Cover

Title

NATURAL
HISTORY

stories

ANDREA BARRETT

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

for Emily Forland,

stalwart companion

There were some advantages about being a writer of histories.

The desk was a shelter one could hide behind, it was a hole one could creep into.

—WILLA CATHER, The Professor’s House

I

I

Wonders of the Shore

WONDERS OF THE SHORE

I.

The sea-shore, with its stretches of sandy beach and rocks, seems, at first sight, nothing but a barren waste, merely the natural barrier of the ocean. But to the observant eye these apparently desolate reaches are not only teeming with life, they are also replete with suggestions of the past. They are the pages of a history full of fascination for one who has learned to read them.

The cover is a faded olive, not flashy; not the first thing you’d pull from a bookshelf. Wonders of the Shore. Black type, black decorations: a small silhouette of a fiddler crab; a pair of stylized starfish bracketing the author’s name. Coiled snails frame the “Wonder” while sea anemones frame the “Shore.” Actually it is attractive, in a sober, subtle way. Someone labored over that design. And over the photographs, too, reprinted from many sources but freshly labeled and crowded on thick, glossy paper, which makes the book heavy.

The writing is old-fashioned, more detailed than we’re used to now; it was published in 1889. The author, Daphne Bannister, thanks a long list of people at the end of her preface. Some are professors at places like Harvard and Barnard, others curators or—the women—assistants at the Smithsonian. Especially thanked are Celia Thaxter, “whose kind invitations to Thaxter Cottage made my working visits to the Hotel such a pleasure,” and “my dear friend and stalwart companion, Miss Henrietta Atkins.”

One of Henrietta’s relatives, Rose Marburg, inherited the book, but for a long time Rose didn’t look at it.

II.

It is hoped that this book will suggest a new interest and pleasure to many, and that it will serve as a practical guide to this branch of natural history, without necessitating serious study. Marine organisms are interesting acquaintances when once introduced, and the real purpose of the author is to present, to the latent naturalist, friends whom he will enjoy.

Celia Thaxter is easy to trace; she wrote a book of poems, a collection of pieces about the beloved island where she was raised, a book about her garden. There are letters, too, and portraits and photographs, and a couple of biographies. Among her well-known friends were Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the painters William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam. Nathaniel Hawthorne visited her island cottage. Major Greely claimed her poems comforted him during his disastrous Arctic voyage. She met Dickens and Robert Browning.

Daphne, who wrote under two different names, is harder to classify, but she had her day as well and people in the village noticed her: a woman, visiting repeatedly, traveling on her own. At the drugstore, at the theater. Walking along the lake with her friend, pale hair improbably thick above her sharp features and delicate neck. Or skating—she had tiny feet but was very fast—in a costume showing more leg than was usual in this part of upstate New York. Some were annoyed by her manners. After one visit, the Crooked Lake Gazette reported:

Among those arriving last week by train from Bath was Miss Daphne Bannister, here for one of her frequent stays with our esteemed biology teacher, Miss Henrietta Atkins. A well-known authoress, Miss Bannister has written guides to the insect pests, the wildflowers of Massachusetts (where she makes her home), and the birds of the fields and farms. She traveled from the Cornell campus, where she presented a talk on parasitic nematodes.

That one, the gossips said. Henrietta’s friend. All around Crooked Lake, people were aware of Henrietta. Mention of her in the Gazette goes back as far as grade school: “Winner of the Spelling Bee.” “Student Fossil Collection Impresses Visitors.” “Sisters Show Off Lake Trout Caught in Fishing Derby.” Later articles note her departure for Oswego, where she went for her teacher training, and the grant she received when she finished. She met Daphne after she graduated, at a summer school for the study of natural history run by Louis Agassiz. After that she came back home to teach biology at the high school. She established the Natural History Club, the Young Lepidopterists Club, an ice-skating group, a reading group. Several times she won teaching awards. Each year she pulled a few promising students into her investigations, which ranged from aiding the local farmers’ experiments with breeding cows and corn, to studies of fish, the development of other uses for wine grapes during Prohibition, and a new method for producing the membrane used to make balloons and rigid airships impermeable to gas.

All of this is noted in the Gazette. Henrietta, so firmly rooted wherever she stands that she looks tall unless she’s next to someone else, ages silently in the photographs; her skirts narrow, then rise, then give way to voluminous slacks. Her sleeves are always pushed back from her sturdy wrists and blunt-fingered hands, lines appearing as her hair grays and metamorphoses from a mass pinned at the back of her head to a neat crop just below her ears. Grateful students mention her as they in turn appear in the newspaper for one thing or another. Appreciative colleagues thank her as they retire. The tone is invariably kind—except for the notes about Daphne’s visits, which are colored by something that wouldn’t be there if either of the women had married. Now they seem to point at something. They might not have read that way then.

III.

Every coast-line shows the destructive effects of the sea, for the bays and coves, the caves at the bases of the cliffs, the buttresses and needles, are the work of the waves. And this work is constantly going on. The knotty sticks so commonly seen on the beach are often the hearts of oak or cedar trees from which the tiny crystals of sand have slowly cut away their less solid outer growth.

In August of 1885, Henrietta was thirty-three and had been teaching high school for twelve years. Although her sister, Hester, was almost a decade younger, she’d married two years earlier and left Henrietta alone at home with their mother. This had suited Henrietta very well until her friend Mason Perrotte, an ambitious farmer whom she’d known for some time, began to court her attentively. Confusingly. Now, after seven months of thinking one way about this in the morning and another in the afternoon, she knew he was about to propose. She was fond of him, as was her mother. If she was going to change her life and start a family, it was surely time. But to leave her job, after all she’d put into it—no point to that unless she could do more work, not less, as Daphne had after leaving her own teaching job. And her mother’s argument that Henrietta would be teaching her own children wasn’t wholly convincing.

She and Daphne had shared a vacation every summer since they’d met, which didn’t always mean Daphne visiting Henrietta: sometimes Henrietta went to the little town in western Massachusetts where Daphne, having pried herself free from her parents and her brothers, had bought herself a tiny white house. And twice they’d managed to stay at a resort. Once in the White Mountains, once in Rhode Island: what luxury, to have their meals cooked and their rooms cleaned! Henrietta had been Daphne’s guest both times, which might have been awkward if, instead of pointing out that the income she made from her books was much greater than Henrietta’s small salary, Daphne had not insisted graciously that those books wouldn’t exist without Henrietta’s help, so the treat was simply Henrietta’s due. This year, having done especially well, Daphne had offered three weeks at the hotel on Appledore Island, a few miles off the New Hampshire coast.

On the day before Henrietta began her journey to the island, Mason came from his farm in Pulteney with a tin of gingersnaps for the train ride and a big white canvas hat that tied with two strips of muslin under her chin. He was wearing the blue-checked shirt he knew she particularly liked. She could feel him trying to get her alone, but instead she sat steadfastly with her mother at the table, making lists of what she should bring and what she would read during this stretch of uninterrupted time. She’d been catching up with Darwin’s work since Daphne first led her, years ago, to an acceptance of his great theory. Reading slowly and carefully as her interest deepened, filling pages with notes, repeating some of his experiments and adapting them for her students. But there was no catching up to Daphne.

Daphne wrote to Darwin, and was answered. Daphne wrote to Asa Gray. Daphne wrote about climbing plants and burrowing spiders, publishing more and more articles and then a book, and another and another, earning enough money from those (and also from the part of her writing life she kept quiet) to stop teaching at the academy where she’d been working when they met. Henrietta fell even further behind. Not giving up; but working more slowly than she wished. Only in the summers could she pursue her own investigations wholeheartedly, keeping the thread alive during the school year by stealing an hour or two at night, after her lessons were prepared.

Her “work”—what did she mean by that, exactly? In the libraries of central New York, you can find files of the horticultural and agricultural society bulletins so popular toward the end of the nineteenth century. The New York Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin. The Rural New-Yorker. The Bulletin of the Buffalo Naturalists’ Field Club. The Western New York Horticultural Society Bulletin. Transactions of the New-York State Agricultural Society. In them are accounts of meetings and county fairs; brief observations about local growing conditions, new seeds and breeds, keeping a clean dairy; longer articles too, weaving multiple sources and reports into an overview for the farmer. Daphne was writing pieces like that when she and Henrietta met; now Henrietta wrote them. “The White Grub of the May Beetle.” One or two a year, carefully observed, clearly written, thoughtfully and thoroughly referenced. Useful to students and farmers alike. Together they give a sense of her steady progress through the years, although they don’t suggest the work she did with and for Daphne. There’s a hint of that in a letter she wrote to Mason during the first week of her stay at Appledore Island:

Already we’ve settled into a pleasant routine. Our rooms are on the third floor, mine a few doors down from Daphne’s: hers larger than mine, of course, as she needs space for her specimens, but both very comfortable. In addition to my bed and dresser and wardrobe, I have an armchair near a window that looks out over the tennis courts, and a sturdy desk. After breakfast in the dining hall downstairs (airy and well laid out, if a bit noisy; over two hundred people are staying here!), we take a walk along the shore and then return to our rooms to work. We meet again downstairs for lunch and then, depending on the tide and the weather, visit the tidal pools, or take out one of the hotel’s rowboats, or swim in the bathing area. The island is small (about half a mile wide, I think; and perhaps a bit longer), but so rugged and broken by the sea that we keep discovering new pools and crannies. After dinner we relax for a while on the huge porch, which stretches the length of the hotel and is lined with rocking chairs.

Daphne’s working furiously on a book about the plants and creatures of the shore, collecting samples (I help her with this) and comparing them with the photos and descriptions in other books, writing up her own descriptions. I read what she writes each day and offer suggestions, but am also working through Darwin’s book about insectivorous plants. Much of it is about the common sundew, which grows at home, so I can easily gather plants for my class.

Daphne knows the place already, from when she came here alone two years ago. She also met Mrs. Thaxter, who owns the big cottage near the hotel, then. But she hadn’t really gotten to know her, and last night she announced, with much excitement, that she’d managed to get us an invitation to the evening’s gathering at Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage. Apparently this is a great coup! Only the most select of the hotel’s guests are invited, writers and musicians and painters and so forth. Honestly I would rather have had a quiet night reading or watching the stars, but Daphne was so pleased with herself (I think she tried and failed to get invited before) that I felt I had to go.

Some of this visit she describes in her next letter to Mason, noting especially the densely cluttered parlor. Chairs, tables, lamps, easels, every surface covered and the walls obscured by paintings and sketches touching each other and rising from chair rail to ceiling. The mantels and windowsills packed with Mrs. Thaxter’s famous flowers: poppies arranged by color and tea roses in matching bowls; sweet peas, wild cucumber, hop and morning-glory vines spilling from suspended shells and baskets; larkspurs and lilies in tall vases and stalks of timothy and other grasses rising above a massive vessel with a few red poppies interspersed.

She describes the olive-green upholstery on the sofas and chairs, the polished floor designed to enhance the sound of the piano being played by a man in a linen jacket, the loosely draped shawls on the women. But not the feeling she had after Daphne was pulled away by their hostess and introduced to a circle of literary men, which closed and left her partnered with a bookshelf. The linen man played Chopin, stroked his thin brown beard and played Mozart; she studied white water lilies floating in white bowls. Daphne’s face pinked with pleasure as their hostess, who was very stout, said that her book on the insect pests had been of great use to her, really enormous use.

Then Mrs. Thaxter rested a plump hand on Daphne’s arm and ranted about the island’s dreadful slugs, her bolstered, comfortably bulging self making Daphne, short and even slimmer than she’d been a dozen years ago, look like a sea oat. Where Henrietta had softened and, she would have admitted, slowed, Daphne was still furiously energetic, her small hands scored by her determined work. She nodded vigorously as Mrs. Thaxter described waging war on the slugs each morning between four and five, when the dew still lay heavy in the garden. And the grubs, the vicious grubs destroying the carnations! Mrs. Thaxter stabbed with her free hand, emulating the long pin with which she dug the grubs from the stems. Daphne suggested importing toads to eat the slugs, answered questions about the grubs, acted the part of expert regarding all aspects of insect life, which in this context Henrietta supposed she was, and yet—

Yet still it was exasperating to be so thoroughly abandoned, to see her friend showing off so flamboyantly, and to know that Daphne would never reveal to this artistic crowd that in fact she made much of her income writing cookery books under a different name. As Dorrie Bennett she had a separate and even more successful professional life, so absorbing that in the dining room she had to be careful not to draw her neighbors’ attention to her judicious comments about the lobster or the biscuits. Here in Mrs. Thaxter’s parlor, she might never have whipped egg whites and Cox’s gelatin for her famous snow pudding, noting the time it took to raise the frothy white mass. Might never have worried over a bill or stayed up all night to meet a deadline.

At home, where Henrietta kept Daphne’s cookbooks shelved next to her more serious works, she told Mason the truth about that juxtaposition when he asked: she’d wanted her two friends to understand each other. But their relationship was different now—and perhaps because of that, she hid from him her hurt feelings after that first visit, and also much about her second visit. She wrote:

A smaller crowd last evening, four painters and a singer and a pianist, two writers from Boston, a doctor from Springfield, one of Mrs. Thaxter’s brothers and one grown son (her husband passed away last year). Mrs. Thaxter sat in her gray dress next to a table covered with roses and directed the conversation and the entertainments, which included Daphne’s demonstration of mounting seaweed specimens. I brought over the metal trays, filled them with seawater, stood by with the sheets as Daphne floated the samples and teased apart the finest branches with a hatpin. A beautiful piece of Cystoclonium purpurascens mounted perfectly, after which all the gentlemen wanted to try their hands. Mrs. Thaxter, as one of the younger painters observed to me, likes being surrounded by men; women are sparser, which makes Daphne even more pleased about our invitations there.

What the younger painter, whose name was Sebby Quint, actually said was more cutting than that; and he said it to Henrietta not in the parlor but outside, on the cottage’s porch, beneath the shelter of the vines with their overlapping leaves. None of this, nor what followed from it, reached Mason.

IV.

We have to do, however, in this volume, not with the history of the past, nor with the action of physical forces, but with the life of the present, and to find this, in its abundance, one must go down near the margin of the water, where the sands are wet. There is no solitude here; the place is teeming with living things.

Out on the porch, where the candles cast confusing shadows, a warm breeze pushed through the leaves encasing the columns, muting the words and music easing through the open parlor windows—a surprisingly pleasant sensation, interrupted by footsteps behind her and the scratch of a match being lit. The man she’d noticed while Daphne did her hatpin trick (he was bulky, but with soft, intelligent eyes and a way of seeming to pay real attention) lit his pipe and said, “That dress suits you.”

“Thank you,” she said. She’d hoped, backing out of the room, that no one would see her. Twice she’d tried to insert herself into the conversation Mrs. Thaxter was orchestrating about the floating seaweeds; twice she’d been rebuffed. Bored and annoyed, she’d slipped off for a few minutes of quiet. She smoothed the tucks of her only good dress, glad now that Daphne had convinced her to bring it for evening events.

“The color,” he continued. “The line of the neck. You can tell it’s a success just by the way Mrs. Thaxter treats you. Your friend’s in no such danger.”

“What do you mean?”

He nodded at the circle, visible through the open windows. “Dear Mrs. Thaxter likes being the queen of the hive,” he said. “She doesn’t always welcome attractive women.”

“Me?” Henrietta laughed. For years Daphne had been chasing suitors away, while she’d only had to deal with Mason. “She must like you, if you flatter her like that.”

“She does like me,” he said quietly. “And we all like her. She makes us welcome, she admires our paintings, she sells them to her hotel guests. I’d do anything for her. But these evenings—the same people, in the same room, saying the same things, pretending rapture over the same poems and flowers . . . it’s not surprising you found it tiresome.”

“I was mostly hot,” Henrietta protested.

“But also bored, I think. And maybe feeling a little left out? I was watching your face. Your friend was treating you like an assistant.”

He puffed out a little cloud, which hung between them. Daphne, she thought, had simply been focused on impressing Mrs. Thaxter. And why was he watching her face? From the other side of the tennis courts came the clack of something hitting a rock and then a man’s quick bark of laughter.

“Do gather,” Mrs. Thaxter called. “Everyone—Donald is going to play Beethoven for us now. Everyone come!”

Henrietta turned but couldn’t force herself through the door. Behind her, the painter laughed. “Where are your manners?” he said.

“Where are yours?”

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

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