Unsheltered Read online

  “I can’t say how it began, exactly. All plants interest me, but the carnivorous ones have become one of my special projects with Mr. Darwin.”

  She was either the most interesting person Thatcher had ever met, or she was mad. He had spent the better part of an hour trying to decide. “So you mentioned. Would that be Mr. Charles Darwin, in England?”

  “At Down House in Kent, yes,” she said, her warmth suddenly retreating. “There must be other Mr. Darwins but only the one with whom I have a correspondence.”

  “You have a correspondence.”

  “That’s one of the latest I’ve had from him, just there on the top of that file. I can’t reach it but you’re welcome to look.”

  Thatcher felt reluctant but commanded. He reached for the letter and felt an instant jolt through his body. He had never seen Charles Darwin’s handwriting, of course, but somehow felt he recognized the angular pencil strokes. “My Dear Mrs. Treat,” it said below the Down House letterhead, Beckenham, Kent, and the date, June 1874. Thatcher’s eye scanned down the page past the sundry thanks and good wishes.

  My observations on cultivated plants of Dionaea muscipula are now complete, and I shall publish them in six or nine months, though they will be of little value compared with yours, made on the plant in its own country. I should very much like to hear about one point …

  Glancing up, Thatcher caught the dark gaze leveled at him, and he blushed. She could see his masculine presumptions. His shame amplified as he cataloged them: The scientist’s solitude he’d mistaken for an abandoned wife’s loneliness. The wall of books assigned without hesitation to Dr. Treat. Those were her books, and her Mr. Darwin was the one at Down House, Kent. Thatcher laid the letter down feeling chastened.

  “I envy you, Mrs. Treat. He must be the most interesting correspondent.”

  “I could discuss Dionaea muscipula all morning, and move on in the afternoon to Utricularia,” she said. “But I know from experience, some would find it tedious.”

  This mild scolding, if it was that, made him keen for her favor. “I hope you will come to consider me a colleague, but I won’t pretend I’m your peer. I have nothing to offer Mr. Darwin but my reverence. I stayed awake six nights running when I discovered On the Origin of Species, and I did the same last year when The Descent of Man came available in the Boston library. These books have turned the city on its head. The whole world, I suppose. But for me they bring a comfort I can hardly explain.”

  She seemed to relax a little. “How is that?”

  He considered the question. “It’s the solace of hearing a truth one has suspected a very long time. I’ve not had the luxury of buying many books, but those two volumes were my first purchases. This is what they have meant to me.”

  “Then you support his theory of descent through modification.”

  “It’s remarkable the subject would come up. I spent this morning in a difficult meeting with my employer. When he offered me a teaching position in Vineland, I believed I was coming to an oasis of enlightenment. Yet I find Mr. Cutler has not settled his mind about allowing me to discuss Mr. Darwin’s thinking with my pupils.”

  “Regardless of Mr. Cutler’s mind, I trust yours is settled.”

  Thatcher took in and released a long breath. “I wonder if settled is an attainable state, Mrs. Treat. I torture myself with doubts. Of course I’m completely convinced by Mr. Darwin. No man could have collected so much evidence or syllogized it more clearly. But I can also see the despair it portends.”

  Mrs. Treat’s brow furrowed. “Which sort of despair?” she asked quietly. She seemed to accept there were many.

  “Well. People believe,” he began, though he hardly knew how to state an animosity as widespread as the air they breathed. “Most people believe life can only be worth having if the deliberate business we call life belongs to us only. To mankind.”

  “Distinguished by God from the base existence of mosses and tadpoles. That sort of trouble,” she said, sounding spectacularly untroubled. Thatcher envied her confidence. He turned over his hat and studied the inside of its crown, fuzzed with years of wear. His wife’s strongest passion of the moment was that he abandon this hat and buy a new one.

  “Yes. For that sort of person,” he said finally. “Their distress is real. If my mother-in-law believed she shared any inheritance with the grand-daddy-long-legs, she would have to pluck off her limbs and tear out her own eyes. I don’t exaggerate.”

  “Mr. Greenwood, earlier when I told you how I’d become attached to my little plants, you said we all are of the same world. You said, ‘of course.’”

  “Because I believe that! Not only believe but feel it. I’ve felt it since I was a boy catching minnows in the streams of the Catskills. In truth I have a mortifying confession, Mrs. Treat. A little while ago I was admiring the competent construction of your spiders’ homes and lamenting my own, without any doubt of our kindred want for shelter.”

  “Where is the mortification in that? Our needs are every animal’s needs.”

  “Yes. And like every animal, our losses and gains have shaped our bodies and made us the creatures we are. I believe it completely.”

  She leaned toward him now with such animate energy, he worried she might forget about her hand and spoil her experiment. “To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?” Mrs. Treat’s fingertip remained in the jaws of the Venus.

  “Exactly. Mr. Darwin’s argument does not malign divinity. I never thought so.”

  “No. Nor does he. He only means to argue for the unity of Creation.” She glanced toward the photographs arranged on her mantelpiece. “I’ve exchanged these sentiments with Dr. Gray. He worries a good deal about God.”

  Did she mean Asa Gray? Thatcher would not be more astonished if the spiders in this parlor began to sing. “I have profound respect for Dr. Gray’s crusade,” he said.

  “Did you know him? In Boston?”

  “Only from afar.”

  “He is a brave soldier, determined to win our continent to Mr. Darwin’s side.”

  “Brave soldiers sometimes die in battle, Mrs. Treat. My disagreement with Cutler this morning was painful. In Mr. Darwin’s defense I might have planted the seeds of my demise.”

  She gave him a thoughtful look, but said nothing to this. No reassuring denial of his fears.

  “You and I are not like other people,” he ventured. “We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty. But if that sense of unity in all life is not already lodged in a person’s psyche, I’m not certain it can ever be taught.”

  “You are a teacher of natural sciences. Are you not?”

  “I am. Also an employee, and head of a family. As it happens, a family in dire need of costly home repair. I have inherited a flawed house and find myself pledged to uphold it. If I should lose my home and vocation …” He found it difficult to go on. Since that awful moment with Rose, the day he told her, he had resisted believing a truth he now saw plainly. Mrs. Treat waited for him to say it.

  “If I lose my position here, and fail to find means for preserving our home, I’m sorry to say my wife would probably follow. I would lose her also. I can see no happy end for myself in noble crusades.”

  Mrs. Treat looked him directly in the eye. “Mr. Greenwood, those are qualities personal to you. They have no bearing on truth.”

  Such words, and yet she’d spoken them without a hint of chastisement, only as one scientist to another. Whatever else he might be, she expected him to be rational. “Of course,” he said. “You observe the situation correctly.”

  Now she leaned toward him, guileless as a girl in her confidence. “We are given to live in a remarkable time. When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.”

  “Falls away, or is torn. The old mythologies are a comfort to many.”

  “But we are creatures like any other.
Mr. Darwin’s truth is inarguable.”

  “And because it is true, we will argue against it as creatures do. Our eyes are not new, nor are our teeth and claws. I’m afraid I foresee a great burrowing back toward our old supremacies, Mrs. Treat. No creature is easily coerced to live without its shelter.”

  “Without shelter, we stand in daylight.”

  “Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.”

  Again she answered his dread with a thoughtful gaze, and only that. No pabulum of reassurance. Here was the rare sort of woman who could recognize an occasion when further words are useless, and still say none. Not even to an uncomfortable companion. Thatcher had the feeling she could see into his soul.

  He stood and moved his chair back to its place near the étagère. “I have overstayed my welcome. Everything you say is right, of course. Now I should clear this tray and take my leave.”

  “No, leave the tray. The tea and nibbles will help me bear up. But I believe I am about to concede my little botanical campaign.”

  “I hope you can forgive my intrusion today, as much as I have profited from it.”

  She smiled. “Your call was heaven sent. Please intrude again soon.”

  “It isn’t out of the question, I’m afraid. But we will try to do a better job of keeping our own hounds, Mrs. Treat. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all. They are gentle company.”

  He thought to ask. “Do you happen to know which one is which?”

  “You’ll find Scylla on your left, outside the door. He likes the shade. He’s dug a little wallow there under the yew hedge. Charybdis prefers the sun.”

  When Thatcher stepped outside he was surprised to see the potbellied clouds of a gathering storm, and the two hounds still lying on either side of the steps, as she’d said they would be. Poor Polly would be in a lather after so much time. She would think all three of them had gotten tangled in Mrs. Treat’s web.

  Thatcher closed the door behind him and felt like Odysseus as he stepped between the two beasts, drawing up the mantle of his worries, turning homeward, striking out.

  5

  Striking Out

  Getting Nick ready to go for a drive set a new high-water mark for Willa’s patience, definitely harder than buckling two squirming toddlers into cereal-encrusted car seats. This morning she felt nostalgia for those days when her passengers might cry, vomit, kick off shoes, or whine for ice cream but never tell her to quit horse-dicking around and get the goddamn show on the road.

  Step one was to carry his suitcase-size portable oxygen compressor to the car, wedge it behind the driver’s seat, and plug it into the cigarette lighter. (No! The twelve-volt outlet, as Tig had lately corrected her, because seriously, Mom, you think Americans still light cigarettes inside cars?) Start the ignition, make sure the thing was hissing, and leave the car running.

  Next, back in the house, she had to detach Nick from the big compressor in his bedroom that served as his mother ship. Its powerful pump pulsed oxygen through a long, flexible tube that gave him free range of the first floor, though the line was always getting pinched under chair legs, tangling underfoot, and setting off poor Dixie’s inborn snake alarm. Willa tried not to wince as she removed the yellowed plastic cannula from Nick’s face. She found the thing repellent, especially the ends that tipped into his inflamed nostrils. She suspected a latex sensitivity but wasn’t going to bring that up. Nick classed allergies along with mental illness as symptoms of weak resolve.

  It felt treacherous to switch off the main compressor, the eternal backbeat of their household, and to hear its pulse go silent. For a couple of rattled seconds they stared at each other. Now he was free, or as close to that as Nick could get, briefly off the compressor and breathing bottled oxygen. With the metal bottle hooked to the back of his wheelchair he could be an overland scuba diver. Unfortunately this arrangement would get him only as far as the car, where she would hook him up to the car-charged compressor. He’d resist another changeover, but they’d been through all this. The bottled oxygen went too fast, he would breathe through most of a tank in the drive to Philadelphia. The cost of refilling it was more than a tank of gas.

  Ferrying Nick to the car in his wheelchair was nearly beyond her power. In the year he’d lived with them, Willa had somehow managed never to do this alone. But today she’d volunteered to drive him without thinking it through, and the family had all gone their various ways while the doctor’s appointment loomed. She tried to recall whether he’d been out even once, all summer, and thought not. Such a housebound soul might be expected to marvel at the sunlight and blue sky, rather than become a crybaby of the three hundred–pound class. He refused to help shift his weight as she nudged him over the doorsill onto the porch and down two disintegrating steps to the sidewalk.

  She felt a stab of lost homeowner innocence: on move-in day they’d discussed cosmetic repairs to this porch, naively planning a facelift when they were going to need something well beyond All the King’s Horses. Whenever the Petrofaccio team banged on the roof the whole structure shuddered, widening the fissures down the walls. Willa could see daylight through some of these cracks from her bed.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to fall forward,” she warned as she levered Nick over degenerate concrete. “I need you to put some of your weight on your feet.”

  He grunted a negative.

  “I’m serious, Nick. I’m not strong enough to do this without your help.”

  He waved a hand in the air. “Ston poutso mou louloudia kai giro giro melises.” Meaning, “My penis has flowers and bees buzzing around it.” The Greek tongue stopped at nothing to express the depth of a feeling: in this case, of not giving a damn.

  “Really. Not even a little?”

  “I’m a cripple. You think this chair is for giving my balls a joyride?”

  What Willa thought, as she muscled him toward the driveway, was that he still managed to get himself toileted and dressed without help, so this transfer could be easier. So much of life with infirmity came down to dignity and will. Nick wanted to go to the bathroom alone, but not to the doctor at all. Willa also thought, after she’d barreled him into the car, hooked him up to his automotive compressor, and headed down Landis Avenue, that they were probably not far from the day he would require help with his intimate daily tasks. She wouldn’t want Iano doing that for his father. But on their income, any request for live-in help might as well be sent to the tooth fairy.

  Since Iano’s mother died, Nick had made the rounds of the three older sisters who’d stayed close by in Arizona. Starting with Athena, the eldest, he’d lasted a year or so before getting passed on to Lita, then Irini. Their mother, it was now understood, had been a saint. Each sister thought she could take him, then watched Nick’s afflictions grow more ruthless along with his disposition, and finally declared: Now Pop is really losing it, suggesting no previous warden quite knew the trouble she’d seen. Still, each transfer was accepted as a filial failure. Iano, the only son, was the end of the line.

  From Landis Avenue Willa turned onto the four-lane that ran north from Vineland into flat, sparsely wooded country. Through the roadside trees she caught glimpses of one industrial park after another strung out between fallow fields and pine woods, with the odd deciduous tree laboring to turn itself red. Summer had surrendered to autumn in the last week, arriving around the same time as in Virginia but less gracefully, Willa thought. She was homesick for the blue mountains and veiled horizons of their lost college town, and with an older ache, for the steep hills of her childhood, even if they’d mostly been turned into coal-tipped wasteland now. South Jersey’s table-flat terrain and white sandy soil struck her as foreign, and so did the road signs: ENTERING TWP OF PITTSGROVE. What did that even mean? WAWA OPEN 24 HOURS.

  She shot cryptic glances at Nick, who was giving the scenery some attention. Surely he must feel a tiny bit happy to be catapulting through a totally new environment, secured to his aqualung. An intrepid whale striking out to con
quer New Jersey.

  The whale spoke up. “What did you do with my cigarettes?”

  Dying of COPD, drowning in his own wrecked, soupy lungs, Nick still smoked. She and Iano banned it from the rest of the house but Nick was allowed to roll himself out onto a little sun porch attached to his bedroom, open the windows, and puff away.

  “Sorry, you can’t,” she said.

  “What?”

  The engine noise must have drowned what little hearing he had left. This would be a journey of raised voices. “Can’t,” she said loudly. “Sorry. Not here in the car.”

  “Gamo tin panageia sou.” Meaning, “I fuck your Virgin Mary.”

  “Like she would let you,” Willa said. Iano’s family claimed Greek swearing wasn’t really what it sounded like to foreign ears, and that even this was a garden-variety curse used by decent people. Willa felt that sixty years in a new country might be long enough to reset the obscenity dial.

  “You can’t handle a little smoke?” he persisted. “Gotta be such a yuppie health freak you won’t let an old man have his pleasure?”

  Yuppies, Willa thought. What decade was that, in which millennium? She pulled into the right lane to let a tailgating pickup pass her. “You’re breathing one hundred percent oxygen. If you lit up in here we’d probably blow up like the Hindenburg.”

  “I smoke at the house.”

  “Yep. In a big, drafty house beside an open window.” She tried to enunciate without sounding bossy, which was pretty impossible to do. “In this car I’m pretty sure we’re an oxygen-enriched environment. It leaks out of your cannula.”

  He grunted.

  “Iano doesn’t let you smoke in the car. Your daughters never did. Am I right?”

  No response.

  “Why would it be different now, just because it’s me driving?”

  He blew through his lips a long, beleaguered expiration that let Willa know how he felt about rules like this. Ha! she thought, Tig was wrong. Nick was the American who would still light a cigarette inside a car. Risk of self-immolation notwithstanding.