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Would they consider taking his brother in addition, a good boy who was fourteen months? It was exactly the windfall Bernadette had dreamed of, something too good, too rich to even pray for.

Did Doyle want another child? Another two? By the time they arrived he could no longer remember. Early in their marriage he had wanted to fill up the house as much as Bernadette, but in the years those children failed to materialize he ceased to want them for their own sake. In those years all he wanted was for his wife to be happy.

So when the little boys arrived he did not think,
Finally I have all the
children I want
, he thought,
Now Bernadette can be happy
. Seeing Bernadette happy after so many disappointments was Doyle’s truest desire, and that was how he came to love the boys themselves. He loved them for the joy they brought Bernadette. For four short years the house was full. The Virgin moved into the little boys’ room and watched them from the dresser while they slept. It was in January after the extravagant rush of Christmas that Teddy got a cold. There was nothing unusual about that. Teddy always caught things fi rst.

Then Tip’s cold leapt into strep throat and Sullivan started to cough.

Sullivan got strep throat and then it went to Doyle, and they passed it around like that, one to the other, back and forth, with Bernadette r u n

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doling out antibiotics and taking temperatures and running herself down, further and further down as she climbed the stairs with Pop-sicles and bright, shivering bowls of Jell-O. In taking the children to the doctor she never went to see a doctor herself. It was the pe-diatrician who touched her neck. He reached up from Tip, who was sitting patiently on the table, turning the pages of a picture book, and put his hand on Bernadette’s neck without asking her fi rst.

“Do you feel this?” he said, touching the lump that was there.

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c h a p t e r 2
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I
N
THE
BASEMENT
OF
THE
MUSEUM
OF
COMPARATIVE

Z O O L O G Y ,
T I P
S T O O D
A L O N E
W I T H
T H E
F I S H E S .

Threats of bad weather that had not yet materialized sent everyone else home early, and while he was quietly fond of the people he worked with there was always something thrilling about having the place to himself. He walked through the catacombs of dead fi shes, filing back the jars that had been taken out for study that day.

Over the dull thrum of fluorescent lights overhead, Tip kept listening for the sound of his brother coming down the hallway. All he heard were his own feet on the cement floor, the squeal of tennis shoes and the musical clink of the glass jars touching in his basket.

Teddy was late, a fact so basic and essential to his nature that Tip could hardly believe he had ever expected it could be otherwise. His brother was late. The sun would come up in the East. One would think he could remember that.

“Just meet me and Da at the lecture,” he had said on the phone that morning, thinking then at least one of them would be on time.

a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 18

“But I’ll be at the museum by five and the lecture doesn’t start until seven.” Teddy had sounded perfectly logical. “I’ll just sit at your desk and study while you work.”

A two hour margin of error, even Teddy could manage that. But now it was six forty-five. If Tip left this very minute he’d barely be on time himself, and he couldn’t do that anyway because then Teddy would have walked all the way to the museum just to fi nd a note taped to the door saying he’d left. Teddy had lost his last four cell phones and had not pursued a fifth, so there was no way to head him off. It wasn’t that Tip minded being late exactly. He didn’t have the slightest interest in hearing what Jesse Jackson had to say. It was only the knowledge that their father would already be in the auditorium by now looking at his watch that made Tip feel uncomfortable about the time. How much better the night would have been if the sky had thrown down the bank of snow that was predicted and locked him in with the fi shes.

He took a jar containing eight small warmouths from his basket and put them back on the shelf where they belonged. There were six rooms in the Department of Ichthyology, which was located beneath the museum, six brick-walled cells in the subterranean hive, each one a maze of metal shelving, fishes stacked floor to ceiling like bins of nails in a hardware store, 1.3 million dead fi shes suspended in alcohol. A dozen or more tiny fish clustered together in small jars, single fish folded over in larger jars, huge fish alone in metal boxes.

There were fish that had been recently discovered in the Amazon and a fish dating back as far as the 1700s. Put a jar in the wrong spot and you can pretty much say goodbye to it altogether. Tip followed the numbers with a librarian’s precision, setting his basket on the floor so that he could handle the jar more carefully when he returned it to its proper location. Tip Doyle had a position of importance in the lab, even if his father didn’t see it that way. Historically, r u n

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the recataloguing of fishes was work for graduate students. That this job had come to Tip, a senior, was a sign of his seriousness and demonstrated his sense of responsibility.

“Does the country need another ichthyologist?” his father would have said had he been following Tip through his rounds. Tip was looking for the empty spot to which the next jar, eleven small bluegills, should be returned. “Would the country lay down its foreign wars, its need for health care and education, in order to turn its collective gaze to the splendors of the cod?” Tip stopped for a moment, using the buzz of the lights to work the voice out of his head.

His father liked to say he paid more than forty thousand dollars a year to one of the finest universities in the world to give his son the right to peer into glass jars at dead fish. While Jesse Jackson’s son went to Congress, his own son had wandered into the stacks of the Mayr Library, never to be heard from again.

Every jar Tip replaced introduced him to a group of specimens he had never seen before. Whenever he put a fish back he stopped to pick up three or four of its neighbors and contemplate their connections, and inevitably those connections led him to other fi sh, which might lead him to someday making a real scientifi c discovery of his own. The warmouth, for example, was in a bin next to some nearly translucent banded pygmy sunfi sh. Normally, had there been more time, that would have been enough to make him put the bluegill down on the fl oor and lift up all the sunfi sh. Once he got going, Tip could often manage to shoot through half a night, fi nally turning the lights out behind him and locking up with his own key.

Tip’s father resented his son’s love of fi shes. He thought that the fishes and possibly even science were a waste of Tip’s serious consideration if he wasn’t even willing to go to medical school, but Tip knew the exact point of origin of this interest and his father was completely to blame. It was Doyle who had driven them over the a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 20

Sagamore Bridge and down the straight and narrow shot of Route 6

when he and Teddy were little. Sullivan, the oldest of the three boys, was twelve years older than Tip and much too grown-up for trips to the beach, and so they left him in his bedroom with the headphones on. On the drive, the two little boys asked their father questions about the ocean: What made the waves and why was it salty and where did the seagulls sleep at night? They did not ask to stop at the ice cream stands and taffy shacks that dotted the Cape with bright distractions. All they wanted was to get to the water. Everything about those perfect afternoons stayed with Tip, the parking lot blown over with sand, the tall sea grass bunched by the wooden steps that led down to the water, the matching red swim trunks he and his brother wore, and Doyle holding their hands. It was Doyle who settled them at the edge of the tide pools and there, for their benefi t, identified every living thing in that shallow slice of ocean.

Those were the earliest summers in Tip’s memory, long before he had ever heard of Carl Linnaeus. On those sunny days with the wild roses blooming red against the dunes to their right and the ocean sliding back and forth over the sand to their left, his father was the inventor of taxonomy, the namer of living things. He instilled in Tip the sincere belief that there was nothing more fascinating than a tommycod and a string of kelp. Every day at the beach was gorgeous: in rain and sun, with noisy crowds carrying bright towels and in utter desertion, they found the same clear, cold water over the small pulsing universe, a fully comprehensible world.

Had Doyle been asked to tell this story he would have included the fishes but assigned them a much smaller role in history. He would admit that his youth had been marked by a great interest in marine life, but that it came along with an interest in the Red Sox and Latin, twentieth-century American novels, Schubert, the Demo-cratic Party and the Catholic Church. His plan had been to pass all r u n

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of those interests and dozens more along to the boys in equal measure in hopes of making them well-rounded, well-educated citizens.

He did not mean for any of his sons to become ichthyologists. He had meant for them, at least one of them, to be the president of the United States.

From far away Tip heard a banging on the door and then the sound of his own name called out again and again. Teddy made a lot of noise in the lab ever since the time he startled Tip, coming up behind him unexpectedly and causing him to drop a jar. It had been neither forgiven nor forgotten. Tip took his basket down the hallway towards the sound of his brother’s voice, turning off lights behind him as he went.

“Tip,” Teddy called.

“Late,” the brother answered back.

At six feet three inches, Teddy, a year younger, was the taller of the two, though Tip was more inclined to stand up straight and so made up for the difference. “I’m sorry,” Teddy said, the expression on his face genuinely sorry and surprised, as if he had never been late before. “I forgot to check the clock.”

“You always forget.”

“I had to go see Uncle Sullivan.”

Tip sighed and pointed to the door. “Go.” He regretted leaving behind seven jars unshelved, not to mention the fact that it was reading period and exams were one week away. Tip did well on his tests because he studied for them. Everyone seemed to think his grades came in with no effort on his part. He grabbed his red jacket from the coat tree and threaded one arm through a sleeve while stuffi ng his books into his backpack.

“Is that the coat you wore?” Teddy said, his own parka was zippered from his knees to his chin. “It’s freezing.”

“That’s the coat I wore.” Tip should not have let his tone be a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 22

short. Teddy was the better of the two of them, making them late so that he could visit their ancient uncle in the home downtown where old priests were stashed away, but still the whole thing grated on him. It grated on him even more when Teddy told him their uncle had sent his love.

“You told me that after you saw him yesterday.” He wiped his hand across the last row of light switches, casting the kingdom of fishes abruptly into darkness. Teddy stepped behind his brother through the open door and followed him down the hall.

“It’s crazy down there,” Teddy said, shaking his head. “It’s completely out of control. There were so many people lined up to see him when I got there today I could barely get to his room. Sick people, people in wheelchairs, women with screaming babies. ”

“A regular miracle at Lourdes.”

Teddy was talking faster now and he raised his volume slightly as if it needed to keep pace with his words. “Sister Claire told me a news crew came today to do a human-interest story. It was bad enough when they put it in the paper. Once it’s on television no one is ever going to leave him alone. It’s like he’s being crushed by a stampede of sick people. If I’m not there to make them go he never gets any rest.”

“So you cut class.” Just because his brother went to Northeast-ern didn’t mean he didn’t have to show up. In Tip’s food chain, academics sat on the top and everything else was there to be eaten. In Teddy’s food chain, nothing even came close to their uncle. “Why doesn’t he just tell these lunatics he can’t actually cure the sick?”

“He tells them every day. He tells everyone who walks in the door.”

“Well, he ought to be more convincing. And you ought to go to class.” Tip could not abide the Regina Cleri home. There was some vague antiseptic odor in the hallways that all but brought him to his r u n

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knees. Tip, who spent half his life elbow deep in dead fi shes, could not endure the smell of old people.

“Didn’t you hear the weather report?” Teddy said. “We were supposed to get covered up. I didn’t think I’d be able to get there tomorrow, maybe not even the next day.”

Tip locked the final door behind him and together they walked out of the museum and into the clear winter night. “So where’s the snow?”

Teddy looked up at the sky. Both boys had wanted the same thing: to be stranded in the place that they loved, to have the situation taken out of their control by nature. “The storm missed us.”

“Well, tell it to Da, he’s the one who’s going to be pissed off.”

“Take my hat,” Teddy said, reaching up for his stocking cap. The air was hurtful, too cold to breathe.

“I’m not taking your hat,” Tip said. He had found a pair of mittens in his pockets. At least that was something.

Doyle would be irritated that the boys were late, but it was Tip who was angry, not really at his brother but angry because he hadn’t paid attention to the weather and it was at least twenty degrees colder now than it had been when he’d left for class that morning.

Without his winter coat the wind fell down the back of his collar like handfuls of snow. He was angry to have to leave his work unfi nished, and with every step they took towards the Kennedy School he thought of something else in the lab that needed his attention, another set of notes that deserved review. How much longer could he afford to waste all this time on his father’s naïve obsession with politics? It was one thing when they were little boys, a captive audience happy to be dragged along in tow, but now Tip had other things to do. He started to grouse about it all to Teddy, but when he looked back he saw his brother was lagging, nothing more than an outline behind him. He squinted. It was already dark as midnight.