The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett

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      It’s not Lavinia’s fault her brothers underestimate her. I know she’ll be different once the men leave and we’re on our own; her mind dissolves in Zeke’s presence. I’ll be glad when we can be ourselves. This house is so beautiful, so spacious—what would my parents think, I wonder, if they were alive to see me in these two gorgeous rooms I now call my own? The window over my bed looks down on a planting of dwarf trees. My bed-linen is changed weekly, by someone other than me. And this painting is such a pleasure, so much more satisfying than needlework. So much better paid. Beneath the lining of my sewing box I’ve already tucked a surprising sum. Soon I’ll be able to purchase some books of my own, an extravagance when I have the Repository shelves to browse through, once the men leave…I’m impatient for them to go, I am. And wish that, like Erasmus, I might have the luxury of sleeping out there.

      Does he know that he rocks the toe of his boot in the air whenever Zeke speaks? I wonder what Erasmus was like as a boy. Before he grew so frozen, before he sat with his chin tucked into his collar like that, and his right hand wringing his left so strongly one wonders he doesn’t break the bones. Lavinia says that when she was a girl he was fond of beetles and moths, and teased the succession of governesses who raised her. I can’t imagine him teasing anyone.

      THE NARWHAL SET sail on May 28, in such a wild flurry that everything important seemed still undone and nothing Erasmus meant to say got said. He and Zeke stood on the deck in their new gray uniforms, waving their handkerchiefs. Above them the Toxophilites’ pennant streamed in the wind, snapping straight out then beginning to droop, snapping straight out again. Terns hung motionless in the high currents, and Erasmus felt as though he himself were hanging between two worlds.

      The acquaintances of the Narwhal’s crew gathered in little knots close to shore, followed by the cheering Toxies in their green outfits. Dotting the wharf in separate clusters were Zeke’s and Erasmus’s relatives and friends, their clothing splayed into wide colored planes by the wind whipping across the river. Alexandra had brought her entire family—her sisters, Emily and Jane; her brother, Browning; and Browning’s wife and infant son—all of them huddled so tightly that it was as if even here, in the open air, they couldn’t expand beyond the confines of the tiny house they’d shared since their parents’ deaths. They were small, neat, and yet somehow fierce-looking; abolitionists, serious young people. They dressed in the colors of sparrows and doves but more closely resembled, Erasmus thought, a family of saw-whet owls. Browning had a Bible in his hands.

      Later, Alexandra would write in her diary about the argument she and Browning had over the verses he read out loud. Later she’d sketch a portrait of Erasmus during these last minutes, which showed his hand clasped nervously around a stay, his graying hair curled beneath a cap that made him look oddly boyish, the tip of his long, thin nose sniffing at the wind. But for now she only stood silently, watching him watch everyone. In the oily water around the pilings wood shavings swirled and tossed.

      To the left of Alexandra’s family stood a group of employees from the engraving firm and some representatives from the Voorhees packet line; beyond them were Linnaeus and Humboldt, as plump and glossy as beavers, and Lavinia, leaning on both of them, overdressed in swirls of blue and green and flashing in the sun like a trout. At the tip of the wharf, befitting their support of the expedition, came Zeke’s family. His father stood suave and proud, his still-thick thatch of ruddy hair moving in the wind and revealing his massive eyebrows and the lynxlike tufts on his ears. His mother, shrouded in black for the death of an aunt, was weeping. Not surprising, Erasmus thought; she was famous for the way she coddled her only son. Flanking her were Zeke’s sisters, Violet and Laurel, beautifully dressed and seemingly contemptuous of their merchant husbands, who weren’t sailing north.

      They waved; the water opened between the wharf and the ship; the tune piped by the Toxies’ piccolo player shattered in the breeze until the separate and unrelated notes merged with the calls of the gulls. Behind the mountains and beyond the north wind, Erasmus’s father had once read to him, past the cave where the cold arises, live a race of people called Hyperboreans. Here are the hinges on which the world turns and the limits of the circuits of the stars. Here there is no disharmony and sorrow is unknown. The figures on the wharf began to shrink. Everyone, except the dead, whom Erasmus had ever loved; every person who might be proud of him or admire his courage or worry over his fate. The faces faded, and then disappeared.