by James Morrow
THIS BEGAN WITH A BUTTERFLY, and it ends with one, too. We were a party of five that mellow April afternoon, eager patrons of the Hawthorne University Great Insect Carnival, organized annually by the zoology department. Besides myself, our fellowship included Leslie, with whom I’d been exchanging romantic protestations and sharing a Back Bay apartment for the past three months, plus Donya, Donya’s charming boyfriend Raúl, and of course little Sofie Ambrose.
Now fifteen months old, my daughter could walk after a fashion. She could also sort her stuffed animals from her alphabet blocks, babble eloquently in a language of her own devising, play level-five peekaboo, and derive considerable amusement from the daily Nickelodeon broadcasts of Uncle Rumpus’s Magic Island, starring Henry Cushing as every preschooler’s favorite bodhisattva. What Sofie didn’t do was talk. Not a single word of recognizable English so far. The situation had me worried, but Dr. Ankers was confident that the child would utter a “Da-da” or a “bye-bye” any day now.
Clinging to the southern face of the Environmental Sciences Building like a piece of avant-garde scaffolding, the Von Humboldt Butterfly Conservatory was a spindly marvel of glass and steel, a kind of secular cathedral dedicated to the adoration of the most exquisite invertebrates Mr. Darwin’s algorithms had ever brought forth. Several additions to the permanent collection had arrived in time for the Great Insect Carnival, including a colony of Nabokov’s South American Blues, so named because the author of Lolita, a first-rate lepidopterist as well as a literary genius, had bestowed on Lycaenidae an innovative and valuable classification system. As our group wandered awestruck among the Nabokov’s Blues, Donya and Raúl described their efforts to protect those unique Mexican forests where most of the planet’s monarch butterflies passed their winters. It was largely a matter of gauging one’s audience. Sometimes Donya and Raúl would attempt to rehabilitate a given land speculator or industrial developer by appealing to his personal moral code, more often by enlarging his private bank account, but regardless of the tactic they usually managed to turn the clueless entrepreneur into a staunch butterfly advocate.
As you might imagine, habitat restoration was just one of the endeavors into which Donya had channeled her trust fund. Beyond her dedication to the welfare of beasts and butterflies, her munificence extended to the human realm; the call of the wild moved her, but so did the cries of the bewildered. I think especially of her invention called the Urban Igloo, an inflatable shelter for homeless people constructed from heavy-duty garbage bags and packing tape. Cheap and portable, every Urban Igloo boasted an ingenious feature—a heating device consisting of a plastic tube terminating in a simple gasket. After installing his igloo on the sidewalk outside an apartment complex, retail store, or corporate headquarters, the occupant would fit the gasket over the exhaust vent of the building’s heating system. Thus was an otherwise wasted resource, the liters of warm air expelled by HVAC ducts, put to a sensible use. So far Donya had distributed four hundred Urban Igloos up and down the eastern seaboard, and she hoped to give away a thousand more before the year was out.
There was a mystery here. How did Donya manage to keep subverting the Phyllistines while eschewing the thorny forest of grandiosity into which her elder sisters had wandered? Why would she never even imagine initiating a project like Themisopolis or Operation Pineal Gland or Edwina 0004? Perhaps Henry and Brock had been more circumspect mentors than Jordan and I. Or perhaps Donya’s sanity traced simply to her having enjoyed something resembling a childhood. Whatever the answer, one fact seemed clear. The last of the Sabacthanis was also the wisest.
If I am to believe my dear Leslie, your narrator has himself attained a certain sagacity. She claims that Mason Ambrose is “no longer his skull’s only tenant” but pays attention to his daughter and even his girlfriend “with touching regularity.” And here’s something else, ladies and gentlemen. Make of it what you will. In recent months I have shed my reflexive dislike of The Faerie Queene. There are passages in Spenser that now move me to tears, and I’ve come to regard that hidebound dogmatist as some sort of great poet.
Lovely though they were, the Nabokov’s Blues did not captivate Leslie and myself for long, and we wandered off in search of gaudier lepidoptera. Our quest took us to the cathedral’s core, dense with ferns and blossoms, little Sofie waddling between us like a penguin. Eventually a Central Asian peacock butterfly caught our attention, a magnificent Nymphalis io perched on a yellow orchid, each wing stamped with an image suggesting a mask of comedy. I scooped up Sofie and brought her within view of the improbably marked creature.
“See, sweetheart?” I said. “See the beautiful butterfly?”
The child selected that very moment to acquire the gift of language. No baby talk for Sophie. She didn’t say, “Bootiful.” She said, “Beautiful.”
Joy rushed through my veins. My cup overflowed.
“Did you hear that? She said, ‘Beautiful.’”
“Mazel tov,” Leslie told Sofie. “No doubt about it”—she flashed me a wry smile—“the kid’ll grow up to become a philosopher, with a special interest in aesthetics.”
Beau-ti-ful. If Sofie’s late mother Edwina 0004 could have heard her little girl articulate those syllables, she would have been immensely pleased. Sofie’s departed mother the primal Edwina would have been equally delighted. But her deceased mother Londa would have been the proudest of all. And so it was that, conjuring up the face and form of my impossible vatling, I bent low and inhaled the orchid’s scent, happy in my knowledge that sometime tomorrow, or perhaps even later today, our daughter would move her tongue and part her lips and say her second word.
JAMES MORROW is the author of nine previous novels, including The Last Witchfinder. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.
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