His name came up just once, as he had known it would: on the website of Caldicott Academy, Godolphin, Mass., the private girls’ school where he worked. In a photograph, taken several years ago, Flax’s hair was retreating but not yet fleeing. His upper lip had not yet put forth its slim mustache. His plump cheeks did not show the two vertical creases that appeared whenever he produced a smile, and his glasses concealed the considerate gaze that had made many a slipshod student called in for a conference feel suddenly worthy, though worthy of what she could not have easily said. Maybe worthy of a conference with Flax; maybe that was enough. Most students responded to their conversations with Flax by paying more attention to their Latin grammars, by finding something intriguing in the ablative absolute, by renouncing their trots—one girl actually burned hers in a little ceremony behind the gym.
Under the picture the legend read Myron Flaxbaum, BA Brooklyn College, MA Columbia, MAT Harvard. Teaches first-, second-, and third-year Latin. Coaches the chess team. It was a tribute to the electronic world that this mild entry had brought him to the attention of the director of Unanticipated Seminars at King’s College on the Strand. What could he invent as a usual fee? More critically, what could he say in his lecture? Let us think for a moment (he thought). Perhaps I can work up something about the history of life—the big bang, the primordial soup, the development of bacteria, the emergence of creatures with a sort of brain and a sort of eye and some locomotion. I will reread Darwin and Linnaeus and Mendel and Richard Dawkins; I will review the Bible. I might require an agent…
And then, shaking his head violently (for him), he stopped considering this daunting task. He googled King’s College on the Strand and discovered that it indeed existed but that no Harry Worrell was named on its faculty. Perhaps Harry was blessedly modest. Flax then shrugged himself into his worn overcoat and checked his shabby briefcase, making sure it carried the books and papers necessary for today’s lessons. He tested the loose button on his overcoat—yes, it would probably hang on another day. He lifted from its hook the beret his sons had given him for his recent birthday—an accessory they considered a sartorial improvement on his old tweed cap—and slipped it onto his semi-bald head. He picked up the half-full cup of coffee resting on the computer table and brought it to a familiar dark corner and dumped its contents into a pot of soil and mismatched pedicels, bracts, peduncles, and leaves. Then he abandoned the flat to this plant’s caffeinated care.
II.
Nobody remembered where the plant had come from. It seemed to have been sitting forever in that ill-lit and (for a plant) unwholesome corner of the living room, on a little table whose provenance was also forgotten, protected by the scrolled arm of the brown plush sofa. The middle boy, Leo, suggested that the plant had been spawned by the sofa, which was called Jack, after Flax’s dear uncle who had lived with them for some years. Uncle Jack had shared a room with the youngest boy, Felix, and never got in anybody’s way, largely because he was usually occupying the sofa, sometimes flicking cigar ash in the direction of Plant. “A lovable schnorrer,” said Mr. Flaxbaum of Jack, though not as part of the formal eulogy.
Young Felix suspected that he himself had brought Plant home from the garden shop during an annual giveaway of moribund merchandise. Flax, devotee of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, entertained the fancy that Plant had once been a nymph changed like Daphne, although not into a laurel on a hill near Olympus but rather into an ill-favored thing rooted in a pot in their living room. Perhaps she had misbehaved when she still had legs and hips. Bonnie, who had received a classical education from the nuns, thought Plant was a household god responsible for luck, one of the Lares or one of the Penates. Why not? The family had been fortunate so far, unless you were silly enough to consider fat bank accounts and granite kitchen counters signs of luck. Even her Leo, who had a neurologic condition which might prove progressive but might not—even he was not unlucky, not yet, not yet, maybe not ever…Plant might be a succulent, Leo had speculated.
In a family discussion soon after Plant’s appearance, Bonnie remarked that it might have been a variety of primrose emigrated from the railroad tracks. Sean, the eldest, taking charge of a one-volume Encyclopedia of Botany no one had known they owned (“Sort of like the plant,” mentioned Uncle Jack), said that its pallor indicated that it might be mycotrophic, might “‘obtain nutrients from the soil by means of the fungi that inhabit its roots,’” Sean read aloud. Its rosettes made it a cousin to Anacampseros telephiastrum variegata, “‘also called Sunrise.’”
“Telephiastrum,” Flax repeated. “Greek, not Latin. ‘Casting afar,’ maybe. Go on, Sean.”
“Like Arsaenia, the tip of its leaf is ‘elongated, upturned, and coiled.’”
“Only one of its leaves,” Leo said. “The striped one is flat.”
“There’s a hint of a caudex just above the soil,” Sean said, and closed the book.
“What’s a caudex?” Felix said.
“An early manuscript,” Jack said.
After a while: “Taproot,” said Sean.
“Our guest has lots of characteristics,” Felix said. “Some growing out of others.”
“Some mutually exclusive,” Leo said.
Plant’s supposed taproot had never been examined (they didn’t want to kill the thing). Sometimes it produced tiny flowers in hues of lingerie. Sometimes it put out scramblers which crept to the edge of the pot and then disintegrated. It was probably a hybrid. “Who isn’t?” Sean inquired (biology was one of his AP courses). It troubled no one, and it endeared itself to no one. In that way it was different from the little terrier the family had acquired from the pound some years ago. Buddy liked to chase cars. It was only a sometime habit; they hoped he’d outgrow it. Otherwise he was affectionate, recognized the boys by name and also Uncle Jack, who gave him candy in secret. He seemed numerate; Leo thought Buddy might learn to count, or at least to feign counting, like Clever Hans. But math lessons never got started, because one misty morning the fit was on him, and he came to grief with a Camry. Poor Buddy…Plant persisted, like the busy Flaxbaums themselves—like Flax, Bonnie, Sean, Leo, Felix, and the incarnation of Uncle Jack.
III.
The next morning, Tuesday: “Do you want me to print out Professor Harry Worrell’s invitation?” Flax asked Felix.
“Thanks, no,” Felix said. “Have you answered it?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, maybe I’ll take the next communication if it comes by mail.”
Felix was a scrupulous collector, not a catch-as-catch-can hoarder. He didn’t care for documents, though he did admire stamps. But his taste was mainly for odd items like fancy buttons and bicycle bells and orphaned circuit boards that might come in handy sometime; and he also liked things with a peculiar beauty, like the last garnet inch in a flask of cough medicine, or his own vermiform appendix, deftly removed from his cecum and preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. He picked up crosses on chains in secondhand shops—they reminded him of his early childhood when he’d attended Masses with Grandma Reilly, his mama’s sweet mama. Felix might never have indulged his scavenging habits—or might have been reduced to collecting Pokémon cards—if Uncle Jack hadn’t died and abandoned his half of the shared bedroom. Over the next few years the boy built some shelves, bought a glass aquarium, discovered in a junkyard a small office safe and repaired its lock with Leo’s help. There Felix kept his crosses. The aquarium now housed some goldfish, two, three, four, or five of them, their number depending on their own luck and on a larger fate which Felix didn’t understand and which he guessed was a mystery also to his dependents. They conducted repetitive exercises under Felix’s benign attention. He fed them flakes that looked like dried cilantro. He gave them the names of Latin poets in honor of his father, but whenever one of them was found floating without purpose, he retired the fish while recycling the name. He had thus been guardian of numerous Virgils and Juvenals. Mr. Flaxbaum was comfortable with the monikers but he thought the group as a whole oug
ht to be called by its appropriate Linnaean taxon. So Felix posted a little sign: C. auratus auratus.
Felix played basketball and soccer, but his favorite sport was walking with his head down and stopping to look at a fallen leaf or worm cast that attracted him and sometimes picking it up, bringing it close to his frank Irish face—a physiognomy unusual in the Flaxbaum family but occurring often among the Reillys. He particularly admired a lifeless bug trapped between the two panes of stormproof glass in one of his parents’ bedroom windows. Their bedroom was just off the living room.
“Can’t we liberate him?” Felix had wondered. “How did he get there?”
“It’s an adult longhorn beetle,” said Flax after some research. “My guess is that its pupa was blown between two sheets of glass when the workmen in the yard of the glass factory were jamming them together. We have double panes on our windows to keep the cold out, Felix, and they can’t be separated—they’d have to be broken. And for what purpose?—to extract the cadaver of a common insect. I know you’d like to add him to your curiosities, so please consider our room your annex.”
“Thanks. What killed the dude?”
“Insufficient oxygen. In one way or another that’s what kills us all. Uncle Jack…”
“He had a blood disease.”
“Yes, in the end his blood couldn’t carry oxygen to his heart and he died.”
“Oh. The bug didn’t disintegrate,” said Felix. Flax guessed that the boy was thinking of Uncle decomposing in the earth. He treated himself to a measured look at his son’s eyes. If sincerity had a color…“Lack of oxygen again,” Flax explained. “He was preserved in an accidental vacuum.”
Every morning Felix opened his safe and took out one of the crosses. Then he stashed it again, gave Plant a fish-flakes treat, and took a quick look at the beetle to see if it had been resurrected yet.
IV.
On Wednesdays, Leo’s first class was at ten. Godolphin’s progressive high school mandated attendance at classes but allowed freedom at other times. On Wednesdays Flax didn’t teach at all. So at eight o’clock the two were home, alone with each other. And on this Wednesday, already afternoon in the UK, Professor Harry Worrell was probably alone in a pub booth, empty steins accumulating around his laptop, sending messages to distinguished Americans.
While thinking of the blessed professor, Flax was enjoying a lethal breakfast of pancakes and syrup and bacon, Leo a life-enhancing one of muesli and tea and several colorful capsules. There was a resemblance between these two—limp brown hair, abundant in the son and scanty in the father; gentle voice; slow smile; a talent and love for teaching. Leo at sixteen was already helping the ninth-grade teacher explain logarithms, in so modest a manner that his classmates were unoffended; and on late-afternoon visits to the local elementary school, he tutored some kids who were called intellectually challenged. He hated the term. It was mathematics itself that was challenged. There was something wrong with numbers, their incarnation on paper. They were flummoxing these dear children, preventing them from doing more than count. The children were good at counting when they used words, one, two, three; they also loved gazillion. But the shapes for numbers made their eyes fill. And the visual aids some sadistic pedagogue invented: handcuffs for 3, a hook for 5, an ax for 7; 4 was a cruel pitchfork… “I’ve come to hate number shapes,” Leo said.
They washed the dishes. Leo did not feed Plant but he did stand looking down at it. “I wonder if Buddy could really have learned to count,” he muttered. He was still thinking about numbers, Flax realized. Might Plant be numiverous? Leo slanted his head forward and Flax imagined ungainly symbols tumbling into the pot; good-bye, 2, 5, 17; good-bye, 9, you noose.
Then Leo picked up his backpack, father and son got their bikes out of the garage. Beneath the helmet Flax’s beret flapped onto his forehead. In overcoat and headgear he looked stately on wheels, Leo noticed, though a button appeared to be missing from the coat. Flax noticed the angularity of his son and experienced that cold dread that someday Leo’s dormant disease would dispatch tubers to his organs and turn him into wood. They rode, Flax first, into the empty street and bicycled side by side until at the second intersection Leo with a wave turned toward school and Flax with an arm raised in answer went straight ahead, toward today’s job, selling shoes at Dactyl.
V.
Though Bonnie’s days were packed with obligations, she nonetheless devoted an hour every Wednesday to minding her man. After work she took the underground as always from the hospital to the central metro station and then, instead of trolleying to the section of Godolphin where the Flaxbaums lived—firm wooden three-deckers, mostly firm families within—she trolleyed to Godolphin’s commercial area, Jefferson Corner. Dactyl, where Myron worked Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons, was on the historically registered block that included Forget Me Not, an antiques shop; Roberta’s Linens; Dunton’s Tobacco; and the Local, a restaurant. This stretch of stores stood behind a brick colonnade. Each store had inner doors opening to its neighbors. Historians guessed that the whole arrangement had been part of the underground railway. The door between Forget Me Not and Dactyl had a square glass window. At three o’clock, Bonnie, wearing a bowler she kept at Forget Me Not and rimless glasses with no refraction, took possession of the window after first exchanging nods with Renata, Forget Me Not’s proprietor. In her long years of storekeeping, Renata had seen far more peculiar things than a wife keeping an eye on a blameless husband.
Bonnie’s habit had begun on a July Saturday. Coming out of the bookstore across the street, her arms full, she had glimpsed Myron inside Dactyl. She swiftly crossed the street and took a spy’s position behind one of the columns and peeked out. She could see him better now. He was standing with his hands behind his back. His chin was slightly lowered as if he were looking down, but his glasses pinching the tip of his nose indicated that his eyes were raised in order to see over them. She watched for a while. And then, bending the rules of physics and physiology, she entered him. She burrowed between his ribs; she spread her substantial self within his smaller periphery. The scraps and scrolls of his knowledge occupied their now-shared frontal cortex. His lively interest employed four optic nerves. His disappointments made four shoulders slump. She knew his shame at having to sell footwear in order to increase the family’s comfort, and she knew the secondary shame that so respectable an extra job should cause that first shame. And so whenever she watched him on Wednesdays—watched only; she couldn’t occupy him after that first exalted melding—she was able to feel again what was felt by this father brother husband nephew teacher protector salesman patron of a botanical curiosity lover of Ovid…
So the practical, competent woman, every surgeon’s favorite nurse, calmness itself behind her mask and gown, ready always with the instrument needed, her pity always contained, this paragon of unflappability surrendered to her own soft interior every Wednesday and peeped at her husband from the window of Forget Me Not, saw pride and disappointment and shame and resignation, saw him kneeling like a knight—not like a servant, Myron!—in front of some woman shopping for pumps exactly the color of a certain Bordeaux, exactly the height of a certain stair rise, no, no, no, higher, lower, redder, less red, did I say I wanted a bow, a buckle, a golden chameleon climbing up my instep, amphibians give me the creeps…
“Reptiles,” corrected Flax.
The woman bought the shoes.
“Can you read their lips?” Renata inquired.
“Not exactly,” Bonnie said. “I supply.”
“That’s the how of communication, isn’t it.”
“Yes.” It was the how of family too, but she didn’t say that to the kindly spinster. All commensals supplied each other in one way or another—commensals, from com mensa, eating together. She loved mealtimes, preparing the dinner with help from everybody, using ingredients bought with the money she and Myron supplied. Dinner-table conversations were full of information, not always accurate, and full of earnest misquotations; the boys
’ manners if not perfect were adequate, and the dining-room mirror obediently reflected them all, her own fat self and Myron’s balding self and Sean’s and Leo’s loved faces, and the back of Felix’s loved head, although in his darting way he showed one profile and then the other. “Salt, please,” he would say to his father. (Someday she must stop putting salt on the table.) Myron passed the salt; Myron, the fellow she had stumbled upon, literally, twenty years ago.
He’d been slumped in a chair in the surgical waiting room while his poor sick father died under the knife, it couldn’t be helped, and returning from the sad conclusion of the operation, she had tripped over his legs sticking out into the room. A small woman slept in the next chair—his sister, it turned out. It was three in the morning.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she’d said to his feet.
His eyes flew open. His mouth flew open. He wanted to ask her. It was not up to her to tell him. But she broke protocol with a gesture: she put her hand on his shoulder, and then fled. The woman beside him stirred.
Later he sought her out to thank her for the care she had given. “Papa had a good life,” wearily.
“And an unterrible end,” she said, breaking protocol again.
He’d called her a month later and they were married a few months after that.
And now there were five Flaxbaums, moving every night within a silvered oblong, a group portrait, including a corner of the couch in the next room. This portrait would disappear when the last of them underwent the physiological necessity of individual extinction, when the last memory of the last of them was gone. Then these two generations of Flaxbaums would fade from history, taking with them all their supplying and relying and self-denial and dissatisfaction and gratitude. Life and death? They were incidental, in her opinion, though of course she deplored suffering. But what counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you. That was the long and short of it. Her honorable spouse could instruct those overeducated Brits, all 850 of them, just by his own example.
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