“He remembers it very well,” her mother said. “Don’t you?”
Sam nodded without looking up from the huge volume open on his lap.
“What are you reading?” Phoebe asked.
“A biology textbook,” he said, spreading his fingers over the pages. “My teacher loaned it to me, for an extra project.” When her mother said, “Sam?” he added, “I wrote something about Lodge, for an English class.”
“Can I see it?”
He paused, looking down at his book, and then closed it on a pencil and rose. “If you’d like.” He left the room and returned with a few sheets of paper, covered in his meticulous small script.
The essay, which he’d called “My Father, at a Distance,” started not with a memory of Michael but with a description of Sam’s evening at the theater in New York. Here were the rapt women, the box with the thread, the flow of Lodge’s talk as she too remembered it — but these things, for Sam, had been only a beginning. Like her, he’d gone to the library and investigated Lodge’s writings; but unlike her — she hadn’t been able to stand more than a few pages — he’d actually read Lodge’s book about his son, Raymond, who after being killed in the Great War had supposedly made efforts to communicate with his family.
I didn’t expect to be swayed by it, Sam wrote. But I was, although perhaps not in the way Lodge meant. Sam described the letters Raymond had sent from the front, the photographs of him as a boy, the long transcriptions of Lodge’s sittings with mediums after Raymond’s death, the chapters of theory and exposition meant to help a reader interpret what Lodge presented as evidence for Raymond’s continued existence in another form. What this was, Sam argued, was evidence of a different sort: evidence of love. When Lodge wrote, People often feel a notable difficulty in believing in the reality of continued existence. Very likely it is difficult to believe or to realize existence in what is sometimes called “the next world”; but then, when we come to think of it, it is difficult to believe in existence in this world too; it is difficult to believe in existence at all, what he meant was: My existence makes no sense without my son.
From Lodge’s longing for his son had come, Sam argued, an entire theory of etheric transmission, which, if it wasn’t true — he himself believed it was not — was still a marvelous example of how science was influenced by feeling. About the connection between that feeling and the construction and testing of any scientific hypothesis. Lodge had suggested in his lecture that Einstein’s theory had been tested but not completely proven by the eclipse experiments. His book suggested that his experiments after Raymond’s death offered a similar level of proof for the theory of survival of personality. Phoebe slowed down and read each word.
My father died when I was four; I miss him all the time. For years I was sure he was up in the air somewhere, among the stars he studied. I listened for him every night; I thought that from someplace deep in space he would try to contact me. When we moved from the house where I was born, I was terrified that if he sent a message it wouldn’t reach me. Later, I convinced myself that he could find me anywhere, at any distance, and that the fault was mine; if I couldn’t hear him, it was because I didn’t know how to listen. If I stretched myself, broadened myself, I’d be like a telescope turned onto a patch of sky that before had seemed blank; suddenly stars would be visible, nothingness would turn into knowledge. Across time and space, my father would reach out to me.
Here was Michael at last: she could see his face as clearly as when they’d first kissed on the riverbank, under the starry sky.
Eventually, I had to give up on this idea, but as I listened to Lodge’s lecture I fell back into it, and for a few moments, I wanted so badly to believe him that I did. I understood the ether of space to be exactly as Lodge described it, a universal medium that transmits not only electromagnetic forces but also the thoughts and longings of the dead. Only when I looked around at the audience and saw them all believing the same thing did I realize what was happening.
I don’t understand the physics behind Einstein’s theory, and I don’t believe in the existence of a spirit world, but my introduction to Lodge’s work changed the way I think. I don’t know, and I don’t believe there is sufficient evidence yet to prove, whether the ether is real the way the atmosphere is real, or the way the equator is real. Whether Einstein’s theory has been proven, or Lodge’s theory of survival of the personality after death, or neither or both. I don’t know whether my father exists in some ethereal form or only in my heart. What I do know is that the questions we ask about the world and the experiments we design to answer them are connected to our feelings.
Where had Sam learned to write like that? Upstairs, her father’s viola sang, dismantling troubles Phoebe knew nothing about. Across from her, Sam and her mother nestled back in their chairs, each reading with such concentration that when she finished Sam’s essay, neither noticed for a moment. Then her mother looked up.
“It’s good,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Lovely,” Phoebe agreed. Her mother had already read it. Down the stairs, through the empty rooms, triplets rippled in sets of four: the prelude to the sixth Bach cello suite, transcribed for viola, which her father had been playing while she and Sam and her mother read, each of them deep in their own thoughts but sharing a room, the light from the lamps, the sense of piecing together a sequence of thoughts. Then — not a rift, but a discontinuity. How does a person end up like this? For much of her life she’d been listening, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, to her father play those suites. Until just that moment, with the triplets running steadily up and down, she would have told herself that the space between her and family wasn’t empty at all but held light and music, feelings and thoughts, and a bond that could be stretched without breaking.
The Island (1873)
The train trip took the whole day. Oswego to Albany and then the length of Massachusetts, orchards and mountains and rivers and fields, cities appearing then disappearing while the sky darkened steadily until, near Boston and the coast, the rain began. By nine o’clock, when Henrietta Atkins stepped down at New Bedford, it was pouring. Her skirt was spotted with mud before she was halfway down the block; her hair dripped over her shoulders; the two bags packed with notebooks, drawing pencils, boots, clothes, and the tiny stipend meant to cover her expenses for the next seven weeks sagged alarmingly.
This was on a Friday night in July of 1873, the low clouds trapping a smell — weedy, salty, slightly medicinal — that Henrietta, who had never been near the shore, thought might be the sea. She headed away from the station, searching for the hotel that the organizers of the natural history course had recommended to those coming from far away. Excelsior? Excalibur? She’d lost the letter with the details — but there at the end of the block was a gray building, four stories tall, marked with a giant E. She climbed the steps, set down her bags, and pushed back some wet strands of hair. Inside, she imagined, might be other students signed up for the course: girls who, like her, had just graduated from Normal School and were about to start teaching, older women who’d worked at academies for a while, men who taught at colleges and might give her advice. A shame to meet her new companions so bedraggled.