State of Wonder (27 page)

“They only want a little recognition,” Nancy said, watching and waving as they fell farther and farther behind. “If you don’t acknowledge what they’re doing they just keep doing it. Frankly, I don’t think they’re such good swimmers. You can’t have half the tribe drowning on the way to the trading post.”

“Nancy would have made a great social behaviorist,” Alan Saturn said, dropping a very tan arm over his wife’s shoulders. “Dr. Rapp would have loved her. There were so many things we missed back then that Nancy picked up on the very first time she came out here.”

“You knew Dr. Rapp?” Marina asked.

Nancy raised her eyebrows briefly and then sighed with the recognition of what was to come. “How in the world did you miss that lecture?” she said, stepping out from under her husband’s arm and rifling through her bag for sunblock and bug gel. She handed one tube to Marina and began to use the other on herself.

Alan Saturn lifted his sunglasses to better show the delight in his eyes. “I was his student at Harvard! I was actually enrolled in that famous mycology class the year he broke his ankle in New Guinea and wound up coming back to teach for the entire semester. Those were the lectures that were published by Oxford University Press, and there have been no end of papers written on them. I’m sure you must have read some of them. There were a great many legends built up around that class. It was listed in the catalogue every year but Dr. Rapp virtually never made his way back to the classroom for more than a day or two. In reality it was taught by some graduate student who had been in the field himself and was qualified to do no more than read the notes and mark the tests. So while Studies in Mycology was considered to be one of the seminal classes at the university, no one but rubes actually signed up for it. Signing up for the class was as good as admitting you had no idea what was going on, so who better than me to enroll? When people realized what had happened, that the great man himself was coming back to teach, you had a situation where seniors and graduate students and in some cases faculty members were making cash offers to freshmen to give up their seats. I for one stood firm and was rewarded fortunes beyond that fifty bucks I turned down. I got to know Dr. Rapp that semester, I made sure of it, and so I was asked to travel with him in the Amazon for the next three summers in a row.”

“Is that how you met Dr. Swenson?” Marina thought of her teacher taking the trouble to catch the red-eye back from Manaus. To the best of her memory Dr. Swenson hadn’t missed a single class.

Nancy Saturn smeared a great handful of white paste across her face and began to rub it in. “To know Martin Rapp was to know Annick Swenson.”

“Don’t ruin the story,” Alan said to her. He turned his attention back to Marina, that untapped source of listening pleasure. “Annick is several years older than I am, of course.” This news was delivered for his own vanity, as Alan Saturn, with his thinning white hair, enormous white eyebrows, and perilously slender ankles, could easily have been taken as older than Dr. Swenson. The only thing that made Dr. Saturn seem younger was his younger wife. “She was coming down here years before me. They were, shall we say, quite inseparable in the field.”

“She picked the boys who went on the trips,” Nancy said. “Only boys. She held interviews in his office at Harvard. She was the one who picked Alan. Dr. Rapp didn’t have the time to fill the rosters himself.”

Marina could see him then, a tall and lanky undergraduate, a canvas rucksack on his back. “You knew him too?” she asked Nancy.

Nancy gave a small, snorting laugh and applied a layer of sunblock to her breastbone, reaching into the collar of her shirt to do the job right. “I came after Dr. Rapp.”

Alan Saturn was ignoring her now. He was launched. A giant tree had fallen into the river and the roots and branches reached up through the water as if begging to be saved. A bright yellow bird with a long, slender neck sat on one of those branches and watched the boat as it passed. Benoit, having spotted the bird, began his frantic turning of pages. “Martin Rapp was more than my teacher. He was the man I wanted to be. He was fully engaged with his life every minute that he lived it. He didn’t trudge along doing what someone else told him to do. He was never a cog in the wheel. He held his head up and looked at the world around him. Now, my father was a very decent man, worked as a tailor in Detroit back when there were men in Detroit who had their suits made. He worked until his hands were so twisted with arthritis he couldn’t hold a needle. If a man came into the store and told my father what he wanted, the only word my father had for him was yes. It didn’t matter if it was a ridiculous order, didn’t matter if this guy showed up on Saturday morning and wanted his suit for Saturday night and there was already work piled to the rafters, my father said yes. And once my father said yes it was as good as done because that word was all he had in the world. He spent his life in the backroom of a store and the only thing he knew about his environment was that needle going in and out of the cloth. He did all this so my brothers and I could go to college and not be tailors and have the luxury of telling somebody no someday. So off I went to Harvard, the tailor’s boy from Michigan. The next thing I knew I was sitting in a lecture hall and in walked the great Martin Rapp, his ankle sunk in a plaster boot, his crutches swinging forward. He came up to the lectern and he said, ‘Gentlemen, close your books and listen. We have nothing less than the world to consider.’ We were awestruck, every last one of us. We would have sat there for the full four years of college. I remember everything about that day, that room, the giant blackboards, the light coming in those leaded glass windows. What I saw in front of me was the character of a man. It was the most remarkable thing, and I’ve never had that experience before or since. It was some sort of aura he had. From ten rows away I knew exactly who he was and I knew I would follow him anywhere.”

“Here,” Nancy said to Marina, “take the sunblock and give me the bug gel.”

Marina took the sunblock but there was only so much sunblock could do. As careful as she had tried to be she was as dark as the natives now. Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.

“Listen to her,” Alan said, declining to take the paste himself. “We didn’t have sunblock back then. It was a melanoma that killed Dr. Rapp in the end. By the time they found it, it had spread everywhere there was for a melanoma to go. I cannot imagine all the years he spent in an open boat with no more than a straw hat and a white shirt for protection. It’s amazing he lasted as long as he did. I came back to Cambridge to see him in the end and he was every bit himself. He was interested in his own death, fascinated by it. He was taking notes. He was in his eighties then, he couldn’t go out to the sites anymore. When I asked him if he still did his meditation he said to me, ‘Why would this time be any different?’ That was the thing most people never knew about him: if he was in his house in Cambridge or he was in a tent in the driving rain outside Iquitos, he always meditated, and that’s back in the days when only a handful of Indians and maybe a few Tibetans had even heard the word. He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it. But we were undergraduates and for the most part we couldn’t find our asses with our hands and so we followed his compass instead. Until we knew how to be men by our own standards we tried to be men like Dr. Rapp. We never would be, of course, but it was still a noble goal. I look out over this river now and I can see him, paddling the canoe along with the rest of us. In fact we would have stopped paddling, crying like children about our blisters and our splinters, and he would just keep on. He wouldn’t say a word and then all of a sudden he would turn the boat so hard we would nearly capsize. He would take it to shore and the next thing we knew he was in the water and then into the jungle, gone. Gone! And there we were, alone. Ten minutes later he’d walk back out with a mushroom in a bag, a specimen that had never been recorded before. He’d be writing up the coordinates and taking pictures of the site, and then he was cleaning off the knife he’d used to cut the mushrooms from the tree on his handkerchief, the surest sign that the discovery was now complete. Everything he did was orchestrated, every movement was beautiful. We boys would scramble into the jungle trying to figure out what he’d seen and how he’d known those mushrooms were there, and when we’d ask him he would say, ‘I keep my eyes open.’ ” Alan Saturn was moved by the memory. “ ‘I keep my eyes open.’ That was the lesson. I have to tell you those were the happiest summers of my life.”

Looking along the edges of the river in the blinding daylight, the mesh of the jungle as tight as twenty chain-link fences stacked together, Marina could imagine that reaching in to pluck a single mushroom from the forest floor must have been an act akin to pulling a full grown sheep from a top hat, at once dazzling and pointless. Easter turned back from the steering wheel of the boat and waved to her. Benoit looked for birds in the trees.

“So why didn’t you go back with him after that?”

“Malaria,” Alan said, and gave a sigh for the memory of what he had lost. “I got it in Peru the summer after my junior year. Dr. Rapp had had malaria who knows how many times. He said I’d pull through it fine, but I didn’t do so well. After I got home I ended up having to sit out the first semester of my senior year. By the time the summer came around again and Dr. Rapp was putting his crew together I was probably back to ninety-five percent but my father wouldn’t let me go. I shouldn’t blame him, I suppose. He thought he was protecting me, and I couldn’t make him understand. My father had never seen the world so he didn’t think it was much of a crime to keep me from it.”

Nancy Saturn looked at her husband, great streaks of unabsorbed white paste still standing on her chin and around her ears. She waited for another minute to see if there was anything else forthcoming and then she asked him, “Finished?”

“Those are some highlights,” he said.

“As many times as I’ve heard this story there are two things that never sit well with me,” she said.

“Tell me,” Alan said.

“Well, first, your poor father. Why must he always be made the drudge in opposition to the free spirit of Martin Rapp? He didn’t want his son who still had occasional relapses of malaria to return to the jungle where he’d gotten it in the first place? That doesn’t seem so criminal to me.”

Alan Saturn considered his wife thoughtfully for some time, chewing over her criticism. He brushed some sort of leggy cricket out of his hair. “You have a valid point,” he said finally. “But this is the story of my life, the story of how I related to my father and then later to my mentor, who, it is obvious enough, was a father figure to me. I’m not misrepresenting my father. I say he’s a hard worker, a provider. But if I lean towards Dr. Rapp as a role model then that’s my choice to make.”

Nancy waited a long time before shrugging her shoulders. The shrug appeared to cost her something. “I can see that.”

“I hear you, though,” he said. “And I appreciate what you’re saying.”

Marina wondered if they had been through a great deal of marriage counseling or if it was possible that this was the way they had spoken to each other all along. It was such a long time ago that she had been married. She couldn’t imagine she and Josh Su had, in their twenties, ever had such an exchange.

“You said there were two things,” Alan said.

“Annick Swenson.”

“She isn’t in the story.”

“She is implicit in every story about Dr. Rapp. Your story tells as much by what you leave out as what you put in.”

“I leave out what was private in his life. Those matters didn’t concern me and they didn’t concern science.”

“Listen to him,” the second Dr. Saturn said, turning to Marina. “What is this,
Meet the Press
?” She pivoted back to her husband. “It absolutely did concern you. When one’s role model brings his mistress along trip after trip with a dozen boys and you are one of those boys then it concerns you. It concerns you when you later go to his house and have dinner with your mentor and his wife.”

“Dr. Swenson was his mistress?” Marina said. Just saying it brought a sour taste to her mouth. It was, she thought, a terrible word, and in no way representative. A mistress was a woman who waited in a hotel room.

“This is what I meant by private,” Alan said pointedly to his wife.

“Mrs. Rapp lives in Cambridge and has three daughters. She is ninety-two. We send her grapefruit at Christmas. I’m not saying people don’t have affairs, even very decent people, let us be so lucky as to fall into that category. But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do. He was a great scientist, I will grant you that, and by all accounts a true charismatic, but he was also deeply unfaithful to two women and frankly that bothers me. It bothers me that the man you say you wanted to become was a lifelong philanderer.”

“When did this start?” Marina asked.

“We
can
take the life apart. We do it all the time.” The veins on Alan Saturn’s temples were pressing forward with their new influx of blood. “Picasso put his cigarettes out on his girlfriends and we don’t love the paintings any less for it. Wagner was a fascist and I can hum you every bar in the opening of
Die Walküre
.”

“I don’t know Picasso and I don’t know Wagner!”

“And you didn’t know Dr. Rapp!”