State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [105]
“Is that how you met Dr. Swenson?” Marina thought of her teacher taking the trouble to catch the red-eye back from Manaus. To the best of her memory Dr. Swenson hadn’t missed a single class.
Nancy Saturn smeared a great handful of white paste across her face and began to rub it in. “To know Martin Rapp was to know Annick Swenson.”
“Don’t ruin the story,” Alan said to her. He turned his attention back to Marina, that untapped source of listening pleasure. “Annick is several years older than I am, of course.” This news was delivered for his own vanity, as Alan Saturn, with his thinning white hair, enormous white eyebrows, and perilously slender ankles, could easily have been taken as older than Dr. Swenson. The only thing that made Dr. Saturn seem younger was his younger wife. “She was coming down here years before me. They were, shall we say, quite inseparable in the field.”
“She picked the boys who went on the trips,” Nancy said. “Only boys. She held interviews in his office at Harvard. She was the one who picked Alan. Dr. Rapp didn’t have the time to fill the rosters himself.”
Marina could see him then, a tall and lanky undergraduate, a canvas rucksack on his back. “You knew him too?” she asked Nancy.
Nancy gave a small, snorting laugh and applied a layer of sunblock to her breastbone, reaching into the collar of her shirt to do the job right. “I came after Dr. Rapp.”
Alan Saturn was ignoring her now. He was launched. A giant tree had fallen into the river and the roots and branches reached up through the water as if begging to be saved. A bright yellow bird with a long, slender neck sat on one of those branches and watched the boat as it passed. Benoit, having spotted the bird, began his frantic turning of pages. “Martin Rapp was more than my teacher. He was the man I wanted to be. He was fully engaged with his life every minute that he lived it. He didn’t trudge along doing what someone else told him to do. He was never a cog in the wheel. He held his head up and looked at the world around him. Now, my father was a very decent man, worked as a tailor in Detroit back when there were men in Detroit who had their suits made. He worked until his hands were so twisted with arthritis he couldn’t hold a needle. If a man came into the store and told my father what he wanted, the only word my father had for him was yes. It didn’t matter if it was a ridiculous order, didn’t matter if this guy showed up on Saturday morning and wanted his suit for Saturday night and there was already work piled to the rafters, my father said yes. And once my father said yes it was as good as done because that word was all he had in the world. He spent his life in the backroom of a store and the only thing he knew about his environment was that needle going in and out of the cloth. He did all this so my brothers and I could go to college and not be tailors and have the luxury of telling somebody no someday. So off I went to Harvard, the tailor’s boy from Michigan. The next thing I knew I was sitting in a lecture hall and in walked the great Martin Rapp, his ankle sunk in a plaster boot, his crutches swinging forward. He came up to the lectern and he said, ‘Gentlemen, close your books and listen. We have nothing less than the world to consider.’ We were awestruck, every last one of us. We would have sat there for the full four years of college. I remember everything about that day, that room, the giant blackboards, the light coming in those leaded glass windows. What I saw in front of me was the character of a man. It was the most remarkable thing, and I’ve never had that experience before or since. It was some sort of aura he had. From ten rows away I knew exactly who he was and I knew I would follow him anywhere.”
“Here,” Nancy said to Marina, “take the sunblock and give me the bug gel.”
Marina took the sunblock but there was only so much sunblock could do. As careful as she had tried to be she was as dark as the natives now. Her own mother wouldn