Rear-View Mirrors (3 page)

I ride half a block to Danforth's Grocery, take a newspaper from the pile by the door, and leave a pair of dimes in payment. I open it up to the weather, find there's a chance of showers, then spot what I'm after: “Sunset: 8:30
P
.
M
.”

I stuff the newspaper into my basket and glance at my watch. It's 6:45. Which leaves me something more than thirteen hours. For the point of the ride, my father made clear, wasn't simply to view the scenery along Highways 30, 14, and 520—but to make it back home before the sun went down.
An
odd condition, like the wearing of gowns and mortarboards at graduation. But one I've sworn myself to meet.

I return to the crossroads, head north, and soon am informed that I'm leaving the village of North Hooton. After which I start up my first real hill, wondering—since I'm no marathon biker—why I didn't look at a map, see that the ride would be seventy miles long, and train for it back in California. Panting, I reply reasonably enough that I assumed I could easily pedal as far as a fifty-year-old with heart palpitations. And all of a sudden, as I crest the hill, my father's motive in taking this trip is revealed to me: it's no sightseeing tour, but a race, against the coming of night. A race he must have relished last summer, performed during one of those occasional spells when his surrender to hypochondria was replaced by a passion for besting Death. The same mood of defiance, no doubt, that led him up to his roof in a thunderstorm.

I shift gears, pass a cornfield on my left, and gradually regain my breath. Then I'm jolted by the thought that, just like my father, I'm using this trip to resist his mortality. Resurrecting him by reenacting his ride, taking his Raleigh over his old route as if to maintain the illusion of his living. The notion stuns me. I wonder if it's true. Then two butterflies flit in front of me, and as if I'm on Eastern Variable Time, my mind at once jumps back a year.

***

“Butterflies are lured to nectar, men to butterflies.”

I turned from the mounted pair I'd been eying and beheld my father coming downstairs. It was late in the morning, my first in North Hooton. Out of foolish politeness I'd held back from eating breakfast alone and was famished.

“I see that you too are a lover of the order Lepidoptera,” he proclaimed.

“Actually, what I'd love even more at the moment is some food.”

“And who could resist,” he continued, approaching the butterflies, “the alluring sight of one of nature's most flighty and ephemeral creatures preserved behind glass, fixed in space and immune to the passage of time.”

Was this, I asked myself, the explanation for his ardor for them: not as insects to be appreciated in the field, but as symbols of eternal life, poised permanently in midflight on his walls?

“Shall we grab a net and collecting jar and see what we can find fluttering about?”

I rolled my eyes at his wishful presumption that I shared his obsession. “Maybe later. I'm starved.”

“Starved! Is that all you can say this morning?”

He
stepped back and glared at me with contempt. “I perceive distinct signs of Dr. Spock's second edition in your upbringing. Feeding on demand!” He sneered at the notion and entered the kitchen. “Or did your mother prefer Machiavelli's
The Prince
for guidance in raising a grasping child?”

I charged after him. “And where were you with your expert advice on childrearing?”

He closed a cupboard and turned to face me. “You don't know how
lucky
you are I wasn't there. I wasn't meant for marriage, and certainly not for raising children. No more than were my parents.” He gestured toward a framed photograph on the wall. “As they demonstrated in the naming of their offspring.”

I glanced from their faces to his. “Why ‘Hannibal'?”

“They were both professors of history. Collaborating, at the time of my birth, on a book on the Roman Empire. A project they felt, no doubt rightly, that I threatened.”

I looked back at his parents, both smiling warmly, and wondered how they could have done such a thing.

“My brother Leo's full name is Napoleon. Born just as they were starting their study of Russia.” He took out a bag of bagels from the refrigerator, then gave me a basket. “Speaking of which, go out to the barn and see if socialism is still intact and each hen giving according to her ability.”

I walked outside and over to the barn, realizing I'd never been in one before. Cautiously, I opened the door and was greeted with soft, suspicious cackling. I stepped into the gloom. Suddenly I made out a goat to my left, instantly froze, then discovered with relief that it was penned. To my right was a waist-high row of nesting boxes. The half dozen hens occupying them muttered conspiratorially as I poked around in search of eggs. I didn't find any and was about to leave—then it dawned on me that they were under the hens. Not chancing to be dressed in armor, I ruled out reaching my bare hand underneath. Then I noticed a rake, picked it up, positioned myself at a respectful distance, and gently budged a hen off her nest. She burst into flight. I crept forward, brandishing the rake in defense, and found two brown eggs. Placing them proudly in my basket, I retreated, held out the rake, and proceeded to bulldoze the lot of them off their nests. With hens flying and squawking and scuttling, I hurried down the row, snatched up six more eggs, headed gratefully for the door—and slid three feet on a pile of droppings, launching my harvest into orbit before I fell.

Eggs splatted all over the floor of the barn. I slowly picked myself up from the straw and manure, feeling fouled for life, and looked in the basket. Two eggs remained. I cursed the chickens, all cackling merrily, cleaned myself off with a rag, then wondered if my father might be coming to investigate. Fearfully, I grabbed a shovel, scooped up the wreckage of shells and yolks, and dumped the
slimy
mess in the goat's pen, praying that goats ate eggs. This one did.

I picked up the basket and straightened my hair, tried to seem calm, strode out the barn door as if I'd just graduated from charm school—and nearly had a head-on with my father, who was carrying an old soup kettle.

“How many this morning?”

I showed him the basket.

“Two eggs?”

I nodded.

“I need
six
to make omelets. And as your mother and all good revolutionaries know, you can't make an omelet without cracking eggs.” He turned toward the hens. “Or without
laying
them.”

He entered the goat's pen, tied her neck to a post with a rope, and began milking her.

“Ever taste goat's milk?
”

“A few times,” I lied. I watched him shoot it into the kettle, studied the goat's strange coffee-colored eyes, then gaped at the sight of bits of shell on her chin.

“Is that all you've got?” my father asked her, peering into the kettle.

I considered brushing off her chin myself, but didn't feel like finding out firsthand whether or not goats bite.

“You can forget about that two-week vacation on the shores of the Black Sea,” he informed her. He gave a few final squeezes, untied the goat, and, to my relief, left the pen. “And Lenin aside,” he boomed to the barn at large, “there won't be any ‘withering away of the state' whatsoever around here. Not until milk and egg yields go up!” A comment, like so many others, mocking my mother—and indirectly me.

We returned to the house and finally had breakfast, during which I took my first sip of goat's milk. And last—I spit it all over my plate. It may have been country fresh, but it tasted to me like it had sat in the sun for three months.

“Now for our stroll through the field,” said my father.

I felt like I'd already had more than enough of Mother Nature that morning. But what else was there to do in this wasteland? He fetched a butterfly net, handed me a jar, and we set off out the back door.

“Those are red pines you see at the edge of the field,” he proudly declared. Not that I'd asked. “I tended that grove on weekends as a boy.”

I could think of better things to do with a weekend.

“That
tree you see over there is a beech.” He pointed as we wandered through the long grass. “Smooth gray bark. Leaves yellow in the fall. Muscular trunks—always make me think of the human limbs Michelangelo drew.”

He paused to admire the tree a moment and I suddenly saw what he wanted in an heir. Someone to whom he could leave not simply his house and land but, more important, his loves: for his pines, for beech trunks, for butterflies. A successor who, far in the future, would take his own grandchildren on this same walk, view the same tree, and speak of Michelangelo. Someone through whom his enthusiasms would survive.

“The white flower to your left is Queen Anne's lace.”

I glanced at it out of duty, then spied a shiny black stone and picked it up. I'd collected rocks ever since I could remember—they were the only part of nature that roused me—and I brushed this one off and tucked it in my pocket.

“Though in Berkeley's botanical gardens,” he went on, “where anti-royalist feeling runs high, you'd be prudent to use the plant's more humble alternate name—wild carrot.”

I raised my hand to fight off the sun. An action that, in that humid air, was enough to make my body burst into sweat.

“That's milkweed to the right. The monarch butterfly's favorite.”

I unstuck my hair from my sweat-slick neck, wondered if it might mildew on me, then felt a mosquito bite my thigh. “Is that all there is to do around here—memorize the names of flowers all day?”

My father resumed walking, unperturbed. “He who tires of North Hooton,” he bellowed theatrically, “tires of life.” He crouched and stared at a caterpillar. “Your mother never cared for the country either, despite females' famous kinship with the earth.” He straightened up with a sigh and moved on. “I believe her knowledge of nature has been gained entirely by the study of woodland scenes on maple syrup containers.”

“She knows whippoorwills,” I spoke up in her defense.

“God help her if she doesn't! That's one bird that
tells
you its name every time it calls.” He examined a beetle, then proceeded onward, his muslin net slung over his shoulder. “Her idea of a hike was a walk through the Bowery, where the wildlife was largely beggars and drunks. Though I suppose she may have produced, unknown to me, a learned tract or two on the life of that city-loving bird, the starling.” He halted. “‘The Avian Proletariat: Starling Population Growth, as Predicted in Marx's Ornithological Writings.'”

I was racking my brains for a retort when he peered at a flower, then swooped down upon
it
with his net.

“Banded hairstreak,” he announced with pleasure. He took the jar I'd been holding, transferred his catch to it, and held it up. “Now tell me that isn't a beautiful sight.”

“Right up there with the
Mona Lisa,”
I answered with a maximum of apathy. The butterfly was tiny and brown and wasn't fluttering about at all. “What's the white stuff in the bottom of the jar?”

“Plaster of paris, on top of potassium cyanide crystals. The fumes kill them quickly, with almost no damage to—”

“Yoo-hoo! Bull!”

We both spun around to find a gnomish figure topped with a bonnet bearing toward us. My father's face fell.

“Oh, Christ—not her.”

The woman was wearing boots and a long crimson skirt, which she lifted above the grass.

“Such a glorious day!” she erupted as she reached us. “Straight out of van Gogh, wouldn't you say, Bull?” She smiled up at him sweetly, then cast a worried glance at me. “Who's your friend?”

“That's my daughter Olivia. Here for a visit.”

The woman seemed greatly relieved by this answer. My father gestured toward her with his net. “Flora Gill. Famous painter and professor of art at Oakes College, up the road in Ashton.”

“‘Famous'—how could you!”

His duty disposed of, my father resumed stalking butterflies.

“I'm sure your daughter's never heard my name.”

Nor had I ever heard anyone call him “Bull” or imagine I'd ever be regarded as a rival for his affections.

“Of course,” she confided in me, “the name van Gogh was unknown when he died. Utterly!” She smiled with satisfaction at the thought, loosening the makeup over her wrinkles. “Emily Dickinson? The very same story. And Mozart—buried in an unmarked grave!”

My father brought down his net, then swore. All three of us watched his quarry flutter off.

“The freedom of flying things never ceases to move us, does it?” Flora put forward.

My father sneered at this proposition.

“A living metaphor for the soul, do you think?” she suggested as we strolled along.

My father's eyes rolled. Then he sighted something, stopped us, and crept on ahead alone.

“I certainly hope he's not after one of those giant, gaudy butterflies.” She untied the
yellow
ribbon holding down her bonnet, took it off, and fanned herself with it. “I can't look at that kind without thinking of Graham.”

I defended myself against a cloud of gnats and wondered when nature class would be over. “Who's that?”

“Graham Gill, my former husband. I'm sure you must have heard of
him.”
Her voice was sharp with resentment of this fact. “His paintings, geared to the popular taste, began to sell for five figures, then six. There were interviewers waiting at the door, retrospectives, fast cars, fancy clothes—while no one in New York would hang my work.”

Eying her lipstick, which looked as if it had been put on by Jackson Pollock, I had no trouble believing in her failure.