A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  July 26

  Dear Sophia,

  Your brother sounds amazing, and it’s a compliment to look like him, if only in a foggy photo in the daily press. But I’m not political or particularly courageous or outspoken, so I’m afraid that trying to BE your brother will turn out a disastrous failure.

  What I am is an obsessed piano player with good hands and enough concentration and neurosis and desire to be a musician, maybe a composer.

  AND I’m a bit of nerd, like my father.

  Still there?

  I just got “Hey, Mister, Sing A Long” from you. Pure song and so funny.

  So “Here’s looking at you!” AND . . .

  I arrive in the flesh at 3:15, Northwest Airlines, on the fifteenth of August. I don’t expect you to meet the plane, but I’ll be wearing eggshells in case you do.

  “I love it,” Milo said, playing “Hanging by My Knees.” “Don’t you love it?”

  The music was fast and dramatic, capped by a final run over the keys with the backs of his fingers. Milo played it again and again.

  “Crazy,” Milo said. “Completely wonderfully crazy and daring. I am in love with this composer, and you should be, too.”

  It was a Saturday, and my father was in the kitchen with Julia, who had moved home until she got over the cold she caught sleeping in a draft at the glass factory.

  “It’s a temporary visitation,” she said. “Not to be confused with the word ‘return.’ ”

  The FBI had stopped by in the morning with more questions, hoping for a “breakthrough” clue, as Agent Burns said, but I wasn’t listening, sidelined by my own problems. At one point I did hear them ask my father the specific circumstances surrounding his departure from NIH. I listened for that answer.

  “What difference does it make?” my father asked.

  “Did your leaving have anything to do with the boy who wanted you to adopt him?”

  “I can’t answer that,” he said initially.

  But he sat in a loaded silence, pressing the ends of his fingers in the shape of a diamond, considering what he might say.

  The agents waited, shifting on the rush seats of our hard-back chairs, trying to get comfortable, their arms resting on the table. I was at the end of the table, watching my mother rattle around the sink doing the dishes.

  “Are you going to say something, David?”

  Finally she turned off the water and sat down beside my father, a wet dish towel over her shoulder, and her presence, her noisy presence, was of some comfort to him.

  “I don’t know if this answers your question,” he began. “But I will tell you what went on with me.”

  He tipped his chair back, pushed his hands into the pockets of his pants.

  “Originally I had in mind to work with patients. It was why I wanted to be a doctor in the first place, the only reason. But I chose to work in the lab, because—and I know this makes no sense—I was afraid I wouldn’t be successful helping the sick. That I could do harm.”

  “Do no harm,” Julia interceded, repeating the Hippocratic oath.

  “I couldn’t save any of the patients under my charge at NIH. Not personally. Maybe the research I was involved with will eventually make a difference in some lives,” he said. “But not personally, and that was too difficult for me.”

  He got up to leave the room, probably embarrassed, certainly exposed, nonconfessional by nature. I couldn’t look at him. He was standing at the door to the hall.

  “I don’t know why I said that just now,” he said. “What did you ask me? Why did I leave NIH?” He shook his head. “It’s no one’s business but my own.”

  I had my father’s ability to fly at such a high altitude above my life that what I didn’t see—and it was easy for me to hide out from myself—had no viable existence.

  Now I lay awake nights watching the coming of dawn, replaying the scene in the bathroom with Vanessa/Rosie St. John at the Café Rouge in the bright room of my mind.

  What was Steven doing with Victor, I wondered, and how often did they see each other, and why? What did I really know about my brother?

  Milo and I spent every evening at the piano, Milo composing with me beside him, listening until I knew the music well enough to hear it in my head without the piano. There was a sense of safety about those hours together, Bernard on the couch behind us, clapping when the music was finished, mumbling encouragement, telling me I was turning into an excellent composer, although I never once made up a melody.

  At some point in early August, I stopped responding to Benjamin’s letters with anything more than music. My early letters had been full of the life of Sophia Lupe, but she was slipping away, and I had no particular desire to retrieve her. Without Sophia I had nothing to say to Benjamin, nothing I could say except these songs.

  My family was curious about the music. They’d stop by the door to the living room or sit with Bernard, who was always there when Milo was playing, and then they’d leave without a comment. I’m sure they were glad that I was home at night, looking like myself since Lisha had taken her clothes back and left for Germany with her parents, to recover.

  I was beginning to take an interest in things again. Faith had purchased some praying mantises from Gray’s Flower Center on Old Georgetown Road to protect the flower bed she’d planted that summer in front of the house. They came in a small bag, hundreds of them, hatched and frozen and when she scattered the babies in the garden in early June, many of them grew to adulthood and filled the front yard with praying mantises feeding on insects damaging to plants.

  One afternoon before dinner, I found myself on my hands and knees watching their delicate heads arched against the hydrangea leaves in an attitude of prayer.

  Victor called, but only in the evening when my phone was turned off so he could leave a message. He had taken to calling me his “lucky charm.” Every message began, “Is this my lucky charm?” And each time I heard these words in his distinctive voice, I felt a panic coming on.

  The messages were brief—“I’m here or there,” he’d say. “Working for DTT tonight.” “Moving to a new place soon, but maybe not until September.” Street noises in the background, the scream of sirens. “Heading to a meeting with my DTT buddies.”

  I deleted his messages, not wishing to play them over and over as I did when I was attached to his voice, listening for signs of affection in the tone.

  Something like faith had come unraveled, and even his face or the sound of his voice had taken on a different texture. But I was trapped, and I put Victor Duarte out of mind whenever I could.

  Something was happening to me with Benjamin.

  August 3

  Dear Sophia,

  In answer to your questions:

  1. The hardest thing in my life? No contest. Losing my mother, although I didn’t know it at the time. It has defined me.

  2. My father? My father and I are not alike, which we accommodate in a formal way but with affection. I know he loves me, but often when we’re together, especially now I’m older, we sit in front of the television watching the news in pained silence. The spirit ignited in him by my mother died with her. When you are young and someone you love dies young, she becomes a perfect work of art.

  3. My biggest success? I hope it hasn’t happened yet.

  4. My biggest failure? The one that stays out of a long list of unkindnesses and temper tantrums and convenient lies is permanent, like a birthmark, which I also have in the shape of a small black pear on my shoulder. When I was in sixth grade, a new boy came to school whose mother had just died, and he had no father. Maybe because I was the only kid in the class whose mother had also died, and I wanted no competition in suffering, I took off after him with a group of other boys, and we taunted him until he stopped coming to school.

  5. Item #4 is my shame, and I can’t even believe I’m writing it down for you to read. You seem to be a lovely, generous, sweet woman and by now have changed your mind about me and will not be writing back.
r />   6. Love in my life? NA.

  On another note:

  Milo played the long lyrical passages of “Delphinium Evenings,” moving his body into the notes with exaggerated emotion.

  “Beautiful, yes?” he asked.

  We were alone in the living room, except for Bernard sitting quietly on the couch.

  “Beautiful,” I agreed.

  He stood, brushed off his trousers and reached out his arms to me.

  “Would you like to dance?”

  “It would be a pleasure,” I said.

  I moved into the circle of his arms. Milo, for all his awkwardness, was a graceful dancer.

  “Can you hear the music?” he asked.

  “In my head.”

  My parents were in the kitchen and must have seen us dancing, and I wondered what they were possibly thinking. How unlikely and strange this music between Uncle Milo and me must seem to them, how out of the ordinary for a man like Milo and a girl like me.

  “Can you write one more song for me?” I asked him after we had danced. “The last song before he comes.”

  “Of course, of course. Certainly, no question.”

  “I want it to be about the birth of butterflies,” I said.

  “Why not?” Milo’s hands fluttered above the keys, thinking. “If you’ll tell him you’re a biologist and not a composer.”

  I laughed. “Maybe I will if the occasion arises.”

  I got up from the piano bench so Milo could compose alone, as he preferred to do.

  “Claire?” he called as I was leaving the living room. “Can we tell your father about the composer when he arrives from Michigan?”

  “If he comes,” I said.

  “Oh, he’ll come. He’s probably on his way from Michigan now.”

  2

  Benjamin Reed arrived in Washington from Detroit three hours late, just before 6:00 P.M. on August 15. The weather was stormy from Chicago to the Atlantic, according to the ticket agent at Northwest Airlines with whom I spoke.

  I had been lying on Steven’s bed all day, pretending to read, on break between summer sessions from my job in the biology lab.

  In the kitchen my parents worked on a list of acquaintances from Steven’s past for the FBI. They had been given old class lists from our elementary school and junior high and high school. My father had paid very little attention to the names or faces of Steven’s friends, but Julia had a remarkable memory and could describe the friends and their parents and situations and the peculiarities of people like Adele Stockman, the mother of Rufus, who came to the first PTA meeting when Steven was in third grade wearing a red halter top and short shorts.

  Julia had left her home at the glass factory in early June, intending to return when she felt better. But her cold dragged on, and her weariness accentuated the sadness, and so she took a leave of absence until the fall.

  All day they sat in the kitchen, eating sourdough bread and olives, working on their lists. Only at night, with the prospect of sharing the double bed they’d always shared, did my father return to the hangar to work and then to sleep.

  Milo was putting together a selection of his own compositions, mainly the love songs between Benjamin and me, calling it Preludes to Night Music.

  After work Bernard sat on the couch in the living room, leafing through newsmagazines, looking at the photographs and listening to Milo.

  Faith was beginning to like her new job at the Commerce Department. She even mentioned having lunch with Charles Reed, and I wanted to ask her about it, but of course I couldn’t. One morning at breakfast, she asked me, in such a way that I could tell she’d been worrying about it, if I had told Steven that she’d been fired.

  “I didn’t want to be the one to tell him,” I said. “I thought he’d find out at dinner that night.”

  She was genuinely relieved and took my hand and kissed my fingers.

  We held on to small threads.

  A sense of the normal was returning to our lives. At least to my family’s life.

  I was skipping across a minefield. No predicting where my foot might fall.

  That morning I’d sat at Steven’s desk trying to discover what had happened to me by filling in the days on his calendar from April 4 through the middle of August. I marked the days in May and June I’d been with Victor Duarte in red ink and the musical correspondence with Benjamin in blue, and in those seventy days between early May and mid-August, I could see a graph, as if it were the angled lines of a heart monitor, of what had begun to feel like insanity.

  In Benjamin’s last song, he had added a postscript: “Trocadero’s at 23rd and S at 10 the evening August 15.”

  I looked up Trocadero’s in the phone book and drove by to check it out. It was a small, intimate place with a bar on the first floor, dining room on the second, low lights and white tablecloths, vases of tulips. I could imagine us there.

  At noon on August 15, Victor called my cell phone.

  “I thought I would have heard from you by now,” he said. “Any word?”

  “No word,” I said.

  “Can you meet tonight?”

  “With him?”

  “With me.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I didn’t have a plan from one hour to the next, hoping some sense of order might surface after I met Benjamin.

  “I’ll call you back when I know what I’m doing.”

  I clicked off the phone and buried my face in a pillow, closing out the light.

  Whoever Victor Duarte was, and of that I wasn’t sure, I knew that his mission was no longer mine.

  I lifted the pillow from my face just as Julia came in, without knocking as usual.

  “Eli Trueheart, do you remember?” She stood at the door. “Curly carrot hair, crooked teeth.”

  “I don’t remember Eli Trueheart.”

  “His parents wouldn’t allow him to come over to play at our house.”

  “What was the matter with our house?” I sat up in bed.

  “Nothing was the matter with our house,” she said. “The problem was with the Truehearts.”

  I tried to keep the door to Steven’s room closed, but Julia kept arriving with a new possibility for her collection, and gradually I realized I was actually pleased to listen to her accumulating list from the past, relieved to see my parents in the same room together, trying to make sense of our lives without Steven.

  Victor called again at three, but I didn’t pick up.

  “Benjamin is delayed until six because of the weather,” the voice mail began. There was a hollow silence, and I was just about to delete the message when Victor’s voice, a little desperate, came on again.

  “Call me as soon as you can. I have new and important evidence about Steven’s death.”

  I pressed “end” to turn off my cell phone and slipped it into my pocket.

  Faith stopped by Steven’s room when she got home from work and sat on the end of the bed.

  “Milo told me,” she said.

  It was hot, and her blue linen blouse was wet with perspiration, damp curls framed her face, and she looked as lovely and sweet as I used to think of her.

  “He told you about the music?”

  “About the young composer.”

  I blushed.

  “Milo says he’s coming today.”

  “He hasn’t called.”

  “He will,” she said, reaching out for me. “I’m so glad for you, Claire, after the awful year you’ve had, and I hope it works out.”

  I wanted to tell her who the young composer was, that he was Charles Reed’s son, that I was meeting him at Trocadero’s that night and that it wouldn’t work out between us. It could never work out.

  But I didn’t know what was true. Not about Victor Duarte or Benjamin or myself. Especially about myself.

  I felt as if I were holding on to the back of an old caboose, which seemed to be stopped in a station but was in fact traveling faster than the speed of sound. If I were to release my grip on th
e railing, I would catapult into space.

  There was no telling if I could survive.

  Benjamin called while Faith was still lying on the bed talking about her photographer boyfriend and how she hadn’t felt the desire to see him since Steven’s death.

  “Your phone?” she asked when it rang in the pocket of my pants. “Maybe it’s the call.”

  “Sophia?” he asked when I answered the call.

  “Yes, it is,” I said, struck by the name Sophia spoken aloud.

  “It’s so odd to hear your voice after all this time of knowing each other.”

  “It is.” I held the phone tight to my ear.

  “I hate to start like this, but I need to cancel tonight so I can be with my father,” he said. “Just tonight.”

  I was relieved. I hadn’t figured how I could sustain the charade of Sophia Lupe face-to-face with Benjamin, counting on my instinct. I hadn’t even thought what this meeting between us could be, and now I couldn’t imagine anything beyond the menace of a slow, linear advance of time.

  Maybe by tomorrow Benjamin would have changed his mind, would have reconsidered meeting at all, deciding that direct-mail music was a better way to go.

  “Can I call you later?” he was asking. “Maybe after eleven?”

  I drew my knees under my chin, avoiding Faith’s curious look.

  “I’m terrified,” he said.

  I rolled over onto my stomach and turned the cell off so I wouldn’t hear from Victor.

  “The composer?” Faith asked.

  “He can’t see me tonight.”

  “Men!” Faith got up, smoothed the bedspread. “Julia’s made coq au vin, and it smells yummy.” She toussled my hair.

  After dinner I stayed at the table with my parents, listening as they made their lists. They were working sequentially and had reached seventh and eighth grades at Milton Junior High.