Honeydew: Stories (7 page)

The sister-in-law burst into tears.

Nineteen people, then.

“Jamie left New York after that,” Fern wound up. “She got a master of arts in education at a state university, and she married a good dull math teacher who gave her two good dull sons. She scraped her hair back, and renounced contact lenses, and bought a lifetime supply of white blouses.”

Silence for a while. Then Barbara said, “So she’s up in her room now, hair loose, glasses off, reliving it all, drenched in guilt.”

“Yes,” Fern said. She was staring at the olive in the bottom of her glass. “Some people have all the luck.”

O
n the first Monday in March Mr. Flaxbaum received the following e-mail:

Mr. Flaxbaum reread this epistle, removing his glasses for the second perusal. “I’m invited to give a lecture,” he mentioned to the three boys, who, though hurrying off to school, paused to look at the invitation. “Fab,” “Wicked,” “Steamy,” they agreed one after the other; and, one after the other, backpack following backpack, left the flat, their departure as usual causing a small conflagration in Flax’s heart. “Awesome,” added Felix over his shoulder, revealing for a moment the abbreviated nose and one of the blue eyes inherited from Bonnie. Bonnie had already been at work for several hours—she was a surgical nurse at a Boston hospital—but she would affirm late that afternoon that the Unanticipated Seminar would be elevated by the presence of her Myron. (No one except Bonnie called him by his first name; even his sister called him Flax.) Bonnie would bend her blond, large-chinned head toward the screen and review the topic—“The Mystery of Life and Death”—and then stand erect again, an oversize woman, authoritative as a Roman aedile though she wore pants and sweater and sturdy shoes rather than toga and sandals. “Darling, you could even do it in Latin.”

Now, in Bonnie’s absence, and after the noisy departure of the boys—in the presence only of the Flaxbaums’ peculiar houseplant—Flax indulged in an unusual activity: he googled himself.

His name came up just once, as he had known it would: on the website of Caldicott Academy, Godolphin, Mass., the private girls’ school where he worked. In a photograph, taken several years ago, Flax’s hair was retreating but not yet fleeing. His upper lip had not yet put forth its slim mustache. His plump cheeks did not show the two vertical creases that appeared whenever he produced a smile, and his glasses concealed the considerate gaze that had made many a slipshod student called in for a conference feel suddenly worthy, though worthy of what she could not have easily said. Maybe worthy of a conference with Flax; maybe that was enough. Most students responded to their conversations with Flax by paying more attention to their Latin grammars, by finding something intriguing in the ablative absolute, by renouncing their trots—one girl actually burned hers in a little ceremony behind the gym.

Under the picture the legend read
Myron Flaxbaum, BA Brooklyn College, MA Columbia, MAT Harvard. Teaches first-, second-, and third-year Latin. Coaches the chess team.
It was a tribute to the electronic world that this mild entry had brought him to the attention of the director of Unanticipated Seminars at King’s College on the Strand. What could he invent as a usual fee? More critically, what could he say in his lecture?
Let us think for a moment
(he thought).
Perhaps I can work up something about the history of life—the big bang, the primordial soup, the development of bacteria, the emergence of creatures with a sort of brain and a sort of eye and some locomotion. I will reread Darwin and Linnaeus and Mendel and Richard Dawkins; I will review the Bible. I might require an agent…

And then, shaking his head violently (for him), he stopped considering this daunting task. He googled King’s College on the Strand and discovered that it indeed existed but that no Harry Worrell was named on its faculty. Perhaps Harry was blessedly modest. Flax then shrugged himself into his worn overcoat and checked his shabby briefcase, making sure it carried the books and papers necessary for today’s lessons. He tested the loose button on his overcoat—yes, it would probably hang on another day. He lifted from its hook the beret his sons had given him for his recent birthday—an accessory they considered a sartorial improvement on his old tweed cap—and slipped it onto his semi-bald head. He picked up the half-full cup of coffee resting on the computer table and brought it to a familiar dark corner and dumped its contents into a pot of soil and mismatched pedicels, bracts, peduncles, and leaves. Then he abandoned the flat to this plant’s caffeinated care.

Nobody remembered where the plant had come from. It seemed to have been sitting forever in that ill-lit and (for a plant) unwholesome corner of the living room, on a little table whose provenance was also forgotten, protected by the scrolled arm of the brown plush sofa. The middle boy, Leo, suggested that the plant had been spawned by the sofa, which was called Jack, after Flax’s dear uncle who had lived with them for some years. Uncle Jack had shared a room with the youngest boy, Felix, and never got in anybody’s way, largely because he was usually occupying the sofa, sometimes flicking cigar ash in the direction of Plant. “A lovable schnorrer,” said Mr. Flaxbaum of Jack, though not as part of the formal eulogy.

Young Felix suspected that he himself had brought Plant home from the garden shop during an annual giveaway of moribund merchandise. Flax, devotee of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
entertained the fancy that Plant had once been a nymph changed like Daphne, although not into a laurel on a hill near Olympus but rather into an ill-favored thing rooted in a pot in their living room. Perhaps she had misbehaved when she still had legs and hips. Bonnie, who had received a classical education from the nuns, thought Plant was a household god responsible for luck, one of the Lares or one of the Penates. Why not? The family had been fortunate so far, unless you were silly enough to consider fat bank accounts and granite kitchen counters signs of luck. Even her Leo, who had a neurologic condition which might prove progressive but might not—even he was not unlucky, not yet, not yet, maybe not ever…Plant might be a succulent, Leo had speculated.

In a family discussion soon after Plant’s appearance, Bonnie remarked that it might have been a variety of primrose emigrated from the railroad tracks. Sean, the eldest, taking charge of a one-volume
Encyclopedia of Botany
no one had known they owned (“Sort of like the plant,” mentioned Uncle Jack), said that its pallor indicated that it might be mycotrophic, might “‘obtain nutrients from the soil by means of the fungi that inhabit its roots,’” Sean read aloud. Its rosettes made it a cousin to
Anacampseros telephiastrum variegata,
“‘also called Sunrise.’”

“Telephiastrum,”
Flax repeated. “Greek, not Latin. ‘Casting afar,’ maybe. Go on, Sean.”

“Like
Arsaenia,
the tip of its leaf is ‘elongated, upturned, and coiled.’”

“Only one of its leaves,” Leo said. “The striped one is flat.”

“There’s a hint of a caudex just above the soil,” Sean said, and closed the book.

“What’s a caudex?” Felix said.

“An early manuscript,” Jack said.

After a while: “Taproot,” said Sean.

“Our guest has lots of characteristics,” Felix said. “Some growing out of others.”

“Some mutually exclusive,” Leo said.

Plant’s supposed taproot had never been examined (they didn’t want to kill the thing). Sometimes it produced tiny flowers in hues of lingerie. Sometimes it put out scramblers which crept to the edge of the pot and then disintegrated. It was probably a hybrid. “Who isn’t?” Sean inquired (biology was one of his AP courses). It troubled no one, and it endeared itself to no one. In that way it was different from the little terrier the family had acquired from the pound some years ago. Buddy liked to chase cars. It was only a sometime habit; they hoped he’d outgrow it. Otherwise he was affectionate, recognized the boys by name and also Uncle Jack, who gave him candy in secret. He seemed numerate; Leo thought Buddy might learn to count, or at least to feign counting, like Clever Hans. But math lessons never got started, because one misty morning the fit was on him, and he came to grief with a Camry. Poor Buddy…Plant persisted, like the busy Flaxbaums themselves—like Flax, Bonnie, Sean, Leo, Felix, and the incarnation of Uncle Jack.

The next morning, Tuesday: “Do you want me to print out Professor Harry Worrell’s invitation?” Flax asked Felix.

“Thanks, no,” Felix said. “Have you answered it?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, maybe I’ll take the next communication if it comes by mail.”

Felix was a scrupulous collector, not a catch-as-catch-can hoarder. He didn’t care for documents, though he did admire stamps. But his taste was mainly for odd items like fancy buttons and bicycle bells and orphaned circuit boards that might come in handy sometime; and he also liked things with a peculiar beauty, like the last garnet inch in a flask of cough medicine, or his own vermiform appendix, deftly removed from his cecum and preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. He picked up crosses on chains in secondhand shops—they reminded him of his early childhood when he’d attended Masses with Grandma Reilly, his mama’s sweet mama. Felix might never have indulged his scavenging habits—or might have been reduced to collecting Pokémon cards—if Uncle Jack hadn’t died and abandoned his half of the shared bedroom. Over the next few years the boy built some shelves, bought a glass aquarium, discovered in a junkyard a small office safe and repaired its lock with Leo’s help. There Felix kept his crosses. The aquarium now housed some goldfish, two, three, four, or five of them, their number depending on their own luck and on a larger fate which Felix didn’t understand and which he guessed was a mystery also to his dependents. They conducted repetitive exercises under Felix’s benign attention. He fed them flakes that looked like dried cilantro. He gave them the names of Latin poets in honor of his father, but whenever one of them was found floating without purpose, he retired the fish while recycling the name. He had thus been guardian of numerous Virgils and Juvenals. Mr. Flaxbaum was comfortable with the monikers but he thought the group as a whole ought to be called by its appropriate Linnaean taxon. So Felix posted a little sign:
C. auratus auratus.

Felix played basketball and soccer, but his favorite sport was walking with his head down and stopping to look at a fallen leaf or worm cast that attracted him and sometimes picking it up, bringing it close to his frank Irish face—a physiognomy unusual in the Flaxbaum family but occurring often among the Reillys. He particularly admired a lifeless bug trapped between the two panes of stormproof glass in one of his parents’ bedroom windows. Their bedroom was just off the living room.

“Can’t we liberate him?” Felix had wondered. “How did he get there?”

“It’s an adult longhorn beetle,” said Flax after some research. “My guess is that its pupa was blown between two sheets of glass when the workmen in the yard of the glass factory were jamming them together. We have double panes on our windows to keep the cold out, Felix, and they can’t be separated—they’d have to be broken. And for what purpose?—to extract the cadaver of a common insect. I know you’d like to add him to your curiosities, so please consider our room your annex.”

“Thanks. What killed the dude?”

“Insufficient oxygen. In one way or another that’s what kills us all. Uncle Jack…”

“He had a blood disease.”

“Yes, in the end his blood couldn’t carry oxygen to his heart and he died.”

“Oh. The bug didn’t disintegrate,” said Felix. Flax guessed that the boy was thinking of Uncle decomposing in the earth. He treated himself to a measured look at his son’s eyes. If sincerity had a color…“Lack of oxygen again,” Flax explained. “He was preserved in an accidental vacuum.”

Every morning Felix opened his safe and took out one of the crosses. Then he stashed it again, gave Plant a fish-flakes treat, and took a quick look at the beetle to see if it had been resurrected yet.

On Wednesdays, Leo’s first class was at ten. Godolphin’s progressive high school mandated attendance at classes but allowed freedom at other times. On Wednesdays Flax didn’t teach at all. So at eight o’clock the two were home, alone with each other. And on this Wednesday, already afternoon in the UK, Professor Harry Worrell was probably alone in a pub booth, empty steins accumulating around his laptop, sending messages to distinguished Americans.

While thinking of the blessed professor, Flax was enjoying a lethal breakfast of pancakes and syrup and bacon, Leo a life-enhancing one of muesli and tea and several colorful capsules. There was a resemblance between these two—limp brown hair, abundant in the son and scanty in the father; gentle voice; slow smile; a talent and love for teaching. Leo at sixteen was already helping the ninth-grade teacher explain logarithms, in so modest a manner that his classmates were unoffended; and on late-afternoon visits to the local elementary school, he tutored some kids who were called intellectually challenged. He hated the term. It was mathematics itself that was challenged. There was something wrong with numbers, their incarnation on paper. They were flummoxing these dear children, preventing them from doing more than count. The children were good at counting when they used words,
one, two, three;
they also loved
gazillion.
But the shapes for numbers made their eyes fill. And the visual aids some sadistic pedagogue invented: handcuffs for 3, a hook for 5, an ax for 7; 4 was a cruel pitchfork… “I’ve come to hate number shapes,” Leo said.

They washed the dishes. Leo did not feed Plant but he did stand looking down at it. “I wonder if Buddy could really have learned to count,” he muttered. He was still thinking about numbers, Flax realized. Might Plant be numiverous? Leo slanted his head forward and Flax imagined ungainly symbols tumbling into the pot; good-bye, 2, 5, 17; good-bye, 9, you noose.

Then Leo picked up his backpack, father and son got their bikes out of the garage. Beneath the helmet Flax’s beret flapped onto his forehead. In overcoat and headgear he looked stately on wheels, Leo noticed, though a button appeared to be missing from the coat. Flax noticed the angularity of his son and experienced that cold dread that someday Leo’s dormant disease would dispatch tubers to his organs and turn him into wood. They rode, Flax first, into the empty street and bicycled side by side until at the second intersection Leo with a wave turned toward school and Flax with an arm raised in answer went straight ahead, toward today’s job, selling shoes at Dactyl.