The Evolution of Jane (18 page)

"Yes, I hate to lie in a tent, too," Aunt Anna said. Then she looked at Martha's father. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" she said.

Martha and her family moved back to New York City at the end of August. We moved back into our house. I hardly had time to miss Martha, the house needed so much sorting out. It had been painted, inside and out, and the furniture had been cleaned, but the smell of smoke still hung on. Clothes had to be thrown away, papers sifted through. It was during that frenzied two weeks of cleaning before school started that I discovered a paper bag with a few old letters in my mother's closet.

"Love letters?" I said.

"Really, Jane. Are they even mine? Some old papers."

"So!" I said. "At last! The real explanation of the family feud."

"You loved that feud when you were little, Jane."

"I didn't
love
the feud."

"You were adorable."

"When you were little," my father said.

"You thought there were murders, wasn't that it? Something very Latin and dramatic."

"A love child," I said.

"Yes, well," my mother said.

It was an odd and sparse assortment. A postcard from someone named Geoffrey in California; several unsent birth announcements for Jane Barlow Schwartz, with little pink ribbons at the top; a photograph of my father with no shirt on; and, last, two letters from my mother's father, Edwin Barlow, in Cuba to his mother.

The day he arrived in Limones, Edwin sent a letter home announcing he had met the family of Professor Linden, the Harvard botanist who had recently set up an agricultural research station there. The Lindens were exceedingly hospitable and courteous, he wrote, and Professor Linden was delighted to have Edwin as his new assistant. The next letter discussed Professor Linden and his dream of improving the sugarcane and making new varieties through crossbreeding which could be marketed to cane growers and so prove profitable. "He came to Cuba hoping to produce a hardier race of cane by crossing vigorous types with weaker canes of high sucrose content." The professor, Edwin wrote, had arrived in the winter a few years before when he had undertaken to study the floral structure and fertility of the cane flowers and find a suitable location for an experimental station. "Limones was selected," he wrote.

Limones was where, a few years after this letter was written, my mother was born. It was a town that was a garden named after a fruit. As a child, I used to say the name of my mother's birthplace over and over, and I could almost smell the blossoms of the lemon trees, though I had never seen a lemon tree, much less smelled one, and had no idea if lemons even grew on trees. They could just as easily have grown on bushes or vines for all I knew.

My mother had told me stories about Grandpa Edwin and Grandma Marianne, how they had been thrown together, the only two foreigners of their age in the town.

"Work on the garden was commenced in the fall," Edwin wrote.

"This tells me nothing," I said to my mother.

"Nonsense. It tells you that in the past, work was such a beautiful thing that it was 'commenced' rather than 'begun.'"

"Oh, Mother."

"Work on the garden, as if it were the Garden of Eden. 'Work on the garden was commenced in the fall.'" My mother smiled in an annoyingly beatific way.

In the Garden of Eden, Eve ate an apple and gave some to Adam and everyone knew what had gone wrong. But what had gone wrong for the Barlows in their garden of lemons and sugar?

"So why was there a feud if everything was so wonderful in Edenic Cuba?" I said.

My mother kissed the top of my head in her gesture of compassionate acquittal. "Didn't Adam and Eve have a quarrel in Eden? That's what Eden is all about."

Aunt Anna died in the hospital the year after Martha left Barlow. She had a heart attack. I was at school. My mother was at school. My father was at work. Graziela, Aunt Anna's smoking buddy, called the ambulance and rode in the back with her, holding her hand, and murmuring "son of a bitch" over and over, like a prayer.

Aunt Anna was in the hospital for about a week.

"Graziela sews," Aunt Anna said the next day, looking up from her hospital bed. "And she shall reap!"

She laughed at her joke, but she was paler and weaker than usual, and without her clothes and makeup and cigarette, she looked bare, like a tree without leaves. The doctors had told us she might pull through, but looking at her stretched out and unadorned, I thought that unlikely.

"Graziela is Cuban," Aunt Anna said.

"My mother is Cuban."

"Graziela is
not
your mother, Barlow, dear."

"No, she isn't."

"I visited your mother in Cuba. Your mother was a little girl, you know. A lush and verdant island. The fragrance! Sometimes I think of what I've seen, what I have even now. And then I think of where I'm going. To the grave. In a hole in that dirty dirt."

"Oh, but—"

"Then I say to myself, Anna Barlow, if Princess Grace could go in that hole in the ground, so can you."

"But Aunt Anna—"

"And then I say, Anna, when you get there you won't know your ass from your elbow anyway. So shut up."

She smiled at me. She offered me a cigarette, tried to light it for me with her trembling hands.

"The Barlows grew sugar in Cuba, right?" I said. "Or imported it?"

"Sugar is the root of all unhappiness," Aunt Anna said with a sudden vehemence that surprised me. "Sugar killed my father."

Slowly I worked my way through the family ties, as I always did when anyone dead was mentioned. Aunt Anna was my mother's aunt. She was my grandfather's sister. She had visited her big brother, Edwin, at Limones. So Aunt Anna's father was my great-grandfather, Frederick. The other two triplets were her uncles. Martha's great-grandfather Franklin was Aunt Anna's uncle.

"So he had, like, diabetes? Hypoglycemia? I thought Great-Grandpa Frederick died of a stroke."

Aunt Anna sighed heavily. Two scrawny arms, as white as the sheets they lay on, reached out. Two bony hands grasped my arm.

"Never repeat what I am about to tell you," she whispered.

"Okay."

"It could place someone in grave danger."

"Right. I won't tell."

She pulled me closer, put her mouth to my ear.

"Graziela," she said, cackling with pleasure, "is bringing my martini at five o'clock!"

"God bless Graziela," I said.

"God? Pshaw!"

"I thought you were going to tell me something about the feud."

"The feud..." she said. She trembled. Her voice trailed off. She closed her eyes. I had a terrible feeling that she would die that very moment, the secret of the feud dying with her, killing her actually, with its cursed power of generations of hate and bitterness.

"Aunt Anna, just rest. Don't talk now. Never mind that stupid feud. Should I call the doctor?"

"Those dirty hypocrites," she said. She opened her eyes. She raised a frail fist. Her voice was clear and vigorous. "Vultures. Gangsters."

Dr. Bradley a gangster? He was a white-haired gentleman who wore big, square space shoes.

"They killed my father," she said. She shook her finger at me like a bird waving its long beak. "Sold off parts of the company, said my father owed the company money. They kept the profits, you see? From the sale. Left him with nothing. Not even a job. We never talk about it. They say his hair turned gray overnight. But I remember it black as night. He died soon after. Poor as dirt."

I stroked her arm.

"Edwin left Harvard, went off to work. Employed by that professor fellow. Poor Edwin. Poor Papa. Sold the company out from under him. Said he owed them money!" she said.

"Did he?"

"Oh, yes," Aunt Anna said. She smiled serenely. She reached toward the bedside table and patted her hand absently over the surface, searching for the pack of cigarettes.

Martha took the train out and saw her the next day. I heard this from Aunt Anna. Martha did not call me. She had stopped calling. She had stopped returning my calls. Aunt Anna died three days later.

The funeral was small and sad and in a church. Martha didn't come, but her family sent flowers.

"Garish," my mother said when she saw them.

O
N THE SHORES
of the Galapagos Islands, I had begun to pose questions to myself not only about the mystery of creation, or even about the mystery of friendships and feuds, but now also about the mystery of hanky-panky. Visions of bodies draped with blankets wandering across the midnight cabin like spirits on a moor plagued me.

Perhaps I was just an old gossip, like Jeremy Toll. Or a phrenologist, those contemporaries of Darwin who judged people's characters by the shapes of their skulls, who saw meaning in the bumps on their heads. I reminded myself that not everything means something, that some bumps are just bumps. But still I daydreamed and speculated idly the way I always had. I thought, If only I could have followed those fleeting forms. But they had vanished, lost in a crowd of seasick passengers waking up on a varnished floor. Of course they must have been the same couple that had met outside my cabin window and whispered their need and desire.

"Where? When? Oh, if only..."

I envied this furtive couple the hush of their secrecy, the urgency of their voices, their intimacy.

"My ex-husband was a horse's ass," I said to Gloria. "And now I'm too disgusted to find a new one. He ruined everything. Martha's a horse's ass, too. Perhaps it was she who ruined everything."

Gloria furrowed her brow. She tapped her forefinger thoughtfully on her cheek. She fixed her eyes on me as if I were another bone or leaf she might study.

"I think," Gloria said, "that you are the common denominator in those two equations." Then, in a schoolmarm voice, she added, "Let sleeping dogs lie."

"My mother used to say, 'Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.'"

"There you go," said Gloria. "You can't keep digging up a friendship like some chewed-up old bone..."

At the word "bone" she looked suddenly concerned. "Jane!" She turned her back to me. "Look at my spine," she said. She twisted her head around to me, her brow furrowed. "Calcium deficiency?"

I was sure she was not deficient in calcium. I was sure she was not deficient in anything, and I told her so. Nevertheless, she went down to the galley to see if she could get a glass of milk. I stood by myself, beneath the morning sky, and realized how little time was left. I tried to imagine going back, but it seemed quite impossible and thoroughly unnecessary. I saw a head pop up from the stairs, thought it was Gloria, hoped it was Martha, and realized it was Jack. He saw me, smiled his rather dazzling smile in a way that suggested to me that he knew it was a rather dazzling smile, and came over to stand beside me, both of us leaning on the rail.

"Don't you love being so far away from everything?" he said. "And everyone?"

"But your whole family is here with you."

"I meant you."

"But your whole family is here with me."

Jack kept an eye on his mother. I noticed that. But he didn't follow her around or fetch and tote for her. This was a delicate balance, surely, and required an emotional surefootedness, even grace, or elegance. I wondered what it would have been like to have my mother on the trip. She would have kept an eye on me, I suppose. Certainly, there was nothing she could complain about as vulgar. I thought she would have been happy on such a trip, which made me feel for a moment how happy I was.

"Yes, you're right," I said to Jack. "I really do love being so far away."

Later that morning, I took a picture of Jack. He was standing beside a mangrove. It was a profile, his head turned to face a red-footed booby perched in the tree, also in profile, the two of them staring absurdly at each other. And at lunch, I sat with all the Cornwalls, all except Dot. She was at Martha's table.

"It's so stupid," I heard Dot say. It was what she often said. "It's so stupid to try to
preserve
the Galapagos. Evolution means, like, change."

"It is sort of stupid," Martha said. "Now that you mention it."

That's what makes it noble, I thought. Or is that what makes it stupid?

"My niece is very wise," Jack said, and I realized he had been eavesdropping, too.

We spent a lot of time together that day, Jack and I. He was my snorkeling buddy, pointing out different kinds of coral and fish. If he wasn't as good a guide as Martha, he did focus all that he did know on me, and that goes a long way, doesn't it, all that undivided attention? Galapagos penguins kept diving in with us from a rock, like lemmings. There weren't very many of them, maybe five, but they dove in one by one, stared at us, then waddled back out onto the rock and dove in again. I don't think they were playing the way the sea lions did. They seemed piqued.

When we got back to the
Huxley,
I beat Jack, and everyone else, to the hot tub, but even as I lowered my frigid limbs into the warm water, Jack was climbing in beside me.

"Those penguins," he said, "those minuscule penguins. Didn't you find them threatening? Like the old ladies with their shopping carts at Fairway?"

"You shop at Fairway?"

It turned out we lived on the same block in New York. My number was 401 on West End Avenue. His was 401 on 79th Street. We had the same apartment number, 2B. His elevator man always made the same joke that my elevator man made—"2B or not to be." At last, an explanation for why we sometimes got the wrong Chinese-food deliveries.

I guess I gave Jack a pretty good looking-over then. And he looked pretty good. Why should the two people wrapped in blankets have all the fun? Even if one of them had been him? Competition for scarce resources was the way of the world. Survival of the fittest and all that.

I reminded myself that psychological Darwinism was crude.

But still, I thought, Why not? And think how convenient it would be.

At dinner, Jack was already sitting with his family when I came down. He smiled at me, but I had to sit with the Tommasos and Jeremy Toll. Mrs. Tommaso was concerned that the mockingbirds on Tower Island did not get enough water. She proposed bird feeders and birdbaths. Mr. Tommaso said, "My dear, you must let nature take its course," to which Mrs. Tommaso replied, "Well! We know where that leads!"