The Killing of Butterfly Joe

by Rhidian Brook

  ‘Well, there you are then. You can find out if that’s true.’

  ‘If we do this I will have to tell her. At some point.’

  ‘All right. But you can’t tell her yet. Not until Joe is free. Isabelle? Yes? Agreed?’

  Isabelle shook her head no. And then nodded her head yes.

  * * *

  Three days later, we set off to find her father.

  To minimize the possibility of Isabelle giving the game away before we left, I told her to avoid being in a room with her mother and to leave the white lying to me. Edith was so distracted by having to get the huge Cleveland order ready that she didn’t even bat her single eyelid at me when I told her I needed to drive Isabelle to the headquarters of the FWA. One morning I took Chuick to get some groceries and made a call to Princeton University. I pretended to be a journalist interested in interviewing the great American lepidopterist Professor Shelby Wolff, and established that the professor was in town. The secretary at the department of entomology informed me that as well as giving his usual weekly lectures he would be delivering the Annual von Humboldt Lecture at the Princeton Chapel that Friday (‘tickets available at the door’). I thought this would be a fitting way to see him, before meeting him.

  By the time we set off, Isabelle was sick with the subterfuge. She had dark rings under her eyes from lack of sleep and looked paler than usual. She sat stiffly in the passenger seat and had the look of someone wanting to get it all over with as soon as possible. Even without the secrecy it would have been a momentous day for her, so I let her be until we’d left the controlling force-field of her mother (a range that extended to the very edge of the Appalachia).

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I get car sick.’

  ‘I’ll try keep it smooth. You want the window open?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Thank you for doing this. I know it’s a big thing.’

  ‘I’m not doing it for you.’

  ‘No.’

  Isabelle looked straight ahead, to keep from being sick. I thought I’d ask her what I was actually thinking.

  ‘Why don’t you like me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I laughed. Her candour was somehow appealing now.

  ‘So you really don’t like me.’

  ‘What do you want me so say?’

  ‘I don’t know. That I’m not as bad as I think you think I am?’

  ‘I don’t think you are bad.’

  ‘That’s not what you said the other night. What was it? That there was nothing I wouldn’t say to get what I wanted? That’s pretty bad.’

  ‘I was upset. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘It was true. I seek approval from others by saying what I think will make them like me. Or make them happy. Usually both. I’m shallow that way. And if I can’t win someone’s approval I decide that I don’t like them. As a sort of protection. It’s what I told myself when I met you. But, the truth is, I do like you.’ And as I said it I felt it, a welling up.

  Isabelle didn’t show any outward sign that this news made any difference to her. She stared resolutely ahead, still trying not to throw up.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of you, Rip.’

  I nodded, encouraging her to try.

  ‘When Joe “found” you he came back all excited, saying he’d met someone interesting who wanted to work for us. Said you were a bit lost, a bit depressed. But clever and charming. When you first turned up I thought that you were, although I wasn’t sure why you would work for a family like us. But charm and cleverness impress Joe – they even impress Ma – but they don’t really work on me. I don’t say that as a brag. They just don’t. They slide off me.’

  ‘I thought you disliked me. You seemed pissed off with me.’

  ‘I saw you looking at Mary, the way so many guys do, and I thought, OK, that’s what he wants.’

  ‘I was . . . I am . . . a sucker for the obvious. Although Mary fooled me. What will you do? If you find out that Mary was right? About your father not being her father.’

  ‘Whatever happens, she’s still my sister.’

  I warmed to Isabelle, with every passing mile. On that journey, I began to see that it wasn’t a generalized need for approval I wanted from her, but a specific one. I wanted to please her because I liked her and, if I was being honest with myself (always the hardest person to be honest with), I hadn’t allowed myself to show it yet, not just because of her more distracting sister, but for fear of her rebuff. I had the notion that Isabelle had some salvific quality. That if I was honest enough about my sins she would accept me and maybe even save me.

  ‘Joe was right. I was depressed. And a bit lost, when he found me.’

  Picking up on this candour, Isabelle looked across at me and nodded for me to continue. It really was as though this was the only language she was prepared to speak.

  ‘Why was that, do you think?’

  ‘My father had died only a few weeks before. I’m in a foreign country. I was alone. I had got a little introspective.’

  ‘Were you close? To him?’

  ‘Close enough to feel sad, not close enough to know exactly why or for it to hurt.’

  ‘You were grieving perhaps.’

  ‘If I grieved anything it was the lack of a relationship.’

  ‘What was your father like?’

  I didn’t answer her for a while. Partly because it was so uncomfortable thinking about someone whose image gave me a sinking feeling. Yes, sinking is exactly what I felt I was doing when my father came to my mind. I was also quiet because he belonged to a different world. I mean the world I’d come from which seemed unreal to me now, and to which I wasn’t sure I wanted to return.

  ‘It’s OK if you don’t want to talk about it.’

  But I wanted to talk about it and not for any gain.

  ‘He died two weeks before I was due to fly here. When my mother rang to tell me she said I shouldn’t change my plans. “Your father would have wanted you to go.” Out of kindness to her and respect for the dead I didn’t correct her revisionism. Months before, when I actually told my father about this trip, his enthusiasm wasn’t that apparent. We were having what turned out to be our last supper together. When I mentioned my trip he asked me why I’d give up my job (he thought I was working for a publishing house). I told him it was a stop-gap and he said, “Between swanning around and fannying about?” That was how he saw me. A bit of a waster. It was true: I had no vocational certainty (his phrase). Unlike my brother Michael, who is already a doctor, or my sister Fran, who is not only a solicitor but married, I had little to show for my expensive education and I still had no clear sense of where to head, just a vague feeling that the universe would point me in the right direction. For my father tertiary education was meant to be a stepping-stone to respectable employment. He was conservative, a lawyer. He valued vigour, intelligence and plans and people who had all three. I was not so much the black sheep of the family, more its snail. We are a competitive family and I think value was measured in Darwinian terms, and success reduced to a rarefied checklist of A grades, university, a career in either law, banking or medicine and a mortgage before you were twenty-five. Put me in an average family and I’d have been considered a moderate success; but among the Joneses I was a runt. I didn’t have enough high grades and I had a low-grade drug problem. It’s partly why I was keen to get away. I had a vague idea that some sort of reinvention would be possible in America.’

  I felt myself getting hot with the telling. I put the air-conditioning on.

  ‘You mind?’

  ‘You were saying. You were looking for reinvention. A reason to come here.’

  ‘When I told my father about the trip he quoted Shakespeare at me. “‘I’ll not lend thee a penny.’” When I said, “I’m not asking for money,” he said, “I’m just quoting: it’s what Falstaff says to Pistol. ‘I’ll not lend thee a penny.’ Then Pistol replies: ‘The world’s mine oyster which I with sword shall
open.’ ” ’ Quoting lines was a family sport and my father was its champion. It irritated me when he did it. I felt he was using other people to say what he wouldn’t say himself. He could slap me down with Shakespeare, vanquish me with Virgil, dismiss me with Donne but really he was letting other people’s truths do the dirty work for him. You can’t really have the last word with other people’s words. He said something like, “One day, you’re going to have to choose a proper profession, Llew. When I was your age I was engaged to your mother. I had responsibilities. You’ll be thirty before you know it. You have to be ready to do things you don’t enjoy if you want to get on in life. The point of that quote, the bit that people miss, is that the world is not just your oyster. It’s everyone’s. And they are all fighting to get to the pearl. You have to decide, what are you going to do that makes you stand out, Llew?” That was when, foolishly, I shared my pearl with him. I told him that I had an idea for a book. A travel memoir in epic verse. He laughed. It was the laugh of a man who has read the classic canon and thinks that unless you’re capable of adding to it, forget it. For him literature was something that had arrived fully formed, having been created by great people who were all dead. “Dream on,” he said. Those were my father’s last words to me.

  ‘Dream on!’

  I had to blink out the tears to stop the road multiplying. For months I’d kept these thoughts, these feelings, at bay and lost myself in the immediacy of my adventuring. But they were not that far beneath the surface. It all came out without forethought or guile, in a clear flow, without caveats or second-guessings, or consideration for which bits were true.

  ‘So you see, having a father around isn’t necessarily better for your health and happiness. I have even thought I needed him to die to amount to something. You know, where I had failed him in life I would show him in death. A dead parent can be a potent source of motivation. Is that an awful thing to say?’

  ‘It sounds like a true thing to say.’

  ‘My mouth did that thing?’

  Isabelle laughed. ‘I didn’t notice it . . . Well,’ she went on, ‘perhaps you should convert his “I told you so” into an “I’ll show you so”.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By writing that book.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Are you serious about wanting to be a writer?’

  I shrugged. ‘I was when I arrived in America. I’m not sure now.’ This sounded weak – if there’s anything that should never rest, it’s ambition – but at least it was honest. ‘I have been so immersed in events I haven’t had the chance. I’ve managed a few verses. The other night I actually wrote a stanza. About my father. I thought it might make for a beginning.’

  ‘Do you have it with you?’

  I nodded, coming over all shy. ‘It’s in my notebook, in my bag. There.’

  ‘Can I look?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Isabelle reached into my bag for the black notebook.

  ‘It’s the last entry.’

  She found the last page and read it out.

  ‘ “So I scattered his ashes

  On a butterfly breeze

  Then flew away

  Across seven seas . . .” ’

  ‘It’s not much. But it’s a start.’

  ‘There’s more.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  Isabelle respectfully closed the book and put it back in my bag.

  ‘Thanks for letting me see it.’

  ‘I think . . . I’m afraid of failing.’

  ‘Isn’t that the risk anyone takes, when trying to say something true?’

  I nodded. Honest confession is like a song, one verse opens up and flows into another.

  ‘But more than that even, I think I am most afraid of all this ending.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘This . . . time. This adventure. With Joe. With you. I don’t want it to end. My constant thought these last few months is “How can I keep this going?” Keep this story on the road. How can I be this person – Rip Van Jones – who is having this extraordinary time? I fear going back to my old life. My old self.’

  ‘Your old self?’

  ‘My slightly cynical, lost, depressed self? I think it’s why I was so drawn to Joe. It takes real confidence – belief – to be that un-cynical. I used to wear my cynicism as a badge of honour but I secretly loathed it, knowing it was really a cloak to cover my essential uncertainty about myself. I envy his hope, his faith. And yours. I’d like some of it myself. What is it? It’s a mystery to me.’

  Isabelle was fully engaged now.

  ‘Well, it’s not magic; but it’s hard to explain it. It’s a bit like a butterfly. It’s beautiful and true but elusive – and fragile.’

  ‘And the moment you catch it you kill it!’

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled at this. I was rather pleased with the metaphor, not least because it combined her two great loves.

  ‘Then maybe that’s the answer. Not to catch it. Or try and explain it. But let it fly.’

  How good it was to be able to just talk without an agenda. And to have – after Joe, and Mary – a listener. That drive was, I see it clearly now, the point when I forged a new appreciation for Isabelle. And she, in turn, for me.

  ‘I think I’ve judged you harshly,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I misread you, too. Deliberately.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes. Your lack of need for admiration frustrated me; it deprived me the use of a core skill: saying what I thought people wanted to hear. Instead of what I want to say.’

  ‘It must be a tyranny. Trying to be all things to all people.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You end up lying to someone. Which will make it hard to write something true.’

  She hadn’t misread me at all.

  ‘You’re a rare one, Iz. An American girl who isn’t susceptible to flattery. Who doesn’t drive, knows the ontological argument – and its limitations – and who – as far as I can tell – isn’t interested in boys.’

  ‘You’re embarrassing me now.’

  ‘I like it when you change colour. It’s like the opposite of camouflage.’

  Isabelle looked better now. She had got a little of her colour back and I felt as though I’d recovered a little bit of my soul.

  New and historic bits of America were passing by but if there were landmarks and fine sights, I missed them. I don’t know how long we talked this way, but we failed to notice the fact we were in a new state or that it was already late, too late to get to Princeton for the night. Somewhere in New Jersey, Isabelle fell asleep and I felt my eyes getting heavy with the strain of looking into and away from the on-coming lights of trucks and cars. I eventually pulled over at a truck stop to catch forty winks. I covered Isabelle with my jacket and watched her sleeping for a few minutes. Not long after that I fell asleep lying across the back seat, one of the sweetest sleeps I have ever had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In which we encounter The Big Bad Wolff.

  The university threw me back to a time I’d tried to forget and gladly left behind – the cloistered world of academia that I had failed in and that had failed me. The fact that it was all modelled on, and similar to, my own university only unsettled me further. The fourteenth-century-style architecture of the Princeton Chapel compounded this sense of transportation to a time and place with which I had unhappy associations. We pulled up in the square and I could see already one or two people forming a queue for the lecture that Isabelle’s father was going to be giving in about an hour’s time. I insisted we have something to eat, so we found a coffee shop and took a table near the front window from which we could see the street. We ordered coffee and apple pie and cream. Isabelle – brave and resolute until now – started to lose her nerve. That vibration in her voice re-surfaced. She coughed and tried to clear her throat which was all clogged up with phlegmy emotion and fear’s constriction.

  ‘I feel sick.’

 
‘I’m sure it’s nerves, Iz. I mean, I’m nervous.’

  But, of course, my nerves had a different root. For me, this trip was about saving the deal, freeing Joe and sating a curiosity; for Isabelle it was potentially life-changing. I tried to encourage her by making light of it.

  ‘The first lecture you attend at university will be given by your father. Not many people can say that.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do this, Rip.’

  ‘We’ll sit at the back. He won’t know we’re here.’

  ‘I feel faint,’ she said.

  ‘Whatever happens, and whatever he is like, he is still your father and you have a right to hear him. More than anyone else in this place. Come on, eat your apple pie.’

  The sad reality of twenty years without a father seemed to be summed up in the moment of having to purchase tickets for Isabelle to hear her own father speak, and the fact that these people, these strangers, probably knew him as well as if not better than she did. Her father had certainly drawn a crowd. It was hard to identify a single type from the queue of people now filing inside. It seemed to be a mixture of students, teachers, academics. Entomologists, lepidopterists, amateur and professional. A poster on a billboard outside the chapel carried his picture beneath the headline: ‘The Annual von Humboldt Lecture’. And the title of his talk: ‘Signs At The End Of The Age’.

  Again, I tried to joke. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  But Isabelle wasn’t hearing me now.

  Inside, the front pews were already taken but Isabelle was happy to be near the back and out of sight. She had an understandable but irrational fear that her father might spot her in the crowd and single her out. We took our pews and waited. I watched the stage eagerly, Isabelle played with her nails unable to look. I put my hand to her back and continued to tell her that all would be well.

  At exactly midday, two men entered from the side. One of them was wearing a ceremonial academic gown, the other dressed as though clothes were an inconvenient afterthought. The man in the gown approached the lectern.

  ‘Welcome everyone to the twenty-fourth Annual Alexander von Humboldt Lecture. It’s with great personal pleasure that I introduce today’s speaker. I have known Shelby for nearly twenty years. I could say intimately as we once shared a tent in Colombia for three months. He is widely regarded at one of the finest entomologists this country has produced. He’s known by many of you for his book American Lepidopterist. But it’s upon his mammoth and still unfinished work that his reputation in science has been built. He knows more about life on earth than almost anyone I know. He also has a thing about time and people using it up. So without wasting another second, I will hand him over. Ladies and gentlemen, the American lepidopterist, Professor Shelby Wolff.’