Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  He had never seen Alexander Higginson’s splendid false-Tudor hunting lodge before, but today he was in no mood to admire its grandeur. Parking beside a small red car in the courtyard, he leaped out of the front seat and strode into the house.

  At first his eyes were blinded by the solemn high gloom of the great hall, and by a bright spot of light in one corner. But then Buddy Whipple appeared in the shadows, marching up and down. He was dictating something to a secretary. For a moment Homer was boggled by the secretary, who looked familiar somehow, and out of place in this setting. Vaguely Homer became aware that the dazzling radiance in the corner of the room was given off by the golden ripeness of the secretary’s skin and the incandescence of her orange hair, rather than by some sort of spotlight glaring in his eyes.

  “Well, hello there.” Buddy stopped walking up and down and looked at Homer, smiling politely. “What can I do for you?”

  There followed a scene of some violence. The roughhouse was all on Homer’s part, because Buddy remained serene and cheerful. He merely grinned and let his body shake limply from side to side as Homer took him by the shoulders and shook him and accused him loudly of setting fire to Mrs. Bewley’s house.

  Buddy was all astonished ignorance. “It burned down? Good God. You know, I thought lightning might have struck around here somewhere, it sounded so close. I worried about this house, as a matter of fact, because we stick up so much higher than anything else. But we were lucky, I guess. Hey, come on, what’s the big idea?” Buddy laughed with long-suffering good humor as Homer hugged him in a grizzly-bear embrace and smelled him with great inquisitive sniffs like a dog. “Hey, let go of me. Come on, let go.”

  “I swear, if I smell lighter fluid on you, or gasoline —” Homer backed away and shook his head, disappointed. There was no odor of anything intensely flammable in Buddy’s hair, or in his beard or in his clothes. The man smelled a little musty, if anything. Goddamn.

  “It’s too bad about that nephew of yours,” said Buddy, grinning at him. “Did the place burn to the ground? I guess the kid is stuck with sixty thousand dollars worth of uninsured smoking ruins, right? I’m just as glad I didn’t make the winning bid after all. Say, why don’t you ask him if he’d like to get rid of the place now? I’d be glad to take it off his hands for a sensible price. Nothing like that crazy sixty thousand, of course.”

  “Go to hell,” said Homer, heading for the door.

  “No, no, I’m serious,” said Buddy, trailing him to his car. “I’ll give him twenty thousand. He won’t get that much from a realtor. Hey, look, it’s stopped raining.” For a moment Buddy and Homer stared up at the limpid blue of the clearing sky. Then Buddy backed away as Homer scowled at the gearshift and turned the key in the ignition. “Don’t forget,” said Buddy. “Tell him what I said, okay?”

  Forty-Eight

  THE SAVAGELY PELTING RAIN WASHED JOHN’S BARN SPIDER TO THE ground, and in the boiling puddle at the foot of the rain spout she nearly drowned. But then the rain stopped and the puddle guttered down. The sodden spider managed to get a foothold on the gravel under the spout and crawl free. Her belly was swollen with eggs. Making her way blindly along the granite foundation of the house, she climbed to the stony terrace and began to ascend the clapboards beside the kitchen door.

  In spite of himself, Homer was affected by the change in the weather. The air had been washed clean by the rain. It was dry and cool at last. As he drove down the hill, cautiously negotiating the streaming ruts, he could see a great shelf of cloud retreating between the branches over his head. His anger at Buddy faded. His spirits rose. He felt sociable and inquisitive. He would stop in at the house at the bottom of the driveway and see Virginia. Sooner or later he wanted to discover the reason for her peculiar slackness, her odd refusal to take sides, to fight back. Why not now?

  There was a pickup truck in the driveway. One of the firemen was helping Virginia grapple with a gigantic potted plant. Homer got out of his car and lent a hand.

  “Just put it in the border here,” said Virginia. “It will be glad to be outdoors for a while.” Clumsily Homer and the fireman heaved Mrs. Bewley’s colossal singed rubber plant over the low wooden fence. “Good,” said Virginia. “Thank you. That’s just great.”

  “Funny-looking damn thing,” gasped the fireman. Climbing back into his truck, he gave Virginia a genial wave and drove away.

  Homer turned to Virginia. “You were the one who discovered the fire, right? John told me on the phone. My God, what do you think happened?”

  She looked at him soberly, then glanced away. “I suppose it was struck by lightning.”

  “Lightning!” Homer controlled himself. “Listen here, where’s John?”

  “John? He went with Barbara to see Mrs. Bewley at Ferndale Manor. Did you want to see him? They’ll be back in an hour or so. It isn’t far.”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t want to see John.” Homer stroked his chin and gazed at a small furry spider crawling up the trellis beside the kitchen door. “I was just passing by. Thought I’d stop in. Look —” Homer made a sweeping gesture that included the brilliant sky, the immaculate trees, the low juniper breaking like a cresting wave at his feet, “— it’s such a lovely evening. Do you suppose I could have a tour of the garden?”

  “The garden?” Virginia laughed. “Imagine calling it a garden. Of course you can have a tour. What would you like to see?”

  “The best, whatever that is,” said Homer grandly. “The most beautiful part. You know. The aesthetic pinnacle of the horticulturalist’s art.”

  “The pinnacle? Well, that’s easy. If you had asked for the worst, the ugliest, it would have been hard to choose, because so many places around here vie for honors in that department. But the best? That’s simple. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  They walked down the slope past the vegetable garden with its transvestite scarecrow, its burgeoning tomatoes, its sprawling cucumber and squash vines, its shiny green peppers and purple knobs of eggplant, then up again through a drenched field of wild asters and goldenrod and along a narrow path between wet bristling wands of blackberry. At last they came back out on the driveway and approached a gate made of rough poles. Swiftly Virginia ducked through the gate and entered the field. Homer struggled through in his turn, knocking down one of the bars. They crossed the field.

  Homer kept his eyes on the ground and carried on an easy flow of small talk, probing gently now and then, looking for a tender spot. He felt like someone who has miraculously captured a bird and holds it lightly in his hand, allowing it to fly away if it will, amazed when it does not. One by one he lifted the feathers of the wings, looking for the scar that refused to heal.

  Virginia’s mother — did she remember her mother?

  “Oh, no. She died when I was too small to remember. Barbara was always there, taking care of me. All I can remember is Barbara.”

  “Your father’s death must have been a blow.”

  “Oh, yes. But it’s surprising how quickly we got over it. I feel a little guilty about it. Of course, his death was an awful shock. But I’m astonished how little I miss him. In a way he was another child for Barbara to take care of. In some ways it’s a relief. Certainly to Barbara.” Virginia turned to Homer. “I want her to be let alone, to have her own life. She’s spent so much time taking care of the two of us, father and me.”

  “She’s a nurse, isn’t she? You want her to practice nursing again?”

  “Nursing?” Virginia’s eyes flickered away. “Well, of course, if she wants to.”

  There was a surprise at the end of the field. The ground dipped down into a hollow, where a stream had been dammed up to make a pond. The water was amber with organic matter and dark in the shadow of the tall white pines. Homer followed Virginia around the pond, getting his shoes wet on the stepping stones that made a path across the boggy inlet at one end. “This place here,” he said, “it must mean a lot to you, I guess.”

  “Well, of course it does. We’
re devoted to it. Barbara even more than I. It’s her whole life now.” Virginia held a branch aside for him. “And the pressures have been so — you know — unrelenting.”

  Pressures? That could only mean one thing. In his eagerness to hear Virginia talk about Buddy Whipple, Homer jumped on the word too quickly. “Pressures?” he said. “What pressures?”

  “Oh, there are a lot of them.” Walking ahead of him along the mossy path, Virginia waved her hand vaguely. “If it isn’t one thing it’s another. There was that woman with the dried kelp and the rhubarb. And the other one with the overheated radiator, only it turned out to be stone cold. And another one who likes Williamsburg drapes. And that girl who was born under the sign of Scorpio. And then there are the carpenter ants in the eavestrough, and the thorns, the honeysuckle, the catbrier, the poison ivy, the blackberry, the firecherry. It presses in on all sides. All we can do is keep it at bay. We cut and slash at it, but there’s such a teeming lunge of it everywhere, do you see?” Virginia’s hands thrust into the air to describe the upward rush of growing weeds and the feeble strokes of their helpless tools. “Sometimes I think all that scoundrelly force and energy should be harnessed somehow, the way people want to do things with the tides. Oh, look, Homer, there’s a frog. See him there in the mud?”

  “A frog? No kidding! Where, where?”

  “Right there. See his big eyes above the water? Look, I’ll throw a little stick and make him jump.”

  “Where do you mean? I don’t see any frog.” And then in his eagerness and enthusiasm, Homer leaned too far, slipped on the mossy bank and fell in the pond up to his knees. The frog disappeared. Homer climbed out again, splashing and cursing. Virginia laughed and helped him onto the path again.

  So it was not until Homer was struggling once more through the bars of the gate that he remembered there had been an avowed purpose in setting out. “Hey, listen,” he said, “which was the great beauty spot? I’ve been expecting marble statuary and hedges shaped like birds or tennis rackets or electric guitars or upright pianos or something.”

  “Oh,” said Virginia, “it was back there. We already saw it. That field there, on the other side of the gate.” They turned back to the gate and looked over it. “Those big old white pines. Don’t you think they’re really nice? Nobody even planted them. They just grew by themselves.”

  “You mean those trees over there? Well, yes, I suppose so. Yes, now that you mention it. Very nice indeed.”

  “I think they look like soft green explosions, only it takes fifty years instead of a few seconds.”

  “Right. I see what you mean. Right, right.”

  “They’re what I like best anyway. Those trees on the edge and the way the field slopes a little bit to the south. Nobody even planned it. It just happened that way.” Virginia turned away from the gate, and together they began walking down the hill. “Barbara likes the pond best. I like the field.”

  Barbara likes the pond best. They always came back to Barbara. Homer took a leap in the dark. “Buddy Whipple is threatening Barbara in some way, isn’t he? What does Buddy have against Barbara?”

  Virginia looked at him, startled, missed her footing, turned her ankle, hopped once or twice, then settled again into a smooth stride. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’re protecting her from Buddy. Isn’t that it?”

  Virginia nudged his elbow and eased him in another direction, down a path through the woods. “There’s a shortcut here. It leads to the place where the old piggery was, when the big house was a hunting lodge.”

  It was no good. The bird in his hand had opened her wings and flown away. Homer sighed, and made up his mind to try again. Only this time he would send in his wife.

  Forty-Nine

  AT THE SUPPER TABLE BUDDY REPEATED HIS OFFER. “TWENTY thousand dollars for a pile of charred wood. You’ve got to admit it’s a princely offer. I mean, what do you want to do with the place anyhow? It won’t do the old lady any good, not with the house gone, right?”

  John flashed him a suspicious glance. “What do you want to do with it yourself?”

  “Investment for the future,” said Buddy patiently. “If it was IBM stock, or something, you wouldn’t ask me what I wanted it for, would you? And the trouble with stocks is, they go up and down. Real estate only goes in one direction, straight up.”

  “I don’t want to sell,” said John stubbornly.

  Buddy’s good humor vanished. He shouted at John. John shouted back, and Buddy slammed out of the kitchen.

  “Good boy.” Barbara patted John briskly on the shoulder and went upstairs to bed.

  John picked up his book with trembling fingers and stared at the open page, trying to concentrate, reading it over and over.

  Virginia sat calmly beside him, her head down, running her needle in and out of the hem of a new dress. The dress was for New York. Virginia was going to New York with Barbara to unveil a plaque in honor of Edward Heron’s contributions to horticulture. A lot of silly stupidity, thought Virginia. Horticulture would have been a lot better off without her father’s poisonous green roses and rusty canna lilies. She didn’t want to go, but Barbara had said she had to.

  Sitting so close to Virginia without speaking was torture. “Good night,” said John. Picking up his book, he nodded and smiled wanly at her, made his way through the darkened house and climbed the dark laundry stairs to his room in the shed.

  Virginia put down her sewing and stood up. Nervously she switched on the television, then switched it off. She looked at the clock. She waited five minutes. Then she too walked through the house in the direction of the shed. Opening the laundry door softly she gazed up into the hollow black rectangle of the stairway to John’s room. The stairs looked vulnerable. They were approachable from all directions, from the door to the house, the door to the workroom, the door to the porch. Upstairs she could hear John bumping around. Was he going to bed? What if he came down again and surprised her here at the bottom of the stairs? But in a few minutes the bumping stopped. There was silence overhead. Quietly Virginia crossed the laundry, picking her way past the baskets of dirty clothes, and drew the bolt on the door to the porch. Then she groped her way through the workshop and the lumber room and the wood room and fastened the latches of three more doors. But even as she pushed the last bolt home, Virginia knew she had secured nothing. The bolts were old. They were small and fragile. One sharp kick at a door and they would burst from their rusty screws.

  Slowly Virginia made her way back to the stairs and sat down on the bottom step. Leaning sideways, she stretched out her legs and rested her head patiently against the wall. Through the small window on the other side of the room she could just see the new moon lying like a white cradle over the trees. The laundry clock ticked loudly on the wall. In the daytime she never noticed the sound of the clock, but now it seemed to make the quiet house quieter, as if its click-clock-click were warning the washing machine and the dryer and the wooden drying rack and the baskets of laundry to keep still.

  Fifty

  “I CAN’T DO ANYTHING WITH VIRGINIA,” SAID HOMER. “YOU’RE going to have to ask her. Go ahead. You ask her.”

  Mary looked at him doubtfully. “Ask her what?”

  “I just told you. Ask her what Buddy’s got on Barbara. She’ll tell you. She won’t tell me.”

  “If she won’t tell you, why should she tell me?”

  “Because you’re — you know. Women tell each other things.”

  “Well, I’m not going to ask her a thing like that. I hardly know Virginia. Not really.”

  “Oh, come on, girl.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “But, goddamnit!”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go over there. I’ll bring her something. I’ll bring her some of my grape jelly.”

  “Your grape jelly?”

  “And that’s all. I’m not going to ask her anything.”

  “But you could just — I mean, after the grape jelly, you co
uld just say —”

  “Not a word.”

  “You’re so damned stubborn!”

  “Not a single word.”

  Mary took down a jar of her wild grape jelly and left Homer playing Monopoly with Benny. It was a painful morning. Benny turned out to be a promising young capitalist. Before long he was building hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. Homer landed on one or the other without fail, every time he edged timidly around the board. Three hours later the game was still in progress far past its natural point of resolution, because Benny had loaned his bankrupt uncle ten thousand dollars at fifty percent interest, and Homer had holed up craftily in jail. When Homer heard the familiar dying rattle of the Volvo in the driveway he leaped to his feet and ran outside.

  “Well?” he demanded, leaning into the car window. “What did she say?”

  Mary smiled up at him. “She liked the jelly.”

  “Oh, the jelly. Never mind the jelly. Did she say anything else?”

  Mary turned around and reached for the paper bag on the back seat. “You know, Homer, those foxy wild grapes make a really nice tart jelly. Look, we found some more, see?”

  “Well, fine, that’s fine, but what the hell? Is that all?”

  “You remember the way they taste when you eat them raw, all skin and pits, with a musky flavor?”

  “What, the grapes? The hell with the grapes! Mary, for God’s sake, will you forget the grapes and tell me what Virginia said?”

  “Listen, Homer, the grapes are important. The grapes are everything. Here, take the bag and I’ll tell you all about it while I start lunch. It was the grapes that did it, you see. I gave her the jar of jelly, and she was pleased, because she said Barbara loved good homemade grape jelly …”