“Kind of like the way the U.S. is treating the atomic race today,” Gwinnett said.
Margaret stirred the instant coffee in her cup. Annabelle and Gwinnett were silent; the only sound came from a distant chorus of gulls, egrets, and red-winged blackbirds.
“There were forty-three men in the crew,” Margaret said. “Twenty-nine survived. My father was not among them.” She lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the ground.
“There were four zeppelins in the U.S. around that time,” Gwinnett recalled. “Three were made by the Americans. They all crashed. One was made by the Germans. It didn’t.” He took a swig from his flask. “Our great infallible capitalist system at work.”
Margaret didn’t know how to take his remarks. She looked at Annabelle, who was nodding in agreement.
“I’ll be right back,” Annabelle said, suddenly standing. She went to her tent, reached in, grabbed a roll of toilet paper, and headed to a nearby grove.
“So, Margaret,” Gwinnett said, moving so close to her that their knees were nearly touching. She looked at him expectantly. “I noticed you threw up this morning. Twice.”
Margaret grimaced. She knew what was coming.
“When were you going to tell me you’re pregnant?” he asked.
Damn it, Margaret thought. She’d really counted on more time to keep the news to herself. “Well, I figured I could keep participating in the fieldwork until I had to stop,” she said. “I was going to tell you, I just didn’t know exactly how. And—honestly? I was hoping to get away with not being treated differently for as long as I could.”
“It’s fine,” Gwinnett said. “I’m sure neither Annabelle nor any of the others picked up on it. I would have noticed sooner or later—I’m a connoisseur of the female form. Especially yours.” He held up the flask as a toast and took another swig.
She had been ignoring men’s inappropriate comments since she was twelve, but Margaret felt differently about Gwinnett’s come-on. In some small corner of her mind, she wanted him to find her appealing. Her heart began beating more quickly; she thought of a hummingbird.
“Well, to be perfectly candid, Charlie and I didn’t plan this,” she said, motioning vaguely toward her womb.
Gwinnett smiled. “You know how it happens though, right?”
Margaret laughed. “Yes, I understand the basic cause and effect.”
He turned away and muttered something—the cadence made her think it was “I’ll bet you do”—but she tried to ignore it. She liked Gwinnett; they worked well together, and he was a respected figure in their field. She hoped this baby, and this conversation, wouldn’t change things between them.
They’d first met at the 1943 Zoological Association of America annual summer conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where Gwinnett, a renowned Equus expert, taught. Margaret, then about to begin her junior year at Barnard, ate lunch every day with the other women in attendance—there were six of them, at a conference with eighty-four participants. Most of the men ignored them, but Gwinnett pulled up a chair and talked to all of them about what areas of the field they were most interested in as well as his concerns about the difficulties the London Zoo was having during the war. Learning that she was hoping to write her senior thesis focused on the mysterious wild ponies of Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands, he invited her to keep in touch. Margaret suspected it was a casual remark but she was still thrilled to be noticed by a scholar she’d long admired. And, she had to admit, by someone so undeniably handsome.
She had missed the conference in 1945, when Charlie finally returned from war and he and Margaret were engaged and married in haste. At the 1946 conference Margaret attended at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Gwinnett shook her right hand hello and simultaneously grabbed her left hand, admiring the wedding band, and making a regretful tsk sound. Over the course of the weekend, they shared an obvious chemistry, as well as a few meals together, but Gwinnett was careful not to openly flirt, and Margaret, very much a blissful newlywed in all other respects, worked hard to tamp down the attraction she felt toward him, going so far as to look in the hotel mirror one morning and say sternly and dramatically to herself, as if she were in a Cary Grant screwball comedy, “You are a married woman, Mrs. Marder!” She and Gwinnett attended panels and lectures together, and she diligently kept every conversation completely appropriate, as if Charlie were there with them. Gwinnett followed her lead; to end one particularly loaded silence after her hand accidentally grazed his, he clumsily launched into the details of an article he’d read about the recent discovery of echolocation by bats. She was relieved when the conference was over and they shared a friendly, brief farewell with vague promises to keep in touch, just like every other casual academic acquaintance.
And then…that was it. Margaret had wondered if their friendship would blossom (carefully, chastely) with each successive encounter—twenty years her senior, he was full of experience and brilliance—but Gwinnett didn’t show up at the 1947 or 1948 conference. He was there in 1949 but he kept a respectful distance, and their relationship continued that way until just a few months ago, two days after Charlie had accepted Governor Dewey’s offer to serve out the remainder of Congressman Van Waganan’s term. Out of the blue on a December day, a letter had arrived special delivery from Gwinnett, informing Margaret that he had received a grant to study the ponies that had been their shared interest. He was putting together a small team to conduct field research throughout the year, starting in January, and there was a role and a tent for her if she so desired. Suddenly, moving to Washington, DC, a mere two or so hours away from the islands, offered her more than just the opportunity to be a congressional spouse.
And now, here they were.
“May I ask you a personal question, Mags?” he said. “And I’m sorry for flirting, I’ll calm it down. I’m just tired, and the whiskey isn’t helping.”
“Sure.”
“Have you been trying to have a baby all this time and it’s only now happening?”
“Because I’m a bit old, you mean?”
“You’re a perfectly healthy specimen, it’s just that I’m used to observing an earlier breeding process.” He smiled.
“Well, we just kept putting it off,” she confessed. “Charlie and I were working on his book, and—”
“You worked on Sons of Liberty?”
“Yes, as an editor. And I helped organize his research. And we both just got caught up in the world of academia and scholarship—for a time I was working with the City Parks Department to catalog every wild animal in Manhattan.”
“Including the alligators in the sewer?”
She grinned. “No alligators, sadly. I had to debunk that myth in the summer of 1950. No, no alligators, but quite a few sewer rats and even some sad colonies of people under there.”
“Well, I’m crushed,” Gwinnett said. “You’re very special. We’ll miss you when you have to leave.”
Margaret was irritated. She was having a baby, not retiring, and she was certainly not ready to mourn for her career. She started to assure him of this when something in the distance caught her eye.
“Look,” she said, pointing toward the western horizon. Gwinnett turned to see a pony. Margaret picked herself up off the ground and slowly, quietly, deliberately began heading toward the pony, slogging through the wet marsh, the weeds squishing beneath her feet. In her hurry she accidentally dropped her binoculars into the swamp, but she was too preoccupied to stop to retrieve them.
Gwinnett followed her. Margaret was twenty feet away when the pony turned and, it seemed to Margaret, looked directly into her eyes. It was Teardrop.