crowded with books and papers, but the instruments he used to make his measurements (which he later explained to her, but not that night) were set out neatly. She didn’t touch them, though she looked through the telescope and saw a few things she had never seen before—Mars, the craters of the moon, the rings of Saturn (which, he said, had been at their optimum visibility in 1901, and would be again in 1927), and Neptune, which, Andrew pointed out, was blue. He said, “My view is that Le Verrier discovered it, but Adams gets joint credit.” He put his arm around her shoulders and spoke triumphantly: “They knew it was there! They expected to find it and they did! Bouvard and Adams did the calculations that showed it was there because it deformed the orbit of Uranus. That, to my mind, was the beginning of the modern world. Isn’t it amusing? Six years after the Battle of Waterloo, and already they had begun.” Then he kissed her on the cheek. Very late, they walked back to their house. Margaret was as impressed by the fragrance in the moist air—Andrew said it was from the alyssum—as she was by the solar system.
Since the only book she had read about California was Mr. Dana’s, she had imagined it as a forbidding place—hard to get to by land or sea, protected by mountains, deserts, offshore winds, and an impenetrable coastline, but this California, the California pierced and conquered by the Southern Pacific Railroad, seemed to embrace her. The grass around her little house was green, and there were roses on the bushes. The breeze off the bay was sometimes damp and foggy and sometimes warm, but it was always redolent of the sea grasses that grew on the western side of the island. The sun shone, and as a result of this sunshine, of the observatory, of the factories, of the flowers, of the unending activity of all kinds—as a result of the constant, pressing presence of Andrew in their small house—she did not feel herself to be the same person that she had always been.
One of the first things that happened after she arrived was that the back of the powder magazine blew out in an explosion. They heard it, and saw the fire. By the time she and Andrew got outside, the boys next door, the Lear boys, were already walking around on the roof of their house. “It isn’t like this all the time, by any manner of means,” called out Mrs. Lear with a smile. She let the four boys walk around on the roof of the house all that day and did not make them go to school. The boys’ names were Theodore, Martin, Hubert, and Dorsett. Mrs. Lear’s name was Winnifred. Captain Lear commanded the Leader and would be at sea until Christmas.
The bed was delivered, and she and Andrew explored the fringes of marital relations. According to Beatrice, a woman was lucky not to conceive a child on her wedding night; with Andrew, this good fortune was not a matter of luck. Even so, they proceeded in what Margaret thought was a stately and warmly clothed manner to full marital relations. Since neither of her sisters had described with any exactitude what marital relations were, she found them unexpected, rather like the blue color of Neptune. But for Andrew, the lure of the observatory was strong. Their walks about the island and her visits to the observatory were what seemed to make him happiest and most affectionate. Any new variety of bird or detected movement of a star caused him to squeeze her hand, or even kiss her on the top of the head and tell her about all the other birds and stars he had seen over the years and around the world.
Margaret had no idea who she was anymore, since she was no longer an old maid in a small Missouri town where bitter cold was succeeded by dogwood, then lilacs, then breathless heat, then the bronze trees and gray skies of autumn, and at last snow again, so she kept her eye on Mrs. Lear.
Mrs. Lear was naval to the core. Her father was a retired admiral living in New York, also on an island (Long Island). He had known Admiral Farragut himself (a very famous man whom Margaret had never heard of) and had been present when Farragut shouted to his crew, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” (“Or maybe Papa