State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [104]
It was true, the Lakashi were poised to begin boarding, all of them. Benoit pushed ahead of the pack and jumped without solicitation. He clearly meant to go somewhere, and Nancy followed him. Two more Lakashi leapt onto the boat but before they had gotten their balance Benoit tipped them back into the water, and then Marina jumped without ever meaning to go. Easter laughed at her flat-footed landing and she went and stood behind him, both of her hands on his shoulders. Every night they went to sleep separately, he in his hammock and she in her cot beneath the netting, and every night his dreams woke them both. His dreams, not hers, and she would go and scoop him up, bring him back in with her where they would sleep out the rest of the night in her little bed. They had gotten good at it. In only a week they had learned how to stretch and turn in unison.
The Lakashi were wading into the river and with the cross of breaststroke and dog paddle they favored, they swam. Marina looked at their dark heads in the water and wondered if she would have swum out too, just to have something to do. Nancy Saturn removed her hat and waved it at them, showing the short auburn hair she cropped herself. She called out an enthusiastic series of farewells—goodbye in English and tchau in Portuguese and then some sort of humming sound followed by a high pitched cry that essentially meant I am gone from you in Lakashi. After her fourth or fifth repetition they finally turned around and swam back to shore. It wasn’t as if they ever would have caught the boat. Easter was gunning the engine now that Dr. Swenson wasn’t on board.
“They only want a little recognition,” Nancy said, watching and waving as they fell farther and farther behind. “If you don’t acknowledge what they’re doing they just keep doing it. Frankly, I don’t think they’re such good swimmers. You can’t have half the tribe drowning on the way to the trading post.”
“Nancy would have made a great social behaviorist,” Alan Saturn said, dropping a very tan arm over his wife’s shoulders. “Dr. Rapp would have loved her. There were so many things we missed back then that Nancy picked up on the very first time she came out here.”
“You knew Dr. Rapp?” Marina asked.
Nancy raised her eyebrows briefly and then sighed with the recognition of what was to come. “How in the world did you miss that lecture?” she said, stepping out from under her husband’s arm and rifling through her bag for sunblock and bug gel. She handed one tube to Marina and began to use the other on herself.
Alan Saturn lifted his sunglasses to better show the delight in his eyes. “I was his student at Harvard! I was actually enrolled in that famous mycology class the year he broke his ankle in New Guinea and wound up coming back to teach for the entire semester. Those were the lectures that were published by Oxford University Press, and there have been no end of papers written on them. I’m sure you must have read some of them. There were a great many legends built up around that class. It was listed in the catalogue every year but Dr. Rapp virtually never made his way back to the classroom for more than a day or two. In reality it was taught by some graduate student who had been in the field himself and was qualified to do no more than read the notes and mark the tests. So while Studies in Mycology was considered to be one of the seminal classes at the university, no one but rubes actually signed up for it. Signing up for the class was as good as admitting you had no idea what was going on, so who better than me to enroll? When people realized what had happened, that the great man himself was coming back to teach, you had a situation where seniors and graduate students and in some cases faculty members were making cash offers to freshmen to give up their seats. I for one stood firm and was rewarded fortunes beyond that fifty bucks I turned down. I got to know Dr. Rapp that semester, I made sure