Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  “What’s she doing here?” muttered Barbara to John. “Oh, well, I suppose as a realtor she’s interested in land as well as housing. Never let an opportunity go by. That’s her motto.”

  “In the language of the flowers,” agreed John, grinning at Barbara. “Hey, here comes Mr. Warren.”

  William Warren was holding open the front door for Mrs. Farhang and Mrs. Gardenside. He smiled broadly at Barbara, nodded at John, shook hands with Buddy. His thin hair was awry, his necktie wrenched to the side. He was beaming. “I’ve just been looking down on you people from ten thousand feet.”

  “You were up in a plane?” said John. “Oh, wow.”

  William wiped his red face. “Looking down on everything. It was like —” He waved his hands. “Wait till you see the pictures. The plane flies on a grid pattern, you see, taking pictures automatically every few seconds. They overlap, the pictures, so you can look at them with a pair of stereoscopic lenses, and the trees stick right up at you in three dimensions. It’s — well, it’s just —” William was still floating in the sunlight ten thousand feet above the earth. “You just wait. I’ll show you the pictures when they come in.”

  John walked behind them to the selectmen’s office, seeing them silhouetted against the fanlight at the end of the hall. William’s head was surrounded by a thin aureole of windblown hair, Buddy’s was shaggy and hirsute, Barbara’s small and round like a cobblestone. If John had understood the universal elemental principles of the language of the flowers he might have seen William, fresh from the sky, as the airy heavens; Buddy as man, heavy with sin; and Barbara, her shoes green with grass-stain and her jeans brown with dirt, as the flat and uncompromising ground.

  Nineteen

  “FINE WEATHER FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS,” PROMISED THE MEteorologist at Channel 4. “Cool and dry.” In his satellite picture not a single wreathing lacework of cloud obscured the landmass of the northeastern United States. Around the big house at the top of Pine Hill the trees stood glittering, every separate leaf distinct. In the spaces between the trees light was held in suspension, defining voids and volumes of air with the precision of a crystal.

  But the brilliant morning was shut out of the great dark hall of Howard Croney’s campaign headquarters. The only window open to the world was the vulgar screen of the TV, permanently switched on to catch random scraps of political news and revelations about the current state of the ex-governor’s public image.

  Croney himself was in residence at the moment, in heavy consultation with Buddy Whipple. A sticky little problem had arisen, and Buddy was dealing with it in masterful fashion. The troublemaker was a young female volunteer with whom Croney had been exercising droit du seigneur in the majestic bedroom on the second floor. The stupid girl had been exultant at losing her virginity. She had been throwing her weight around, showing off, claiming rights at the conference table in the great hall as well as in the bedchamber. “She’s got to go,” moaned Howard Croney. “Goddamn bitchy little interfering goddamn bitch.”

  “It’s all right,” said Buddy. “Why don’t you just kick her upstairs? Tell her you want her to be your special head fund raiser for the western end of the state. I’ll talk to her. She’ll keep her mouth shut. Let me handle it.”

  In the old house at the bottom of the driveway, Barbara and Virginia and John were eager to get to work outdoors. John had three acres of lawn to cut. But it was too early in the morning. The cool fragrant grass was still soaking wet with dew. The grass would fill up the mower and spew out the side in ugly green clots. And Barbara’s transplanting and Virginia’s violent digging up and clearing out would be easier when every leaf and blossom no longer dipped and spilled its contents down the back of one’s neck.

  They sat at the kitchen table with second cups of coffee, happy in the absence of Buddy Whipple, intent on different things, hardly hearing the slosh of the dishwasher or the murmur of commuting cars on Route 126.

  John was writing a letter to his mother and father.

  … I watched my barn spider finish one of her molts yesterday. She was hanging upside down under a lilac leaf beside the porch. It took quite a while. I sat there and just waited, until I saw the skin of her cephalothorax begin to tear, like when you rip the plastic covering off something. Then the skin split right off the abdomen, and she pumped her legs up and down. It was really amazing — how does she do that? those long skinny delicate legs! — and then she pulled out the new legs, and —

  Dramatic Announcement!!

  Ta-dah!!

  There were eight legs! The new one is very small, but perfect. All the parts are there: femur, patella, tibia, metatarsus and tarsus. With my magnifying glass I can even see three tiny claws. She’s a really good-looking spider.

  Barbara was trying to catch up with her garden diary.

  Now that we can do what we want, we’ve got a really good plan. Virginia calls it THE GREAT COMPROMISE. We’re taking out the fancy stuff father liked, all those tricky perennials, and putting in native things that want to grow here anyway — trying to make a sort of halfway station between the wilderness that would be here if we let everything go to hell and the formality of father’s grandiosities. All the flowers are coming out of the round border, to be replaced by red cedar and mountain laurel and pasture juniper and meadow lilies, things like that, native stuff — only we’re keeping it within the brick edging in the old formal circular shape. We are excited about this.

  It feels so good to be doing what we want, instead of those foolish elegancies of father’s, like the sunken garden and the impossible roses. He had such absurd notions —

  Barbara’s pen faltered, and she stopped writing.

  John felt her eyes on him, and he looked up. But Barbara was gazing right through him. Politely he looked down again at his letter.

  It was really all my fault, wrote Barbara, and threw down her pen.

  Virginia was writing too, on a loose sheet of notebook paper.

  I think there is a gigantic creature in the sky, looking down at us with eyes like a fly’s. Enormous billion-compartmented eyes flickering like a computer panel in a science-fiction movie. Whenever anything gets born — a human being, or a zebra, or a clam — a little compartment flickers on, and when we die it flickers off. There is this colossal impersonal fly’s eye, stupendous, gazing down.

  Virginia glanced across the table. John was drawing a picture. “Another spider, I see,” she said.

  “No, it’s the same one,” said John. “That barn spider I showed you the other day. It’s grown a new leg. See? Just a miniature one, so far.”

  Virginia bent over the drawing, her hair brushing the page. “That’s really nice. What’s it’s name? Oh, I see. Araneus cavaticus.”

  “What are you working on?” said John politely. (Well, not just politely. He was really curious.)

  Virginia laughed. She looked back at her page and said nothing. Barbara explained. “Virginia writes these letters.”

  “Letters?” said John, blushing. “Oh, excuse me.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said Virginia. “They’re not to anybody in particular. Letters to an Unknown Correspondent. Letters to the air.” Snatching up her piece of paper she tossed it at the ceiling.

  “It’s been going on a long time,” said Barbara, smiling at John. “It’s a long and serious correspondence. Virginia’s written an awful lot of letters to the air.”

  “Well, it’s all been rather one-sided,” said Virginia, catching her paper as it floated down.

  “The air never writes back, I guess?” said John.

  “No, never. Oh, of course, I open the mailbox every day, looking for an airmail letter in a pale blue envelope with a patch of rainbow for a stamp. But there’s never anything like that. Isn’t it sad!”

  The telephone rang. Virginia leaped to her feet.

  On the other side of town, Amelia Farhang flashed a conspiratorial smile at the other members of the program committee in her living room, then raised her eyebrows
and mouthed, Virginia. “Oh, Virginia, dear, this is Amelia Farhang. You remember, I brought over that memorial flower arrangement the other day, after the service. Of course, I’ve known you since you were a little girl, but it’s been a long time since I — how are you, dear? Now, Virginia, I’ll have to confess to being very naughty. I had never set foot in that dear old house of yours before, although of course I used to visit the big house when your mother was alive, and — well! I had no idea! I must confess, I peeked around the house and I kept seeing the most marvelous backgrounds for our floral compositions, all those blank white walls. I mean, just perfect, those stark — not to say, bleakly powerful! — old historical rooms. I mean, I was just so impressed. Well, the point is, what I’m leading up to is, to ask you if the Middlesex County Society of Flower Arrangers could hold our annual meeting in September in your home? You see, once a year we all get together to demonstrate our flower-arranging prowess and creativity in someone’s home, in preparation for the state competition in October. In your house, for example, we would concentrate on eighteenth-century bouffant effects, large mixtures in Chinese bowls and jars, and you wouldn’t have to do a thing, because we have this committee that brings in the sherry and the goodies and we set the table and then of course we fill the house with lovely arrangements, and the point is, the local chapter does so much enjoy it, and — oh, now, Virginia, you mustn’t make up your mind too soon. Just give the idea a little time to —” Mrs. Farhang rolled her eyes melodramatically at her committee. “Well, of course, if you feel so strongly. I expect I rushed in too soon after — well, I’m sorry too. Well, then. Well, all right then, dear. Good-bye.”

  Amelia Farhang put the phone down and burst into merry laughter. The other women smiled sympathetically and leaned forward to hear her report, careful not to disturb the Japanese arrangement on Amelia’s coffee table — an austere masterpiece assembled from a single calla lily, a cabbage leaf, and a long frond of swamp grass shaped into a tight spiral at the end with a curling iron. An onion and an artichoke lay beneath the container on a bed of crushed lava.

  “No soap,” said Amelia Farhang, shaking her head.

  “Too snobbish,” said Dora Turnstone.

  “Typical,” said Debbie Saunders. “I’d call it rather typical, wouldn’t you?”

  “Do you know, there didn’t used to be any Herons even buried in the cemetery,” said Effie Fawcett. “I mean, they wouldn’t even lie stone dead next to other people. They were all cremated, and then their dust was scattered in the woods. I mean, it was almost like incest. All those family ashes mingling in the fallen leaves! Incestuous necrophilia!” Effie made gay little tossing motions in the air, the dust of the Herons flying left and right, and the committee burst into delighted whoops of laughter. Effie was so clever.

  After the last giggles had subsided, it was left to Shirley Camberwell to forward the business of the meeting. “Well, you know, actually, I’m not disappointed. I’ve seen that place of theirs too, and I must say, I think there’s something a little amateurish about it. Unfinished. And the house, after all, is falling down. There’s really nothing to compare with the perfection of your home, for instance, Amelia.”

  “Well, of course,” said Amelia Farhang complacently, “you girls are always welcome to come here again.”

  “Oh, yes, dear Amelia. You’re always so generous.”

  “Some of my camellias blossom in September, and some of the orchids, and of course my big pompom mums. And I’m sure Putnam wouldn’t mind at all, as long as our meeting didn’t conflict with one of his political affairs. I expect the new gubernatorial race for the Republican nomination will suck him in. You can imagine how everybody cozies up to the president of the Paul Revere Insurance Company.”

  “Oh, Amelia, that’s really grand of you. And your house is, well, it’s just so perfect.”

  It was true. Amelia Farhang’s house was only two years old, but it had been brought out of nothing in a single giant effort by a team of architects, landscape gardeners and interior decorators. Bulldozers had cleared the woods and dug a great hole. The house had been erected, roofed over, completed. Rug samples and swatches of fabric had been whisked in and out. Full-grown shrubs and evergreen trees had been dropped into the ground around the foundation. Low walls and sweeping shallow steps and bluestone terraces had been created, all in a momentary slice through time, all in a single summer. The Farhangs’ house was harmonious, perfect, finished and done.

  “We’ll need something really fabulous for my dining room table,” said Amelia. “Dibs on that. You girls can do the rest.”

  “Oh, Amelia, it will be such good practice for the big show in October,” said Effie Fawcett. “But we already know who’s going to win the creativity award, don’t we, girls?”

  “Amelia!” cried Shirley Camberwell and Dora Turnstone and Debbie Saunders. “Amelia Farhang! Let’s hear it for Amelia!”

  Twenty

  THE RASPBERRIES WERE RIPE. JOHN MOVED AMONG THEM WITH his bowl, stopping to admire the black and sulphur-yellow belly of a huge garden spider suspended on her great round web among the thorny brambles. Birds had snatched up a goodly share of the raspberries, in spite of the limp arms of John’s scarecrow and the tossing veil of the beekeeper’s hat and the trailing shawl. But there were plenty of berries left. Enough so that John could eat as he picked and still fill his bowl with the dull-red, soft, sweet fruit. They crushed deliriously against the roof of his mouth. His hands were soon stained with the overripe ones that squished between his fingers.

  He took the bowl to the kitchen, then set out on another expedition. This time he was looking for bugs to feed his spiders. Scouting outside the kitchen window, he saw a hornet rise over his head and drop into one of the yew bushes that arched over the stone steps.

  Maybe there was a nest in the yew bush. John bent down and peered inside. Yes, there it was, a medium-sized nest deep in the twiggy interior. By the end of the summer it would be huge, with a population of ten thousand white-faced hornets, most of them equipped with mean little stingers in their hindquarters. Ten thousand hornets, right here where people went back and forth all the time.

  John stood up and waited to see where they went in and out. He was pleased when one of them rose from the hedge on the other side, away from the stone steps — then another, and another. That was all right, then. They wouldn’t interfere with human traffic on the stairs. He could leave them alone. And it would be fun to keep an eye on them, and record their doings in his notebook. Next fall when he came home from college for Thanksgiving, he could drop over and see if they had been frozen out, and then he could take the nest apart and count the number of cells and see how many stories tall their apartment house had grown to be. (And of course it would be a good excuse to see Virginia.)

  The phone was ringing. John ran indoors and snatched it up. Then he winced, and held the squawking phone away from his ear. “I’m sorry,” said John. “What did you say?”

  The crazed voice on the line screeched again. Barbara was coming into the kitchen. Grinning helplessly, John held up the receiver so that she could hear.

  “Oh, I know who that is.” Barbara hurried across the room and took the phone. “HELLO, MRS. BEWLEY, WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU THIS MORNING?”

  There were noisy sobs and gulping screams.

  “LISTEN, MRS. BEWLEY,” said Barbara, “I’LL BE RIGHT OVER. I’LL HANG UP NOW.” Barbara turned to John. “She’s had a letter. Some kind of letter. She’s all upset. I don’t know what the hell it is. And her hens won’t lay. And something’s the matter with her TV. Why don’t you come along and take a look at the TV, while I see what her letter is about? Wait a minute.” Barbara looked around the kitchen, poked in a drawer, pulled out a bottle brush with a pink handle and put it in her pocket.

  “What’s that for?” said John.

  “Oh, I think it might come in handy.”

  Mrs. Bewley’s house was around the corner, just beyond the sharp curve on Route 126. It had
once been inhabited by the chauffeur for the big horsey establishment at the top of the hill. Mrs. Bewley’s brother had driven hard-riding Higginsons back and forth to the Lincoln depot in massive touring cars, and later on, in Edward Heron’s time, he had become a general handyman. And then he had retired, and now he was dead, and his elderly sister lived on in the house alone. It had once been a pleasant clapboard cottage, but now it was falling into decay. The roof sagged. The floor of the porch had rotted through.

  John followed Barbara up Mrs. Bewley’s weedy driveway to the back of the house. They found her peering at them through her lorgnette from the kitchen door. As they climbed the back steps Mrs. Bewley reached for Barbara and tugged her inside. She didn’t seem to see John. He had to wedge his foot in the door to keep it from slamming in his face. Inside the house Mrs. Bewley was galloping Barbara through the small kitchen. In the living room John was astonished to see a number of tiny hens roosting in a gigantic rubber plant. There were fluffy black ones with white pompoms falling over their eyes, and gold ones with bushy ankle feathers. Under the rubber plant there were encrusted deposits of chicken droppings.

  “Wow,” said John impulsively, “Polish bantams. I’ve only seen them in pictures.”

  “JOHN’S HERE TO LOOK AT YOUR TV,” explained Barbara.

  John nodded and smiled at Mrs. Bewley. But she had no eyes for John. She was thrusting a letter at Barbara, with cries of “MINE, MINE.”

  “Well, just a minute,” said Barbara, turning the letter right-side up.

  John knelt on the floor beside the TV set and switched it on. Immediately it began shouting at top volume and flopping its picture. He turned the volume down and twisted the vertical-hold button. The picture slowed down and stopped, becoming a man with a jar in his hand, talking fast, tapping the jar with his finger. John stood up, his task accomplished.

  Barbara looked up from Mrs. Bewley’s letter. “Damn,” she said. Then she read it through again.