Socorro

Socorro is the New Mexico setting where Augustine Lofthouse’s ambition to make a lasting scientific discovery became entangled with a relationship and a possible family he could not accept. His nearly four years there, unusually long for a man accustomed to moving between research posts, became one of the most vivid periods in his memory. Only much later, while living at the Barbeau Observatory and watching Iris by a lake, did he understand Socorro as the place where another kind of life had been within reach.

Scientific work and a rare stay

In his thirties, Augustine took a position at the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in Socorro, a center of exceptional opportunity for radio astronomy. The appointment marked a departure from his optical research, but the funding was readily available and required none of the tedious paperwork or bureaucratic maneuvering he disliked. He treated the change as a possible way to advance his research, packed the large, worn leather suitcase he had carried since his undergraduate years, and went to New Mexico.

Augustine was already a prominent scientist. Colleagues knew his meticulous, groundbreaking work, and his reputation extended beyond the research community. His youth and photogenic appearance brought media attention, while his scientific reputation gave him his choice of tenure-track positions. Yet professional recognition had not given him the discovery he believed would secure his place among the pioneers of science. He disliked teaching and felt compelled to discover rather than settle for a career built around it. Socorro offered a new field of work without diverting him from that ambition.

He settled in quickly and remained for almost four years, longer than he had expected and longer than he had stayed anywhere since college. That duration distinguishes Socorro from a brief stop in a career otherwise marked by movement. It gave him time not only to work at the array but also to meet Jean, whose presence would make the period matter in ways he did not then know how to acknowledge.

Jean and the possibility of a family

Jean and Augustine both worked at the facility, and their connection placed a personal decision directly inside his working life. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-seven when she told him she was pregnant. Augustine could not separate the news from his memories of his parents and his own unhappy childhood. He rejected the prospect of fatherhood and demanded that Jean end the pregnancy. She did not respond as he expected; her sadness, rather than an argument, became part of what he remembered about their separation.

The relationship unsettled the detachment Augustine had tried to cultivate. He had treated love as irrational and unpredictable, something to avoid, but later admitted to himself that he had loved Jean. In Socorro, however, he experienced her not as an abstract subject to observe but as someone whose regard mattered to him. That shift did not make him ready to build a life with her. Instead, faced with the pregnancy and the responsibilities it implied, he left New Mexico for a position in Chile, where he had lived before, and tried to put Jean behind him.

One later memory returns to a small adobe guesthouse Jean rented near the facility where they both worked. After he had demanded an abortion, Augustine came there late at night, uninvited but allowed inside. He was drunk and sat at the table where her dissertation pages and notes were spread out. Tea spilled onto the work; Jean covered the puddle with a dish towel as it spread toward the edge of the table. She was sad rather than angry, and asked what he was doing there. The scene preserves a contrast between his inability to explain his return and her practical attention to the immediate mess. Socorro holds both the rupture and this quieter, unresolved encounter.

Leaving and the traces that remained

Augustine tried to sever the connection by leaving quickly. Years later, however, he called Socorro and learned that Jean had left New Mexico not long after him. She had kept in touch with other research fellows, and through them he discovered that she had given birth to a girl in November, somewhere in the southern California desert. He tracked down a work address for Jean and kept it in his wallet for months. His knowledge of the child came indirectly, through the distance created by his departure and his limited inquiries.

He eventually sent an expensive amateur telescope for the girl’s birthday, without a note or return address. For a few years he continued to send occasional gifts and checks to Jean. These gestures did not amount to taking part in his daughter’s life, and Augustine knew he could not claim them as full or thoughtful care. Jean cashed the checks and once sent him a photograph, but the response went to an old address at an observatory in Puerto Rico after he had moved on. The chain of gifts, checks, and missed correspondence shows how Socorro remained a point of origin for a connection he attempted to maintain without confronting its absence directly.

Socorro in Augustine’s later memory

Decades after leaving, Augustine recalls Socorro while watching Iris skip stones along a lake shore. The moment brings together contentment and regret: he recognizes that the life he now finds meaningful resembles the one he might have had with Jean. His memory makes Socorro more than a former workplace. It becomes the setting of a chance he had not understood while it was still present, when his need for discovery and his fear of love seemed to leave no room for another kind of future.

The place also gives the novel’s account of Augustine’s past a deliberate distance. The years in Socorro are not narrated only as a sequence of career decisions and departures; they return through recollection at a later point in his life, when he can finally name what those decisions cost him. His eventual recognition does not undo his refusal or restore the family he left behind. Instead, Socorro marks the gap between the life Augustine pursued and the life he can, much later, imagine having lived. Its significance rests in that belated understanding: the period he once treated as a temporary scientific posting had contained both his professional hopes and an intimate possibility he could not accept.