I answered right away.This is perfect!
Curled up in bed, I went to work deciphering Andrea Darrel’s handwriting. Now I recognized the loops and dips of her words, the way hern’s bled into the letters around them. These journals covered the years when Andrea would have accompanied Annie Cannon to Nantucket to help on her astronomy course—the years when Andrea might have overlapped with Frederick Gibson.
June 3, 1906
I’m of two feelings, heading home. I’m thrilled to see my family, but I’m nervous about my professional and personal worlds mixing. Annie and I will be staying with my parents, whom I have given strict instructions to in regard to their behavior. Specifically,they are not to make rude comments about spinsters. At thirty-three, I am solidly in the spinster category (and yet they still have hope), but I know Annie, ten years my senior, will baffle them.
June 15, 1906
Home, and it is mostly fine. Annie charmed Papa. Mama is, for the first time, acting as though my career is worthy of interest. Hattie has made a few snide remarks about age and children, but she has sympathy for anyone who has lost their mother. She does often forget to face Annie so she can lip-read, and when I remind her acts as though it is a trial, but Hattie also acts as though feeding her own progeny is a trial.
We have started the summer class, and it is going quite well. The students are mostly locals (many I have known my whole life). Annie is an excellent teacher, and we have been asked by Mrs. Albertson, the curator of the Maria Mitchell Association, to give talks at the end of August open to the whole community. It is nice, the people I have known all my life finally seeing me shine.
August 27, 1906
The talks went well! Yesterday, Annie spoke about the constellations, and today about the 1900 eclipse we saw in Virginia. There was a lively atmosphere, especially as this served as the culmination of our summer classes, and I believe everyone enjoyed themselves. Afterward, my parents’ friends Mr. and Mrs. Thomas came to chat. They introduced me to a Mr. Gibson, who has beenvisiting the island for a few days. He is very tall and lanky, and he made me laugh, twice, which generally men do not.
In Cambridge, it’s easy to talk with the men I meet through work, but here I’m always on my guard, aware it is my parents’ greatest wish I acquire someone else’s surname through any means possible. I’m reluctant to give them any reason to think it a possibility, so I was more reserved with Mr. Gibson than I’d usually be with someone so handsome.
“I enjoyed your talk very much,” Mr. Gibson said.
“Thank you,” I said, and if Mr. and Mrs. Thomas hadn’t been there, I might have flirted, but instead I asked him about his own career. He was very charming as he told me and the Thomases about his work with the Coast Survey. We talked for almost an hour, and at the end everyone insisted they had had quite the best time. Mr. Gibson said, very sincerely, he hoped to see me again.
It’s been years since I was so taken with someone. I am happy with my independence and have no desire to relinquish it, but I must admit I might have a desire for something else. It is too bad I am leaving for Cambridge in a few days, and he lives in New York.
A delighted grin spread across my face. Iknewit! They’d met. They’d met, and shelikedhim. I wanted to tell Ethan, but it was near midnight, and knocking on his door at this hour wouldn’t lead to anything good. I went back to reading, skimming furiously for mentions of Gibson, but Andrea rarely mentioned him after returning to Cambridge. Instead, she talked about the endless search for variable stars, the publications of her colleagues,and the catalogue of stars she, herself, was working on.
Then, the next summer, Andrea and Annie Cannon returned to Nantucket.
July 3, 1907
Frederick Gibson is taking the astronomy course Annie and I are teaching.
I haven’t thought of him (very much) this year, but I occasionally daydreamed of running into him again. Now I will be teaching him for eight Wednesdays in a row.
He came up to me on the first night. “I’m sure you don’t remember me,” he said with a crooked smile, as though I make a point of forgetting attractive men who make me laugh. “We were introduced last summer by the Thomases.”
“Mr. Gibson, how do you do,” I said. “I remember you. We’re glad to have you here.”
I know he’s probably taking this course out of an interest in astronomy, but part of me hopes it’s also because of me. Or that it might become because of me.
July 10, 1907
After class today, Mr. Gibson lingered until everyone but Annie had left. Then Annie (with a bit of a smirk) said good night, leaving me and Mr. Gibson alone.
So much of my conversation with men happens at work or at dinner parties—rarely alone at night. I can’t remember the lasttime I was nervous to talk to anyone. To make up for it, I tried to be brisk and businesslike. But soon he had me laughing, telling me about a woman who is suing her hairdresser for burning her hair while trying to create a marcel wave. “They brought a hairdresser into court to show how it is properly done,” he quipped. “I don’t believe the judge was impressed.”
Frederick Gibson often lingered after class, under the stars onlate summer evenings,but nothing further ever happened. Andrea clearly developed a massive crush, but by the end of the summer she had no idea where he stood, and she resolved to put thoughts of him out of her head during the rest of the year.
But the next summer, and the summer after, Frederick Gibson reappeared on Nantucket. Like the first summer, Andrea and Frederick had plenty of flirtation and little follow-through. It was frustrating for Andrea—and for me as a reader, honestly. By the time she returned to Cambridge at the end of the summer of 1909, Andrea seemed done.It is irritating how much I think about Mr. Gibson,she wrote.I am starting to want this to be more than it is, and I don’t have the time or energy to waste if it won’t be. He has made no move to visit or write to me in Cambridge outside the summers. I need to stop spending so much time thinking about him, and spend it instead on my work.
Fair enough, Andrea.
She returned to Cambridge, refocused, and filled her journals with scribbled equations and verbal sketches of daily life. And for the first time, in 1910, Andrea didn’t go home to Nantucket—instead, her family came to visit her in Cambridge for a few weeks in May. And in August, the local astronomy scene ramped up for a gathering of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America.
August 1, 1910
One cannot turn a corner in Cambridge these days without bumping into a famed astronomer. It seems everyone in the world is here for Dr. Pickering’s meeting. Hale is determined to convince Dr. P to join his Solar Union, which I think would be a good thing, and so a whole collection of astronomers will be taking the train out to Hale’s Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles so he can properly entice him. Until then we are overrun with royal astronomers and the like. We’re whisking them all about the city, showing them telescopes and plates and the observatory, and I haven’t had so much fun in a long time.
