He smiled wryly at the stars. “You should tell your dad you want to spend more time with him.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. We’ve reached a standstill. Neither of us will properly communicate with our parents.”
“Sounds good to me.” To my surprise, Ethan covered my hand with his own, giving it a small squeeze. I had no idea what he meant by it—a shared understanding, a flirtation, an accident—but it made my chest ache. Maybe neither of us was honest with our parents, but at least we’d been honest with each other. The wind and moonlight and sea had stripped us bare, and there were no more pretenses between me and Ethan Barbanel.
Nine
On Monday, Cora arrived at her office an hour after me, sweeping in in a whirl of raindrops and giant hair. Outside, a summer storm raged, hurling fat raindrops against the roof. I was glad it had held off through the weekend, which I’d spent lying on different beaches with the Barbanel cousins and their friends. Now a torrential downpour had decimated the sunshine, water flung about by howling wind. I liked it, the rage of the storm, especially from safe inside. I felt cozy and calm, with my browser full of tabs and my steaming mug of coffee.
I’d spent the morning working on a project Cora had sent me, though I’d also read the notes she’d made on a large whiteboard. Now I draped myself over the back of my chair in her direction. “Are you working on an article?”
She looked up. “Hm?”
I nodded at the whiteboard with its largeTO DOlist. The first item wasMAKE DECISION ON HC ARTICLE!!!Another readDECIDE ABOUT HC ARTICLE!!And a third,EMAIL DF ABOUT HC ARTICLE. A pro/con list was tacked to the adjacent bulletin board. The pros:1) Shiny article, 2) Will get DF off myback, 3) Might not have a choice.Cons:1) Ugh, 2) Tedious research, 3) No time, 4) Sentences are bad.“I’m decent at research and stuff, if you want me to do some. That’s, like, my dad’s whole world.”
She sipped her coffee. “That’s not…a horrible idea.”
I glowed.
“I’ve been asked to write a piece connecting my work to the legacy of female astronomers and their stellar classification systems. It’s not the worst article,” she said, damning with faint phrase, “but it’s human interest, not academic. I don’t love the idea of writing it, but it’s for a high-profile magazine and it’d be great exposure.”
“If I could help, I’d love to.”
“I’ll think about it.”
By lunch the rain had stopped, and I met up with two of the girls who I’d met at the beach party and then again over the weekend: Abby, who was dating Noah Barbanel, and her friend Stella. We picked up sandwiches downtown and ice cream after, sitting on park benches and devouring our cones as we watched bunnies dart across green lawns still glistening with raindrops.
When I got back to the office, Cora beckoned me over. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t moved from her spot, but her coffee cup was full once more.
“Your idea works,” she said. “I wrote up a project doc over lunch with a bunch of the info I need—names and dates and background. You good to go over it now?”
“Yeah,” I said eagerly. “Sounds great.”
“Cool.” She leaned forward in her chair, hands clasped. “Here’sthe deal. The article is about the Harvard Computers, a team of female astronomers in the late eighteen hundreds who invented ways to categorize all the stars in the sky. Hopefully, I’m also going to invent a radically helpful categorization system, so the article is about the lineage. I’m going to have you pull details about their backgrounds, accomplishments, and obstacles overcome. Sound good?”
I nodded. “I didn’t know there were so many early female astronomers. Like Maria Mitchell.”
“Yeah, in the eighteen hundreds lots of women studied astronomy—it was considered ladylike, done in private, in the home. After Mitchell discovered her comet, she became a massive celebrity and all these young girls got into it. She got an award from the King of Denmark, met with Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson. People were psyched about her.” Cora sipped her coffee. “But when astronomy became professionalized a few decades later, men swept in and women were shut out.”
“That seems…bad.”
“Yep. It’s rarely been easy, being a woman in STEM. Not to mention being a woman of color. Though we’ve always been here.” She rolled her eyes. “They used to call the Harvard Computers ‘Pickering’s Harem.’ He was the director of Harvard’s observatory and they worked for him.”
My mouth fell open. “What?”
“Men always think they’re cleverer than they are. Anyway, it’s these women you’ll be researching. There’re a few really famousones—Annie Cannon, who designed the basis of our current star-categorization system; Henrietta Leavitt, whose work helped Hubble determine the size of the universe. Cecilia Payne, she came later, in the 1920s—she discovered stars are made up of hydrogen and helium. I’ve noted the specifics I want, but add anything interesting you come across, too, especially anything related to Nantucket—I’ve also been asked to write an article on the island’s astronomical heritage, so we can use this research there, too.”
I dove in.
In the 1880s, an amateur astronomer named Henry Draper and his wife, Mary Anna, photographed the spectrum of stars. Their photographs, which were viewed on glass plates, translated stars into shaded bars with lines through them. On her husband’s death, Mary Anna donated the plates to Edward Pickering, the director of Harvard’s observatory.
Pickering realized the stunning amount of information in the photos and hired a team—half women—to photograph every star in the sky. It turned out the striations corresponded to everything from chemical blend to distance to brightness and temperature. The Harvard Computers set out to photograph the heavens and analyze and classify each star. To do so, they used two new telescopes, one donated by Mrs. Draper and one bought with money from the Bache Fund: a foundation, of course, named after Ben Franklin’s great-grandson.
One of the women, Annie Jump Cannon, stood out to me. Over the course of her career, she classified over three hundred and fifty thousand stars—more than anyone else. Her classification system was still in use by the International AstronomicalUnion. And best of all, she’d visited Nantucket.
When the Maria Mitchell Association was founded in 1902, they reached out to Pickering, who agreed to help launch the island’s nascent astronomy program. He asked Cannon to advise them, and she became a founding member of the Maria Mitchell Association. For several summers, she spent a few weeks on Nantucket teaching astronomy courses. This was exactly what I’d been looking for.
I wasn’t my father’s daughter for nothing; when Google turned up little on the astronomy classes, I turned to primary sources, thinking this would be a good way to beef up background for Cora’s Nantucket astronomy article. The archives on the Atheneum’s website included back issues ofThe Inquirer and Mirror, Nantucket’s long-running newspaper. Annie Cannon’s name pulled up a handful of results, and I clicked on the oldest, an issue from 1906. It opened a digitized scan. In tightly printed letters, sandwiched between an article on the cranberry bog yield and another about a dog running off with some luggage, I found a short note:
