Servants of the Map (21 page)

“Oh, I do,” Rose said fervently. “I do.”

Two days later they returned to the site. The ground was blank beneath the red flag, but Peter brushed aside some litter to show Rose the bit of fishing line protruding from the ground. Carefully they scooped away the loose dirt to uncover the mouse, already hairless and mummified, and below it the gleaming pair of burying beetles who had so assiduously dug the grave.

“Fabre called the species of
Nicrophorus
native to France ‘transcendent alchemists,’” Peter said. “For the way they convert death into life.” He let Rose hold the beetles briefly before he placed them in his vial. “You always find them in couples—a male and a female, digging together to provide the family larder. They push away the dirt below their quarry until the corpse buries itself. And all the time they do that they secrete chemicals that preserve the body and keep other insects from eating it. Then they copulate—can I say that word in front of you?—and the female lays her eggs nearby. When the larvae hatch they have all the food they need. Aren’t they pretty?”

At the library, a few days after Peter departed and her heart broke for the first time, Rose looked up “transcendent” and “alchemy,” ransacked the card catalog for books on entomology, and stole outright the one volume of Fabre’s she could find. Against her stomach, held by the waistband of her shorts, the warm book pressed on her like a hand.

It was just as well she stole that book, because Peter never sent the books he’d promised. And why should he? Why should he remember her, small and slight and short-haired and breastless? She was almost nine, and then really nine—but Peter was nearly thirty, as old as her mother: a grown man with a complicated life. And girlfriends, as she was forced in the following years to understand.

When he left Hammondsport after that first visit in 1964, Rose pined for weeks: so obviously, so melodramatically, that her great-aunt Agnes shook her head at the sight of Rose pushing peas around her plate. “Puppy love,” Agnes said, which caused Bianca to snort into her milk and Rose to resent both of them. That night Suky sat on the edge of Rose’s bed and said, “You’re very fond of our friend Peter, aren’t you?”

Rose writhed and buried her head in her pillow.

“I’m fond of Peter too,” Suky said. “He’s an old friend; he was at our wedding. When I first started seeing your father, we did things with
Peter all the time; and he was part of how your father and I fell in love with each other. He has this way of making everything and everyone around him seem more interesting.”

She stroked what she could reach of Rose’s hair.

“It’s the
beetles
I’m interested in,” Rose snapped. “The
beetles.”

Suky bought her some Schmitt boxes and a lovely hand lens, and said nothing more about Peter. Rose pored over her stolen book and made her own first collection of beetles, a clumsy imitation of her mother’s neat array of dried mosses. Suky’s praise she found condescending; she couldn’t identify most of her specimens beyond the family level, and she waited impatiently all through the fall and winter for Peter to reappear. He’d taken a teaching job in North Carolina, she learned from her parents. And would visit again when the school year was done. She was crushed when Peter arrived that May with a young woman, and disgusted by the sleeping arrangements.

“I could stay in the living room,” Rose offered. “She could have my room.”

Suky said, “That’s sweet of you, but it isn’t necessary,” and put the couple together in the guest room. Two rooms down the hall from them, Rose lay rigid and sleepless, too young to know what she was listening for but sure that she must listen.

Rose forgot that young woman’s name, as she did the name of the one who showed up with Peter the following summer. During both visits she alternated between sulking alone in the vineyard and making furious efforts to pry Peter away from these usurpers. She spread her beetles out alluringly, piled heaps of books next to her forceps and vials, and bent to her work in a way that could not, she thought, fail to bring Peter to her side. When she succeeded and he drew a chair next to her, casually naming the beetles she had tried and failed to classify, her heart beat so violently that she plucked her shirt away from her chest lest the pounding show. But when he turned from her, when those women, identical in
their despicable ripeness, walked by so casually and drew Peter away by raising their arms in their sleeveless shirts, revealing bristly shadows beneath their armpits, and bra straps, and the curves of their breasts: then Rose flew into furies that puzzled everyone except, perhaps, her mother.

Suky found her one afternoon, after Peter’s third visit, pulling beetles from her boxes and savagely stripping them and their labels from the pins. Rose was almost eleven then, and almost had breasts of her own. On the floor near her feet was a disheartening cone of dried bodies and small paper points. She had jabbed herself several times and her fingers were bleeding.

“Oh,
Rose,”
Suky said. She tried to pull Rose’s head to her shoulder but Rose would not be comforted. And by the following summer, there was no comfort anywhere.

A hundred times, a thousand times, Rose would try in the following years to reconstruct her mother’s life and mind, her mother’s death. What was science for, if not for this? In her mother’s closet she turned the same things over and over again. An old brown book, falling apart, filled with interesting drawings of fossils but stubbornly silent regarding the nature of its path to Suky. A slightly less decrepit green book,
Mosses with a Hand-Lens,
which Suky had consulted almost daily. The letters, those crumbling letters, among which a few leaves and lichens had been pressed. And, incongruous among all that paper, one ancient, tiny lady’s boot, black and moldy, balanced on a ledge as if the woman whose foot it had once sheltered had scaled the side of the closet, passed through the ceiling, and simply disappeared.

There was no understanding, Rose thought, why her mother had saved the odd things she’d saved. No knowing what had really happened on Suky’s last day.

On that day, Rose would think, her mother had been walking along the lakeshore road near Hammondsport. Happy, or not; thinking of her
daughters, or not. Cars were speeding along the road, tourists, some of them driving too fast; Suky, wearing a red shirt, held something green in her hand. On the lake the sailboats sailed. On the hill a dog with a brindle coat was barking at Rose and Bianca, who were holding their arms above their heads, lengths of thread stretching tautly from their hands and sweeping out the shapes of invisible cones. The threads were tied to Japanese beetles, who in straining to escape only orbited the pair of girls; who were shrieking with happiness. Could Suky hear them?

She could, Rose would decide each time. She could hear her daughters and, listening to them, hardly noticed the cars moving too fast along the road. She was watching the starlings swoop over the telephone lines, the swallows flicking over the lake, the light on the trees, the light on her shoes, the light.

On the lake the sailboats were heading for shore; the wind had picked up and the sky had darkened; a few drops of rain were falling. In the vineyard gleaming above her the tractor was running again and the brindled dog still barked. Near him Theo worked happily, holding Suky in his mind; he was thinking they ought to buy shoes for the girls, he was thinking about the rain. As he turned he saw the dust spout up, greeting the drops splashing down. On the lake Suky saw a shining patch, the shape of a door, smooth on the rippling surface.

It was as if a door were floating there, opening into the depths below. The door between this world and the next, the door to the rest of her life. Years later, as Rose looks up from her microscope, she’ll see something like that door and will hear the sentence, always the same, which confines her mother’s death:
Walking along a lakeshore road, she was struck by a speeding tourist and killed instantly.

Those are the words, always those words. Behind them lie all she’s forgotten. A noise Rose didn’t hear and then a moment she couldn’t name: the moment when Suky disappeared. Theo, stuck in his well of grief, was no help afterward, and although Peter showed up briefly, and alone, for
Suky’s funeral, Rose was blind to him and clung to Bianca. Their differences mattered less then than their shared loss, and they drew together and closed out everyone else.

Into a trunk—a smaller version of Suky’s closet; even Rose could see that she closed the lid exactly as she’d sealed that door—went the hand lens, the stolen library book, and the mysterious stew of feelings she’d once had for her parents’ cherished friend.

When Rose and Peter met again, Rose was draped over a pair of chairs in the Detroit airport, looking over some notes for a talk and drinking coffee from a cardboard cup. She was waiting for her friend Signe to arrive from Oslo, so that they could share a rental car. This was a kindness on her part; they were both headed for the same enzymology meeting, and she knew Signe would be too exhausted to drive. Rose was in one of her airport trances. Her home near Boston left behind, the meeting and the prize she was to receive for her research still in the future; the air stale, the day still young, her thirty-first birthday a week away. Legs looped over the arms of one chair, feet braced against another, she was wondering if she’d reached the age when she could no longer sit like this, like a teenager, in public places. Then a hand touched her shoulder. She looked up and there was Peter Kotov.

“Rose?” he said. The tone in his voice was pure wonder; they hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years. He was much changed, and yet still himself: the mustache grizzled, the black hair half gray; thicker at the waist and shoulders yet still with the same eyes. She’d changed more, she knew; she’d been a weedy girl when they last met and was amazed that he recognized her.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked.

“Your mother used to sit just like that—remember? With her legs draped over the arm of the couch? And the way you push back your hair with your left hand is so like her …”

The oddest feeling passed over her, as if Suky had breathed in her ear.
When she gazed into a mirror she saw only broken shadows of her mother, and it hadn’t occurred to her before that habits of body and gesture might link them, visible only in motion, and only to others.

In the hour they had before Signe arrived and Peter had to catch his flight to Arizona, she was further amazed to learn that they’d been nearly neighbors for the last six years. All the time she’d been at the Institute, he’d been at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge; he lived in Watertown, not far from her apartment in Waltham.

He was on his way to a huge entomology meeting in Tempe, he said; and she, in turn, revealed that she was headed for a gathering so small and prestigious that he raised both eyebrows when she named it. Briefly, she told him about her research, which didn’t seem to surprise him. Although he hadn’t been in touch with Theo in years, he’d heard that she’d gone to graduate school in biochemistry, done a stunning thesis, and set off for a postdoctoral fellowship in Philadelphia when she was still very young.

“But I didn’t know where you went after that,” he said. “I had no idea you’d ended up around Boston.”

She didn’t tell him about the prize she was about to get, nor her grants and her embarrassingly large research budget, nor the fact that she was the youngest Senior Fellow at the Institute. “Is it still beetles with you?” she asked.

“Still. Unfashionable beetles.” They talked briefly about his trials; how the money for whole-animal biology had dried up, and how the molecular biologists who’d taken over at Harvard and elsewhere scorned his kind of science now.

“For a while I thought maybe I’d recruited you into the fold,” he said wryly. “Do you remember how much you liked my beetles?”

She stared, amazed at how little he’d understood of her violent feelings. “Somehow I drifted away from that.”

“It’s a shame,” he said. “You had a real flair for taxonomy. But it’s just as well, I guess—here you’ve ended up working in a hot field, and I’ve
been relegated to the sidelines. I didn’t even have enough money this year to fly a graduate student to the meeting with me.”

Rose changed the subject before the difference in their professional lives became more embarrassing. “Are you married?” she said. “Family?”

Peter looked down at his legs and plucked at invisible lint. “I
was
married,” he said. “You must have known—I got married the year your mother died.”

How could she have forgotten that? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t remember much from those years.”

“Lauren,” he said. “You met her, I brought her to the house. We split four years ago, in ’82. Lauren wanted children, but we were never able to have any.” He looked up here, he looked right into Rose’s eyes. “She lives in Missoula now.”

His hands were still plucking at the cloth on his legs, tenting then releasing the material, and Rose reached over and covered his fingers with hers.

“I am fifty-one years old,” Peter said flatly. “And all alone. How about you?”

“The same,” Rose said. Although this was something she never thought about, which she normally forbade herself to think about. Her life was interesting, and very busy.

“But,” Peter said. “You know …”

And then Signe appeared in the distance, bowed beneath her backpack and struggling with a suitcase; and it was time for Peter’s flight to Tempe. A flurry of introductions and almost simultaneous farewells, an awkward hug, everything left hanging and Peter suddenly distant, clearly embarrassed by what he’d revealed. He rushed away, his stride still that of a young man, bouncy in running shoes.

He called her, though. Two weeks later, after they’d both returned from their meetings, he called her at work and asked her to meet him for
dinner. She was on her way to Italy and had to put him off. When she returned he was in Costa Rica with a group of students, gone for the rest of the semester. But finally they were both in town at the same time, and they did get together. He visited the Institute and she toured the Museum; he cooked a mushroom risotto for her and she made a complicated dish with eggplants and pine nuts and goat cheese for him. The first time they went to bed together was in her cluttered apartment, and it was not a bed they shared but a futon. Peter knocked over the lamp. Later he showed her the oval, slanted holes in the slab of tree trunk she used as a coffee table. “Longhorn-beetle larvae,” he said. From the floor the underside of the table was easy to see.