Among the Wonderful (34 page)

With the curtains drawn back, the huge windows of her
office framed the harbor as a portrait of commerce. Gulls circled the ships moored in the distance, and in the foreground was a forest of a hundred swaying masts. On the docks below the windows, men speaking many different languages unloaded the myriad cargo that fed the city, while others loaded provisions for the next voyage. It happened here just as it had for centuries all across the world’s oceans, Guillaudeu ruminated, temporarily distracted. The cargo changed over time, but some of these ships had been sailing unchanged for decades, recognized by generations of captains as they passed one another at some distant ocean crossroads.

By the time he saw Edie she was staring up at him from the rain-slick dock where she’d been directing the sailors, her hands on her hips. His heart jumped. She motioned to him, raising both arms and pulling them down near her temples. He cocked his head, confused. She pointed to him accusingly and then motioned to her own head. Was she telling him to get out of there? That she didn’t want to speak with him? That he was crazy? He had ruined everything.

Frowning, she jabbed her fingers toward him again, and then she started shouting. Guillaudeu wanted to flee, but no, he would face this. He deserved her anger, every ounce of it. Had he not turned his back on her, his closest friend? He opened one of the windows.

“Bring me my hat, you silly man! I’m getting soaked!”

Cautiously, he brought it, a floppy old felt thing that would hold more water than it repelled. Her hair was a dripping net of tangles and her skirt streaked with creosote. She embraced him immediately. “I was wondering when you’d come.”

He delivered mumbled apologies to her damp shoulder. He’d been foolish, he told her. Brainless! How could he blame her for Barnum’s changes at the museum?

“You are so stubborn, Emile. I knew there was nothing I could say that would reach you.” By her tone he knew he was forgiven. “But when Father saw you outside the house, you appeared to be quite mad! That’s what got us worrying. He misses you! How many times must I say that to you? You
pretend to be so alone in the world, when your family is right here! Why you didn’t come to live with us after Celia died is really beyond me, but what can I do? You won’t listen. You don’t have to say anything, just don’t be silly anymore. Now, come with me to lunch. I’m starving.”

“I’m starving, too,” Guillaudeu murmured. He followed her up the dock, abashed and suddenly very glad.

The next morning Guillaudeu set to work. The aviary door bore a sign reading
TEMPORARILY CLOSED
. He obtained various supplies at Dr. Putnam’s recommendation and could already envision the finished aviary: Netting would hang like a high-topped tent. Below, a path winding through the trees would give the visitors an entire journey with the birds, with several benches and a small fountain along the way. Perhaps there would be a small plaque, engraved with the words of Audubon and including a small dedication to Celia, the beloved wife of museum naturalist Emile Guillaudeu.

Within ten minutes of setting to work, he became uncomfortably tangled in the netting he had purchased. It was not particularly fine netting, but in an attempt to lay it out flat, Guillaudeu had caught the buckle of his shoe and then two waistcoat buttons. The more Guillaudeu fumbled with it, the more entrenched, and panicked, he became. After five minutes of struggle, he lay at rest on the floor with both of his feet thoroughly enmeshed. He had not thought to bring a knife, and he had already bruised his hand trying to snap the hemp cord. If he attempted to return to his office, he would drag fifty feet of net behind him.

The purple gallinule crept toward him, clenching and unclenching each three-pronged foot before setting it delicately down again. The gallinule turned one eye upon him and then the other. It stepped closer.

“I am an imbecile,” he told it.

“To too two terp t too,”
the gallinule replied.

Other birds came close, flitting to the sill above him and swooping overhead. Guillaudeu became uneasy. The gallinule’s eyes were beady, the gestures of its head and legs eerily human. He couldn’t keep track of the smaller birds that flitted around him. Two pearlish brown doves pattered across the floor toward him with speed. He recoiled. They cocked their heads and ruffled. Guillaudeu renewed his efforts to untangle himself. He felt he was being watched. His eyes caught too many flickers of movement all around. The swallows dipped closer, seeming to close in on him. Distracted and trapped, he cursed the birds of the world. He pictured Dr. Putnam’s horror at such a gesture. High above him, two ravens,
Corvus corax
, emerged from inside the bowl of the chandelier. They perched on the rim. They watched him.

Finally, after removing his shoes, his socks, the buttons from his waistcoat, and his dignity, Guillaudeu wriggled free of the netting. He scrambled back into his clothes before addressing the birds.

“There now, then. Much better.” He brushed his knees and backed away from the doves, who queried him with a round of head-bobbing. “No need for alarm. Just your keeper making a mess of things.” He continued backing away until he reached the aviary door and slipped outside. He breathed deeply.

William’s nephew, Gideon, was nowhere to be found and Mr. Forsythe, the theater manager, had recently forbidden his workers to leave their posts to help with other museum tasks. Guillaudeu didn’t want to spend all day searching for someone to help him with the aviary, so he climbed the back stairs all the way to the fifth floor.

The tribesman had been hauling the buckets of fish up each morning and administering the whale’s morning feeding. After his initial concern, Guillaudeu was delighted by the man’s diligent and solemn execution of the task, and grateful for the help. Most mornings he would meet the
tribesman at the beluga tank for a few minutes before proceeding up to the roof to feed the Happy Family. He picked up the neatly stacked buckets on his way back down.

Guillaudeu crept past the Indian camp, where someone was snoring on one of the cots. He passed through the door to the hall of apartments and made his way to the final door on the left.

“It seems I need another pair of hands,” Guillaudeu offered when the tribesman opened his door. He must be closer to seventy, Guillaudeu noted. He pointed to himself, then the other man, and back to himself. “Will you help me?”

Guillaudeu made a poor imitation of a bird with his thumbs hooked together and both hands flapping. He pointed up the hall. “In the aviary.”

The tribesman nodded as if he’d been expecting the request. He carefully removed a wool shirt from a hook on the wall and buttoned himself into it.

“You will help me?” Guillaudeu hadn’t expected it to be so easy. The tribesman tacitly agreed. On the way out, Guillaudeu picked up the beluga’s ladder.

“The things you’ve seen, coming all the way from Botany Bay.” As they returned to the fourth-floor aviary, Guillaudeu had the unexpected urge to converse. “You could be quite a lecturer on the subject of your travels. There are many in this city who would be interested in you. You would have no trouble finding sponsorship. To lecture. If you wished. Which I don’t think you do, but I can’t be sure.

“You know,” Guillaudeu continued. “I’m a bit of a traveler myself. I know, it may be difficult to imagine, but it’s true. I walked almost the entire length of New York Island.” The tribesman was the first person he had told.

Once inside the aviary the tribesman seemed to understand the purpose of the room, and after a few seconds watching the birds he disregarded them completely. They set up the ladders and began to nail up the netting.

“Well this seems to be working much better,” Guillaudeu remarked. “And strange as it may be, I am enjoying your
company very much. Is it unusual to prefer the company of one with whom I do not share the benefit of language?” He glanced at the tribesman, who worked without pause. “I believe that says something about my interest in my fellow man, doesn’t it? The truth is, I am relieved to find a person to whom I must give no explanations of any kind.”

The men ascended and descended parallel ladders, raising netting and retrieving dropped nails.

“If you are not obliged to perform,” Guillaudeu said, starting up the conversation again after twenty minutes, “I wonder what you are doing here.”

The tribesman paused for a look in Guillaudeu’s direction.

“In other words, what is keeping you here? You could walk outside and never return, if you pleased. Not that I want you to do that, of course. I should like to know your name, but that seems entirely impossible.”

Presently, the tribesman began to sing. It was an unusual piece of music, with barely enunciated vowel sounds rising and falling between intervals of throaty tones. The song continued for a period of minutes and Guillaudeu recognized a kind of refrain, but the verses between seemed to grow consecutively longer and bore no discernible resemblance to one another. After ten minutes, Guillaudeu gave up trying to characterize the song, and after twenty minutes the song seemed to have always been there. As with the tribesman’s general presence, the song put Guillaudeu at ease. He hung the netting and drifted into an enjoyment of the work and the warm sunlight on his face.

When the tribesman stopped singing, it wasn’t at the end of the song. By that time Guillaudeu had correctly supposed that the song couldn’t possibly have an ending. For a minute or two Guillaudeu didn’t notice that the other man had stopped, but when he did, the silence hit him abruptly, and he felt an unexpected sadness. When he looked down from the perch of his ladder, the tribesman was at the base of it.

“What is it, sir? I do wish you’d keep up the song.” Guillaudeu hummed a few notes as he came back to the ground.

For the first time in their brief acquaintance, the stranger responded to Guillaudeu’s voice. He put his hand on the taxidermist’s arm and gestured for him to follow.

The gallery adjoining the aviary on the fourth floor held the glassblowers and their furnace. The glassblowers drew large crowds, and the heat of their fire added to the day’s spring warmth, making the gallery uncomfortably hot and a vivid contrast to the cool aviary. In the far corner, Cornelia the sewing dog panted and pumped the pedals of her machine.

The tribesman led him straight to a small cabinet in the corner of the next gallery, which had drawn no crowd. The
Ornithorhynchus anatinus
sat on its pedestal, its brassy fur gathering dust and its broad, fleshy bill absurd as ever.

Amid the clamor of the forge and the intermittent call of the cold-drink vendor, the tribesman spoke in a low voice, drawing invisible figures on the palm of his hand using his right index finger as a pencil. The
Ornithorhynchus
had some special meaning to the man. Guillaudeu listened to the tribesman, whose voice was just barely audible.

“I suppose there is no translator, maybe in all of New York, who could enlighten me as to what you say,” Guillaudeu said softly. “And you are probably giving me the information about this creature I looked for in all the books.”

The tribesman continued marking lines on the palm of his hand.

“I have a pencil in the aviary. Let’s see if that helps,” Guillaudeu said. They returned, and he found a sheet of thick brown wrapping paper and handed it and the pencil to his companion. “Show me,” he encouraged.

With his eyes, the tribesman asked Guillaudeu what paper and pencil had to do with anything. Guillaudeu again made writing gestures, and finally resorted to humming a few notes of the tribesman’s original song. After a few seconds of rumination, the tribesman began to draw.

The tribesman worked slowly, beginning on one edge of the wrapping paper, making seven small circles arranged in a
rough crescent. He then marked out a path through them. His lines branched out from the seven circles, and he followed one branch, creating what seemed to be geography around it as he went. The tribesman worked so slowly that Guillaudeu went back to work, periodically checking on his progress as he moved his ladder and continued with the netting.

When the tribesman finally brought it to Guillaudeu, the map covered nearly the whole surface of the paper. Extending out from the seven circles, which Guillaudeu sensed were hills or mountains of some kind, were what appeared to be streams, ravines, and broad expanses of flat terrain. Approaching the right-hand side of the map, the desert transitioned to rolling hills, which the tribesman had crosshatched with the pencil.

“Forests?” Guillaudeu pointed to the crosshatched marks. “Trees?” He raised his arms above his head in a gross approximation. The tribesman did not respond to Guillaudeu’s effort, but he traced a route across the map, from left to right, ending at what appeared to be a coastline. He then backtracked a finger to a stream, or river, running through the crosshatched section. He tapped this region several times and pointed through the aviary wall toward the
Ornithorhynchus
.

“A-ha! Is this where the creature lives?” Guillaudeu tapped the paper. The tribesman tipped his head in a gesture Guillaudeu interpreted as affirmative.

That evening, when Guillaudeu returned to his office, he brought out a map published by the United States Exploring Expedition of sections of Australia, primarily the eastern coastal areas of that vast continent. He spread it out on his desk with the tribesman’s drawing alongside it. After several minutes of looking between them, he recognized the same river outlined on both. Setting the tribesman’s map against the other, he saw that the tribesman’s map extended deep into the unmapped interior of the land, hundreds of miles beyond the last lines of the American cartographers. The scales of the maps were different, of course, and one was
based on geometry and precisely measured distances. It wasn’t until he sat staring at the strange continuum between the high-quality paper and inks of the one and the penciled lines of the other that he wondered how the tribesman could have drawn the terrain in the first place, as if he’d flown over the land on the back of a giant bird.