Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

Take Route 70 to Route 2, and then to Route 40. Your endpoint is Baltimore. If you get there before five, you’ll be able to tour the medical museum at Johns Hopkins-a favorite of mine.

  Afterward, you denied that you ever owned a rabbit. But this is what I remember about the incident: it was the first time I ever held your hand when we were walking, instead of the other way around.

  Love,

  Joley

  47 JANE

  It’s empty, except for the twenty teenaged boys who wear T-shirts emblazoned with the interests they have at stake. Medical Explorers, the shirts read. They are outlined with the faint black cartoon of a skeleton. Boning Up on the Future of Physiology. Apparently they are a division of the Boy Scouts, devoted to the study of medicine.

  If that’s true-if these well-meaning young kids are planning to be doctors-I’d never bring them to this museum. Set off from the campus of Johns Hopkins like a quarantined captive, the building is even more dismal inside than it is outside. Dusty shelves and dimly lit glass exhibition cases form a maze for visitors.

  Rebecca runs up to me. “This place grosses me out. I think Uncle Joley got it mixed up with somewhere else.”

  But from the looks of things, I’d say this is just up Joley’s alley. The meticulous preservation, the absolute oddity of the collection. Joley collects facts; this is cocktail party conversation for a lifetime. “No,” I tell her, “I’m sure Joley got it right.”

  “I can’t believe the things they’ve got in here. I can’t believe someone would go to the trouble of saving all the things they’ve got in here.” She leads me around the corner, to a gaggle of Medical Explorers who are bent over a small glass case. Inside is a huge overgrown rat, bloated and patchy, its glass eyes frozen toward the north. The card says it was part of a research experiment, and died from the cortisone shots. At death, it weighed 22.5 pounds, approximately the same as a poodle.

  I stare at the gummy features a few minutes longer until Rebecca calls me from across the room. She waves me over to a wall-length exhibit of stomachs that have been frozen in time. Floating in large canisters of formaldehyde, the anomalies are tagged. There is a series of hair balls in the stomachs of cats and humans. There is a particularly disgusting jar with a stomach that still contains the skeleton of a small animal. Amazing! the tag reads. Mrs. Dolores Gaines of Petersborough, Florida, swallowed this baby kitten.

  How awful, I think. Was it possible that she didn’t know she was doing it at the time?

  The next wall of the maze holds shelves of fetal animals. A calf, a dog, a pig, which Rebecca informs me she will dissect next year in biology class. A human, in several stages: three weeks; three months, seven months. I wonder who willed their own children to this museum. Where the mothers are today.

  Rebecca stands in front of the human fetuses. She holds her forefinger up to the three-week specimen. It doesn’t even look like a baby, more like a cartoon ear, a pink paisley amoeba. There’s that red dot, like Jupiter’s storm, that is an eye. It is just the size of the nail on Rebecca’s pinky. “Was I really that small,” she says rhetorically, and it makes me smile.

  By the time the baby is three months, you can really start to see that it is a baby. An oversized head, transparent, carries thin blood vessels to the black hooded eye. Stick-figure arms and webbed fingers and Indian-crossed legs stick out from the body, which is little more than a spine. “When do you start to look pregnant?” Rebecca asks.

  “It depends on the person,” I tell her, “and I think it depends on whether you are having a boy or a girl. I didn’t show until about three months.”

  “But it’s so tiny. There’s nothing to see.”

  “Babies seem to carry a lot of extra baggage. When I was pregnant with you, I had been doing a practicum towards a masters as a speech pathologist at an elementary school. And back then you weren’t allowed to teach and be pregnant. Well, you were allowed, but it wasn’t common practice, and you’d certainly be out of a job when you gave birth. So I kept getting bigger and bigger and to hide the pregnancy I wore these hideous tie-dyed caftans. All the faculty kept telling me, ‘Jane, you know, you’re putting on a little weight,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what I can do about it.’ I’d run out of faculty meetings and student consultations to throw up. I told everyone I kept contracting different strains of the flu.”

  Rebecca turns around, fascinated with this story of herself. “And then what?”

  “School ended,” I shrug. “I had you in July, two weeks after school was finished. I still had six months of student teaching to do in the fall, so your father took care of you. And then, when I finished, I stayed home with you till you went to nursery school, when I continued my coursework and graduated.”

  “Daddy stayed home with me for six months?” she says. “Alone?” I nod. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Actually, I’d forgotten.”

  “Did we get along? I mean, like, did he know how to change diapers and stuff?”

  I laugh. “Yes. He knew how to change diapers. He also burped you and bathed you and held you over his back upside-down from your ankles.”

  “You let him do that?”

  “It was the only way you’d stop crying.”

  Rebecca smiles shyly. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She points to the seven-month fetus, complete with tiny toes and a nose and a bud of a penis. “Now that’s a baby,” she says. “That’s the way they are supposed to look.”

  “They get bigger. You’d think natural selection would have found an easier way of reproduction. Childbirth is like trying to get a piano through your nostril.”

  “Is that why I don’t have a brother or sister?” Rebecca asks.

  We’ve never talked about this. She’s never asked, and we didn’t volunteer. There’s no real reason we didn’t have any other children. Maybe because the plane crash scared us. Maybe because we were a little too busy. “We didn’t need any other kids,” I say. “We got it perfect the first time.”

  Rebecca smiles again, looking like Oliver in this dismal light. “You’re just saying that.”

  “Yeah, in fact, your father and I have already willed you to this exhibit. For the extra cash. Three weeks-three months-seven months-fifteen years!”

  Rebecca throws her arms around me. As she speaks I can feel her chin, shaped exactly like mine, pressing into my shoulder. “I love you,” she says, plain and simple.

  The first time Rebecca said she loved me I burst into tears. She was four and I had just rubbed her dry with a towel after a romp in the snow. She was very matter-of-fact about it. I am sure she does not remember but I could tell you that she was wearing red Oshkosh overalls, that there were hexagonal snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, that her socks had come off, bunched and burrowing in the toes of her boots.

  This is why I became a mother, isn’t it? No matter how long you have to wait for her to understand where you come from, no matter how many bouts of appendicitis or stitches you have to suffer through, no matter how many times you feel you are losing her, this makes it all worth it. Over Rebecca’s shoulder there are brains of monkeys and eyes of goats. There is a thick brown liver curled inside a glass cylinder. And there is a line of hearts, arranged in order of size: mouse, guinea pig, cat; sheep, Saint Bernard, cow. The human, I think, rests somewhere in the middle.

  48 OLIVER

  They have two tapes at the Blue Diner in Boston-the Meat Puppets and Don Henley, and they alternate them over and over, the entire twenty-four hours that they remain open. I know because I have been here at least that long, having noticed the same waitresses repeating their shifts. I can sing most of the words from each tape. I have to confess I had never heard of either, and I’ve been wondering if Rebecca knows them.

  “Don Henley,” Rasheen-the waitress-says, refilling my coffeecup. “You know. From the Eagles. Ring a bell?”

  I shrug, singing along with the tape. “You’ve got that down,” Rasheen says, laughing. From the greasy grill, Hugo, the shortorder cook who is missing a thumb, cheers. “You got a nice voice, Oliver, you know?”

  “Well.” I stir