The Evolution of Jane (24 page)

We were all wearing rain jackets to protect us from the famous mists that were supposed to blanket the higher elevations during that season, but the sky was clear and it was hot. The names of the plants did not interest me anymore, now that our trip was almost done. I tried to look carefully, though, if only for Jack's sake, to encourage him, keep his chin up, revive the teacher's pet in him.

"I'm actually a little tired of examining little leaves," he said. "And yet I don't want to go home, I don't ever want to leave. Funny, the end of a trip, isn't it?"

Martha guided us to a field where we saw two huge tortoises grazing. A little farther on, a corpulent sow and a line of piglets ran past. The light was fading. The field looked like the English countryside, open and lush, a tall tree here and there swaying above the stone walls. It was a familiar scene, from hundreds of books and movies, from Masterpiece Theatre. Why was it here?

We were all standing, marveling at the appearance of barnyard animals. We said how cute they were. We jostled one another trying to get pictures. Martha leaned against a tree and looked on in disgust.

"You have come three thousand miles to a new hemisphere to take pictures of pigs?" she said.

We continued to watch the mother pig and her enormous piglets, comfortably scratching themselves against a tall, introduced tree. It was a homey scene, if your home happened to be Sussex. The tortoises, two of them, rare and lumbering through the grass, looked out of place, fragile. The parable of the tortoise and the pig.

"My father had a pig's valve in his heart," Jack said.

His mother began to dab her eyes. Mrs. Tommaso stared at him in anti-vivisectionist angst.

"Nothing is where it should be," Dot said.

"You have fine instincts," Jeremy said, patting her head proudly.

"Look, extinction is the counterpart of evolution," Martha said. "Let's go. It's getting late." She tried to round us up. "Come on. They're just pigs."

But we stood transfixed in a meadow that looked as if it had posed for an illustration of Dr. Dolittle's Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. When one stands in an evening field and the sky fades in a glorious wash of scarlet, and the barnyard animals are grunting, and lush green grass rolls in every direction, gently, to the horizon, and the faint scent of damp earth rises as the sun sets, even the presence of two Galapagos tortoises cannot obstruct a rush of almost hackneyed emotion, of delicious melancholy, of homesickness, of the impossibility of complete happiness and, at the same time, the unending need for it.

"This is a Caspar David Friedrich moment," Jeremy said, his voice hushed, awed.

"I want to go home," Dot said.

I thought of Barlow. I could almost smell my mother's lilacs.

"Come on, off we go," Martha said. She poked me.

How did you get here, Martha? I thought. How did you end up at home in the Galapagos like these pigs?

Unable to move us, Martha took a deep breath, then assumed her instructive role. "Those pigs and those tortoises are actually related. One way you can see it is when you examine the mammalian inner-ear bones. They are derived from reptilian jaw elements."

Probably you came here on a whim, just like me, I thought. Although surely you came on your own whim, not your mother's. Fate, which is to say, whim, brought us together. And Fate, which is to say, whim, would separate us again.

"For the last hundred, hundred and fifty years, a lot of zoology has been the study of phylogeny, that is, tracing an organism's form back to a common ancestor, and so reconstructing that common ancestor. It's a limited way of looking at evolution, but it has yielded some interesting descriptions."

If a century of zoologists could devote their lives and their monographs to such a pursuit, surely I was within my rights attempting to trace friendship, this oddest of all organisms, back to its roots.

"When two organisms have attributes that derive from an equivalent characteristic of a common ancestor," Martha was saying, "they are said to be homologous."

Why weren't Martha and I homologous?

"Would you say you and I are homologous?" I asked Martha.

"Why? Because we both have Barlow in our name?" She laughed. "You're so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time."

I was, wasn't I? A black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize it out of all recognizability. Darwin was right— the habit of comparison leads to generalization. He was right—we travelers stay such a short time, able to make mere sketches of what we've seen. And then we fill up the wide gaps of knowledge with inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.

Wasn't that what Martha did as well? No. Martha told stories, but she described what she saw. Detailed observation—just what Darwin valued. The world opened up before her, inspired by her vision and her touch. She used what she found, like my father opening all those misfiled drawers. Whereas all I seemed to do was put things in the drawers. I was the one who misfiled in the first place.

I wondered how much of my life I had misfiled over the years. Had I misfiled my ex-husband, Michael? Obviously. Although whether I had misfiled him under "Husband" or had misfiled him under "Ex-husband" was anybody's guess. Probably both. I had certainly misfiled Martha. And our friendship.

Let's pretend friendship is a species. One possibility is extinction. I had searched my memory for an event that precipitated the end of our friendship. A sudden change in climate, a meteor, a story of a drowned man. But our friendship was not extinct, for I still carried it with me. If a species has not become extinct, yet has not survived, it must have changed. Easy enough. The species had changed. Gloria had theorized that this change left Martha reduced to a remnant, an organ that had lost its usefulness and so shrunk and not quite disappeared. But I finally realized, as I stood and watched those pigs with their mammalian ear bones derived from reptilian jaw structures, that it was not Martha who was the residual organ.

Here is something I read in Darwin's journal. He was amused by a theory of a contemporary philosopher, William Whewell. "Says length of days [is] adapted to duration of sleep of man!!! & not man to planets," Darwin wrote. "Instance of arrogance!!"

I pulled Gloria aside. "I got it backward," I said. "Like Whewell."

"I'm sorry."

"The sun does not bend itself to man's needs. It's the duration of man's sleep that is the adaptation. Our sleep is the accommodation to the earth's rotation, to the cycle of the sun and the planets," I said. "That explains everything."

It was so obvious. I had—"instance of arrogance!!" —been looking at it upside down, backward. I had assumed that the length of the night was the result of my need for sleep. For years I had been asking myself what I could have done to Martha, an action of which I thought nothing at the time, but which cut her to the quick, something unforgivable, unforgivable even to Martha. I had come up with so many possible explanations. The note with the heart and the question mark. An inadvertent slight. My story about that poor drowned man.

But it had nothing to do with me or my story. It had to do with Martha, with her story, with her rotations, her travels from dawn to dusk, from horizon to horizon, whatever they were, whatever they had been, journeys beyond my sight that had nothing to do with me, the other side of the moon.

"You see, Martha is the sun—"

Gloria nodded in an indulgent, teacherly way.

"And
I'm
the male nipple."

There was no mystery to it. There was no forgiving or not forgiving. There was no meteor, no saltation.

"God, what a relief," I said.

The splitting event was, as splitting events are, a haphazard affair, an accident, a shift of direction that was, in hindsight, an opportunity, an occurrence with no meaning other than its ultimate but unintended outcome.

"I'm the whale's thumb. I was so arrogant and self-centered that I thought it must be Martha, but really it's
me! I'm
the vestigial organ."

I pointed at myself, poking myself in the chest.

"Me," I said. "Me, me!"

"For six days she labored in order to discover humility," Gloria said. "On the seventh day, she rested."

Darwin wrote in one of his notebooks, "No structure will last without it is adaptation to
whole
life of animal, and not if it be solely to the womb, as in monster, or solely to manhood—it will decrease and be driven outwards in the grand crush of population." That statement was in the fourth of the transmutation notebooks, which Darwin labeled "E," and which was written in gray or brown ink and bound in rust-brown leather with cream-colored labels and a broken clasp. I have not read the notebook bound in rust-brown leather. I read a paperback edition. But I like to imagine the book itself, the weight of it, the smell.

In the same notebook, Darwin hypothesized on the possible reason for the existence of the sexes. I mean, what are they here for? It would be so much simpler without them. But evolution needed sexes and sexual reproduction, thank God, so that natural selection could work on whole populations, rather than just individuals. "My theory," Darwin wrote, "gives great final cause (I do not wish to say only cause, but one great final cause—nothing probably exists for one cause) of sexes in separate animals: for otherwise there be as many species as individuals." I read this line, several times, and understood it at last and was impressed by its astute, exuberant, imaginative simplicity, but what really struck me about this important passage was the insignificant aside "nothing probably exists for one cause."

Martha was very civil when I left and even asked for my address. Gloria gave me a pair of earrings as a keepsake, which may or may not have been fashioned from pigeon excrement.

The first night back in New York, Jack e-mailed me an article about species from
Scientific American,
a funny note, and an invitation to take-out Chinese at his 2B or mine. "Or is it not 2B?" To which I replied, "2B continued," and went home for the weekend to see my parents in Barlow.

"Did you get far enough away?" my father asked.

"Did you know that we don't really see objects, just the light reflected from them?"

"That's pretty far, I guess."

My mother stared at us.

"We should have sent you to Paris," she said.

"Did you have fun with Martha? What a small world it is," my father said. "Did you make lots of new friends, too?"

"Yes, actually. I did."

I took a walk past the Not Our Barlows', but no one was home.

"You didn't tell me you used to be engaged to Martha's father," I said to my mother.

"No, I didn't."

"I'm glad you didn't marry him," I said.

"Well, I couldn't, could I? I mean we
are
brother and sister."

My father offered me a Scotch.

I drank the Scotch and waited for my mother to say something like, "Metaphorically speaking, of course, ha ha!" But she didn't. She said, "You always wanted a love child in the family. Now you've got one. Robert Barlow."

"He's not a Barlow?"

"Oh, he's a Barlow all right," my father said.

"Your grandfather Edwin, my father, was once engaged to the suffragette. She left Edwin for Hamilton Barlow, who was Edwin's first cousin."

I ran through the names in my head. Hamilton was Franklin's son. Hamilton was Martha's grandfather, and the suffragette who married him instead of my grandfather was Martha's grandmother.

"Hamilton was older than my father," my mother was saying. "Hamilton was richer."

"They'd already screwed your grandfather," my father said. "Hamilton and Franklin sold assets without his approval, hid profits. Your grandpa Edwin and aunt Anna were left almost penniless. I've told you about that. Well, Anna had her house. Edwin had this house. But the Not Our Barlows got the dough."

So the suffragette dumped Edwin, that handsome man in the white suit in the photographs from Cuba. She left him for Hamilton, the rich cousin with the mustache. I'd seen pictures of Hamilton, too, thumbs tucked in his waistcoat pockets. Hamilton and the suffragette got married. And Edwin got a job in Cuba and married the boss's daughter.

Did Martha know this? Did she want to know it? Perhaps I would write to her and tell her someday.

"My uncle Hamilton and aunt Suffragette had a son," my mother said. "That was Robert. But ... Uncle Hamilton was not Robert's father. Uncle Hamilton was Robert's uncle."

"Huh?"

"The suffragette really was progressive, I suppose. At any rate, she was already pregnant when she married Hamilton. My
father
was Robert's father."

"That makes Robert your
brother
" I said. "You can't be engaged to your brother!"

"My feelings exactly. My father had to go to Cuba, start over. He met my mother, got married, had me. Robert and I met at a college mixer. Isn't that absurd? We realized we were cousins from feuding sides of the same family. It was all very Romeo and Juliet. Until he told his mother we were getting engaged and she told him who his real father was. Then it was a bit Siegmund and Sieglinde."

"That's disgusting," I said.

"True," said my father.

"
Operatic,
" said my mother.

"I prefer to think that your mother was too seasick to marry old Robert Barlow."

"Well, that, too," my mother said. "I don't think my father ever knew. Thank God. Aunt Anna did. And, really, that suffragette jezebel person could have changed the sheets."

"Indeed," said my father. "A feud is a many-splendored thing."

"Did you have clean sheets on your boat, Jane? I hope Martha was well. My niece. What an odd place for her to end up. Well, she always liked scampering around the woods. Pleasant little girl, all things considered. You know, Brother Robert and his new wife are thinking of opening that wretched bed and breakfast again. Why don't they open it in the Galapagos? Thank God Graziela got her shop.
Querido,
should we go to visit her? Martha can be our guide. Show us your pictures, Jane, dear. Daddy and I want to go to the Galapagos Islands. Perhaps I can get a cutting of some darling wildflower."