The Seal Wife

Snowshoes of varying degrees of workmanship. A fistful of matches still dry in their waterproof can. A wooden tripod. A needlepoint cat stretched taut in its frame. A broken-necked ukulele. A statue of the Virgin with her nose sheared off, her blue dress faded to the same limy gray-green as the water that brought her. Two brooms and one bowling pin. A shard of mirror left in the corner of a gilt frame. An oak headboard with carved pineapple finials. A braided switch of blond hair. A hasty plank grave marker, the dates 1872–1911 burned onto one side. Walking bent over along the water’s edge, Bigelow examines each object, keeping whatever seems useful, the matches and the shard of mirror, the tripod, and two snowshoes that might work together. He ties them on, tests their weave on the sand, thinking of his own possessions, what little he packed and brought north. Maps and instruments, clothes, although not enough and not the right ones, a box of books and a few sentimental trinkets, and his work, of course, calculations—thousands of them—copied meticulously into notebooks.

Standing on the shore, swaying on the long shoes, Bigelow imagines these things in the water, his among what others have lost, his maps and equations and longings erased by the tide.

Chapter 7

TO SLOW HIMSELF DOWN, to give her time to come, he has to stop moving altogether.

He has to call upon his whole repertoire of calming images, one especially, he has no idea its source, of an empty chair in a road—a simple wooden chair, the kind you’d expect in a kitchen, and yet it sits alone, without table, lamp, or occupant, in the middle of a straight, paved road, a road going nowhere. Green fields on either side and a range of mountains in the distance. An altocumulus, maybe two.

Once he adds the clouds, he runs through classifications of their forms, starting with the lowest, the nearly earthbound stratus and fractostratus, up through cumulus and nimbus and all their subclassifications, even those textbook clouds that he never sees, like altocumulus-castellus, up and up through all the layers of the air until Bigelow reaches the high, high cirrus, clouds spread at thirty thousand feet like a frayed veil between earth and heaven, between coming and not coming.

Aloft, he swallows his breath, in control now, almost.

The habit of ice.

The habit of ice.

The habit of ice will hold him where he wants to be held, frozen at that most delicious point. The basic pattern of ice is hexagonal, a union of six tetrahedra, but the formation of crystals varies with temperature. From zero to negative three degrees centigrade, it is the habit of ice to form thin hexagonal plates. With the subtraction of one or two degrees, needles result. Take away three and get hollow prismatic columns. From negative eight to negative twelve: thicker hexagonal plates. The dendritic forms—fronds of ice, like botanical growth—occur from negative twelve to negative sixteen.

Bigelow keeps his eyes closed until she cries out. He wants to watch her as she comes, the way she seems for a moment to swim beneath him, her legs kicking in some rhythm he can almost understand.

But she’s too quick; it’s over before he has a chance to see.

Chapter 8

“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a balloon and a kite is that a balloon can be blown off course.”

He sits across from her at the table as she examines the raccoon he has brought. It’s still warm; he shot it in the station, cornered it under his bed, where he keeps—used to keep—his cornmeal and his sugar.

“And,” he says, “to fly a balloon, you need good weather. That’s not true for kites.”

Her clothes are off, folded on the chair. She has only the one dress, and sometimes removes it before cutting up game. He’d like to believe this is to please or tempt him, but she’s no more flirtatious than she is modest. It must be that she doesn’t want to get it stained. He watches as she picks up the carcass, turns it over, looking for the place where the shot entered, a way to predict how it will bleed when she butchers it. Her breasts move with the rest of her, not so small that they don’t sway prettily when she stoops to retrieve a fallen knife. Still, he knows better than to interrupt her when she’s working.

“The first thing that was wrong with the Nairobi experiment was the balloon, because balloons have no line, no line angles to measure, so they could only estimate the height, they couldn’t calculate it. Besides being wasteful, because you have to send up five balloons for every one you reclaim. They just deflate. Or they burst and fall, and that’s no good—not here in Alaska, the population’s too sparse. Around Nairobi there’s a million people who will retrieve a balloon, but here in the territories I’d never get my instruments back.

“Anyway, a kite’s better. With the length of the line and the angle it presents, I can determine the exact height. It’s a standard equation, Pythagorean, using a sine table for the—

“Look,” he says to the woman, and he pulls her away from the table, the raccoon divided into a bowl of entrails, a pan of meat. He steps around the pelt, set fur-side down so as not to stain the floor. She’ll scrape it later, after he’s gone.

With a hand on either shoulder, he sits her on her bed. Then he opens his rucksack. She leans forward, curious. Has he brought another, different animal?

White fabric. He pulls it out, unfolds, unfolds, unfolds. It covers her lap, her bed, her table; it falls in rippling layers and washes up against the doorsill.

“A hundred and eighty square feet of muslin,” he says. “Lifting surface. And that’s just one cell’s worth. Do you know how much that is?” He throws his arms open. “Six by nine by twelve. Six feet tall, nine feet long, twelve feet wide. There’s never been a kite this big. Not on record.” He picks up the end of the fabric and wraps it around her naked shoulders, looks at her black eyes. She indulges him for a moment, holding still before shrugging it off so that it crumples around her on the bed.

Bigelow picks up a corner. “Every night I make myself sew another seam. God, but I’m slow. I don’t know how you do it. An hour every night, and not half, not a quarter as neat as you.” He finds the spot where he left off and pushes it into her hands. She examines the place, smudged gray, where his fingers gripped the cloth. The muslin is puckered in spots, and she pulls at the fabric, trying to smooth it.

“I found a tall fir. Dragged it two, maybe two and a half miles to the mill and had it cut. Thirty-four spars. The kite takes twenty-eight, but they can crack, sometimes they break in flight. And I’m nowhere near finished sanding.

“Here’s what I need,” he says. “I need to build a reel that includes some kind of timing device. A stationary reel that I can set to pause at five-, maybe ten-minute intervals. Then instruments can record at selected altitudes. The Nairobi balloon, it was—well, it was famous. Written up in all the papers …” Bigelow trails off.

“What I need,” he says after a minute, “is line that’s strong enough to go up for miles. And a reel that’s bolted down to some kind of platform. Because you can’t control a kite this big. Not manually. It would pull you off your feet.”

The woman hands the muslin back to Bigelow, and he sees a fleck of blood on it, from her hands.

“Silk. I thought silk,” he says. “But silk might fray on a reel. So it’s got to be metal, but flexible. Piano wire. Maybe that would work.

“It’s going to change everything. Forecasts—it will make long-range forecasts possible.”

He folds the muslin, folds it tight to fit back inside his rucksack. “See,” he says, laying the bag aside, “what they did in Nairobi was measure the air temperature over the equator. And found out that it isn’t hot.”

He takes her fingers and gives them a shake. “It isn’t even warm,” he says. “It’s cold. Cold the way you’d expect air to be here. Freezing.”

Bigelow releases the woman. He throws himself back on her bed, chewing his lower lip, thinking. “Everyone knows that winds move eastward around the globe, because of the earth, the rotating earth. That’s obvious. But it’s also true that heat rises.” He gets up, walks to the stove, holds a hand above its surface. “So you’d think air over the equator would be hot. Hot like it is near the ground. I mean, Nairobi! But. But.”

Bigelow steps out of his boots and onto the chair, and from chair to table, avoiding the bloody bowl and the knife. He reaches to feel the air near the ceiling, jumps down before she can begin to scold. While she watches, he moves the chair from one part of the room to another, standing on its seat to test the air overhead. Then he sits down next to her with his pen and notebook and sketches her square room, floor, walls, stove, and ceiling. “See,” he says, and he draws arrows coming up out of the stove, arrows that move toward the middle of the ceiling and down the opposite wall, across the floor and back, big, spiraling circles. “That’s the way a closed system of air circulates.”

He pulls her up from the bed and walks her through the room. “Warm. Cold. Warm. The earth, it’s a closed system, too. Heat from the equator rises. Cold air from the poles sinks. And it would make huge crosscurrents. Streams that flow across east – west winds.”

The woman stands back, watches Bigelow sweep his arms around. “I bet,” he says, “that the air over Anchorage is warmer than the air over Nairobi. I just have to get the kite high enough.”

The woman looks at him, her eyebrows drawn together. He’s made her forget the raccoon.

“You’ll see,” he says. “You’ll come with me, up the bluff. I have a place picked out. A spot where the wind is always perfect.

“The kite, it’s going to be huge. Enormous. This”—he picks up the rucksack with the fabric inside—“this is just to give you an idea. It isn’t even half of it. A kite big enough to carry all the instruments you could want. Barometer, thermometer, anemometer, hygrometer.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Dry-cell battery, and rotating barrel for graphing readings simultaneously.”

She sits on her bed, leaning back on her elbows, and he comes to her. He kneels and puts his arms around her waist.

“You’ll come with me, up to the place I’ve found,” he tells her. And he tries, because he can’t not try, to get his tongue between her legs.

Chapter 9

HE BRINGS HER a bar of soap. He likes to think of her, sitting in the bath.

There isn’t much of a selection, not in a place like Anchorage, not in April, when the inlet’s ice pack still prohibits shipping, but still, he lingers over the available brands. Canthrox, one bar says—shampoo. He’s never seen her wash or even wet her shining hair. Cuticura, but he doesn’t like its medicinal name or its smell. Naphtha, for laundry only. Most of the soaps have been on the shelf long enough that their wrappers are stained and torn. After all, why buy soap when most people bathe at a bathhouse and bathhouses provide their own?

Bigelow returns to the one bar with a picture on its label: a lady in a tub, her ringed hand resting on its edge, bubbles floating up from the surface of the water. The bathtub is long and has claw feet. It isn’t much like the one the woman uses. And the woman isn’t much like his woman, either. She has a little cap on her head, with curls peeping out from under. LAVANDE. The word is written under the drawing. French. On the other side of the wrapper is the address of the National Toilet Company in Paris, Tennessee.

Still, if she likes the pictures of the corsets, the dimpled faces above the squeezed middles.

Bigelow buys the soap, and after they eat and lie together in the bed, he gives it to her. She’s sitting in the tin tub, smoking, and he slips out from under the skins to fetch the bar from his coat.

“Here,” he says, and she takes it from him. She lays the pipe on the floor beside the tub and, using both hands, turns the gift over and over, smells it, looks once more at the picture, then hands it back.

“No,” he says. “It’s for you. For baths.” He unwraps the soap and gives it to her, and immediately it slips from her wet hand into the water, where she leaves it.

Bigelow hesitates for a moment, then puts his hand in and fishes around for the bar. Past an ankle, under a thigh, the surprise of pubic hair, crisp and springy, even underwater. He hesitates too long in that spot, and she takes his wrist, she pulls his hand from the tub. But he’s seen the soap’s shadow; before she can stop him, he has it and is rubbing the bar up and down her arm to demonstrate how it makes lather, sniffing at it to show her its perfume.

She doesn’t like it. She gets out of the water and empties the tub out the door. Still naked, she fills the kettle with snow and puts it back on the stove, sits in the chair to wait for hot water while Bigelow gathers his clothes and dresses, taking his time because the sight of her perched there, nothing on, is one he enjoys. Too proud to cover herself, she’d rather be cold, the dusky skin of her breasts almost mauve, their nipples drawn up in angry, hard points.

The next time he’s at her place he sees that the soap is gone—she’s thrown it away, no doubt. But she’s kept the wrapper. She’s stuck it to the wall as decoration.

So he’s gotten something right after all.

Chapter 10

AS IT WOULD MAKE no sense to assemble and disassemble a kite of such complexity and proportion, Bigelow is building a shed for it on the bluff, and, outside the shed, a platform on which to mount a reel. He has lumber left over from the construction of the station house, and he has bought a box of cheap, bent nails from Getz.

On days he does not see the woman, he spends his afternoons on the bluff. He straightens nails with a hammer, striking sparks from the flat rock where he pounds them. He frames the shed and he puts up walls, he pitches the roof steeply to prevent snow from sticking.

Then he carries all the kite’s pieces from the station up to the shed, making two trips with a sledge, first the spars and the wing ribs, and the next day all the rest, muslin and tools and the instruments he wants to send up into the sky.

Inside the new building, protected from the wind, he begins to put the kite together. Crouched under a hurricane lamp tied to a beam, Bigelow is so involved, day after day, with the details of the work at hand—box corners and lock slots, lengths of hemp soaked and tied wet so as not to loosen in flight, spars, three of them, that crack under tension and have to be replaced, a seam so crooked it has to be resewn—that he doesn’t see the whole of what he’s making.

Not until it’s done, ribs tight, stitches knotted. Bigger somehow than he expected. Grander and more beautiful, with a grace that drawings can’t convey.

He walks around and around the kite, squeezing to fit between the taut muslin panels of the cells and the plank sides of the shed, running his fingers over the fabric, touching spars that he sanded, one each night in his station, until they were as smooth as her skin.

He can’t wait to get it outside, into the wind.

Chapter 11

ALL WEEK HE HAS no luck with his gun: torrents of rain wash every last bird from the sky, the rabbits are deep in their dens. Soon the mosquitoes will be as fierce as when he arrived. With nothing to offer the woman, and unable to face the idea of a long, wet evening spent alone, Bigelow settles on the idea of some netting for her bed; he walks into town to buy a bolt from Getz’s store.

His purchase held inside his coat to keep it dry, he’s heading east toward her house, when he sees a man crossing Front Street with a mixed brace slung over his shoulder, one scaup and another, bigger bird with a red breast. Bigelow runs through the rain to catch up with him. He wants the prettier one—a merganser, the man says it’s called—but the man won’t sell it for less than a quarter, so Bigelow takes the scaup instead, and then he has two gifts.

He hurries, head down, trying to avoid the deeper puddles, but by the time he arrives he’s soaked through, and she makes him wait by the door, where she sets aside the bolt of netting to strip off his coat and his boots.

“Against the bugs,” he says, pointing at the netting. He pantomimes getting bitten, slaps at his forearm and then scratches the same spot. The woman nods, a brisk gesture, eyebrows raised as if to say she’s not so ignorant—so savage—that she doesn’t recognize mosquito netting.

He stands barefoot on her bed to screw a ring into the ceiling, shows her how to thread the netting through it, how to drape the stuff so the bugs can’t get in. When he mimes using a needle and thread to close the seam at the head of the bed, she nods, again with a kind of put-upon patience.

“Okay,” he says. “Sorry,” he says. Why doesn’t he learn to resist these gestures she finds condescending?

It’s pretty under the net, the way it makes filmy, indistinct shapes of the chair, the doorway, the squat black stove. The fabric draws halos around lamp and window, and he puts his arm around the woman. With his other hand, he tries to direct her face toward his. But she won’t stay there with him. Instead, she slips out of his arms and pulls the net down, she folds it into something resembling the original bolt.

He moves back to the other room, gets the duck and lays it on the table, sits by the stove, feeling suddenly cold and cheap, apologetic on account of its pedestrian black-and-white feathers. But then she never saw the other one, with the tufted green head, the blood-colored breast.

She undresses before the lamp, and her naked shadow falls across the table, spills into his empty lap.

She picks up the bird, examines it minutely, as she does every meal he brings. There’s no reason to assume she can tell he hasn’t bagged the scaup himself, and yet Bigelow feels sure she knows it isn’t his. Except, he tells himself, that it is. He did buy it, after all. He gave the man what he had left in his pocket, one dime and one nickel.

She cuts the neck to let it bleed; then, without plucking any feathers, she skins it. Does she find the plumage pretty enough to preserve intact? She opens the stomach to find what’s there: the orangy flesh of a bivalve and two small crabs, whole, their legs folded tight. Bigelow finds the sight of them sad somehow, as if rather than having been eaten, they’d been put carefully away, saved for some purpose.

He will think of the crabs later. He’ll try to see them as they were, the pair of them, legs pulled into their sides. He’ll close his eyes to better remember each detail of this evening—the halos drawn by the netting, the smear of blood on the table, the coat of feathers drying on a nail. He’ll wish he’d paid closer attention, as he surely would have had he known to look for auguries. Had he known she would leave him.

As it is, he just sits, shivering by the stove. The scaup has a fishy taste, but he eats it, he holds out his plate for more, the only way he knows to compliment her.

Chapter 12

THE DISAPPEARANCE of the Aleut woman grieves him as nothing ever has. “I’m dying,” he tells the face in his shaving mirror. He expects the words to embarrass him, to rouse him from self-pity, but they feel true.

He reminds himself that he has lists of what he’s learned to do without: butter, milk, peach cobbler. Newspapers, paving stones. A decent library, and a place to buy new recordings for his gramophone. A hot bath in his own home instead of a threadbare gray towel and ten shavings of soap for a penny at one of the bathhouses.

And he has always been restrained in the expression of emotion. He didn’t cry when his father died, not even when the undertaker and his boy carried the corpse feetfirst from the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the road. After the funeral, Bigelow’s mother gave him a box of his father’s effects. That was the word she used, effects, and he remembers repeating the two syllables silently to himself, over and over, e-ffects, e-ffects, a compulsive mental throat clearing, but one that produced no result, for he never opened the box. He noted its size, and imagined what a container of its dimensions might hold—eyeglasses, cuff links, the sign, B. GREENE, ATTORNEY AT LAW, that had hung under the bell—but he didn’t open it.

So why, then, does he return to the woman’s abandoned house almost daily, driven to reconsider the two vacant rooms, the window’s empty pane of light as it moves across the floor and onto the opposite wall?

Sunday morning hours that he once squandered in church, crammed into a pew between mother and sister, grudgingly dropping nickels into the collection plate, he spends in rooms she has consecrated, a word that surprises him when it comes into his head. Consecrated. After all, he hasn’t been to a Sunday service in ten years. But how else to describe what he feels as he walks through her house, around and around, reeling with loneliness?

She chinked between the shrinking, warped boards of the house with scraps of leather, moss, paper—whatever came to hand—and in her absence these have fallen out and cracks have appeared, admitting air, light. He tries to restuff them, but the dried moss crumbles at his touch, the bits of leather and paper slip straight through and outside, then blow away. He presses his eye to the crack, watching the wind tease them over the packed dirt.

Chapter 13

JULY 4, the town explodes, bunting and baseball and smuggled bottles of beer. Despite the fact that the Engineering Commission has designated the town as dry—there are no legal intoxicants in Anchorage, and anyone caught selling contraband beer or whiskey within the town site will forfeit his or her claim to a plot of land—alcohol flows through its streets from the Line, as the straggling track of whorehouses southeast of the site is called. The madams use their connections to buy beer by the crate straight off the dock, packed in boxes labeled BEANS or MOLASSES or LAUNDRY SOAP; and stills abound in the uncut woods. Women who sell their favors sell bootleg, too, either as an aphrodisiac to be consumed on the premises, or as a nightcap, to carry home in a hair-oil bottle.

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