by Junot Díaz
Her “work”—what did she mean by that, exactly? In the libraries of central New York, you can find files of the horticultural and agricultural society bulletins so popular toward the end of the nineteenth century. The New York Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin. The Rural New Yorker. The Buffalo Naturalists’ Field Club Bulletin. The Western New York Horticultural Society Bulletin. Transactions of the New-York State Agricultural Society. In them are accounts of meetings and county fairs; brief observations about local growing conditions, new seeds and breeds, keeping a clean dairy; longer articles too, weaving multiple sources and reports into an overview for the farmer. Daphne was writing pieces like that when she and Henrietta met; now Henrietta wrote them. “The White Grub of the May Beetle.” One or two a year, carefully observed, clearly written, thoughtfully and thoroughly referenced. Useful to students and farmers alike. Together they give a sense of her steady progress through the years, although they don’t suggest the work she did with and for Daphne. There’s a hint of that in a letter she wrote to Mason during the first week of her stay at Appledore Island:
Already we’ve settled into a pleasant routine. Our rooms are on the third floor, mine a few doors down from Daphne’s: hers larger than mine, of course, as she needs space for her specimens, but both very comfortable. In addition to my bed and dresser and wardrobe I have an armchair near a window that looks out over the tennis courts, and a sturdy desk. After breakfast in the dining hall downstairs (airy and well laid out, if a bit noisy; over two hundred people are staying here!) we take a walk along the shore and then return to our rooms to work. We meet again downstairs for lunch and then, depending on the tide and the weather, visit the tidal pools, or take out one of the hotel’s rowboats, or swim in the bathing area. The island is small (about half a mile wide, I think; and perhaps a bit longer) but so rugged and broken by the sea that we keep discovering new pools and crannies. After dinner we relax for a while on the huge porch, which stretches the length of the hotel and is lined with rocking chairs.
Daphne’s working furiously on a book about the plants and creatures of the shore, collecting samples (I help her with this) and comparing them with the photos and descriptions in other books, writing up her own descriptions. I read what she writes each day and offer suggestions, but am also working through Darwin’s book about insectivorous plants. Much of it is about the common sundew, which grows at home, so I can easily gather plants for my class.
Daphne knows the place already, from when she came here alone two years ago. She also met Mrs. Thaxter, who owns the big cottage near the hotel, then. But she hadn’t really gotten to know her, and last night she announced, with much excitement, that she’d managed to get us an invitation to the evening’s gathering at Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage. Apparently this is a great coup! Only the most select of the hotel’s guests are invited, writers and musicians and painters and so forth. Honestly I would rather have had a quiet night reading or watching the stars but Daphne was so pleased with herself (I think she tried and failed to get invited before) that I felt I had to go.
Some of this visit she describes in her next letter to Mason, noting especially the densely cluttered parlor. Chairs, tables, lamps, easels, every surface covered, and the walls obscured by paintings and sketches touching each other and rising from chair rail to ceiling. The mantels and windowsills packed with Mrs. Thaxter’s famous flowers: poppies arranged by color and tea roses in matching bowls; sweet peas, wild cucumber, hop and morning-glory vines spilling from suspended shells and baskets; larkspurs and lilies in tall vases and stalks of timothy and other grasses rising above a massive vessel with a few red poppies interspersed.
She describes the olive-green upholstery on the sofas and chairs, the polished floor designed to enhance the sound of the piano being played by a man in a linen jacket, the loosely draped shawls on the women. But not the feeling she had after Daphne was pulled away by their hostess and introduced to a circle of literary men, which closed and left her partnered with a bookshelf. The linen man played Chopin, stroked his thin brown beard and played Mozart; she studied white water lilies floating in white bowls. Daphne’s face pinked with pleasure as their hostess, who was very stout, said that her book on the insect pests had been of great use to her, really enormous use.
Then Mrs. Thaxter rested a plump hand on Daphne’s arm and ranted about the island’s dreadful slugs, her bolstered, comfortably bulging self making Daphne, short and even slimmer than she’d been a dozen years ago, look like a sea oat. Where Henrietta had softened and, she would have admitted, slowed, Daphne was still furiously energetic, her small hands scored by her determined work. She nodded vigorously as Mrs. Thaxter described waging war on the slugs each morning between four and five, when the dew still lay heavy in the garden. And the grubs, the vicious grubs destroying the carnations! Mrs. Thaxter stabbed with her free hand, emulating the long pin with which she dug the grubs from the stems. Daphne suggested importing toads to eat the slugs, answered questions about the grubs, acted the part of expert regarding all aspects of insect life, which in this context Henrietta supposed she was, and yet—
Yet still it was exasperating to be so thoroughly abandoned, to see her friend showing off so flamboyantly, and to know that Daphne would never admit to this artistic crowd that in fact she made much of her income writing cookery books under a different name. As Dorrie Bennett she had a separate and even more successful professional life, so absorbing that in the dining room she had to be careful not to draw her neighbors’ attention to her judicious comments about the lobster or the biscuits. Here in Mrs. Thaxter’s parlor, she might never have whipped egg whites and Cox’s gelatin for her famous snow pudding, noting the time it took to raise the frothy white mass. Might never have worried over a bill or stayed up all night to meet a deadline.
At home, Henrietta kept Daphne’s cookbooks shelved next to her more serious works, and when Mason asked about that juxtaposition, she had told him the truth; she’d wanted her two friends to understand each other. But their relationship was different now—and perhaps because of that, she hid from him her hurt feelings after that first visit, and also much about her second visit. She wrote:
A smaller crowd last evening, four painters and a singer and a pianist, two writers from Boston, a doctor from Springfield, one of Mrs. Thaxter’s brothers and one grown son (her husband passed away last year). Mrs. Thaxter sat in her gray dress next to a table covered with roses and directed the conversation and the entertainments, which included Daphne’s demonstration of mounting seaweed specimens. I brought over the metal trays, filled them with seawater, stood by with the sheets as Daphne floated the samples and teased apart the finest branches with a hatpin. A beautiful piece of Cystoclonium purpurascens mounted perfectly, after which all the gentlemen wanted to try their hands. Mrs. Thaxter, as one of the younger painters observed to me, likes being surrounded by men; women are sparser, which makes Daphne even more pleased about our invitations there.
What the younger painter, whose name was Sebby Quint, actually said was more cutting than that; and he said it to Henrietta not in the parlor but outside, on the cottage’s porch, beneath the shelter of the vines with their densely crowded leaves. None of this, nor what followed from it, reached Mason.
IV.
We have to do, however, in this volume, not with the history of the past, nor with the action of physical forces, but with the life of the present, and to find this, in its abundance, one must go down near the margin of the water, where the sands are wet. There is no solitude here; the place is teeming with living things.
Out on the porch, where the candles cast confusing shadows, a warm breeze pushed through the leaves encasing the columns, muting the words and music easing through the open parlor windows—a surprisingly pleasant sensation, interrupted by footsteps behind her and the scratch of a match being lit. The man she’d noticed while Daphne did her hatpin trick (he was bulky, but with soft, intelligent eyes and a way of seeming to pay real attention) l
it his pipe and said, “That dress suits you.”
“Thank you,” she said. She’d hoped, backing out of the room, that no one would see her. Twice she’d tried to insert herself into the conversation Mrs. Thaxter was orchestrating about the floating seaweeds; twice she’d been rebuffed. Bored and annoyed, she’d slipped off for a few minutes of quiet. She smoothed the tucks of her only good dress, glad now that Daphne had convinced her to bring it for evening events.
“The color,” he continued. “The line of the neck. You can tell it’s a success just by the way Mrs. Thaxter treats you. Your friend’s in no such danger.”
“What do you mean?”
He nodded at the circle, visible through the open windows. “Dear Mrs. Thaxter likes being the queen of the hive,” he said. “She doesn’t always welcome attractive women.”
“Me?” Henrietta laughed. For years Daphne had been chasing suitors away, while she’d only had to deal with Mason. “She must like you, if you flatter her like that.”
“She does like me,” he said quietly. “And we all like her. She makes us welcome, she admires our paintings, she sells them to her hotel guests. I’d do anything for her. But these evenings—the same people, in the same room, saying the same things, pretending rapture over the same poems and flowers . . . it’s not surprising you found it tiresome.”
“I was mostly hot,” Henrietta protested.
“But also bored, I think. And maybe feeling a little left out? I was watching your face. Your friend was treating you like an assistant.”
He puffed out a little cloud, which hung between them. Daphne, she thought, had simply been focused on impressing Mrs. Thaxter. And why was he watching her face? From the other side of the tennis courts came the clack of something hitting a rock and then a man’s quick bark of laughter.
“Do gather,” Mrs. Thaxter called. “Everyone—Donald is going to play Beethoven for us now. Everyone come!”
Henrietta turned but couldn’t force herself through the door. Behind her, the painter laughed. “Where are your manners?” he said.
“Where are yours?”
“Let’s be rude together,” he said. He brushed off a chair and waved her toward it, seizing another for himself. “Let’s sit, and listen to the waves and the wind and Beethoven in the background, and relish the breeze instead of being suffocated by all the flowers and people crowded together inside. I haven’t seen you here before. What’s your name?”
She told him, and when he asked also told him where she lived, and how long she’d been friends with Daphne, and what they were doing there. He was from Newburyport, he said in return. A student of Appleton Brown’s—“those pastels behind the row of vases are his”—kindly included in Mrs. Thaxter’s invitation. He’d been sharing a small back room on the hotel’s ground floor with two other students for the past three weeks. “So it’s only fair I sing for my supper,” he said wryly, “in return for a place to sleep on this fine island, three excellent meals a day, and plenty of time to paint. Some evenings Mrs. Thaxter prefers to have just her intimates; other times, if a particularly eminent guest is passing through, she’ll put together a larger, more glittering group. If the guest list is more hit or miss, she’ll ask me and the other students to round out the gathering and be jolly.”
“Good thing Daphne doesn’t know where she falls on the list,” Henrietta said. He seemed to be in his late twenties: not so old that he’d object to sharing a room, but too old not to notice it. Aware of how Mrs. Thaxter calculated his value. Was Daphne aware of hers?
Sebby shrugged. “Your friend’s interesting enough,” he said. “I can see how she’d intrigue our hostess.”
“It was good of her to invite us,” Henrietta said. “And I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But really”—she gestured at the scene framed by the windows—“look at them.” Three middle-aged women were gravely painting flowers in painted vases, two men were bent over an album of poems, Mrs. Thaxter herself was examining the mounted seaweed through a hand lens while a group stood around an easel watching a young man, perhaps one of Sebby’s roommates, render with gold and green pastels the moon’s trail on the water. All trying to convey, by their attentive expressions and postures, that they were also listening to the pianist still playing his Beethoven. All of them, including Daphne.
“You feel left out,” her new acquaintance repeated.
“I do not,” she said, more loudly than she intended. Suddenly the music stopped.
Mrs. Thaxter moved toward the nearest window. “Whatever are you doing out there?” she said, clearly affronted. “Mr. Quint, is that you?”
“My apologies,” Sebby said. “I stepped out for a smoke.”
“Perhaps you can step back in again, then,” she said. “Or at least not disturb our musical entertainment.” In the dim light, all Henrietta could see of her was a mound of white hair above, the pleats of a white scarf below. Perhaps her own features were equally erased. Mrs. Thaxter waved vaguely in her direction. “You too,” she added. Did she know whom she was waving at?
Sebby stepped through the parlor door but Henrietta, disliking that sense of being summoned, left both him and Daphne behind and headed back to the hotel. She slept poorly, woke when a big storm arrived and the wind shifted and the rain began to pound, and then lay sweating in her sheets before rising to drink more than she meant to of the bottle of brandy she’d brought along for emergencies. By morning the storm had blown away, leaving the shores littered with seaweeds and all kinds of creatures—exactly, Henrietta realized when she woke, what Daphne needed. She rose and dressed hurriedly, but still she was late to breakfast and Daphne, after greeting her coolly, said very little until she’d finished her creamed eggs. Henrietta, pushing her plate aside and signaling the waitress for coffee, said, “I’ll bring extra boxes this morning, and extra mounting paper.”
“No need,” Daphne said. “I’ll manage on my own; I want to concentrate on some particular groups so I can start writing the section introductions.”
“Don’t be angry,” Henrietta said. “I’m sorry about last night.”
Daphne buttered a roll without looking at her. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said. “You seem not to have liked it there; no reason you should. But Mrs. Thaxter did ask me back this evening, and I’m going to go.”
“I’m sorry,” Henrietta repeated. If that young painter hadn’t egged her on . . . why blame the painter, though, for her own feelings? “I’ll behave better this time.”
“Actually,” Daphne said, tracing the cloth with the handle of the butter knife, “she asked if I’d mind not bringing you.” The little scars netting her hands stood out in the morning light.
Beside them a large family rose, three girls in identical blue dresses watching fondly as their younger brother begged permission to go to the bathing area and their father at first resisted and then gave in. Beyond the open doors the water shimmered, the first boats were launched, the attendants opened the women’s bathhouse and then the men’s, a group of children ran down to the rocks, and the little boy, leaping from the last of the steps, ran toward them through the rinsed soft air. What a glorious day!
“You go, then,” she said to Daphne. “I can entertain myself.”
“There’s a concert at eight,” Daphne said, pointing with her knife to the announcements on the bulletin board.
Henrietta offered again to help with the morning’s collections; Daphne refused again, more firmly, and then pushed back her chair and left. Outside, the three girls in their blue dresses formed a triangle on the rocks, and Henrietta, among the last to leave the dining room, fetched Mason’s hat and after tying the muslin strips under her chin walked in the children’s direction and for half an hour watched them at their sailing lessons in the cove. It was lovely, actually, to have a free day. When she went back upstairs she opened her windows wide, spread her books and papers on the desk, and settled into her own work, no hardship at all. Sailing lessons ended, bathers filled the pool, and
she worked through Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants, making notes for a set of experiments. Drosera, like the dew: the dew being the glistening, sticky droplets tipping the fine red hairs on the disks of the lollipop-shaped leaves. The chapters about what stimulated the hairs—tentacles, really, Darwin said—to bend and draw a possible bit of food into the cupped disk, and how the plant’s secretions digested the bits, were the place to start. Each experiment offered a question posed correctly, to which an answer might be found.
Dead flies, bits of raw meat or boiled egg, specks of paper and wood and dried moss and cinders about the same weight as the flies, maybe some quills: that’s all she’d need for her students to test a leaf’s responses. After that, the problems weren’t scientific but logistical—a huge part of teaching, as she’d slowly learned: in part from Daphne, and not just from the way she organized her scientific work. When Daphne tested recipes for her other work, substituting commonly found ingredients for tricky or uncommon ones, ordering the steps sensibly, and then scaling the result for a family dinner or a party for twenty or a wedding for eighty while working within a fixed budget, she was engaged in just the same sort of task.
They’d laughed over that many times, which Henrietta remembered when she sat down, Daphne-less, to a lunch of croquettes so nicely shaped and crisply fried, with such a savory sauce and garnish, that no one would have suspected Monday’s roast turkey as their source. She ate alone, still thinking about the sequence of experiments, and then went to the lobby, where one of Mrs. Thaxter’s brothers was swiftly sorting the letters and packages brought in the morning boat from Portsmouth. Among the crowd at the end of the long counter she waited for a view of her letterbox: empty, nothing. Why did she feel relieved? Sebby Quint, who was right behind her and bending to view his own box, bumped into her when she turned and then continued to stand so close that she couldn’t avoid talking with him.