The Crossings Read online

  Also by Deborah Larsen

  Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth-Century China

  New Directions

  The White

  Alfred A. Knopf

  The Tulip and the Pope

  Alfred A. Knopf

  DEBORAH LARSEN

  Deborah Larsen was born and grew up as Deborah Maertz in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Wallace Stevens Fellow at Yale, and is Professor Emerita at Gettysburg College. She lives with her husband, David Cowan, near Madera Canyon in southern Arizona; together they have a daughter, a son, and two grandsons. She is the author of Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth-Century China (poetry), The White (novel), and The Tulip and the Pope (memoir). The White, based on a true story from early America, was a chosen book in western Pennsylvania for the regional “One Community Reads One Book” program; on publication, it was also selected as one of two Main Selections for the Book of the Month Club. The Tulip and the Pope was chosen by critic Maureen Corrigan as one of her ten favorite books of 2005.

  Deborah Larsen

  Berylline Press

  Green Valley, Arizona

  Although this novel was inspired by actual history and documents, present-day characters and events depicted herein are fictional and any resemblances to real people and/or events are coincidental. See the “Author’s Note” on the facing page and the “Acknowledgments” section at the end of this book.

  Copyright 2018 by Deborah Larsen

  All Rights Reserved

  Parts of the “son of a gun” episode in this book originally appeared in a different form in The New Yorker magazine.

  Cover Design and Graphic Dividers by Robert Barker

  Hummingbird image: Crystal Eye Studio/

  Shutterstock.com

  Cover Art

  Exposure: Santa Ritas with Bajada

  Charles Thomas b. 1960-

  Oil

  Author’s Note

  The Crossings marries fiction and nonfiction but is essentially a work of the imagination. Several institutions and/or cities bear their actual names. Some public/historical figures are real. A few living persons have graciously granted me permission to include their own names in connection with glimpses of their work, lives, and/or sayings. Otherwise, the characters as drawn here are fictitious.

  Charles Darwin figures prominently in this book. As it goes to press, US scientists Frances Arnold and George Smith and British researcher Gregory Winter have won the 2018 Nobel Chemistry Prize. “They have applied the principles of Darwin in test tubes. They have used the molecular understanding we have of the evolutionary process and recreated the process in their labs,” the head of the Academy’s Nobel Chemistry committee, Claes Gustafsson, told reporters.

  Dr. Frances Arnold at California Institute of Technology becomes only the fifth woman to win the chemistry Nobel. She conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, which can be used in applications such as brain imaging, environmentally friendly detergents, biofuels, and pharmaceuticals. Her innovative research began in the 1990s. In a speech in 2014 she said, “Twenty-five years ago it was considered the lunatic fringe. Scientists didn’t do that. Gentlemen didn’t do that. But since I’m an engineer and not a gentleman, I had no problem with that.” I hope engineers are reading this and smiling; I hope women are smiling; I hope experimental writers are smiling. Charles Darwin must be smiling.

  Deborah Larsen

  October 19, 2018

  For

  Annie Dillard

  David Cowan

  Contents

  1

  Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt

  The Arizona Inn

  Slopes of the Sierras: Germans, British, French, Japanese

  Basin and Range

  Jammed

  A System Evolving With Time

  Charles Darwin

  Death

  Jesus with Hat in Hand

  Tintin in America

  Han Suyin

  Remember Chippewa Falls… ?

  God’s Face… a Blur

  Her Mother’s Daughter

  Urhund

  Pop-ups in the Book of the Desert

  Polly Appears

  JJ Agave

  The Objects of Her Affections

  Do Not Tell the Pea Spitter

  Corpses: Supply and Demand

  Foibles

  Foot Washing

  The Reverence Bump

  Cambridge

  The Language of Rocks

  The Diary

  2

  Crotalus Scutulatus

  Nausea

  Small Shit

  A Plot Twist

  That Mother of a Snake

  The Dark Ink of Slavery

  Glittering Eyes

  Short Stories

  3

  Dropping Anchor

  Free

  Katharina von Bora

  A New Species

  Up in a Balloon

  Around the Throat

  4

  The Sermon

  His Eyes Were on the Laurel

  Out of Her Mind

  Forbidden Pleasure

  A Gift, Not a Murder

  Katharina von Bora and Alan Greenspan

  That Vile Trogon

  Monstrous

  Headed Toward Death

  Scooped

  A Miniature Manhattan

  A Dog on the Mind of Newton

  Two Clouds

  Worms, Bats

  Snake Eaters

  St. Charles

  The Desert Floor

  Death Certificate and Remembrance

  5

  Words and Works

  Handwriting of a Scientist

  Something Rich and Strange

  Champagne?

  What the Hell

  Notes & Citations

  Acknowledgments

  Ariel’s Song

  Come unto these yellow sands,

  And then take hands: …

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  —From The Tempest, William Shakespeare

  At Capel Curig I left Sedgwick and went in a straight line by compass and map across the mountains to Barmouth, never following any track unless it coincided with my course. I thus came on some strange wild places, and enjoyed much this manner of travelling.

  —Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Volume 1, ed. by Francis Darwin

  1

  Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt

  Against the slowing, the reining-in of the massive carrier the passengers leaned forward. At last, far below—gleams, points of light, were appearing.

  The airplane began its angled descent through the dark. It had lifted into the air six hours earlier from Ronald Reagan National Airport. Soon it would touch down on a tarmac in a place Sophie had first studied and then chosen for her next home. Some referred to it as a Land Apart.

  And now Sophie too felt apart, if not falling apart. She was on her own, going to a strange landscape; the sturdy and resilient person she thought she was had turned edgy.

  She closed the tablet on which she was reading a biography of Charles Darwin: it was long, and she was traveling; otherwise she would have chosen the joys, the smells, the textures of a physical book.

  An air of anticipation and relief united the passengers or so she imagined. She felt somehow formal, ceremonious. The seatbelt
signs glowed with the promise of landing. From its tote-bag under some seat, a little dog barked.

  And then a woman in a jaguar-print scarf rose to her feet, stepped into the aisle, and turned around. She was two rows ahead of Sophie.

  Earlier she had noticed this woman, whose scarf covered almost all of her hair. That it was a jaguar print had struck her at once, for weeks earlier she had been reading about big-cat sightings in southern Arizona. A jaguar’s spots were distinctive: rosette or polygonal in shape and these abstract bounding-lines enclosing other, smaller spots.

  Now Sophie could see that the woman wore heavy mascara; her eyes were wide open, the eyes of a child. But she had wrinkles—arc-like creases—framing the corners of her mouth. No child, this jaguar-woman.

  She shouted. “Nobody move, nobody get hurt.”

  Sophie leaned back; she leaned away. She had always had to work on her courage. How could that shout have come from such a slender frame? The relative power, the depth of that voice—a basso cantante straight from Faust—shouldn’t it be coming from a man? Had this figure at one time been male?

  A flight attendant rose from a seat at the far front of the cabin. Sophie’s frame had grown rigid, but she said to herself: do it. She had often thought of Kitty Genovese and the bystander syndrome and Sophie did not want to be a mere onlooker. She stood up and moved toward the woman whose eyes now appeared to be glittering.

  Sophie stopped. The shouter had turned, had stepped back out of the aisle and crumpled, falling back into her seat. The attendant reached the row and bent over the woman; he looked into her face and then his own features softened; he took on the expression of an exhausted but resigned mother. He waved Sophie away.

  Whining, the flaps had extended. The landing gear had come down with a thump. They touched the ground; the pilot applied reverse thrust.

  Here they all were then. Once this area had been part of a supercontinent deep in the southern hemisphere. Later, after riftings, it rotated northward.

  Ice retreated. Seas flowed in; they rose and fell. Soft-bodied worms had lived in this place, and jellyfish; then corals, clams, and fishes had evolved. By and by, mass extinctions happened. Volcanism led to unimaginable upheavals.

  But this day those passengers who sat on the right-hand side of a Boeing 737 looked out the windows and saw the whirling lights of an ambulance and a police car. The woman in the jaguar-print scarf was led from the airplane. The little dog barked. It announced itself: Do not forsake me, oh…

  In this way, the plane concluded its descent into the Sonoran Desert. The travelers had arrived from the East; they were in Tucson, a city ringed with those mountains which are presently known as the Catalinas, the Tucsons, the Rincons, and to the south the Santa Ritas.

  The Arizona Inn

  The next morning, she sat in Tucson in the dining-room of The Arizona Inn with her coffee. Am I out of my mind for having moved to the desert?

  Feeling the same way, some literary person or other had tried to turn anxiety to their advantage and had written with bluster: “If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me.” Who? She couldn’t remember.

  Sophie had just wanted to settle in the mountainous desert and before she died, write something, some kind of a mystery. Tomorrow afternoon she would pick up her new car, drive thirty miles south, and walk into the home she had earlier purchased. She had not planned on incidents involving eccentric, ill persons on the airplane.

  She searched a newspaper for what had happened to whomever that was in the jaguar-print scarf. But—no mention. The episode had happened too late for press. An article would surely appear tomorrow.

  Sophie guessed that the jaguar-person had been admitted somewhere for a mental health evaluation. Or perhaps on the way to the hospital, something terrible had happened to the ambulance drivers: the jaguar-person had somehow wiggled out of a strait-jacket. She imagined the conclusion: she could see it, straight out of something like a Cormac McCarthy novel: two bloody EMT corpses hanging out of the open ambulance door—and no sign of their patient.

  She realized she was holding her breath. The jaguar-person had frightened her. If the jet had gone nose-down, Sophie would be scattered somewhere in bits. Charred flesh, sinew and bone sundered forever after the fuselage hollowed the earth. Her wedding ring. She imagined it—still encircling the splintered fourth proximal-digit?—on the desert floor. Gold holds on in the face of fire.

  But now a waiter appeared at her table with two poached eggs and wheat toast. She studied him for a moment and then caught herself. She wanted to tell him that it was nothing personal, that writers studied people; that this explained why writers looked so spacey, a little out of the action.

  She said only, “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome, Madam.”

  Madam, Sophie thought.

  Was she out of her mind? Despite reports in American newspapers that few people were moving just now, Sophie was upping and moving. She was leaving the East Coast of the United States.

  On top of that, she was moving to what many consider an odd and parched and risky place. Arizona.

  When he heard she was moving to southern Arizona, her friend Ted—ensconced forever in Georgetown in the nation’s capital—wrote her a text-message of three words. “Bizarre. Just bizarre.”

  Unaccountably, or so it seemed to others, she had left teaching and the mid-Atlantic lawns for sand and the Southwest, for the high shoot-‘em-up desert. “Bang, bang out there,” Ted had later texted, and a few seconds later, “Broken shaft and crumbling mound.”

  When next she checked her e-mail, she saw that he had written again; he had actually condescended to write an e-mail, which he hated to do. “And I don’t mean Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper. I mean the frigging border, for Christ’s sake. Guns used every which way. Drugs. Water issues. Tucson may be a Democratic town but it’s smack in the middle of a cactus-nest of conservatives. That’s the only real opera you’ll get out there. Screechings.

  “In sum, Sophie: it ain’t New York or Washington.”

  She would have to pass these remarks on to her daughter, Isabelle, who would say something like, “MOM!! Have you forgotten that Ted ain’t exactly the master of the examined life? He can be kind of a dumb cluck sometimes.” Dumb cluck? She had gotten that expression from her grandfather.

  Isabelle. The wit. Isabelle, who had been dubbed “J.R.” in England. That was what the students at The Wheatley Park School had called her eleven-year old daughter when the two of them were living for a time in Garsington, near Oxford. The curly-headed Isabelle had been astonished: “MOM!! They call me ‘J.R.’ They actually watch ‘Dallas’ here!”

  Sophie considered this. Then she replied to Isabelle in a bad imitation of a drawl: “Well, ma’am. Are ya braggin’ or complainin’? Ah reckon you’ll survive.”

  Later in the day, yet another e-mail from Ted: “Wake up, Sophia. Are you out of your mind? Have you forgotten that you are no longer thirty-five? Or fifty-five? Now let me tell you just where it is that you are: NO COUNTRY FOR AGING WOMEN. Not only a bloody meridian. A bloody latitude as well.”

  She had heard it all. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh might appear any moment out there in the American wilds. Now her American wilds.

  Sophie had reached certain of her own conclusions. Things had been set in motion. She once read that Kit Carson, that man of action, had dictated two sentences to someone who was recording a battle: “Concluded to charge. Done so.”

  She had concluded to leave her life as a professor at Albert Ernest Laurie College in rural Pennsylvania. A place named Glynn. She had done so. She ended up leaving the professor’s house, the professor’s rhythms, the professor’s students—all of it. Some of her students had, it seemed to her, without knowing it adopted the insinuating tone of Luther Billis in South Pacific: “Hel-lo, Lieu-tenant.”

  “Hel-lo, Pro-fessor.”


  She had concluded that she would somehow find her life in the desert—this had taken on the substance of a fact. This meant leaving the East and moving, in her case, to one place and one place only. To the American Southwest. To southern Arizona. To the tip of the swath of geological basin and range. To the mountainous desert. She had concluded this; and she was doing so.

  Yet another fact: she had concluded that she was having yet another crisis of faith. Or another crisis of non-faith. She was getting used to it. God? No God? Becoming a sort of anchorite in the desert might help.

  She would have space. An extended horizon. At the same time, she would come up against the stark facts of teeth, claws, stinging tails, venomous fangs, death by thirst; survival of the fittest—whatever that meant. Well, she was working on what that meant. She was reading Charles Darwin.

  And another fact: she had concluded that she was getting on to dying. Oh, that. What would she do about that? Something.

  Sophie had begun contemplating her move toward the end of Darwin’s world-wide party. Amidst all the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, she had read about him here and there. The crowds at the New York Botanical Gardens were dwindling, so she thought she would run up and take in “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

  Over the course of her teaching years, she left the small town of Glynn as often as she could and jumped a train to Manhattan. She knew that dwellers there called New York the “City,” but she liked “Manhattan.” This was probably because she, an impressionable Minnesotan, had had her first manhattan in a restaurant in Manhattan when she was eighteen years old. And she had always loved Melville’s sentence: “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf.”

  She had not wanted her afternoon in “Darwin’s Garden. . . .” to end. She hated leaving the lofty hollyhocks, the delphiniums, flax, primroses and larkspurs. Standing in a partial replica of one of his rooms, she wanted to linger and study objects there: the microscope, quills, tweezers, brushes, and sealing wax. Don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch. She had clasped her hands behind her back.