A Thin Bright Line Read online

  Also by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Fiction

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  Biting the Apple

  This Wild Silence

  Working Parts

  Sweat: Stories and a Novella

  Nonfiction

  The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic

  Childrens

  How to Survive in Antarctica

  The Antarctic Scoop

  Hoop Girlz

  Cougar Canyon

  Tracks in the Snow

  The Big Bike Race

  A Thin Bright Line

  Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

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  London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom

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  Copyright © 2016 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bledsoe, Lucy Jane, author.

  Title: A thin bright line / Lucy Jane Bledsoe.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016013572 | ISBN 9780299309305 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bledsoe, Lucybelle, 1923–1966—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.L418 T47 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013572

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience and research, names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For

  Lucybelle Bledsoe

  August 16, 1923–September 29, 1966

  Also for

  Rachel Carson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Willa Cather

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Snowflakes fall to earth and leave a message.

  Henri Bader

  Author’s Note

  I’m named for my father’s sister, Lucybelle Bledsoe. They grew up in Pocahontas, Arkansas, their mother a devout Christian homemaker and their father both a farmer and a county judge. Lucybelle died in a fire in 1966, when I was nine years old. Time and again I’ve imagined the horror of that death.

  She lived in a one-room apartment atop a detached garage. She would have been asleep at the time of the fire, so she must have awakened coughing, her apartment filled with smoke, her brain already sluggish from the carbon monoxide poisoning, her arms and legs aching. I imagine her untangling her limbs and setting her bare feet on the hot scorched rug. They say her bed was on fire. Perhaps, with the lethal thickening in her brain preventing her from thinking clearly, she tried to fight the fire with pans of water. A hot roar filled her ears as the flames leapt from the bed to the curtains on the window facing the street. She might have tried hoisting the sill of the other window—the one I now know looks out on an elm tree— but didn’t have the strength.

  And yet her will to survive, that animal imperative, drove her weighted legs. She shoved her way through the dense smoke, stepped through the flames, tripped on some burnt shoes, and made it to the door. Opening it, she entered what she thought was the stairwell. A flight of stairs and she’d be at the door to the outside.

  But she miscalculated the geography of her studio. She opened the closet door, rather than the entry door, and stepped inside that closed dark place. Her arms were empty. Her brain was saturated with carbon monoxide. She slumped to the floor of the closet and that’s where she died. She was forty-three years old.

  Over the years I asked my parents so many questions about my namesake, but I was never able to gather much information. My father told me that Lucybelle had wanted to be a lawyer, but that my grandfather told her it wasn’t a proper profession for women. Without going to law school, she studied for and passed the bar exam anyway. My father also told me that she could read twice as fast as he could, and that Lucybelle and Judge Bledsoe, as my grandfather was called even by my grandmother, were the only two people who checked out Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the Randolph County Library.

  My mother told me that Lucybelle was extremely independent, that even in the forties and fifties she wouldn’t let men hold doors open for her. She never married. My sister, who is six years older than me, remembers a companion named Vera. For years I wondered about Vera, who might have been still alive, who possibly had grieved my aunt. I couldn’t fathom any way of finding her.

  My own memories of Lucybelle are slim: a woman of extreme kindness and much humor, a giver of perfect presents. I have a photo of her, taken in the forties, wearing trousers, her knees apart, staring stormily into the camera. On the back of the photo she, or someone else, had written the word “Showdown.”

  The above bits were the sum total of what I knew about my aunt and namesake, until one day a few years ago a friend suggested I Google her. The idea, frankly, seemed ridiculous to me. She died in 1966, a time when for most people computers were the stuff of science fiction. And anyway, Lucybelle—just a farm girl from Arkansas—had died in a fire, leaving no traces of the life she had lived. Even so, I went home that night and did exactly what my friend suggested.

  What I discovered was astonishing. So began my journey through public records, historical documents, and interviews with her old friends and coworkers. Here is her story.

  A Thin Bright Line

  Part One

  New York City, 1956

  Thursday, May 3, 1956

  The grand steps leading down into Morningside Park were a one-block walk from Lucybelle’s office at the Geological Society of America, where she was an assistant editor. She took her bagged lunch into the park nearly every day, even during the snow weeks in the winter. She loved the winding promenade, the rugged schist walls, big rocky outcroppings right in New York City, and the way the park formed a boundary between Morningside Heights and Harlem, a geographic zone of transition. She enjoyed the rub, the thin region of mixing, as if the park itself resisted a defining identity.

  “That’s Harlem, you know,” the typist at the GSA told her at least weekly, as if they toiled on the border of a hostile foreign country.

  “Yes,” Lucybelle responded emphatically every time. They worked for geologists, for god’s sake; she knew the ground upon which she walked. She enjoyed pretending that she didn’t take the typist’s meaning and would add a comment on the park’s history, how it had been developed because city planners didn’t think they could build streets and housing on the steep cliffs, or on the characteristics of the rock itself, or how she enjoyed watching children play ball or young mothers push their babies in carriages as she ate her lunch.

  Finally, to shut the girl up, Lucybelle told her that her attorney brother, out in Oregon, had prepared that state’
s comparison of public school education for whites and Negroes, which fed into the national study resulting in Brown v. Board of Education. The look on the girl’s pale face was a mix of distaste and chastisement. She never mentioned Harlem again.

  On that warm spring day in early May, as Lucybelle reached the top of the steps, she paused to admire the clean rays of sunlight finding their ways through the iridescent green leaves of the trees. At home in Arkansas the light was warm and spongy, but here even sunlight took on a purposeful task, shooting down into the park where it lit a young woman’s fresh walk and warmed the wooden bench where Lucybelle would sit. She liked reading the New Yorker while she ate her sandwich. Sometimes during lunch she took notes for her novel.

  As she began her descent toward the inviting spot, a tall skinny man with thick, messy black hair and a matching goatee fell into step beside her. He said, “Washburn says you’re first rate. A real hotshot.”

  She picked up her pace, intending to lose the creep, and then registered the famous geologist’s name. She respected Link Washburn enormously. No one understood the Arctic better than he did. She stopped and looked up at the man who waited a few steps above her, grinning as if all of life were a joke. His eyes were a dark blue under striking black eyebrows, and his face bony, like Abraham Lincoln’s, only much more handsome. He wore too-short blue jeans and an unironed short-sleeved plaid shirt.

  “The very best, Washburn says.” The man spoke with a European accent. Maybe French. Had he followed her?

  “Who are you?”

  “Henri Bader.”

  She scanned her memory for the name. But no, they’d never published a paper by an Henri Bader.

  “I don’t know you.” He’d jogged down the stairs to stand next to her, but she still had to look up at least a foot to tell him that.

  “But you know Washburn,” he said.

  “Not personally.”

  “He knows your work.”

  Why was this man waylaying her? She wasn’t sure she liked the mocking look in his eyes. She would never turn away from Washburn himself, but this wasn’t Washburn himself. She looked over her shoulder, down into the sunlit park, and then without another word, headed for her bench.

  “Give me five minutes,” Henri Bader said to her back, following. “I have a proposal for you.”

  The word proposal hit home. The heft of it, the way it pointed into the future. She couldn’t resist the combination of his connection to the legendary geologist and a proposal. She sat on her bench and turned to him when he sat on the other end.

  “Assistant editor for the Geological Society of America. For ten years already. You read at about three times the pace most college-educated people read. You studied for the Arkansas bar and passed—without going to law school.”

  Astonished, she asked, “How do you know that?”

  He grinned, revealing crooked teeth and a dark-red tongue. “Graduated top in your high school class, valedictorian of Pocahontas High.” He paused and laughed at the dubiousness of that distinction. “University of Arkansas. Phi Beta Kappa. Smart girl! Masters degree in literature from Columbia, after which you mysteriously dropped your studies—you were a shoe-in for a PhD and university teaching job, what happened?—and went to work as an assistant for the GSA. It doesn’t add up.”

  A chill prickled her skin. She made herself look this Henri Bader in the eye. “You said you had a proposal.”

  Bader laughed. “I like that: a girl who gets right to the point.”

  She pulled her bologna sandwich out of her brown paper sack, peeled back the waxed paper, and took a bite.

  “It’s a job offer with the Army Corps of Engineers. Between you and me, I don’t give a rat’s ass for the military side of this thing. I’m in it for the research dollars, plain and simple. However, a little finesse in that regard will be required. Washburn says you do speak your mind, but that you can be discreet. That’s going to be necessary on several fronts.” Bader pointed at the other half of her sandwich. “May I?”

  Before she could say no, Bader picked up the remaining half of her bologna sandwich and devoured it in two bites.

  “You want half of this too?” She held up her apple and meant the question sarcastically.

  He grabbed the apple, took a big bite, and handed it back. With juice squirting out the sides of his mouth, he said, “Of course they care mostly about the military applications of the research. You know that boy scout who went to Antarctica with Byrd? He’s convinced everyone in Washington that the Russians are coming for us, as we speak. They’re on their way, crawling across Siberia and . . . who knows, are they coming via Greenland or Alaska? Either way, we’ve got to be ready. We’ve got to understand snow and ice.” Bader roared his big laugh. “I can work with that scenario. You’ve heard about the International Geophysical Year? That’s my baby. And it’s phenomenal what we’ve got funding to do.”

  Henri Bader paused. He lowered his chin and looked at her through those dark-blue eyes. They made her think of Washburn’s photographs of glaciers: translucent, cerulean, futuristic. She’d stared and stared at those photographs, aching to experience the intensity of the pure polar light shining through ice crystals.

  “The Russians are coming,” Bader said in a low quiet voice, and then he threw up his hands, wagged his fingers, and chortled a ghost laugh, ending with “Ha!”

  Lucybelle smiled.

  “Just as an aside, I’ve been to Russia. I speak Russian, along with five other languages, and sugar, those people are smart and they fund their scientists, but cold is cold and ice is ice. They’d be fools to come for us on sleds, but well, policy isn’t my job, and I’d shoot myself in the foot if I convinced anyone this research isn’t necessary for political purposes. So suffice it to say, the Russians are coming, and we need to stop them, and to do so, we need to understand everything there is to know about ice. This is where you and I come in. I have no time for niceties, for modesty, so I’m going to give you the facts. I’m Swiss, the preeminent ice scientist in Europe. America doesn’t have an ice scientist, so they’ve brought me over. Let me tell you what we have planned.” He paused again and looked out in the distance. “The most exotic project I can’t tell you about because it’s classified. Enticing, no? More on that later. For now: we’ll be building roads and run-ways that can stand up to permafrost. That’s the dull part. But listen here, the best of all: we’re going to find a way to pull ice cores. Think, Miss Lucybelle: the snow falls year after year, throughout the millennia, and in the far Arctic and Antarctic, none melts because it’s too cold. It just piles up. Each year’s new snowfall tells a story. A story of earth’s climate, for one. But other stories too, depending on what gets embedded in the layers of ice. Leaves, bones, shells, volcanic ash, meteorites, spores, bacteria. Treasure troves. Preserved, perfectly preserved, for thousands of years. We could look at that, if only we could pull up a core of ice without breaking or melting it.” He clapped his hands. “Got a cookie or something?”

  “No. The job. What is it?”

  “You’ll run the editorial department. You’ll have assistants working for you.”

  She concentrated on looking disinterested. She wadded her paper sack, shoved it in her purse, and pulled the New Yorker onto her lap, as if she were about to start reading.

  “You’re interested,” he said. “How could you not be? A promotion. More money. Much more exciting work.”

  For ten years she’d read the papers of world-renowned scientists who wrote about the making of mountains and the habits of prehistoric insects, who measured the depths of the seas and the travel patterns of sand dunes. She’d felt lucky to get so close to the frontiers of knowledge, but Bader’s offer projected her into an unknown beyond all that. The poles. The Arctic and the Antarctic. The lucidity of ice.

  For a moment, the possibilities transported her. But only for a moment. She knew what he was hinting at when he said it didn’t add up. You were a shoe-in for a PhD and university teaching job,
what happened? Her advisor, Joseph Wood Krutch, had been so angry when she quit the graduate program after getting her master’s degree. He was convinced she had a brilliant academic career awaiting her. But by then she’d moved into the apartment on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, discovered the attendant pleasures of that neighborhood, and wasn’t willing to give them up. If she were to teach at a college or university, she would have no privacy. She’d be expected to participate in the social life of the faculty, probably in some small town.

  The military would be ever so much worse than a college or university. She’d heard stories of exposure, of people’s families receiving unpleasant letters. The thought of such a letter in Daddy’s hands curdled any bit of enthusiasm she had for this offer.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not interested.”

  “We know, you know.”

  She didn’t lower her eyes.

  “This is a classified position,” he said. “Highest level, actually. We’ve already done a security check on you. We know everything.”

  “Meaning what?” She hated the way her voice broke, and she cleared her throat loudly to correct the appearance of uneasiness. She slid her hands under her thighs so he wouldn’t see the tremor.

  “Meaning McCarthy would not approve.” That roar of a laugh again and then the same abrupt halt to it.

  Had they actually followed her? Someone must have. How could they know that about her?

  “Yeah,” Bader grinned. “That.”

  He wasn’t laughing at her. He was laughing at the absurdity of them, whoever they were. She saw that. But she’d taken enough risks for a lifetime and she had everything she needed. She’d come so very far from there, the farm in Arkansas, to here, a job in New York, an apartment in the Village, filled with Phyllis’s theater friends. She had so much more than she ever thought she could have. Greenland and Antarctica? Not necessary.