Page 31 of Under Story

“Right. Or if you’re in Madison, and you need an introduction to anyone at the university.”

It was a feeble addendum. Eli’s work was better known than hers.

“Thank you.” Eli smiled. He retrieved his pen and the receipt from dinner, which he smoothed in the palm of his hand. “I’m ready.”

—

When Laurel returned to Madison, she dove into work at the orchard. There were never enough hands in autumn, even with the seasonal staff. Customers wandered through rows of trees, filling the baskets that Clare stacked in front of the farm store. They served free chili and cider on weekends. Laurel worked the food table, which distracted her from thoughts of Eli. She knew that her father would have been thrilled by the crowds, and by the contented look of each customer.

At one point, an older woman approached. After Laurel poured a cup of cider, the woman took her hand.

“My son and I have been coming here for over twenty years. Now we bring his kids.” She pointed to two boys in matching Packers sweatshirts. “I hope you never get rid of this place.”

Laurel reassured the woman, but internally, she tensed. Climate change made fruit growing more difficult each year. Unprecedented warmth worsened diseases like apple scab and made the trees bloom early. Severe storms wreaked havoc, too: once, high winds broke an heirloom tree and sent the crown into the sheep paddock. Sometimes Clare made comments about throwing in the towel. Laurel was relatively sure that her mother didn’t mean them, but she still stepped in to help. Together, they had managed—for one more year, at least.

Laurel brought a jug of cider to her next meeting with Gloria. It was the first time they’d seen each other since the conference.

“Tell me everything,” Gloria said.

Laurel described her presentation and the audience responses. When she reenacted the botanist’s surprise attack, Gloria cheered at her rebuttal. Then she explained her vision for the next iteration of the maze experiment: another attendee, she said, had boosted her confidence in the electricity angle. She didn’t mention that he had been her crush for the previous decade.

“I loved meeting Seymour and Julian,” Laurel added. “I didn’t realize that you lived together when you were so young.”

She’d had to build up the nerve to say it. Laurel was distressed by the thought of what Gloria had endured. She also felt slightly hurt. Gloria had begun as her teacher, but they were now much closer than that. She had never told Laurel that they shared an early loss in common.

“Ah.” Gloria looked surprised. Then she sighed. “It was a long time ago.”

She seemed to deflate. Immediately Laurel realized that she shouldn’t have taken Gloria’s reticence personally.

“I’m sorry,” Laurel said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“That’s all right. I should have explained, but I didn’t want to weigh you down.” Gloria smiled, wry. “At least that’s what I told myself. Partly I was avoiding it. At some point, I got it into my head that talking about what happened would only make me feel worse. I often forget that talking about my parents also keeps the good memories fresh.”

Laurel tucked her feet beneath her. “Tell me about them.”

“They were both only children, like I was. And they were older parents. They lived a lot of life before they had me.” Cygnus jumped into Gloria’s lap. “My father’s parents died when he was twenty. I never met my mother’s family, because they lived in Russia.”

“Russia!”

Gloria laughed at her surprise. “My mother was born in a small village near the Arctic Circle. Arkhangelsk was the closest city—Archangel in English.” There were wild forest reindeer, she said, and pine forests, and churches with onion domes dipped in gold. “The winters were frigid. My mother used to say that if her tea was cold, she had only to go outside for it to seem warm again.”

“Was your father Russian, too?” asked Laurel.

“Far from it,” said Gloria. He was a soldier, she explained, in the First World War. After the armistice of 1918, most American troops were sent home, but a smaller body—the American Expeditionary Force of North Russia, better known as the Polar Bear Expedition—remained to fight the Bolsheviks. Most of them were Midwestern boys; Gloria’s father, Theodore, had grown up on a farm in Wisconsin. He trained at Camp Custer for only three weeks before boarding a ship for the Far North.

President Wilson had declared that the force would simply guard supplies, but the American ambassador to Russia, urged by European allies, ordered them to the front lines instead. It was a time of betrayal and bloody confusion: orders came from the British, and the White Army mistakenly bombed the Americans. Some of the Polar Bears were sent up the river Dvina to villages where the Bolsheviks lay in wait. There was no surgical equipment in the field, and those who couldn’t be transported to the hospital in Arkhangelsk suffered amputations by jackknife. Temperatures dropped as low as fifty degrees below zero, but officers forbade campfires, fearing that the enemy would see light.

But if Gloria’s father had not been in that unlucky group, he would not have met her mother. Olga was the nurse who cared for Ted after a Bolshevik bullet cut through his left ear. The eardrum was ruptured beyond repair, and a surgeon removed the warped cartilage. When she wasn’t needed elsewhere on the unit, Olga listened to Ted read the book he’d brought from home: Frankenstein, which had been written by a British girl no older than nineteen, and took place partially in Arkhangelsk itself.

Olga understood that she was doing something dangerous. Even before the revolution, work by many Russian writers—Pushkin, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky—had been removed from libraries. According to the Supreme Law Concerning Textbooks and Popular Literature, they were too dark for the masses. Now the Bolsheviks were censoring even more printed material; foreign novels circulated through the nobility and the black market. But Olga had always been a little fearless, a little rogue—like Myshka, the family cat, who often vanished into new hiding places, then sat in contented silence as Olga’s mother cried his name.

Her parents had wanted Olga to be educated. When she was thirteen, they sent her to live with an aunt so that she could attend high school in Arkhangelsk. Nursing school followed. Arkhangelsk was a port city, and Olga often watched the ships depart. She did not know that it was possible to envy an object, but she was jealous of those ships; she wanted to travel like they did. Olga was a quick study. And she was hungry—for language, information, variety. Though she felt for her charges, and gained some satisfaction in helping them, she had no passion for nursing. From the American and British soldiers she picked up bits of English like a magpie, hoarding them, curious. Ted taught her more. His voice was deep and strong as a root, in contrast to her mischief. In his room, her world opened word by word.

She felt for the tall young man who hadn’t lost his sense of humor. What remained of his left ear was a strange, puckered hole that he employed to comedic effect. They developed a ventriloquist’s routine: Olga whistled while keeping her lips as still as possible, and Ted moved his head to imply that the sound came from the hole. She thought he could not always be so cheerful and was confirmed in that suspicion when she glanced through the window in passing. She found him gazing outside, transfixed with an expression of wistfulness so personal that she felt abashed for having seen it.

On the spring day when Ted was released from the hospital, Olga cried with a distress that surprised her. The next morning, he returned with an offer: for her to join him on the ship that would leave as soon as the White Sea thawed. The only catch, he said, was that they’d have to be married.

Ted’s parents had died of the Spanish flu while he was stationed in the Arctic. He learned by letter, lurching in the barracks, another soldier’s arms around his shoulders. They decided to sail to San Francisco, where Ted had a friend in the Harbor Defenses who could help him find work. Books had always been his solace, and he wanted to pursue a teaching certificate in English.