Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

then sits up, abruptly awake, and starts to stand.

      “Not yet, beta,” she calms him. “Let’s find the pictures in the tree.”

      Obedient whenever he likes the game, Ty drops back onto their blanket. She points to the cutwork of branches and leaves high above the mosquito net, and together they trace the dark shapes of two children holding hands, a pair of butterflies. When they narrow their eyes, the shapes change places, and suddenly patches of sky press blue elephants and lizards through the banyan’s fretwork. Ty loves the way he can make the outlines blur and light explode, the pictures jiggle and change, just by squeezing his eyes. Once his mind ignites, he is like a motor that will run forever.

      Naila makes sure he has reached this zone, then summons her parents again. They lean into her memory through the blue gateway of their quarters before the days of Mem and Doctor Shep. Her father’s face is broad and square with a fine chin dusted with whiskers beneath his scruffy mustache. His smile seems never to leave his face, no matter how heavy his cares, and in the thickness of his black hair a crescent of white sweeps above his left eye.

      Her ma liked to say pa wore the moon on his temple. She would take his face between her hands and hold him in her gaze.

      Naila feels their lips against her forehead as a hot breeze stirs the leaves. Go with love, Daughter.

      “But go where?” she begs out loud.

      Ty begins to hum, so softly that she can barely hear him beneath the cicadas. After a few seconds she recognizes the same Bengali lullaby that her mother used to sing, that she herself often hummed to Ty when he was a baby.

      So dear you are to me,

       How could I ever let you go?

      So dear you are to me,

      No one else must ever know . . .

       II

      1936

      “If you want to be the next Margaret Mead,” Shep had agreed, “the Andamans do seem ready-made.”

      They were sitting on the grass in New York’s Central Park in the summer of ’36, having known each other less than a week. Her hair cropped short, her limbs still coltish, Claire looked, Shep would later tell her, like Louise Brooks without the eye makeup. He, on the other hand, was twenty-eight, more Ronald Colman than Gary Cooper, but Shanghai-born and trained in London, now headed for his first posting as Civil Surgeon in the most tantalizing place Claire had ever heard of: a barely civilized archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

      “I could skip all the hoops,” she plotted, hardly believing her own moxie. “No research grants, no department approval.”

      Shep whistled. “Can you imagine the reception you’d get from Columbia? Or Oxford, for that matter—if you walked in the door having already conducted your own original field study!”

      Could she imagine. She reached across the picnic basket and gripped his hand. This ruddy, disarming Brit had kissed her for the first time just four nights earlier, and in her mind, she was already halfway around the world with him, plunging into uncharted territory. It was madness. But he was nothing if not a willing co-conspirator. They’d spent every available hour since that kiss laying the groundwork for this scheme.

      He leaned over and kissed her again, then threw off his seersucker jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The way he watched her, his sea-glass green eyes were slightly out of sync with his mouth, and this flicker of anxiety warned Claire that Shep wasn’t just besotted. He was serious—unlike her previous college-boy suitors. Also, trusting and protective. And vulnerable. She’d need to be careful not to take undue advantage, but what was he offering if not the invitation to take full advantage?

      Truth be told, she was out of her depth. When they’d met at the 21 Club last week, she’d initially mistaken this raw-boned stranger for a world beater. Asia, England, now America for a just-finished fellowship at Johns Hopkins. His doctor colleagues had brought him up to Manhattan to celebrate his appointment; it was that new. “A colonial port on a tropical island,” was how Shep first described his destination. Bully for you, Claire had thought, and was turning away when one of her meddlesome roommates piped up, “Claire here fancies herself the next Margaret Mead. Before you know it, she’ll be hunting heads in Borneo.”

      The gin-soaked glitter of their surroundings had flared, and Claire deflected. Her friends loved to tease her, she told Shep. She’d been drawn to ethnography ever since reading Coming of Age in Samoa when she was thirteen, and she applied to Barnard just so she could study with Dr. Mead’s own teachers, but she’d never been west of Chicago—or east of Long Island. All painfully true. Claire had graduated less than a month earlier, was only twenty-one and barely qualified for the steno pool, let alone Borneo. The only way she could live in New York was to share a room at the Barbizon with three other girls, and the only reason she stayed in New York was because the alternative was to move back home to Connecticut. With the economy still in tatters, her parents couldn’t afford to send her to graduate school, and not even Dr. Benedict’s recommendation had been enough to land her a scholarship.

      Shep said, “I’m told where I’m headed the tribes date back to the Stone Age.” He smiled. “I can’t promise that they hunt heads, though.”

      He was flirting. Nothing more. But he’d gotten her attention. She asked, “What do they hunt?”

      That seemed to catch him off guard. “To be honest, I’ve no idea.” He looked down at his martini as if he wasn’t sure how it had wangled its way into his hand. “I’d never heard of this place until I received my marching orders this morning.”

      She felt herself redden. “So you made all that up.” Again, she prepared for flight.

      “No!” His drink splashed across her forearm, and he gasped. “Oh. Sorry!”

      Claire watched a kaleidescope of emotions flash across this stranger’s face. Despite his nervous British manners, he seemed to radiate candor.

      “It’s nothing.” She licked off the damage and grinned, but Shep remained as flustered as a nabbed truant. It was his turn to blush—or, more accurately, for the tips of his ears to turn bright pink. “Seriously,” she said. “I know times are tough, but sloshing a few drops of gin is hardly a federal offense.”

      He took a half-step away from her, the packed room offering little leeway. Their friends had vanished. “I didn’t make it up,” he said. “I just don’t know much more than I’ve told you.”

      They both were novices, then. She studied his eyes, their clear, open color. By contrast, her own dark gaze must seem furtive, but that didn’t appear to bother him. “What do you want?” she asked softly.

      A new ripple restored Shep’s smile, simultaneously daring and winning. “Everything,” he answered. “Don’t you?”

      Instead of returning to Baltimore with his “mates,” Shep had stayed in New York, and they’d seen each other every day since. Getting down to business now in Central Park, he unfurled their blanket under a sheltering maple, unpacked their picnic—two wrapped sandwiches, two cups and one bottle of cola—then handed her the leather-bound volume they’d found in the library that morning: The Andaman Islanders by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.

      He was calling this their “research phase.” Since he knew almost as little about his destination as she did, he’d suggested they find out what they could together before taking “any next steps.” In the process, he didn’t need to say, they’d also research each other. Exposed already: this gangly redhead was as methodical as Claire was impatient. Doubtless a good thing, under the circumstances.

      “I remember Professor Benedict talking about Radcliffe-Brown,” she said, scanning the book jacket. “She called him one of ethnography’s big-picture men, but she never described his fieldwork.” Claire wished Dr. Benedict hadn’t left already for her own summer fieldwork.