Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He found his neighbor in distress outside her front door, poking a broom handle into the rafters of the piazza. A black cat emerged eventually and slipped like a dark spill down the ivied pillar, carrying away something feathered in its jaws.

  “I despise these cats. Are they yours?”

  “I’m relieved to say they are not. Only the dogs, who have finally learned to tolerate their own masters.”

  “You may send them back to me anytime. They were good at keeping these devils away. I hate to resort to extreme measures but I may be forced. Cats have been known in these parts to commit suicide, Mr. Greenwood.”

  Thatcher took a step backward, deciding his neighbor looked capable of murder. Scowling up at the rafters, wearing a stained work apron over her dress, batting irritably at threads of dark hair that escaped from the twist at her nape, she was a sight outside of the commonplace.

  She smoothed the apron and seemed to return to herself. “Would you like to come in?”

  “I sense it may not be the best moment.”

  She shook her head. “The damage is done. I was in the parlor mounting a little fern just now and heard my friends out here in distress. As any parents would be, losing their young. I’m heartsick that I heard the warning too late.”

  “Survival of the fittest,” Thatcher consoled. “Nature red in tooth and claw.”

  “I’m sure you know you are quoting Tennyson, a sentimental poet. There is nothing of nature in these felines. They’re kept by cosseting human masters, pampered to perfect health and then turned loose on the neighborhood to terrorize poor wildlings who worked so hard to make a nest and brood their young.”

  Her dark eyes drilled into Thatcher, who contained no adequate response.

  “And then they go home at night to lap up their milk and sleep in soft cushions. It isn’t a fair fight.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You think I’m as sentimental as Tennyson. But that pair over there shrieking in the Judas tree have already lost three nests to the cats this summer. It is too late for them to be brooding this far into autumn, just a few weeks ahead of migration. The poor birds were desperate to have one reproductive success before winter.”

  “I understand your misery. No one could mistake those cries for anything but despair.” Thatcher gazed at the Judas tree and his own loss welled up unexpectedly: a child so briefly in his future, so permanently now in his past.

  “I believe they built their last dwelling here in my piazza thinking I would help protect it. And I failed.” She held the broom under her arm now, a soldier off guard.

  “Mrs. Treat. You did try.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “These catbirds are particular friends. They’re companionable and intelligent, and the male is the best musician of the grove. I’ve taken great pains to get this pair to trust me. I feed them whortleberries. Please come in.”

  Thatcher didn’t point out that by making pets of the birds she was undermining her argument against the cosseted cats. The woman’s grief was substantial. He followed her into the parlor, where she showed him a chair near her desk and went off to the kitchen. He heard her speaking quietly, giving some instructions to her girl.

  He looked around at a parlor full of sunlight and potted plants, half-read books lying open, botanical drawings set among the clutter of portraits on the mantelpiece, and no embroidery to be seen. He felt at home there. Had not felt that way entirely in any room, he realized, since coming to Vineland. He had thought himself at odds in a house of women, but so was this one: a second pair of small muddy boots rested today on the hearth beside Mrs. Treat’s. He stared at the four little brogues feeling a strange pair of emotions, protectiveness and envy.

  A row of Venus flytraps in clay pots lined the bay windowsill awaiting their ration of flies, he hoped, and not the flesh of Mrs. Treat. He could not name her botanical essence, but it was not a flytrap. She was a tree of some kind, upward reaching and self-contained. Thatcher got up and looked in on the tower-building spiders in their candy jars. The houses remained beautifully intact but the landladies again were shy. He returned to his assigned chair. On Mrs. Treat’s desk in the mess of correspondence and half-dismantled ferns he noticed a small framed photograph of a man in a bowler and tied cravat. The portrait seemed especially placed there, perhaps plucked from the clan on the mantelpiece. He leaned close for a better look: the mysterious Dr. Treat, he presumed. Aquiline nose, handsome moustache, dark, curling hair. The man was striking. A bit younger than Mrs. Treat, in this portrait at any rate. Thatcher had heard he was older.

  At her appearance in the doorway he affected interest in the mounted ferns.

  “Here we are,” she said happily. “That’s a rare little Schizaea pusilla I brought from the damps yesterday. Have you seen the Pine Barrens, since we spoke of them?”

  “Sadly, no. I’m afraid I’m being kept very busy under the guise of gainful employment. I hope to take my students there one day, if I can extract permission from Professor Cutler.”

  “Of course. The high school.” She sat down facing him, still in her apron, setting both hands on her knees. “How are your pupils, Mr. Greenwood? Can you yet see a light within them?”

  Thatcher was unexpectedly moved by the question. No one else had asked. Rose seemed to have no curiosity about his work. “They wear pinafores, nearly all,” he said. “Nine girls against a mere three boys in my advanced science class, about the same balance in my introductory. I think every day of your advice, that educating these girls can free them from a wearisome dread of nature. It’s becoming my fondest hope.”

  “So many girls studying the sciences. How uplifting.”

  “So I thought, until I noticed the imbalance is general at the high school. It’s mostly young ladies who are allowed to persist the extra two years in their studies. Boys of that age can hardly be spared from their labors for the sake of a mere diploma.”

  Mrs. Treat made an odd little smile. “Of course. Not even here in Vineland, allegedly founded on principles of vigorous health and flourishing minds.”

  “Did these principles influence you and Dr. Treat in your decision to move here?”

  “We were influenced,” she said carefully. “I saw the Barrens and forests as opportunities for studying natural history. My husband was eager to expand his studies of spiritualism. He knew men here in the Free Thinking Society who promised eager audiences for his lectures.”

  “What sort of lectures does he make?”

  Mrs. Treat looked briefly at the ceiling, then at the door. “He has developed theories about the ethereal realm. What he calls his nebular hypothesis of the tides and planets and so forth. Gravity plays no part in it.”

  The man of ether, the woman of evidence: Thatcher contemplated a match possibly more precarious than his own. “I assumed he was a medical doctor.”

  “You are not alone. But Joseph did not study medicine. He did not make any formal studies at all. He worked as an assistant to medical men during the war.”

  “As I did! How surprising. But assistant is overstating it in my case. I was an errand boy in the Boston hospital. In retrospect I think they only let me tend to the lost causes. I’m sure my experiences weren’t equal to those of Dr. Treat.”

  “I would not be sure of it. And yet you do not come to town calling yourself Doctor Greenwood.”

  The girl arrived with the teapot and Mrs. Treat rose to help her, clearing a space on the crowded desk for saucers and cake. Thatcher wondered whether he had any hope of rescuing their conversation from cat murder and magniloquent husbands. The overcast subject of Cutler would only drag her day from bad to worse.

  “Mr. Greenwood, this is Selma. She is a great help in the kitchen as you see, and equally proficient with spade and plant presses. She often accompanies me on collecting expeditions.”

  Selma gave a prompt curtsey. A pale, fuzzy little mullein of a girl, nearly as young as Polly, he guessed, but more accustomed to work
.

  “Your mistress has sung such praises of the Pine Barrens,” he said, “I’m impatient to see them. I hope I can join you soon as an assistant to the assistant. I am very good at carrying things and getting deplorably muddy.”

  Selma made a squashed little grin and glanced at Mrs. Treat.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “You may go. Please take some of the eggs to your mother, I hope she is improved.”

  Mrs. Treat poured the tea. Thatcher drew his chair close to the desk and accepted his cup, hoping this would bolster his neighbor’s spirits.

  “She seems a bright girl. Though young, to be sent to work.”

  “Two sisters even younger than Selma they’ve put out to service. The poor family. After one failed crop their berry farm has gone back to Landis. Repossessed, I assume. They are living now with no proper home.”

  “But she has one here,” he offered. “I’m sure your influence is a great comfort.”

  “I try to teach Selma a bit of botany. I’m afraid she has no other hope of schooling.” Mary set her cup down and gazed at it, retreating into herself. Her eyes drifted toward the photograph on the desk. The disconsolate mask returned.

  “I’m sorry for the lost fledglings,” he said. “Your own, I mean. The little birds.”

  She looked up. “Oh, dear. You saw me in high dudgeon. You’ll be reporting to the neighborhood that I put out strychnine for the cats. To be honest I have thought of it, but could never do it. I am too weak hearted.”

  “Dear lady, in my household I’ve seen higher dudgeon over damages hardly visible to the eye. Yours will never be mentioned again.”

  She smiled, but still looked sad.

  “I’ve come at a bad time. I only meant to discuss a book, and that can wait for another day.”

  “You have. Not only on account of the cats.” She faltered, taking note of the books on his lap. “I’ve had an upset of the most agonizing kind, for which one can only blame oneself. I’ve made a foolish mistake.” Her glance went again to the portrait on her desk. Thatcher pretended now to notice it.

  “Is this your husband?”

  “Oh, no. It is not. That is the state entomologist of Missouri, Mr. Charles Valentine Riley.”

  “Indeed.” Not for the first time in this parlor he thought of Mr. Carroll’s Alice and her Wonderland. Polly had been reading it to him aloud.

  “He is editor of the American Entomologist, ever since the untimely death of Mr. Walsh. But perhaps you knew. Do you read the journal, Mr. Greenwood?”

  “I haven’t to now. I should happily borrow it if you have copies.” Thatcher considered the prospect of a publication entirely devoted to insects, illustrated, gaining entry to his home. It would have to hide in the petticoats with Edgar Allan Poe. “I take it you and the editor are acquainted.”

  “Mr. Riley and I have exchanged letters nearly every day for years, since I began contributing to the journal. He was a wonderful help in guiding my writing style at first, and we’ve grown rather avid in assisting one another with identifications. I often set his little portrait here on my desk as a custom of our correspondence.”

  “As is natural, among friends and devoted colleagues. You must have many of both, Mrs. Treat. I understand you are widely published.”

  “It is my livelihood, yes. The American Entomologist pays good sums, rather better than the popular magazines. They pay not just for articles but also for specimens.” Again she glanced at the books in Thatcher’s hands. “But it may be this line of work doesn’t interest an educator.”

  “Writing I can imagine for myself, eventually. I have done illustration work, mostly in my years of assisting medical men, before I was able to go to university. I find I greatly prefer botanicals to sketching cadavers.” He could never tell Rose he’d laid eyes on a cadaver, let alone recorded countless autopsies with his pencils, but Mary took the news calmly. “It would all rest on my making a discovery worth the trouble. An educator must be an investigator first. Specimen work, I hadn’t considered.”

  “It helps keep my coal bin filled, I don’t mind telling you. And of course it is great sport to be outdoors on a mission of discovery. Today Mr. Riley has asked for living larvae and pupae of curculionidae, our little gall weevils.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the making of a bad day.”

  “No. It isn’t. He addressed something else in the letter, a professional matter. I’m pained to speak of it. But Mr. Greenwood, I am lost here. You presume I have masses of friends. But I find myself now with no proper colleague to help guide my hand.”

  Thatcher hesitated. “Well then. Please feel free to keep the matter private, or speak of it. Whatever best puts your mind at ease.”

  After the briefest pause she nodded. “I will not be at ease unless I speak of it to someone. Mr. Riley scolded me for failing to credit illustrations he made for me, in an article I published. He suggests it was an appropriation.” She avoided Thatcher’s eye. “He is so supportive, Mr. Greenwood, and I behaved as a criminal.”

  “Not at all. I’m sure the oversight was accidental.”

  “Oh, it was! And he knows.” Now fully bent on her confession, she took up a letter from her desk and read: “I know it was not your intention to fail in giving credit, but you gain nothing and lose much in not providing against the neglect. Don’t get into bad habits! You are laboring hard with brain and pen, and it is only because I appreciate your work and wish to see you successful that I indulge in remarks like the above.”

  She looked to Thatcher cautiously as she lay down the letter on the desk.

  “There you are,” Thatcher said. “He said it himself: no harm done to your friendship. He values you as a professional colleague and begs you to see yourself in the same light.” Thatcher was distracted by words he could see plainly written across the bottom of the letter: P.S. A propos Mr. T? Is he still separated from you?

  “I wish it could be so. That I could see myself in the same light.”

  “Mrs. Treat, I say. You count Charles Darwin as a friend. Some of my peers in Boston would leap at that alliance over a personal correspondence with the Almighty.”

  She smiled, but again, so sadly. “And they would have known how to comport themselves well in either arrangement. Not indulge in stealing the work of others and getting in bad habits.”

  “You speak as if your friend has called you a common thief, but he has not. It was simple oversight and nothing more.”

  “Simple and dim witted. I feel like a child caught with crumbs on my face. It did not even occur to me to put his name to the illustration. And you, an illustrator yourself! You must feel the crime as one against your own.”

  Thatcher looked at the slender hands, ragged at the cuticles, folded on her desk as if in prayer. The hands of a worker. “Mrs. Treat, please show yourself some of the kindness you harbor for the birds in your garden. You only forgot.”

  “No, the truth is I did not think. Normally I submit my work with my own illustrations, or those made for me by my dear little friend Phoebe Campbell. This was my first publication assisted by a man of Charles Riley’s prominence. You would have known the difference. You went to university, where you learned not only the laws of science but also these subtle rules between men. Debts and attributions.”

  “You haven’t been to university?”

  Her startled look made him wish he could swallow his tongue.

  “That was a thoughtless question. I apologize. It’s only that …” He looked around the room, at a loss to explain the clemency he found there. “In your house I’ve seen so many impossible things become plausible.”

  She blinked very slowly, as if in pain.

  “And one does hear of it,” he added. “I read that Mr. Darwin is helping to press the case of seven women in Edinburgh, all qualified to study medicine.”

  “I pray they may succeed. I am only a parson’s daughter sent to a finishing school in Ohio.”

  Mercy of Christ. He could picture her as a
girl dipping doleful curtseys before some horrid Ohioan Mrs. Marberry. “And in spite of that obstruction you’ve claimed renown as a scientist. I am prostrate with admiration, Mrs. Treat. It’s the truth.”

  “I claim renown in the purgatory of a ladies’ botanical society, where I am begged each Wednesday to disclose the rules of a pleasing flower arrangement.”

  Thatcher had a terrible urge to take both her hands into his. In this house, impossible things. “Please let me speak bluntly. The first day I sat in this chair and held in hand a letter from Charles Darwin, addressed to Mary Treat, I felt so bloated with envy I couldn’t have drowned in a well. Since then I’ve learned you are a respected colleague not just of Darwin but many men whose presence would strike me mute. Professor Asa Gray, whom I worshipped from across Harvard yard. I’m doing my best to behave as a good neighbor and lace up my adipose envy into a corset of admiration. But I would trade my university for your finishing school if it brought me a tenth of your success.”

  “A corset of admiration, Mr. Greenwood.” Finally a smile arrived with no sadness in it. A shy, elfin twinkle.

  “I live in a house of women,” he said. “You’ll find me far too handy with a female metaphor. I can speak dress patterns in several languages, and outline the case that a new bonnet is more useful than an impermeable roof.”

  “That is impressive, Mr. Greenwood. I find myself handy only with plant presses and digging spades and the bailiwick of mud.”

  “Are we not peculiar birds?” He reached out and touched her sleeve, and that was all. But the hand that dropped back to the books in his lap was trembling.