Chapter Sixteen

The night before the trip, Grace sent me the next batch of Andrea Darrel’s diary entries. I think we’ll need one more trip to finish this off, she wrote. Planning for next week so Sierra and I can have a normal dating rhythm lol unless you desperately need diaries earlier.

I answered right away. This is perfect!

Curled up in bed, I went to work deciphering Andrea Darrel’s handwriting. Now I recognized the loops and dips of her words, the way her n’s bled into the letters around them. These journals covered the years when Andrea would have accompanied Annie Cannon to Nantucket to help on her astronomy course—the years when Andrea might have overlapped with Frederick Gibson.

June 3, 1906

I’m of two feelings, heading home. I’m thrilled to see my family, but I’m nervous about my professional and personal worlds mixing. Annie and I will be staying with my parents, whom I have given strict instructions to in regard to their behavior. Specifically, they are not to make rude comments about spinsters. At thirty-three, I am solidly in the spinster category (and yet they still have hope), but I know Annie, ten years my senior, will baffle them.

June 15, 1906

Home, and it is mostly fine. Annie charmed Papa. Mama is, for the first time, acting as though my career is worthy of interest. Hattie has made a few snide remarks about age and children, but she has sympathy for anyone who has lost their mother. She does often forget to face Annie so she can lip-read, and when I remind her acts as though it is a trial, but Hattie also acts as though feeding her own progeny is a trial.

We have started the summer class, and it is going quite well. The students are mostly locals (many I have known my whole life). Annie is an excellent teacher, and we have been asked by Mrs. Albertson, the curator of the Maria Mitchell Association, to give talks at the end of August open to the whole community. It is nice, the people I have known all my life finally seeing me shine.

August 27, 1906

The talks went well! Yesterday, Annie spoke about the constellations, and today about the 1900 eclipse we saw in Virginia. There was a lively atmosphere, especially as this served as the culmination of our summer classes, and I believe everyone enjoyed themselves. Afterward, my parents’ friends Mr. and Mrs. Thomas came to chat. They introduced me to a Mr. Gibson, who has been visiting the island for a few days. He is very tall and lanky, and he made me laugh, twice, which generally men do not.

In Cambridge, it’s easy to talk with the men I meet through work, but here I’m always on my guard, aware it is my parents’ greatest wish I acquire someone else’s surname through any means possible. I’m reluctant to give them any reason to think it a possibility, so I was more reserved with Mr. Gibson than I’d usually be with someone so handsome.

“I enjoyed your talk very much,” Mr. Gibson said.

“Thank you,” I said, and if Mr. and Mrs. Thomas hadn’t been there, I might have flirted, but instead I asked him about his own career. He was very charming as he told me and the Thomases about his work with the Coast Survey. We talked for almost an hour, and at the end everyone insisted they had had quite the best time. Mr. Gibson said, very sincerely, he hoped to see me again.

It’s been years since I was so taken with someone. I am happy with my independence and have no desire to relinquish it, but I must admit I might have a desire for something else. It is too bad I am leaving for Cambridge in a few days, and he lives in New York.

A delighted grin spread across my face. I knew it! They’d met. They’d met, and she liked him. I wanted to tell Ethan, but it was near midnight, and knocking on his door at this hour wouldn’t lead to anything good. I went back to reading, skimming furiously for mentions of Gibson, but Andrea rarely mentioned him after returning to Cambridge. Instead, she talked about the endless search for variable stars, the publications of her colleagues, and the catalogue of stars she, herself, was working on.

Then, the next summer, Andrea and Annie Cannon returned to Nantucket.

July 3, 1907

Frederick Gibson is taking the astronomy course Annie and I are teaching.

I haven’t thought of him (very much) this year, but I occasionally daydreamed of running into him again. Now I will be teaching him for eight Wednesdays in a row.

He came up to me on the first night. “I’m sure you don’t remember me,” he said with a crooked smile, as though I make a point of forgetting attractive men who make me laugh. “We were introduced last summer by the Thomases.”

“Mr. Gibson, how do you do,” I said. “I remember you. We’re glad to have you here.”

I know he’s probably taking this course out of an interest in astronomy, but part of me hopes it’s also because of me. Or that it might become because of me.

July 10, 1907

After class today, Mr. Gibson lingered until everyone but Annie had left. Then Annie (with a bit of a smirk) said good night, leaving me and Mr. Gibson alone.

So much of my conversation with men happens at work or at dinner parties—rarely alone at night. I can’t remember the last time I was nervous to talk to anyone. To make up for it, I tried to be brisk and businesslike. But soon he had me laughing, telling me about a woman who is suing her hairdresser for burning her hair while trying to create a marcel wave. “They brought a hairdresser into court to show how it is properly done,” he quipped. “I don’t believe the judge was impressed.”

Frederick Gibson often lingered after class, under the stars on late summer evenings, but nothing further ever happened. Andrea clearly developed a massive crush, but by the end of the summer she had no idea where he stood, and she resolved to put thoughts of him out of her head during the rest of the year.

But the next summer, and the summer after, Frederick Gibson reappeared on Nantucket. Like the first summer, Andrea and Frederick had plenty of flirtation and little follow-through. It was frustrating for Andrea—and for me as a reader, honestly. By the time she returned to Cambridge at the end of the summer of 1909, Andrea seemed done. It is irritating how much I think about Mr. Gibson, she wrote. I am starting to want this to be more than it is, and I don’t have the time or energy to waste if it won’t be. He has made no move to visit or write to me in Cambridge outside the summers. I need to stop spending so much time thinking about him, and spend it instead on my work.

Fair enough, Andrea.

She returned to Cambridge, refocused, and filled her journals with scribbled equations and verbal sketches of daily life. And for the first time, in 1910, Andrea didn’t go home to Nantucket—instead, her family came to visit her in Cambridge for a few weeks in May. And in August, the local astronomy scene ramped up for a gathering of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America.

August 1, 1910

One cannot turn a corner in Cambridge these days without bumping into a famed astronomer. It seems everyone in the world is here for Dr. Pickering’s meeting. Hale is determined to convince Dr. P to join his Solar Union, which I think would be a good thing, and so a whole collection of astronomers will be taking the train out to Hale’s Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles so he can properly entice him. Until then we are overrun with royal astronomers and the like. We’re whisking them all about the city, showing them telescopes and plates and the observatory, and I haven’t had so much fun in a long time.

August 2, 1910

Tonight Dr. Pickering hosted a gathering at his home for the astronomers in town. As soon as I entered the parlor, I noticed a pair of broad shoulders, a finely shaped head. Even before I saw a quarter profile, I knew it was Mr. Frederick Gibson. It made my chest ache and my head feel light.

I have not felt like this since I was in college. I don’t particularly enjoy it.

I turned to face my friends. I refused to approach Frederick first; if we spoke, I wanted him to approach me, some validation of his interest.

My friends noticed me behaving oddly. “What is it?” Melony said.

“Who is it,” Claire corrected, with a sly glance toward the knot of men containing Gibson. “Did one of them catch your eye?”

“It’s the man I was telling you about,” I said, so quietly they had to step closer to hear. “From back home.”

“Mr. Gibson, from the summers?” Melony glanced toward the men, even though I made hushing noises at her. “But you said he never wrote.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then what is he doing here?”

“The same thing everyone else is,” I suggested. “He is interested in astronomy.”

“He’s coming!” Melony said. “Our way!”

We burst into giggles, as though schoolgirls instead of fully grown professionals.

His low, smooth voice cut through them. “Miss Darrel? Is that you?”

I turned. In my daydreams, I pictured myself being cool and aloof, but in fact I smiled terribly brightly. “Mr. Gibson! Hello!”

He smiled warmly. “I thought I recognized you. But then, this is your stomping ground, not mine. And these are your colleagues?”

I introduced everyone and I’m sure we had a very pleasant conversation, but I floated through it. I’m not even sure it’s a good thing Frederick is here, but I cannot deny I feel light as hydrogen.

August 10, 1910

Mr. Gibson called on me to see if I would like to go for a walk on Sunday, and so we are going for a walk, and all I can think about is us on a walk. I am supposed to be combing through my quadrant for faint variable stars and helping Mrs. Fleming prepare her manuscript, and I cannot. Is this why so many successful women are unmarried, romance decays the brain and makes you spin in circles?

Andrea didn’t write for several weeks, and I wondered if Gibson had taken over too much brain space.

September 3, 1910

Three days ago Frederick kissed me and I was over the moon about it, so filled with joy and delight I couldn’t even write. But I have not heard from him since, and now I think I’m starting to go mad. What is the protocol for talking to someone who kissed you, and said they would call on you, but did not? I asked Claire and she laughed (bitterly) and said I should track him down and make him tell me his intentions. But Melony said I should under no circumstances do so.

I am too old to be so stressed about whether a man likes me. I am too happy with my life to want to dramatically change it. And yet.

But he did call on her; that week, and the next, and the next. They attended Red Sox games and played tennis and discussed infrared photography and the Wright brothers. Andrea sounded happy, but also irritated Frederick Gibson’s intentions weren’t more clear. I’d had no idea such irritation was so universal throughout history.

November 13, 1910

Somehow, on a perfectly normal evening, I found myself asking (after one too many beers) “Why have you never married?”

Freddie flashed me his crooked grin, like this was a joke rather than a question I’d been harboring for ages. “I’ve never found a woman who could keep up with me.”

“How strange,” I said archly, “given how many brilliant women I know. Perhaps you were looking in the wrong places?”

He laughed. “Perhaps I meant keep up and keep me in my place. I suppose the truth is, I wasn’t ready.”

And then—again, I blame the beer—I said, “Wasn’t? Or aren’t?”

His eyes gleamed, and he leaned forward, and he called me on my implication. “Why, Miss Darrel,” he said, “are you making a proposal?”

The mortification I felt. I don’t know why. I suppose because I am never sure of Freddie. We go for coffee and automobile rides but I’m never sure he wants anything more. And even though I am not sure I want more, I might. Yet I never want him to think I want him more than he wants me. I don’t want to give him that kind of power over me.

I leaned back in my chair and said, “I’m not a goose of a girl, Frederick. I don’t long for marriage. But I am a scientist and I trade in facts, and so I would like to have some. Are you looking for a companion, which we have been to each other over the summers for several years now? Or are you looking for a wife—and if so, are you considering me, or am I a convenient pastime until you find the correct lady?”

I rather think I shocked Freddie. Which I enjoyed.

“You have always been too quick for me,” he said wryly. “And more blunt than I expect. It keeps me sharp, I suppose.”

I waited.

“I think you are brilliant,” he said slowly. “The most brilliant woman I’ve ever met. But you seem married to your career, and I always pictured my wife would be more…married to me.”

I did not snort, but I came close. “To tend your house and raise your children?”

He gave me his wry smile. “Is that so wrong?”

“It is so typical. I would have thought a spouse should be a partner, an equal, not an employee.”

“Maybe you’re right. But…I never expected my wife to have a career.”

I looked away. It hurt, even though I knew it shouldn’t,

“That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t,” he said. “Just I’ve never thought about it. I’m not sure I would have expected a woman with a career to want a husband. After all, you’ve never married, either.”

“Maybe I’ve never met anyone who can keep up with me, either,” I said.

(This is not true; plenty of the men at the Observatory can keep up. But it sounded good.)

“And you think I can?” he asked, smiling.

I shrugged. “Mostly.”

He laughed. Then he looked at me, his eyes that perfect mottled brown-green that I find so beautiful, that I am very afraid that I love. “And—just to make sure I understand—are you saying you are interested in the institution of marriage?”

“I might be,” I said, though it felt like scraping rocks out of my throat to admit it. “Yes. I suppose I would be.”

“I’ll make note of it,” he said, and we did not speak of it again.

I feel like I have swallowed a storm and it is churning my insides in great, wild waves. Do I want to marry Frederick? Do I want to marry at all? I don’t want to give up my career. I don’t want to stop sweeping the skies or searching for a comet, but what if I could have both?

I rather think I would like both.