed for the forecastle, he could not believe this was happening. Some months after his meeting with Wallace, he'd heard that the brig carrying Wallace home had burned to the waterline, destroying all his collections and casting him adrift on the sea for several weeks. This news had filled Alec with genuine horror. Yet at the same time he'd also felt a small, mean sense of superstitious relief: such a disaster, having happened once, could surely never happen again. Although Alec's own collections were not insured, since he could not afford the fees, Wallace's bad luck had seemed to guarantee Alec's safe passage home.

All this passed through his mind as he fought his way forward. Then every thought but panic was driven away when he saw the plight of his animals.

In the holds below him was a fortune in things dead and preserved—but in the forecastle was the living menagerie he was also bringing home. His sweet sloth, no bigger than a rabbit, with his charming habit of hanging upside down on the back of a chair and his melancholy expression; the parrots and parakeets and the forest-dog; the toucans; the monkeys: already they were calling through the smoke. And before Alec could reach them a spout of flame rose like a wall through the hatchway in front of him.

Wallace's ship, he knew, had caught fire through the spontaneous combustion of kegs of balsam-capivi, but their own fire had no such exotic cause. The cook had knocked over a lamp, which had ignited a keg of grease, which had dripped, burning, through the floorboards and set fire to the cargo of rubber and lumber just below. From there the fire licked forward, downward, upward; and when the hatches were opened the draft made the fire jump and sing.

Alec was driven back to the quarterdeck and stood there, helpless, while the men prepared the boats and hurriedly gathered spars and oars and sails. The captain flew by, still shouting, his hands bristling with charts and compasses; they were five days out of Para and no longer within sight of land. The skylight exploded with a great roar, and the burning berths crackled below them. Terrible noises rose from the bow where the animals were confined. His lovely purple-breasted cotingas, roasting; the handsome pair of big-bellied monkeys, which the Brazilians called
barraidugo
—his entire life, until that moment, had contained nothing so distressing.

For a moment he thought the birds at least might be saved. One of the men dropped from his perch on the cross-trees and smashed in the forecastle door with an axe. Then the toucans, kept unconfined, flew out, and also a flock of parakeets. The cloud of birds seemed to head for the cloud of smoke but then swooped low and settled on the bowsprit, as far from the fire as they could get. They were joined by the sloth, who had magically crept up the ironwork. But meanwhile the mate was shouting, “Go!
Now
!” and hands were pushing against Alec's back, men were tumbling over the stern and he tumbled with them, falling into one of the leaky boats. Someone thrust a dipper into his hands and he began to bale, while men he had never noticed before barked and struggled to fit the oars in the oarlocks. The man pressed against his knee dripped blood from a scratch on his cheek and gagged, as did Alec, on the smoke from the rubber seething in the wreck.

The shrouds and sails burned briskly; then the masts began to catch. Soon enough the main-mast toppled and the moon-lit water filled with charred remains.

“Please,” Alec begged Captain Longwood. “Can we row toward the bow? Can we try to save some of them?” His animals were lined along the last scrap of solid wood.

Captain Longwood hesitated, but then agreed. “Two minutes,” he said sternly.

But when they approached the bow Alec found that the creatures would not abandon their perches. As the flames advanced, the birds seemed to dive into them, disappearing in sudden brilliant puffs that hung like stars. Only the sloth escaped; and he only because the section of bowsprit from which he hung upside down burned at the base and plopped into the water. When Alec picked him up, his feet still clung to the wood.

They were three days drifting in their leaky boats before they saw a sail in the distance: the
Alexandra,
headed for New Orleans. A fortunate rescue. Alec was grateful. But a year and a half of hard work, on which his whole future depended, was destroyed; as was the sloth, who died on the voyage. Alec reached home in one piece, but with hardly more to his name than when he'd left. As a souvenir he was given nightmares, in which the smell of singeing feathers filled his nostrils and his sloth curled smaller and smaller, and closed his eyes, and died again and again.

In November, recuperating at his uncle's house as his father would not have him at his, Alec learned that his acquaintance from Barra had written two books, one about his travels and the other about the exotic palms. Alec read both and liked them very much. They had shared a rare and terrible thing, Alec thought: all they'd gathered of the astonishing fauna of the Amazon, both quick and dead, turned into ash on the sea. Alec wrote to him, in England.

Dear Mr. Wallace: I expect you will not remember me, but we passed a pleasant evening together in Barra in September 1851. I was the young American man heading up the Rio Negro in search of specimens. I write both to express my
admiration for your recent books, and to record an astonishing coincidence. You will hardly believe what happened to me on my journey home
…

Wallace wrote back.

Dear Alec: My sympathies on the distressing loss of your collections. No one who has not been through this himself can understand. Beyond the horrors of the fire itself, the terrible loss of animal life, and the substantial financial blow is this fact, so difficult to explain: That each specimen lost represents a double death. Our hunting always had a point; each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science. But burnt, they now serve no one. It is very hard. I thank you for your kind words about my books. I plan to head, this coming spring, for the Malay Archipelago: an area hardly explored at all, which should prove extremely rich for our purposes. Perhaps you might like to consider this yourself?

Alec's mother, who had faithfully written to him during his absence, without understanding that he would get her letters only in one great batch when he returned to Para, was during this hard time very kind to him. She visited Alec weekly at his uncle's. And when he told her what he planned to do next, she encouraged him and secretly bought him two suits of clothes.

It was not as if Wallace and Alec traveled together throughout the Malay Archipelago, nor as if Wallace took Alec under his wing in any practical way. Alec was in Macassar when Wallace was in Bali; Wallace was in Lombok when Alec was in Timor; they both visited the Aru Islands, but in different years. And their situations were no longer as similar as they'd been in the
Amazon. Wallace was still strapped for money, but his books had made him a reputation and the Royal Geographical Society had paid his first-class passage to Singapore aboard a fast steamer. Alec made a slow and uncomfortable voyage on three merchant ships and a filthy whaler. Wallace had with him an assistant, 16-year-old Charles, who helped capture, preserve, and catalog specimens, whereas Alec was all alone, and often overcome by details.