Fen had indeed vanished. No one I know has heard from him in all these years. The only person ever to claim a sighting was Evans-Pritchard, who thought he saw him on the Omo River in Ethiopia in the late thirties, but when he called out Fen’s name, the man flinched and moved swiftly away.
Tears are not endless, I repeated to myself. That was how I made the long walk past these display cases, past an enormous blowup of the photograph Fen had taken of Nell and me with my big suitcase and his pipe and hat and sago fronds across our shoulders. I kept us moving swiftly. It was the only way to get through it. I paused, however, when I got to a Tam death mask. Mud had been smoothed on top of the bone to refashion the face, hair taken from a living head and glued on top. The mud had dried beige, and white warrior stripes were painted down the nose and across the cheeks and around the lips. In the socket of each eye was a small oval cowrie shell, underside up, the long slit with its toothed edges making an excellent likeness to a shut eye with lashes. Five more cowrie shells were placed across the forehead like a crown. It was this line of shells that caught my eye. Something irregular. The one in the middle was bigger, not a shell in fact but a button, a perfectly round ivory button embedded in this mud forehead. I reached for it. My hand slammed into the glass. It did not shatter, but it made a loud bang, which was followed by a sudden silence all around me.
‘See someone you know in there?’ one of the donors said, and the others laughed nervously.
Caught in the holes of the button were tufts of pale blue thread. I forced myself on to the next display. It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.
Acknowledgments
While this is a work of fiction, it was initially inspired by a moment described in Jane Howard’s 1984 biography Margaret Mead: A Life and my subsequent reading of anything I could locate about anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, and their few months together in 1933 on the Sepik River of what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. I have borrowed from the lives and experiences of these three people, but have told a different story.
Most of the tribes and villages here are fictional. You cannot find the Tam or the Kiona on a map, though I have used details from the real tribes Mead, Fortune, and Bateson were studying at the time: the Tchambuli (now called the Chambri), the Iatmul, the Mundugumor, and the Arapesh. The book I call Arc of Culture is modeled on Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture.
The following books helped me immeasurably in my research: Naven by Gregory Bateson; With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson by Mary Catherine Bateson; Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict; The Last Cannibals by Jens Bjerre; Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen; One Hundred Years of Anthropology edited by J. O. Brew; The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler; To Cherish the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead edited by Margaret M. Caffrey and Patricia A. Francis; Sepik River Societies: A Historical Ethnography of the Chambri and Their Neighbors by Deborah Gewertz; Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences edited by Peggy Golde; Margaret Mead: A Life by Jane Howard; Papua New Guinea Phrasebook by John Hunter; Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime; An Autobiography from New Guinea by Albert Maori Kiki; Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women by Hilary Lapsley; Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist by David Lipset; Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski; Rain and Other South Sea Stories by Somerset Maugham; The Mundugumor by Nancy McDowell; Blackberry Winter: My Early Years by Margaret Mead; Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead; Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples edited by Margaret Mead; Growing Up in New Guinea by Margaret Mead; Letters from the Field, 1925–1975 by Margaret Mead; Sex and Temperament: In Three Primitive Societies by Margaret Mead; Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea by Kira Salak; Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality edited by George W. Stocking Jr.; Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork edited by George W. Stocking Jr.; Village Medical Manual: A Layman’s Guide to Health Care in Developing Countries—Volume II: Diagnosis and Treatment by Mary Vanderkooi MD.
I am grateful to the following people for their careful and insightful reading of earlier drafts of this book: Tyler Clements, Susan Conley, Sara Corbett, Caitlin Gutheil, Anja Hanson, Debra Spark, my sister Lisa, my extraordinary agent Julie Barer, William Boggess, Gemma Purdy, and my beloved, brilliant, and wise editor Elisabeth Schmitz. I’m also grateful to Morgan Entrekin, Deb Seager, Charles Woods, Katie Raissian, Amy Hundley, Judy Hottensen, and everyone at Grove Atlantic. Liza Bakewell’s keen anthropological eye on a later draft was invaluable. A big thank-you to the Inn by the Sea, where I finished the final-final edits in cut-rate bliss. And another to Cornelia Walworth, who brought me to the bookstore that day.
A special, perpetual thanks to my husband, Tyler, and our daughters, Calla and Eloise. All my love to you.