Chapter Twenty-Four

I stayed the night at Dad’s place. He borrowed an air mattress that took over the entire floor. I had to admit, I wouldn’t have lasted the summer on it. (It had half deflated by the time I woke up.) In the morning, I took Dad’s bike back to Golden Doors. The high today was supposed to be ninety degrees, but this early, the world was still cool, the light soft and birdsong gentle.

I walked inside Golden Doors, now so familiar it felt like home, and followed the scent of banana bread to the great room. One of the triplets waved me over. “Ethan’s looking for you. On the roof walk.”

“Thanks.” I grabbed a coffee and two slices of banana bread and carried them upstairs. When I arrived, Ethan turned to me. “Hi.”

“Hi.” I sat down and handed him a plate.

“Thanks. How’d it go with your dad?”

“Really well. I got out everything I’ve been stressed about. Um—he knows we’re dating.”

“Does he?” Ethan looked half pleased, half apprehensive. “What’d he say?”

I rolled my eyes. “Apparently, he thought we’d be a good match.”

“Ha!” Ethan let out a joyful shout. “I knew it!” He paused. “I suppose this is less great for the rest of our summer if he tells my parents.”

“Hopefully they won’t kick me out for the last few weeks,” I teased.

“We should probably take advantage whenever we can, just in case.” He leaned forward, and for a few minutes we indulged in drowsy, sweet kisses.

Then I pulled back. “The triplets said you were looking for me?”

“Maybe this was why I was looking for you.”

I made a face. “I really hope you weren’t using your thirteen-year-old cousins to arrange a booty call.”

“Right. Fair. I wanted to make sure you were okay, and also…” A smile grew across his face. “Did I mention the Gibson Foundation sent me lots and lots of old documents at the beginning of the summer? For my research into his early work wire-dragging near Nantucket?”

“I think you did,” I said slowly.

“Turns out they included a bunch of letters he’d sent. Including this one, to his brother, on April fifteenth.”

He handed me a printed piece of paper.

As to the other matter, I assure you I am fine. The lady’s unreasonable behavior makes me question my prior devotion. She behaved as though I had done something wrong. She always said these things must be done early, and as she was asleep I took it upon myself to act on her behalf, as a favor; as I sent the telegraph obviously I signed my name. Which was to be hers, so I do not understand her objection. We were to be a unit. I was going to provide and care for her. Honestly I consider myself lucky; this absurd outrage tells me she would have been a poor wife and mother of my children, and I should consider myself well rid.

Prior devotion.

I sent the telegraph.

I signed my name. Which was to be hers.

Well, damn, Frederick Gibson. A confession in so many words. Maybe not one other people would recognize, reading this paragraph—not if they didn’t know the date of the comet’s discovery, or about Andrea Darrel’s fury, or about their relationship. Which, speaking of—“Were they engaged?”

“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “But if they were…”

“Then this is useful, right? This is corroboration?”

“I think so,” he said. “It’d be better if we had proof he meant Andrea, but it seems like a clear connection.”

“Maybe there is proof. Didn’t historical people announce engagements?”

I pulled up The Inquirer and Mirror, Nantucket’s oldest running newspaper, where I’d originally found mentions of Annie Cannon and Andrea Darrel teaching their astronomy course. I searched for Darrel and clicked forward further than I had last time, until I reached 1911. Then I read entries carefully until I reached one from April 4:

Mr. and Mrs. Darrel are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Andrea Darrel of Cambridge, to Mr. Frederick Gibson of New York. Mr. and Mrs. Darrel will be hosting an engagement party for the couple this Friday.

I read it again. The engagement party was scheduled for April 7. The happy couple would be in attendance.

They had both been on Nantucket, together. Which would explain why Andrea hadn’t been at the Harvard observatory, able to file her discovery immediately. Perhaps Andrea had spotted the comet when sweeping the sky late at night, the day after their engagement party. And perhaps, before she had a chance to telegraph Harvard, Gibson had done so in her place. Perhaps she’d told him about her discovery, or he’d read the entry in her journal. I took it upon myself to act on her behalf, as a favor, he had written. She always said these things must be done early.

“Now what?” I asked Ethan.

“The only better thing would be if we had it written in her own hand,” Ethan said. “She didn’t leave any other diaries, did she?”

“None I know of. She left the Vassar ones to Vassar and the Harvard ones to Harvard, so unless she worked somewhere else—or left them to descendants?”

I paused. Ethan and I stared at each other. Descendants.

How had I not thought about descendants? Sure, Wikipedia said nothing, but they could still exist.

Old letters and diaries. Weren’t these things families had? Family stories and legends and notebooks?

A few minutes later, we’d logged into a genealogy website Ethan’s grandparents belonged to and found a family tree for Andrea Darrel. She’d had two children in the 1910s, one of whom married and had three children in the 1940s. Andrea Darrel’s seven great-grandchildren had been born in the sixties and seventies. I stared at the names. “How do we pick who to contact?”

“The oldest?” Ethan suggested. “They’re all cousins—they’ll probably know who to go to.”

I noticed something else. “Look, this woman has an account.” I clicked on her name and saw she’d uploaded plenty of info over the past ten years. “I bet she’s the genealogist in the family.”

The website had a message function. After laboring painfully over my phrasing, I sent one.

Dear Dr. Trowbridge,

My name is Jordan Edelman and I’m an intern for Dr. Cora Bradley, an astrophysicist at Harvard working on an article about the Harvard Computers. I’ve been researching your great-grandmother Andrea Darrel for the past several months. I’ve read her diaries, and I’m trying to clarify her connection to her former fiancé, Frederick Gibson, who is best known as the discoverer of Gibson’s comet. I’m also trying to understand Darrel’s involvement in the comet discovery itself. I was wondering if you might be available for a call sometime soon?

Thank you,

Jordan Edelman

I received a reply half an hour later: Hi Jordan—happy to chat. Are you free Sunday at 2? I’ll send a link.

I’d never been so nervous for a conversation in my life, but by 1:50 p.m. the next day I was sitting in front of my computer, perfectly coiffed and dressed, waiting impatiently for the call to begin. When the clock ticked over to 2:00, I made myself count to ten and clicked the Zoom link.

Dr. Trowbridge was already there, a woman in her sixties with short salt-and-pepper hair, thick-framed glasses, and a cozy-looking lavender sweater.

“Hi,” I said. Panic immediately seized me. Who did I think I was, talking to actual adults?

“Hi,” she said, then immediately shouted at someone off-screen, “Put the spatula down.” She turned back. “Sorry, I have my grandchildren with me today.”

“Oh, no worries. Thanks so much for talking to us. I’m Jordan, this is Ethan, and we’re researching Andrea Darrel—your great-grandmother, right?”

“Yeah,” she said vaguely, attention off-screen again. She snapped it forward. “What about her?”

“Do you know much about her?”

“Mm. She was an astronomer.”

“Yes. And. Um.” I took a deep breath. “Did you know she was connected to Frederick Gibson?”

“I didn’t know they were engaged,” she said. “I knew they were involved for a while, yes.”

Better out with it all at once. “We think she discovered the comet. The one returning later this summer. Known as Gibson’s comet.”

For a moment, the woman stared at us. Her dark eyes pierced across screens and oceans into my own. Then she turned. “Samir! Get over here!”

A man’s torso showed up in the screen: a buttoned-down cardigan with a mug held in front of his belly. “Yes, dear?”

“Sit down. These two think Grammy’s mom found Gibson’s comet.”

The man lowered into the frame. He was the woman’s age, with matching thick-rimmed glasses and frizzy hair haloing his bald spot. “Do they?”

The woman turned back to us. “And why do you think so?”

“Well,” I said, a little nervously. I didn’t quite understand the energy between the couple, their air of almost amused curiosity. “I was reading her old diaries, and she talks a lot about wanting to contribute to astronomy. And then she fell for Frederick Gibson.”

A clatter sounded on the other end of the call, and a disembodied voice floated through. “I’m here! Sorry I’m late, Mom, the T was—oh sorry, I didn’t realize you were on a call.”

Dr. Trowbridge looked up. “Come in, dear. Dad and I are talking to some students who think Andrea Darrel discovered Gibson’s comet.”

“Really?” the woman said with relish before coming on-screen, squeezing her face in above her parents. She looked around Cora’s age, and a friendly smile tweaked her lips. “How come?”

“Um.” I cleared my throat.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan said, leaning forward. “Are you guys—not surprised?”

“It’d be very strange if we were.” Dr. Trowbridge’s smile invited us to join her in the joke. “We’ve been celebrating her discovery since I was a baby.”

This is what they told us.

Andrea Darrel had always told her family about her discovery. She’d told her husband before they married; he’d believed her. When the comet came back almost forty years later, on its first rotation since Andrea identified it, their children had been grown and with their own kids; Andrea Darrel and her husband had thrown a giant party in the yard of their Cambridge home. Dr. Trowbridge sent me a few sepia-toned pictures, pointing out her own mother, a baby with a cowlick.

Andrea Darrel beamed in the photos. In the late 1940s, in her seventies, her face and body had filled out. But there was still something youthful about her, the headband in her hair, the way she’d been caught laughing.

“But why haven’t you said anything?” I cried when Dr. Trowbridge told us. “Didn’t you want her to get credit?”

“Said anything? To who? It’s just a family story,” she said. “We don’t have proof.”

“Do you, though?” her daughter pressed. “You have proof?”

“We have some things.” I walked them through what we’d discovered: the diaries, the timing, the bulletin with the same numbers as in Andrea’s diary, the engagement party, the letter from Frederick to his brother. “Was she bitter?” I asked. “Never getting credit for her discovery?”

“My mother said no,” Dr. Trowbridge said thoughtfully. “Angry, sometimes. But not always.”

“Why didn’t she fight for credit, later on? The world had changed. People might have believed her. And in her diaries, from college—she sounded like she wanted, badly, to make a major discovery. A contribution to science.”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Trowbridge said. “She said the people who mattered knew, and that was enough. And she did contribute. She published articles and spent thirty years as a professor. And I think—a comet discovery would have opened a lot of doors for her, but it wasn’t the same level of work as what she did later on. I think she enjoyed her later work more.”

I was glad to hear it; I wanted Andrea Darrel to have lived a long, fulfilling life. But at the same time, I also wanted to get her recognition for this. “Did she leave anything with your family in writing?”

“She kept journals.”

“I thought so!” I yelped, then managed to control myself. “I mean, since she kept early journals, at Vassar and Harvard, I thought she might continue writing. But I couldn’t find any more.”

Dr. Trowbridge nodded. “Ah, yes—after she got married, she kept all of them.”

“Who did she marry?” I asked.

“Another of the computers, actually.”

“Really?” I wondered who—if she’d written about him in passing, if she’d known him before Gibson or met him after. “Do the journals mention her discovery?”

“Not directly. She alludes to it, occasionally. But she didn’t like to dwell on it.”

“And what—what happened?” I asked. “Did she ever write why he stole it?”

She smiled, half amused, half sad. “That’s the oddest part. He didn’t think he did.”

According to Dr. Trowbridge, Andrea Darrel had been sweeping the sky from her childhood rooftop while visiting her parents. She caught sight of an out-of-place star blazing across the familiar map of the sky and realized immediately it was a comet. She noted the position, and a few minutes past midnight she had calculated the orbit.

Thrilled beyond belief, she told Frederick. Maybe he was also staying at her parents’ house. According to my scant knowledge from reading Edith Wharton in school, they probably hadn’t been staying in the same bed, but I certainly knew how easy it was to slip from room to room when staying at the same house.

Andrea went to bed and, despite her excitement, slept late. In the morning—perhaps at the breakfast table in her parents’ house, where they’d so recently celebrated their engagement, perhaps, even, at her bedside as she awoke, if he’d snuck in to see her—Frederick proudly told her he’d taken care of filing for the comet. Furious, she told him to take it back, but he refused. And when Andrea reached out to the observatory herself, they said—politely, but firmly—what was done was done.

“She stopped working for them for several years,” Dr. Trowbridge said. “But she went back to it eventually. She loved working there.”

“Are you two planning to do something?” her daughter asked. “We always thought about writing an article, but it never seemed particularly urgent. Or like we had enough proof.”

“I’m not sure what anyone else will think, but I think we have proof,” I said. “And if you’re interested in helping, I think we have a pretty good case.”