In the Field
Page 4
Kate stared at her, unable to speak.
“I didn’t know where you were living.” Thea’s words drifted through the static filling Kate’s head.
“What does it matter?” Kate said.
Thea reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. For an instant, Kate thought Thea had written her a letter, and she began to tremble. But of course it wasn’t that. Her name, and the address of the house on Myrtle Street, were written in the flawless copperplate of her sister Laura.
“I thought it might be important,” Thea said.
Kate reached out and took the envelope. For a moment, their hands held on to opposite ends. Then Thea let go.
“Thanks for taking the trouble,” Kate said angrily.
“I had to be here anyway.”
Thea stood stiffly with her thin shoulders back, her braid swinging slightly. It was cold, and she was wearing a fitchskin coat Kate had never seen before. She remembered how they had agreed not to believe it would snow until they saw it with their own eyes. She wondered if Thea had thought of that when the first flakes began to fall, as she had. “I hope you didn’t have trouble finding a new place,” Thea said.
“No.”
Silence roiled between them. Somewhere in the building, footsteps rang out and faded away. Thump thump thump went Kate’s heart, like a mallet on mud.
“You left your navy skirt,” Thea said. “And a pair of stockings. And a tin of that tea you like.”
“I don’t care. Throw it away!”
The front door of the building banged open, and they both jumped back. A boy and a girl in letter jackets with snow on their shoulders came in, chattering. “You say that,” the girl was saying. “But you don’t know that.”
“I do,” the boy said. He was yellow-haired and as bright-eyed as a canary, his gaze fixed on the girl’s pink face. “I do know it! I’ve known it for a long time.”
“Prove it.” Smiling, the girl moved away from him.
The boy seized the girl’s hand and began to run, pulling her behind him up the stairs. Their laughter echoed down over the railings, circling slowly, then died away. Its brief bright presence had altered the temperature in the hall, leaving behind a chill.
After a moment, Thea said, “You didn’t have to leave the way you did, you know.”
“I couldn’t stay!” Kate said.
Thea’s head jerked around, but except for the dusty display cases of ragged butterflies and faded sand dollars, they were alone.
“You said—” Kate began. But she couldn’t repeat what Thea had said.
“I had to make up something to tell Lena,” Thea said.
“Why not just tell her the truth?” Kate said coldly.
“I cared about you!” Thea cried. “I never had a friend like you before! And you had to go and ruin it.” They glared at each other.
Kate tried to speak, but her brain felt slow and stupid. What if she said, I didn’t mean anything? Could things go back to the way they had been?
But she had meant something. Even if she didn’t completely understand what it was.
“I cared about you, too,” she said.
Words were no good. Kate knew it, and Thea—narrowing her eyes, turning to go—seemed to know it, too. Her taut braid swung like a lash as she stalked toward the door.
All day the letter in Kate’s pocket weighed her down. She worried the edge of the envelope with her thumb until her skin was raw, replaying in her mind the moment when she and Thea had both held it, when she had felt the heat coming off Thea’s skin in brutal waves. I cared about you! Kate imagined rewinding time, climbing down out of Krause’s window to the ground, picking up her suitcase and walking backward down the sidewalks and into the house on Myrtle Street. Backing into the little room that would again be hers. Falling onto the narrow bed beside Thea.
This time, she would just lie there. Lie still. Wouldn’t she? If she were given another chance?
That night, alone in her nest, she opened Laura’s letter.
Dear Kate,
I’m sure you’re having a marvelous time at college, but it would be nice if you could manage to write even one letter to let us know that you’re still alive. Even if you have forgotten about us, we have not, it may surprise you to hear, forgotten about you. And whatever you might think, we do care what happens to you. Mother is very worried. She’d never say so, but she goes around pulling furniture away from the walls and mopping baseboards, screaming if you get in her way. You might give a thought to those of us who are still here.
Thomas and I have found a beautiful house in Brooklyn Heights. Mother refuses even to discuss a wedding. She says it’s because I’m too young, but really it’s because of Papa. She can’t picture a wedding with him not there for her to lean on. Charlie is no help—you know how he is. He keeps threatening to run away to sea or some nonsense. You are lucky to be far away, but I hope you haven’t forgotten that you wouldn’t be there at all if I hadn’t persuaded Mother to let you go. So, take a few minutes from your exciting new life and write to her.
Your sister,
Laura
An unbearable pressure built up in Kate’s head and chest as she read the letter. The room, which she knew to be chilly, seemed far too hot. The stacks of crates and the towers of cages hemmed her in as though she herself were a mouse or a guinea pig shut up in one of the dusty, rusty enclosures. In the weeks since she had arrived in Ithaca, she had hardly thought about her family. Now they came flooding back to her: her tall, aggrieved, selfish sister with her two-carat diamond ring. Her watchful, sensitive brother who was nowhere as cocky as he pretended. Her beak-nosed screech owl of a mother with her flat hard chest and her big moist eyes, operatic and insomniac. These qualities had been kept in check, somewhat, by their gentle, polymath, physician father. Their mother would never forgive him getting himself killed.
Mrs. Croft had always been prone to hysteria. One of Kate’s earliest memories was of her mother’s bony arms and camphor smell as she caught Kate up and squeezed her close, weeping and shrieking about something. Who knew what? Kate learned early to stay out of the way when her mother got that wild-eyed look.
Kate flung open the storage room door and stumbled into the hall. Up and back she walked, up and back, over the hard tiles that were nearly invisible in the dimness.
The feeling of suffocation in her mother’s embrace, like being buried alive.
Was that why her father had volunteered to go to war?
Was that why, even before that, he was seldom home, always at the hospital, or his medical office, or out making house calls? Sometimes he let Kate go with him, and she would sit in the front seat of the parked Ford as the sky emptied of light, daydreaming until he came back out, whistling tunelessly, his black bag swinging from his hand.
“You bored, pumpkin?”
She would shake her head.
“You’re a patient little thing. Ready to go home?”
“Can we get an egg cream?”
He would pull out his watch and frown at it, making some sort of calculation. Then—sometimes—they would go to the neighborhood drugstore and sit at the counter. Sometimes he would tell her about his patients: rich women and waitresses, sailors and shopkeepers. He might tell her about a tricky diagnosis, talking to himself, she knew, using language she didn’t understand, but she didn’t mind. She liked the sound of his voice talking. Liked the syllables of the big words loosed into the air like balloons. She could feel the pleasure he took in laying out the logic that had led him, step by step, to the right conclusion.
“You have to think things through,” he liked to say.
She thought she knew what that meant. Certainly she knew the meanings of each of the words. But in his mouth, with his warm, tired eyes gazing down at her, the sentence seemed to have for him a kind of particular luster. A grand significa
nce she couldn’t quite grasp.
At last he’d reach into his pocket, jingle his change. “Your mother will be missing us,” he’d say.
It was impossible to know whether that was true or not.
All her life, it seemed, Kate’s mother had wanted something from Kate that she could not give. First, she had wanted Kate to be a boy—it was bad enough that she had one girl already—but there was nothing Kate could do about that. Later, when Kate behaved, in some ways, like a boy after all—playing baseball, bringing snakes home from the woods, sprawling in an unladylike way on the sofa—her mother liked it even less.
Mostly, though, what her mother hated was that Kate liked to be left alone. Even when she was very small—two years old, or maybe three—she could sit contently by herself for an hour or more. Not playing, not babbling, just … what? Thinking. Looking. Existing in time.
“Stop sitting like a lump!” her mother would cry. “Go do something.”
Why did her mother care? What was she bothered by, exactly?
Then, when the tall figure stalked toward her, Kate would run away shrieking from the fierce, grabbing hands.
But she always let her father swing her up onto his shoulders. She liked being taller than everyone else, being a kind of extension of her father, like the flower at the top of a stalk. She liked the view from up there, the tops of people’s heads and the sky almost close enough to touch.
In front of her now, a door swung open. A craggy figure loomed up, haloed in yellow lamplight, its eyes black knots in its face. Kate swallowed a cry of fear.
“Miss Croft?” the astonished figure said.
Dr. Krause! It was his gaping office she stood in front of, gasping. As if, by thinking about him, she had summoned him!
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Did you get accidentally locked in?”
Kate seized the suggestion. “Yes!” she said. “I stayed late and then …” But she stopped, looking up into his shadowy face. She did not want to lie to him. “Actually,” she said. “I’m living here.”
“Living?” he repeated, as though it were an English word he didn’t know. He looked her up and down: her wrinkled clothes, her bird’s-nest hair. “Young lady, you can nicht be leben here! It’s impossible.”
Kate held his gaze. “I am, though,” she said. “It is possible.” Together they looked toward the open door of the storage room halfway up the hall.
Dr. Krause coughed. He shuffled in bedroom slippers along the corridor toward the parallelogram of tea-colored light. He peered around the door of the storage room, then looked back at Kate. “How long?” he demanded. “How long have you been living here? Like a stow-a-way!”
“I’m not hurting anyone.”
“That’s not the point. There are rules, you know, Fräulein Croft.” Then he saw the microscope, perched on the old, scarred, lamed wooden desk. Next to it, her notebook lay open to a diagram of a magnified shred of a hardboiled egg she’d brought from the cafeteria. She waited for him to accuse her of theft to compound her offense of breaking and entering; to call the dean; to send her back home to her mother. But he said nothing. He shuffled forward in his backless leather slippers, picked up the notebook, and held her sketch to his eyes. He tapped the pockets of his cardigan till he located his glasses. Pushing them onto his nose, he peered closer, frowning behind his beard. In her mind, she saw what he was seeing: the carefully shaded globules linked together in irregular peninsulas, the secret geography of egg. Licking the pad of his big index finger, he flipped slowly backward through the pages, peering at her drawings of the fingernail, of the hair. Of the variegated, irregular islands of dust.
At last the old man set the book down and blinked at her over the tops of his glasses. “These are good,” he said.
“Thank you,” Kate said.
“Come,” he said. “We will talk.”
Dr. Krause’s office smelled of coffee dregs and tobacco and dried-up oranges. Stacks of books teetered on shelves or lay splayed open on water-ringed tables, bristling with scraps of paper. More paper was pinned to the walls with long rusty pins: charts labeled in odd, slanted handwriting; graphs; lists of binominal names; typed letters; old brownish photographs of bearded men in antiquated hats. Towers of blue books, some faded nearly beige by time, slumped on the windowsill amid the green and purple foliage of potted plants. How could anyone think clearly in here?
Dr. Krause put a coffee pot on a hot plate, lifted an armful of books from a chair, and indicated that Kate should sit. “So!” he said. “You have been living in that storage room? I work here late, many nights, and I have never seen a sign of you.”
The thought of him here, when she’d believed herself to be alone, horrified her. “But the building is locked,” she said.
“I have a key.”
He shuffled over to the hot plate, took the lid off the coffee pot, peered in, and poured them each a cup. The coffee was thin yet sludgy, barely lukewarm. Krause took a sip and rattled the cup back into its saucer. “Your drawings are very clear and precise,” he said.
Kate blinked at him, unsure what to say.
“You have a good eye.” He drew the final word out so that it seemed to contain a multitude of syllables. “Not that you had any business taking a microscope,” he added.
“I was careful!” Kate said. “No one was using it.”
“And if I should come into your room and take your diamond ring when you weren’t wearing it, and put it on my hand, and you found out!” he said. “How would you feel then?”
“I don’t have a diamond ring,” Kate said.
Dr. Krause waved her remark away. “I am thinking to offer you a position,” he said.
Kate stared at his wrinkled face and thin, crooked smile.
“I am making a small study of the coloration of the coleus plant. Plectranthus scutellarioides.”
“I thought—” Kate began. What had she thought? That he was merely a laboratory instructor?
“I have a little space in the greenhouses where I grow my plants. I always have a student or two helping me. A lot of the work is just basic care and maintenance. Routine, you know. But crucial. There is also the taking of measurements. And making charts and drawings. The assistant I have now is not so good at this. He scribbles.”
“I see,” Kate said, trying to keep up.
“I couldn’t pay you,” Dr. Krause said. “But you might find it interesting.” From under his tangled eyebrows he looked at her curiously. Patiently. The way, she supposed, he might look at one of his coleus plants.
Kate swallowed another sip of the terrible coffee. The cup was fine white china, gold-rimmed, with a delicate handle shaped like an ear. It made her think he must have had a wife once, though his presence here late at night in his bedroom slippers suggested he didn’t now. “All right,” she said.
Krause beamed. “Very good! But: you must move out of the storage room into a real place of living. A decent place. Do you understand? That is my condition.”
Kate looked around at Dr. Krause’s water-ringed desk and his stacks of books, the faded journals piled on the dusty rug. There didn’t seem to be much difference between his office and the storage room. But she said, “I understand.”
CHAPTER 6
Krause delivered Kate to the greenhouse the following afternoon. “Thatch will show you the ropes,” he said.
Kate recognized the lab partner of Jimmy McFadden: tall, gawky, sandy-haired John Thatcher, whose trousers were always too short. “You’re the girl who promised to make Jimmy McFadden disappear,” he said, holding out his hand. “Yet I still see him all over the place.”
Kate gave him her hand, which he crushed in his. There was probably twice as much of him as there was of her, even though he was so skinny. “I thought you were friends,” she said.
“Friends is a strong word.”
“Professor Whitaker is doing interesting work with corn,” Thatch said, running his big hand along the sword-like leaf of the nearest maize plant.
Kate didn’t know who Professor Whitaker was. “Dr. Krause said corn is good for genetics experiments,” she said, showing off. Beginning to perspire in the tropical warmth, she unzipped her coat. Her long limp hair clung to her neck and straggled over her shoulders. “Because you get clues from the seeds a year before the plant comes up.”
“Krause is okay,” Thatch said. “But everybody wants to work with Professor Whitaker.”
“Just okay?” A few days before, she had never even dreamed of being a research assistant, yet here she was feeling disappointed.
“You have to start somewhere,” Thatch said cheerfully, stopping in front of a row of richly colored coleus plants: red and amaranth, flamingo-pink and moss-green. “It’s always summer in here, which is going to be nice in January. And February. And March! And there’s lots to learn. Something unexpected is always happening. Of course, sometimes that’s because someone made a mistake. Got the plants mixed up, or didn’t do the protocol properly. On the other hand,” he went on, his eyes glinting, “it might be because you have stumbled onto something.”
Kate tossed her coat in a corner. The warm moist air filled her lungs, and she felt the oxygen energizing her cells as though the plants were making it just for her.
Krause’s experiments, Thatch explained, had to do with the patterns on hybrid coleus leaves. “He crosses certain plants with certain other plants, then tests them to see how sunlight affects the color.”