He said nothing. He said nothing for maybe twenty seconds. A second for every year he’d been gone. He squinted, looking at the Freak on the table. He looked as though he was working through something, like a chess player only going back over old manoeuvres made rather than ones he was about to make.
‘So they’re pimping butterflies.’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘The mother was always trying to persuade me to sell them.’
‘You mean Edith?’
‘Yes. How is she? The mother.’
‘She’s well.’
‘As vivid as a malachite. As volatile as a sprite. The Appalachian Cleopatra. She came from a family that would shoot you rather than argue with you. But she had that Southerner’s tolerance of the aberrant – which I am. Still a fanatic? She was always trying to convert me.’
‘No.’
‘Should never have yoked myself to that woman, to any woman. It was a mistake marrying her. Having children also.’
I glanced at the sand timer. There were things I had to know and he seemed to be opening the gate a little.
‘Why was it a mistake?’
He picked up the Freak and turned it in his hand. ‘Twenty years ago, whilst looking for these, I had what some might call a revelation. I realized that if I was to achieve my ambition I could not serve both family and work. I had to put these creatures above everything else. Wife. Children. Wealth and Health. Edith was not the wrong person. Marriage was just the wrong idea. Those children were the spawn of a bad idea. Quite literally ill-conceived.’
I couldn’t tell quite if this was a confession of remorse. He delivered it all so deadpan. He didn’t sound like a man who had been rolling the rock of regret up the mountain for the last twenty years. But I was warming to him.
‘Why couldn’t you . . . do both?’
‘Entomologists are like mountaineers. They’re not doing it for the view. It’s all or nothing. I wasn’t a hobbyist. So I chose all. And, since then, I have been able to pursue my work – without interruption or a false sense of duty. The man who creates or discovers something does not do it by chance. I did not catch this butterfly by chance, Mr Jones.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
I was brought up to revere intelligence above all else. (‘Are they intelligent?’ I hear my own father asking when I asked if I could bring a friend home. My father’s idea of heaven was a library packed with people who could complete The Times’ crossword in one sitting.) So I was happy to indulge his deficiencies. We can forgive a thousand flaws in a person if they produce something great. We overlook their obsessions, infidelities, narcissisms, social ineptitudes if they rise above the rest of us in achieving something no one else can. And Shelby Wolff had done that. I was sitting with ‘America’s greatest living leppar’. The more we talked the more the conviction grew that Edith had misrepresented and maligned her ex-husband and deprived her children of a connection they might have enjoyed.
He stood up quite suddenly and walked across the room and started looking at the book shelves for something. He pulled a book out and then another, and then reached an arm into the gap and produced a bottle of whisky. He found a glass and poured a triple. He fetched a second glass and poured me a single. He screwed the cap back on and sat down again.
‘Despite what people tell you, blends are more interesting than single malts.’
I raised my glass but he held his, just staring at it. He used up another precious minute of my thirty with another cogitating silence. I suppose he had a lot of catching up to do. He then stood up again and fetched a set of black accounting books. He sifted through them and pulled one out. He opened it and flicked through it to the page he was looking for and then showed it to me.
‘There. Bottom of the page. That’s the butterfly you brought today.’
And there it was: ‘Blue morpho. (Abb) March, 11. 1967.’
‘So what butterflies was he arrested for selling?’
‘Joe? Well, the Big Four. And a set of Palos Verdes blues. Which you mentioned in your talk today. I was there. With your daughter Isabelle.’
I waited to see if he’d bite on that.
‘I don’t even have to look up the Palos Verdes blues,’ he said. ‘I caught them in the summer of 1966 near Long Beach. The Big Four I’d have to check, as I caught a number of them several times over and all in different countries of course.’
‘So you can prove the butterflies Joe sold were caught by you?’
‘Of course. Where are these butterflies now?’
‘At the house. In the Catskills. I brought a catalogue of the collection. Put together by your elder daughter, Isabelle. She has for the last few years worked on setting and mounting them into a collection.’
Again he didn’t take the daughter bait. But he flicked through the catalogue, using a magnifying glass. He took off his glasses and cleaned them absently, squinting, widening his eyes into a stretch big enough to take it in.
‘These have been mounted in the old way.’
‘Isabelle mounted the entire collection that way, Mr Wolff.’
‘They have been well maintained,’ he said. ‘I see she’s used the old British method.’
‘Yes. Do you have a favourite lep?’ I asked, wincing at how crass this question must have sounded to him, but wanting some morsel to take back to Isabelle.
‘The angled castor. Ariadne ariadne. An ugly and unassuming creature.’
‘Well, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, as Shakespeare said.’
‘I believe it was Margaret Wolfe Hungerford.’
‘Right. Yes, of course.’
‘She’s done a fine job.’
I thought of Isabelle a few minutes away. I wished she had been there to receive this accolade.
‘She’s here, Mr Wolff. If you want to meet her?’
‘Who?’
‘Your elder daughter, Isabelle.’
‘I only have one daughter. To my knowledge.’
I could feel the breath of Mary’s ‘told you so’ at my prickling neck and then a wave of sadness for her. But I decided not to enter that dispute at this delicate moment.
‘Yes. I meant Isabelle. Would you like to meet her?
‘Perhaps when the provenance of the butterflies has been established.’
‘Of course. So you will help?’
‘We don’t want these butterflies falling into the wrong hands.’
I handed him Moroni’s card. And Joe’s case number. ‘This is the agent at the FWA who is responsible for arresting Joe. The hearing is on November 5th. You will be called as a witness, for Joe. If you can match your records to the butterflies they have in their possession then Joe will go free.’
He looked at the card.
‘This is . . . wonderful, Mr Wolff. Really. Isabelle and Joe . . . they’ll be very grateful. Thank you.’
Finally, his eyes welled with tears. What were those eyes filling with? Regret? Anger? Sadness? It didn’t matter. It was enough they were filling with something! He had a heart after all.
He then handed me back the Freak. ‘I thought I’d never see them again,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In which we return home and the good news turns bad.
‘He’s going to help, Iz!’
My excitement echoed in the nave of the cavernous chapel where I found Isabelle sitting in an attitude that could have been despair or prayer. She snapped from whatever conversation she’d been having with her maker and looked at me. She was, in that moment, like a little girl, expectant of good things and wanting the promise of happy endings. I realized that, at this point in time, I had exchanged more words with her father than she had. I actually knew more about him than she did. ‘He still has the notebooks recording every butterfly he’s ever caught. He even showed me the entry for this little Freak! And he was hugely impressed at what you’d done with the collection. Knew exactly what method you’d used and everything. And then, right at the end, he s
aid that he’d be happy to meet you after the hearing. I mean, he was eccentric in that brilliant sort of way, and there’s no doubting where his priorities lay – the work comes first for sure. He had me on a timer, for God’s sake!’
‘You liked him?’
‘Well, he was not the man I expected. Or the man your mother described. He was obsessive but admitted that he had put the work before everything. Said he was unsuited to being a husband or a father. He hinted at regret – for not having seen you grow up. Just at the end. After I’d asked him if he’d meet you. He said, “I thought I’d never see them again.” ’
‘He said that?’
‘He did.’
If I had any doubts about the accuracy of what I was saying, the look on Isabelle’s face was enough to reassure me I’d done the right thing in saying this.
‘He’s not the monster, Iz.’
She looked as if she was going to cry but she held the tears in. I put out my hand, placing it over hers. And she let it rest there. That small surface area of hand was the whole world for a few moments; I took her hand then dared a squeeze and to my delight she returned it with her own pressure. It was a touch lovelier – more meaningful – than the full union of flesh I’d experienced with Mary. Mary would have set fire to us both if she’d seen it, but I no longer cared about that prohibition. I lifted Isabelle’s hand to my mouth and kissed it, old school.
‘All will be well, Iz.’
I won’t lie, the sense of being the hero in my own adventure was at its peak on that drive back to the Catskills. I had killed nearly all my ducks in a row: I had succeeded in getting Joe’s father to attend the hearing; I was going to help bring about Joe’s liberation, not just from jail but from years of pounding the road potentially by saving the million-dollar deal that the zealous Moroni had threatened to wreck; I was going to free Isabelle from her mother’s grip and facilitate a potential reunion for Joe and Isabelle with the father that had been denied them by twisted maternal prohibitions. My hunch – that Edith had held history captive and denied her children access to and a possible relationship with the man (whose only offence was a dedication to his work) out of bitterness – had been proven right. As I drove, I talked excitedly of what this might all mean, how good it would be, for everyone. I painted a picture of a great reconciliation, where all misunderstandings were understood, all wrongs turned right, and where everyone had been set free from the prison of the past. Yes, a part of me did wonder if perhaps I had exaggerated the depths of Isabelle’s father’s regret in an effort to say what I thought she wanted to hear, and in order to bring about what I wanted to happen; but I believed I had done the right thing and that things would turn out for the best. For all my cynical pretentions, I had a simple faith in – and an expectation of – a happy ending.
While I described this new world, Isabelle sat in silence, pale again and sad with a melancholy recognition that things had changed.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For helping Joe. For asking for my father’s help. For going without me. I think it was always going to need someone from “outside” to help us break free.’
‘You think you’ll meet him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think he’d have been happy to meet you. Both of you.’
‘Both?’
‘You and Joe.’
‘He didn’t mention Mary?’
I’d almost forgotten this detail. ‘When I described you as his elder daughter, he said he only had one.’
‘He didn’t know?’
‘He spoke of Edith’s “understandable anger” at his long absences. He seemed to be implying that he didn’t blame her for not wanting to have anything to do with him. Maybe he knows but wasn’t saying. But Mary was right.’
‘Poor Mary.’ Isabelle seemed to accept this as confirmation.
‘You suspected it?’
‘I thought it possible. But chose to believe Ma. It’s one of the main reasons I didn’t want to meet him. I didn’t want to find out.’
‘Will you tell Mary?’
‘It’s not for me to tell her.’
‘How are we going to play things? When we get back?’
‘Ma will need to know where we have been sooner or later. And if my father comes to the hearing and she finds out, which she will, then it’s best to confront her now.’
‘She doesn’t have to know about you coming with me. We can say I acted independently. After all, you didn’t actually meet him.’
‘It can’t be put back now.’
I thought about persuading Isabelle to keep her convictions in her britches until the hearing but she was resolved. Her tolerance and her loyalty could not hold off the truth of these things any longer.
‘My days of grace for Ma are over.’
I reached across and took her hand and she let me hold it while I drove one-handed. She looked ahead and in profile I could see her lovely neck, all pale against her black hair, and the little freckles around her nose. All the marking you see and care about when you get closer to someone.
‘You’re a rare specimen, Iz. I’m just sorry I’ve been so slow to see it.’
‘There are more dazzling specimens around.’
‘I’m no longer dazzled by her now.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of Mary.’
‘Oh?’
‘I was thinking of Joe. I think it’s Joe you really love.’
I laughed. I couldn’t deny it.
Those hours on the road home with Isabelle, before the unravelling that followed, were among the sweetest of my butterflying days. We had made an unexpected, if delicate connection – our individual needs and wants finding common ground and roots; I know that it was partly the subliminal themes of lost fathers that joined us, but it was more than this; I was finally able to appreciate her for who she was rather than who I was trying to make her be; after the manipulations and stimulations of Mary, the honesty and the calm were liberating, and it was this freedom that conceived a desire. Not the quick-shallow satisfaction of a lust, but a more profound feeling of gladness that I was with her and a hope that I’d still be with her in the days to come.
*
The day had an hour of light left in it when we reached the Catskills. The landscape was on fire, the mountains aflame with all those lovely shades of orange, red and purple and the thousand tones between that have those names writers pretend they use every day but have to look up when they are called upon to describe the spectral phenomena that is the American fall: ochre, magenta, persimmon (you know the ones). The ‘leaf peepers’ were out in force, pulled over at the roadside vantage points to take photographs of the splendour. Of course, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the dead leaves, given new life by the wind, resembled butterflies swarming. Good luck? Trouble ahead? The end of the world? I’ll leave it to the rune readers to interpret what they signified; we drove on, into the heart of the leafy furnace.
When we arrived at the gates a figure was coming up the main drive. It was Clay. He put up a hand to stop us and came to the passenger-side door to speak to Isabelle. When she lowered the window, I could smell the blood of a double-crosser blowing in.
‘Miss Isabelle.’
‘Clay.’
‘It’s prolly best he stay out of the house. Until things cool down.’
‘What is it?’
Clay glanced towards the house by way of explaining. ‘Miss Edith’s threatening violence.’
‘Nothing new there,’ I said.
‘She seems stirred up by something he done and has been cursing his name to high heaven and low hell these last few hours. I’m sure he got an explanation for it but I don’t rightly know as she’s not in the listening mood.’
Clay wouldn’t look me or address me directly throughout this impartation. ‘I’m here, Clay. You can talk to me, you know.’
He made a rueful, conspiratorial smile that suggested we were in this together.
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‘The Lord knows she don’t make any sense in this mood, with no Joe here to calm her down. And she’s oiled up on that wine. I ain’t the judging kind, I ain’t even had anything against you and I think you mean well, but I’m just here to warn you.’
‘Why’s she mad at me?’
He wouldn’t answer at first.
‘Clay?’ Isabelle said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Miss Edith says you been stirring trouble. Puttin’ thoughts that don’t belong. Miss Edith thinks you plotting. And she knows where you done been.’
‘And how does she know that?’ I asked, convinced he knew and had told her.
He stiffened at my aggression. His nastiness lay millimetres beneath the nice.
‘Miss Mary told her.’
My ripples were finally coming back as waves.
‘How did she know?’ Isabelle asked.
‘Maybe you told her, Clay. I’ve seen you listening at doors.’
Clay couldn’t disguise his reaction quick enough to my eyes. Whatever his words were saying.
‘I think you’d best not go to the house. I see that look in her before. It ain’t pretty.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘She got Besse wid her.’
‘Besse?’
‘Her shotgun.’
‘I don’t have time for her threats now,’ I said.
‘Let me talk to her first,’ Isabelle said.
Edith certainly knew how to create a little drama. She was sitting on the veranda in the rocking chair, a goblet of wine in her hand, the shotgun across her knees. And there was Mary, sat on the ledge behind her mother, legs dangling, smoking a spliff, smiling at me without mirth or affection, with that far-away, indifferent smirk of the stoned. It was all familiar and faintly comic on the surface but no joke underneath. I wondered if Edith had consciously choreographed the scene.
‘Hey Edith, hey Mary,’ I said. I was going to keep this civil and beat them with my civility (as well as the rightness of my cause).
The Killing of Butterfly Joe Page 32
