In the village where she’d been raised, she bought a house and adopted a tufty-headed gray dog, arranged new positions for people who’d worked in her lab, disposed of her old apartment. She bought a bed and a sofa and found a teaching job at a junior college on the shore of another lake. Why? people asked her. As if there was an answer. Even when Dee was doing the asking, all Rosalind could say was that she didn’t know; that all her answers about herself were lies. She’d been lonely in her old life, or she felt engulfed, or she yearned or feared to belong to a group; she loved being absorbed by her work or hated the way that kept her from the larger world; she despised being flattered or needed it; she hurt some people or they hurt her; or the world changed or she changed or science changed or none of those things. So many hypotheses! A well-designed experiment offered a question posed correctly, to which an answer might be found. She had, simply, to do the experiment.

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In 1994, when I set a story called “The Marburg Sisters” in the central New York village of Hammondsport, I had no idea that I’d write more stories about those young women, nor that I’d spend several decades imagining generations of their family and friends. I took as a given, when I started, that Rose and Bianca were interested in science. Only much later, as the sisters’ forebears came into focus, did I see the roots of their deep curiosity about the natural world.

As their history expanded, an imagined landscape encased the actual village, with which it shares steep hills, a long, narrow valley, a tiny airfield, and a handful of streets at the tip of a Y-shaped lake. In two novels and a number of stories, set in places ranging from the Arctic to Philadelphia to the Adirondacks, characters connected to Rose and Bianca go about their business, but the stories closest to them—especially “The Marburg Sisters,” from Ship Fever; “The Mysteries of Ubiquitin” and “The Forest,” from Servants of the Map; and “The Investigators” and “The Island,” from Archangel—are all rooted in the place here called Crooked Lake.

Portions of this book have appeared previously, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: “Wonders of the Shore” in Tin House (Winter 2016) and in The Best American Short Stories, 2016; “The Regimental History” in Ploughshares (Fall 2019); “The Accident” in Harvard Review (Winter 2016); and “Open House” in American Short Fiction (Fall 2016). I’m grateful to these publications and their editors.