Dead as a Dodo Read online

  Striding down the corridor of the gallery upstairs, he smiled grimly as he thought of the young upstart who had refused to shake his hand. In forty years that boy too would be an old has-been, and William would sit up in his grave and laugh.

  CHAPTER 3

  I am the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog in all England, and am ready to cry with vexation at my blindness and presumption.

  Ever yours, most miserably,

  C. Darwin (letter to Joseph Hooker)

  The golden statues were still looking down at the reception in the courtyard of the University Museum. Watt fingered his steam engine, William Harvey presented his model of the human heart, Sir Humphry Davy dangled his lamp, Newton gazed at his apple. The murmuration of combined voices swelled to a roar.

  From his office on the upper floor William Dubchick could hear the noise of the party, but for the moment it could be ignored. The office was a refuge. He forgot the obscene statistics of his age, said hello to his new assistant, Dr. Farfrae, and rummaged among his papers for the outline of his talk.

  The room was little changed from the 1860s, except that it was now warmed by a radiator rather than by the defunct fireplace. For years it had been the Hope Entomology Room, but the drawers full of insects had been moved to larger quarters. It was now the Zoology Office. A long table ran down the middle, and there were two desks between the pointed windows. On the mantelpiece, above the stone foliage with its carvings of moths and stag beetles, lay the egg of an extinct great auk in a glass case, looking ready to hatch. A large photograph of Charles Darwin hung on the wall above the mantel. First editions of Darwin’s works occupied a glass-fronted bookcase behind William’s desk—The Voyage of the Beagle, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Whenever William sat at his desk he was warmed by the thought of the drab bindings lined up behind him.

  Dr. Farfrae was another comforting presence. She was not one of the robust young generation thrusting up around him, all so admirable, looking at him pityingly and speaking their own strange version of the English language. Sometimes it alarmed William to think of the thousands of clever babies who were being born every minute and surging into adulthood to challenge and overwhelm his own generation, like the young upstart downstairs just now. Dr. Farfrae was clever too, but fortunately she was nearly his own age.

  Their relations were cordial and businesslike. She was a helpful and efficient colleague. This afternoon she sat at her desk under the window and did not at once turn to say hello.

  “Oh, Dr. Farfrae,” said William courteously, “why aren’t you at the party? Listen, you can hear the noise from here.”

  There was a pause, while the reverberation of the voices swelled along the arcades around the courtyard, streamed past the columns of Aberdeen granite and Marychurch marble, and lost itself in the crevices of the foliated capitals. When Dr. Farfrae turned away from the pale screen of her computer, her eyes were cast down. “I just wanted to finish up a few things first.”

  She had been crying, William could see that. He felt an anguished sympathy. Dr. Farfrae’s home life was reputed to be difficult. She never complained and William never inquired, but now he couldn’t help asking, “Dr. Farfrae, is there anything—?”

  He had overstepped. She stood up and grinned at him. “Guess what? The gecko laid a clutch of eggs. Look.”

  William laughed, and bent over the tank on the windowsill. “And we thought it was a male.”

  The noise from below was louder than ever. “Oh, dear,” said William, “my talk. I’ve got some notes here somewhere.”

  “Here they are.” Dr. Farfrae shifted the papers on the table and pulled out a sheet. “I’ll be down shortly. I just have a few—”

  “Oh, no, don’t bother to hear me. It’s just the same old stuff.”

  “But I’d like to.”

  William smiled politely at his colleague and departed with his notes.

  Helen Farfrae took a mirror from her bag and looked at herself, then dabbed astringent around her eyes, still a little swollen from crying. She was a tall strong woman with plump cheeks and piercing hazel eyes and a nose with a bump in it halfway down. Her no-nonsense gray hair was clipped at ear level all the way around. Her only adornment was a pair of gold earrings, but she had paid for them with half a month’s salary.

  CHAPTER 4

  The sound of laughter is produced by a deep inspiration followed by short, interrupted, spasmodic contractions of the chest.

  Charles Darwin,

  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

  The glasses of Chardonnay had been filled and refilled. Homer Kelly’s irrepressible euphoria was, as usual, exaggerated by wine. He woke from his jet lag and said loudly, “What’s all this about a dodo?”

  A goofy-looking young man was goggling up at him. They had apparently been in conversation for some time. “The dodo? You mean you don’t know about the dodo?”

  “It’s extinct, that’s all I know,” chortled Homer. “It ain’t no longer. It do not exist. It’s a dead, dead duck. In fact”—Homer leaned drunkenly toward the goofy young man—“it’s dead as a dodo, that’s what it is, dead as a dodo.”

  “Well, hey,” said the kid with the bulging eyes, “come on, I’ll show you. It’s like really famous. It’s the most famous thing in the museum. Hey, my name’s Stuart Grebe, and I know who you are. You’re Dr. Kelly.”

  Stuart’s accent was American. Homer had seen his name on the list of Rhodes scholars. The place was full of Americans. Homer beamed at him. “Happy to know you, Stuart.”

  “Well, thanks, but the truth is, Dr. Kelly”—Stuart looked at Homer apologetically—“I’ve been wondering if maybe you could give me some advice. Because I’ve got this problem.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m a stranger here myself. But go ahead, what’s your problem?”

  “It’s like this,” said Stuart. “I’m a biochemist, and I’m messing around with molecular evolution. The trouble is, I want to do so much else—I mean, while I’m here.”

  It turned out that Stuart Grebe was a wild-eyed enthusiast who wanted to take advantage of everything at Oxford, to sip from every goblet. Surely at this ancient university a person should be allowed to wallow in Elizabethan Prose and Homeric Archaeology and Greek Epic Poetry, not to mention Nonlinear Systems and Parallel Algorithms and Cell Physiology and Excitable Tissues and—

  Homer interrupted him with a glad cry. “Did you say excitable tissues? Hey, does the human body have excitable tissues? My God, that explains it. That’s my whole problem. A diagnosis at last! Look here, Stuart, I don’t know how to help you. Now that you mention it, I want to take all those things too.”

  Stuart laughed. It was a wild donkey’s bray of a guffaw, and everyone turned to look. “Hey, like you’re not much of an adviser, right?” He poked Homer in the chest. “Well, never mind. I’ll do you a favor anyway. Come on.” He led Homer past the stuffed ostrich and the golden figure of Aristotle and stopped in front of a display case on the west wall of the arcade surrounding the courtyard. Behind the glass were the remains of the dodo.

  “Kind of pitiful, if you ask me,” said Homer, staring at the skull and the single foot. “You mean, this is all that’s left? Of all the dodos on earth?”

  “Oh, there are a lot of other miscellaneous bones here and there, but nothing more complete than this.” Stuart’s eyes rolled upward. “Except for the portrait. See?”

  Homer looked up at the comic bird in the big painting beside the display case. “Funny-looking critter. Looks familiar somehow.”

  “Right, because of Alice in Wonderland,” said Stuart excitedly. “Tenniel drew his picture from this one. Did you know Lewis Carroll taught math at Oxford? Well, he did, right there at my college, Christ Church, and then he came to the new museum and he was really crazy about the dodo, in fact he
called himself the Dodo, because when he introduced himself as Charles Dodgson, he used to stutter and say Do-Do-Dodgson. That’s the story, anyway.”

  “Well,” said Homer, with morbid, intoxicated satisfaction, “Dodgson’s dead too. They’re all dead, all those people. Dead as dodos. Dead as a whole bunch of foolish-looking flightless extinct dodos.”

  “Well, I think it’s a shame,” said Freddy Dubchick.

  Homer and Stuart Grebe turned around to find William Dubchick’s daughter glaring at the remains of the dodo.

  “Oh, hi, Freddy,” said Stuart. “You mean they should have saved the whole dodo, and stuffed the whole thing? Well, they did, but it decayed, so they had to get rid of most of it. This is all that’s left.”

  “No, no, I mean it shouldn’t be here at all.” Freddy’s frown vanished. She beamed at Homer. “Hello again, Dr. Kelly.”

  Homer smiled back at her politely, but he was puzzled. “What do you mean, Ms. Dubchick, it shouldn’t be here? Where should it be instead?”

  Freddy’s eyes were alight, but she only said mysteriously, “I can think of a place,” and moved away with Stuart Grebe.

  Homer shrugged and returned to the courtyard, where it dawned on him at once that the reception was like the Mad Tea-Party. Absurd groups of animals and humans were drinking together like Alice and the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. Before him in plain sight the Dormouse was stuffing itself headfirst into an enormous teapot. No, no, it was only a plump paleontologist bending over the giant sphere of an enormous brain coral.

  “Oh, thanks,” said Homer to a waiter, snatching up another glass of wine.

  “Watch it, Homer,” said his wife, putting a hand on his arm. Mary Kelly was a big-boned woman with a calm ruddy face and a clear eye. Most of the time she let Homer have his impulsive way, but when he became insufferable, she stepped in. Homer in his cups was horribly unpredictable.

  “But it says Drink me, plain as day.” Homer saluted her with his glass, then darted away and leaped up on the base of the towering iguanodon. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” cried Homer. “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

  The thousand bones of the giant reptile shivered and shook. There was laughter and applause.

  “Homer!” Mary started after him, but thank God, someone was helping him down.

  It was Hal Shaw, the redheaded scientist from the United States. “No, no, you’ve got it wrong,” he said, grinning at Homer. “The iguanodon was a herbivore. It was perfectly harmless.”

  Mary abandoned her husband to Shaw’s kindly care and went looking for Homer’s sponsor, Dr. Jamison. Her move across the courtyard was part of a general shifting. Like the diners at the Mad Tea-Party, everyone changed places.

  Homer tapped the redheaded zoologist on the front of his shirt and explained his own, entirely new revelation. “Guess what?” he said. “Alice in Wonderland and Charles Darwin, they’re the same.”

  “The same?”

  “Right, right. The voyage of the Beagle and Alice in Wonderland! What is Alice but a mad tour of the natural world, with a dodo and a lobster and oysters, and a walrus and a rabbit and a jabberwock and a caterpillar and—and what else? All sorts of mammals and reptiles and birds and fishes and insects and crustaceans, right? I’ll bet that’s what Lewis Carroll was doing, he was making a sort of dreamlike voyage of the Beagle.” Homer beamed at Hal Shaw, having made, he thought, the cleverest remark of his entire career.

  “Well, maybe,” said Hal cautiously. “I mean, it’s an interesting idea.”

  “Freddy, Freddy.” Oliver Clare found Freddy in the company of Stuart Grebe. Detaching her from Stuart, he hurried her back to the scaffolding in the south arcade. A blue tarpaulin had been draped over one of the metal bars, creating a corner of privacy.

  But in spite of the scaffolding, Freddy’s father caught a glimpse of them as he walked into the courtyard to give his talk. It was obvious to William that his daughter was making a mistake. Young Oliver was charming, no doubt, and honest and good-natured, but he was also a traditionalist, tied to a religion that no longer had any meaning for William. And the fact that Oliver had aristocratic connections seemed to have crystallized the blood in his veins. Worse yet, William suspected the boy was a little bit stupid.

  But at this moment Oliver Clare was not a complete fool. He had discovered a marvelous change in Freddy, and he recognized it for what it was. To his delight she was warming toward him, leaning up against him, nuzzling her face against his shoulder. He murmured in her ear, “Oh, Freddy, Freddy, give me an answer.”

  “An answer?” Freddy pulled away and looked over the top of the scaffolding at the skeleton of the bottle-nosed dolphin suspended above the courtyard. Once upon a time the dolphin had been a happy omen to sailors on shipboard, leaping into the light, plunging down into the waves and splashing up again. Now the sunshine slanting through its ribs made slatted shadows on the floor. No—yes—no—yes, thought Freddy, and then, no, no. “I can’t,” she said, “not yet. Oh, Oliver, listen, my father’s about to speak.”

  Disappointed, Oliver followed her out of the arcade into the sunlit courtyard.

  The director of the museum, Joseph Jamison, stood on a box beside the stone figure of Albert, the Prince Consort. He cleared his throat and waited for the talk to the down, and then began welcoming all the newcomers, the new lecturers, the new graduate students, the Rhodes scholars from across the sea.

  “We particularly want to welcome my old friend Dr. Homer Kelly, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Kelly will be lecturing on American literature this term under the sponsorship of Keble College. Oh, and of course we also welcome his wife, Mary Kelly.” Dr. Jamison smiled at the two Kellys and clapped his hands, arousing polite applause from the men and women gathered around him, a miscellaneous collection of entomologists, zoologists, geologists, mineralogists and ornithologists, and a scattering of husbands and wives.

  We also welcome his wife. Homer glanced at Mary and whispered, “Whoops.” Perhaps the whole thing had been a mistake. Perhaps he shouldn’t have accepted the invitation after all.

  But as Jamison introduced Professor Dubchick, Mary seemed serene. “At last,” she murmured, “the great man.”

  Margo Shaw was standing next to Mary. She giggled and made a joke. “Professor Metatarsal has found the missing link!”

  There were scandalized whispers of Sssh, as the professor mounted the box and adjusted his glasses, which were held together on both sides by paper clips. His bald head was pink in the blazing light, and every strand of the white hair around his shining dome was picked out against the darkness of the arcaded corridor behind him. He cleared his throat and began to talk about Charles Darwin. “His earthshaking book, The Origin of Species, burst upon the world at the very time this museum was opening its doors.”

  He looks like Darwin, thought Homer Kelly with amusement. That bald head and white beard, that broad nose, those eyes shadowed under a pair of shaggy brows, they’re just the same. Did hero worship do that to you? Did it turn you into the object of your admiration?

  Mark Soffit was amused too. After his ghastly initial blunder in failing to take Dubchick’s hand, he persuaded himself now that he didn’t give a shit. He should have known Dubchick would be an old man. He must be at least sixty. And look at him! Early in Dubchick’s life he had been this big expert on primates, and now, God! he looked just like one. Mark thought of the old caricatures ponraying Darwin as an ape, because of his theory that humans were descended from the same ancestors as modern primates. What about a new species, Gorilla dubchickea? Mark laughed aloud. People turned to look at him, and he grinned, and wondered which of them he should attach himself to now. Again he wondered, How am I going to get in? What’s the hierarchy around here?

  Professor Dubchick picked up a cardboard box and lifted something out of it, a small drawer. “We are fortunate in this museum in having some of the specimens Darwin collected on his five-year voyage on the Beagle.” Triumphantly Will
iam tilted the drawer to show the contents. It was full of mounted crabs.

  Hal Shaw stood apart from his wife, staring at Dubchick. He too compared him with Darwin. Both Darwin and Dubchick had refused to specialize. They were grand generalizers, taking the entire natural world as their field of study. Darwin had wandered from beetles to coral reefs to pigeons to barnacles to orchids to earthworms. For Dubchick, too, nothing in all the kingdoms of life on earth—from one-celled organisms to fungi, animals and plants—was beyond the range of his interest. Oh, there were occasional yelps of protest from a botanist here or a toadstool specialist there, but on the whole the name of Dubchick was sacred. Hal thought of him as a furry zoologist, one of the kind that went out into the jungle and lived with animals. In his youth he had climbed mountains in the Andes to study families of woolly monkeys.

  These days, of course, most of the action was in molecular biology. Some of Hal’s more radical colleagues were inventing fictitious creatures on the computer screen, setting them loose in time, throwing in random variation, and declaring them alive.

  Hal watched as Professor Dubchick named the Darwin crabs one by one, and explained where they had come from. He was entranced. Like Dubchick he was filled with a sense of their preciousness. Perhaps there had been thousands of freshwater crabs of the species Dilocarcinus pagei cristatus scuttling in the dry holes of the island in the River Paraná in Argentina when Darwin was there in 1833, but this was the one his hand had picked up, it was the one that had come home from his fabulous journey.