A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  Driving south toward Key Bridge, taking the high roads to avoid the flooded streets near the river, I couldn’t get the image of the Department of Justice flag out of my head. Just the unlikely size of it appearing in the middle of the night, filling up our front porch.

  I opened the window for air, the rain splattering across my shoulders. My father’s old blue Toyota smelled of something rotten—probably some groceries he’d bought and forgotten about, which had slid under the seat, crowding the textbooks and papers and old newspapers and shirts that spent days on the floor of the backseat before they got to the laundry. It was difficult to put up with my parents’ old habits.

  I was an adult still living at home, and so was Steven, and to say we did it happily would not be entirely true. But I wonder now whether we weren’t both grateful to have the excuse of graduate school, the expense of it, the need to conserve cash. Whether we didn’t want to leave quite yet. Something about our mother’s fears for the future of our family kept us close, to swell the ranks.

  When I drove up to the glass factory in Alexandria, my mother was standing at the entrance smoking a cigarillo—a small, substantial woman in her late fifties, with a mass of short, wiry hair, dressed in strong colors, a mustard yellow cape, a loose-fitting purple shirt and gathered skirt and red lipstick—a Gypsy look that had its charm, suggesting a quality of character.

  I stopped the car and opened the door.

  “Is the parkway still underwater?” she asked, rubbing off the end of the cigarillo on the sidewalk, dropping the rest in her purse and climbing into the front seat.

  “I couldn’t have gotten here if the parkway were underwater, Julia.” I leaned over to kiss her. “A narrow escape from near disaster.”

  “Don’t make light of it. Floods have washed away whole towns. Read the paper.”

  Steven and I called our mother Julia. At a certain point, before I was out of grammar school, she decided that we were too old to call her Mama, and she’d never been maternal anyway, she said, which wasn’t exactly true. She had concocted a life in which her terrors for the safety of her family were repeated over and over like prayer, as if to name the dangers might have the power to overcome them.

  She was the daughter of Czech Jews who had escaped from Prague in 1941, before my mother and her sister, Faith, were born, emigrating to Chile, where their girls were raised as generic children, neither particularly Jewish nor Latin nor Czech, mainly Lustig, which was my mother’s maiden name. Years later on September 11, 1973, a military coup overthrew the democratic government in Chile, General Pinochet assumed absolute power and my mother’s family escaped again, emigrating to New York City, passing on to their daughters a legacy of pursuit that my mother in particular had taken to heart.

  But on this morning of April 4, in the middle of a flood, her fears were not entirely unreasonable. In the long shadow of 9/11, most people in Washington, accustomed to regular warnings of possible terrorist attack, were in the grip of unspoken hostility, wary of one another, fearful of differences.

  My father, a scientist with a tendency to fatalism, believed in inevitabilities.

  “We’re animals,” he would say wearily. “And, frightened, an animal attacks.”

  Julia pulled down the sun visor above the passenger’s seat, using the mirror to see while she brushed her hair and put on lipstick.

  “Is this color too red?” she asked.

  “I can’t look. I’m driving.”

  I wasn’t a good driver, too easily distracted, with no instinct for anticipation, so I had to concentrate.

  Last night had been the first in years that my mother had spent the night away from home, and I could feel her assess my emotional temperature for signs of trouble.

  “So everything’s fine at home, yes? Just an inconvenience, this flooding.”

  I was wondering should I be in second gear going down the hill? Would the car skid in third, as the one in front of me had done at a stop sign?

  “Everything’s okay,” I said.

  By the time we got home, Steven would have figured out the origin of the flag, would have concluded that it was a joke from one of his friends at law school, or an angry present from the girlfriend who had preceded Lisha, or a prank played on him by some of the teenage boys in the neighborhood.

  He might have told my father about the flag, and, if so, my father would have kept the news to himself, slipped it into a place beyond consciousness. Certainly he wouldn’t have told my mother, who made him crazy with her imagined disasters.

  “Nothing about Steven?”

  “Why do you ask?” I turned up the hill toward River Road.

  “I have a bad feeling,” she said. “We always get calls about Steven.”

  “You always have a bad feeling.”

  I turned the radio to WTOP to check the traffic report.

  “So who’s at home?” Julia asked, a nervous habit, going through the list of family members, expecting—she couldn’t help herself—that something might have happened to one of us in her absence.

  “Everyone,” I replied, driving with care across Key Bridge into Georgetown, Canal Road closed, Wisconsin Avenue, a slight rise headed north, low water rushing toward us, slippery with an oily sheen.

  “At least everyone was there when I left.”

  “And is your father’s headache better?” Julia asked, changing the subject.

  “He was in the shower when I left.”

  “Of course he has headaches,” Julia said. “Who wouldn’t, using poisonous glue on his stupid airplane, keeping the doors to the hangar shut so the fumes can obliterate his brain?”

  I drove slowly because of the wet streets and rush-hour traffic, which was beginning to pick up.

  “Your conversation is making me nervous,” I said, turning into the subdivision where our house was located, close enough to the river that streams of water rushed along the curb as we drove the winding road.

  Our family lived on Newland Street in Bethesda, between Bradley Boulevard and Old Georgetown Road, a nameless subdivision of matching ranch houses on square, half-acre lots, and we’d remained here even after the family outgrew the house and my father left the National Institutes of Health, taking an appointment downtown on the faculty of the George Washington University Medical School. We couldn’t find an affordable house in Washington convenient to my father’s job with sufficient garden to accommodate a full-size hangar.

  “I have a premonition,” Julia said, rearranging herself so she could look at me.

  My mother often had premonitions at night. In the morning she’d lean against the kitchen counter, warming her hands with a cup of coffee, and tell us her bad dreams while we rushed through breakfast to get to work or school on time. There was no stopping her.

  “Last night I was trying to sleep in my office, which wasn’t very comfortable, and I could hear the rainwater hurtling over the banks of the Potomac, taking the rocks and mud with it, and a terrible feeling came over me that the earth was sick to death of holding up all the buildings we’ve loaded on its surface, and I could feel what it would be like if the ground gave way and the buildings collapsed.”

  “That wouldn’t be possible,” I said.

  “Consider Pompeii. A whole city buried for hundreds of years under the rubble.”

  “That was a volcano, Julia.”

  “Well?”

  “We don’t have volcanoes here.”

  Sometimes I imagined my mother lying on her back next to my father, who’d be sleeping easily, dreaming of Darwin, and she’d be going through her lists of evidence organized in the catalog of her brain. A Korean child murdered in Maine by a gang of boys mistaking her for an Arab. A Cuban mother of four killed as she entered an abortion clinic in Miami. Three unrelated people at a coffee shop in Rockville, Maryland, obliterated by a gunman because one among them wore a turban and the gunman assumed they were together.

  “My duty,” the gunman said when he was arrested for murder.

&nb
sp; Then, for a few long weeks the autumn after 9/11 a Washington Beltway sniper and his brainwashed protégé traveled the inner loop from one suburb to the next in a wide circle of the city, eating in restaurants between killings, working out in gyms, using the trunk of the car as a duck blind, shooting whoever happened to come into the frame of their telescopic sight.

  There must have been many nights when my mother couldn’t sleep, her eyes traveling down a mental list of disasters.

  I turned in to Newland Street.

  “Home!” Julia said with a long sigh, as if it were a miracle we had arrived safely. And, reaching into her large bag, something between a purse and a full-size suitcase, she searched for something.

  “So,” she said to me, her hand deep in the bottom of the overcrowded bag, “I have a present for you, which I found during my sleepover at the factory.”

  My mother was always bringing presents to our family, personal gifts for no particular reason, unless it was to make up for driving us crazy.

  “A treasure,” she said, lifting a small black thing wrapped in a piece of toilet paper out of her bag, setting it in her lap.

  I pulled in to the driveway between the hangar and the house, stopped the car and turned off the ignition, grateful that the flag was no longer on the front porch.

  “Just take it,” Julia said. “Don’t think I enjoy sitting here in the front seat with a dead bat in my lap. It’s what I do for you.”

  The bat, a small one, brittle, dead for some time, was perfectly intact. A pallid bat with delicate facial features and pop eyes and a fuzzy little topknot. Beautiful wings.

  “I love it,” I said, opening one of the wings with care. “And I don’t have any bats in my room.”

  I had been allowed to keep everything I found—insects, living and dead, a harmless snake, some mice, a baby rat, a one-winged bird, and once a rabbit who had two litters without benefit of a mate. My father had cut out the middle of my south-facing wall and filled it with glass, so my room became a kind of greenhouse, ripe with the thick, fetid smell of living things and dead ones.

  I held my hand out in front of me to get a better look at the baby bat in his toilet-paper bed.

  I had a reputation in my family as a collector, like my mother, but Julia collected stones and photographs of strangers and lists of bad news, and I collected dead things, mainly animals, although I did have plants and a few living creatures.

  Our house was small and crowded. Couches covered with soft African cloth and wooden tables with books and the stones my mother had collected on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. There were primitive Andean bowls and early-twentieth-century photographs of other people’s families scattered among our own family photographs on the side tables, in the bookcase, hanging on the walls.

  My mother picked up photographs of people at secondhand stores and antique book- and print shops and old photography stores. Mostly posed shots, set pieces, a family group against a fixed background. But she preferred the candid photographs—an early-twenties photograph of a child in a field of high grasses, and one of two boys sitting on their haunches, straddling a railroad track, and another of a young woman, bare-breasted, her skirt lifted above her knees, standing in the river—this one had noted in Spanish on the back “Mariana at the river. Valdivia. 1921.”

  “Why do we have these pictures of strangers?” I asked her once.

  “Because our family is too small,” she’d replied, as if that answer should be satisfactory.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Think, Claire,” she said. “We have only seven. Too small is too small.”

  Later I had asked my father. “Too small for what?”

  “For a baseball team,” he’d replied.

  I put the dead bat in the pocket of my raincoat, unlocked the front door and followed my mother to the kitchen.

  Everyone was there, surprising for a Tuesday morning, and it seemed to me as if an argument had been in progress, which stopped when the front door opened.

  “Why are you late for class?” my mother asked Steven, who was leaning against the sink eating cereal.

  “My nine o’clock was canceled, or I’d be gone already,” he said, rinsing his cereal bowl.

  Julia dropped her cape over the back of a chair and pushed up the sleeves of the peasant blouse she was wearing. “What’s going on here?” She stood at the sink, her arms across her chest.

  “Nothing is going on,” my father said.

  “I feel it on my skin,” she said.

  I took the pallid bat out of my pocket and hung up my raincoat, saying nothing, sensing that my mother’s instincts were right.

  “At least you owe me some explanation about these looks passing back and forth.” She turned to my father, wiping her hands on her skirt. “Say something, David.”

  My father was tall and slender and sometime during his growing up, he must have felt too tall, because he walked at a slight angle to the ground, as if he were always headed into the wind. He had wispy gray hair and deep, dark, heavy-lidded eyes and a smile that filled his face. His students, watching him write formulas on the blackboard, remarked on the size of his hands, especially, his long fingers, with a wingspread the width of a small baby.

  He was amused by my mother, grateful that she lived a life of high relief. It colored his world, and though he was inclined to a contemplative life, she filled the house with the illusion of a large family, better than the drunken, gossipy community he left in Wales, but similar.

  He and Uncle Milo grew up on a failing sheep farm near Llangollen in north Wales, and when he was twenty, he came to the United States to study medicine. There was nothing for him in Wales except the sustaining chatter of the town where he was born. He met my mother on the subway in New York City, where he was studying medicine and she was a junior seamstress making costumes for the New York City Opera. When they met, she had been in the United States for ten months, and in that time both of her parents had died, one of cancer and the other of a failing heart. My father, who had grown up with a mental landscape of gray skies, weeks without the sun, noticed my mother for the wild colors she wore and her bright cheeks and funny way of speaking with her hands. They got together between Twenty-eighth Street and Lincoln Center on the uptown Seventh Avenue train, and within weeks they’d married, knowing little of each other beyond the intensity of attraction and driven by a desire for home.

  In their uneasy construction of a new family, there were deep pockets, secrets guarded even from one another—especially from one another—for fear that too much knowing might unsettle the status quo.

  I sat down at the end of the table, far enough away from Bernard that I didn’t have to listen to him slurp his coffee.

  Milo had the front page of the newspaper opened on the table and was arguing with Bernard about light—whether to keep the blinds in the room they shared up or down during the rainy month of April.

  “You could go back to your own apartment,” Milo was saying.

  “That’s what you tell me every day,” Bernard replied.

  “So pay attention,” Milo said. “I must believe it.”

  “What’s the news?” Julia asked Milo. “More floods?”

  “Arson in a nightclub on H Street,” Milo said, pouring himself coffee. “No deaths reported. That’s the major news for the city.”

  Faith stood next to the wall phone, reading the food section of the paper. A slight woman, more like me than my mother in bone structure, with a kind of whimsy and abandon, a tendency to optimism.

  “I’m reading about food,” Faith said. “Here’s a recipe for a French fish soup that you should make, Julia.”

  “When there’s a celebration,” Julia said.

  “My birthday is on Saturday,” Milo said.

  “But you don’t like fish, Milo.”

  “Quite correct. I hate fish. I’d like you to make beef the way you do, spicy on the outside and red in the middle. Very nice.”

  “Coffee, anyone?�
�� Faith asked me, putting down the paper.

  “In just a minute.” I held up the bat for Faith. “First I have to put Mr. Adorable in my room.”

  “With dispatch, I hope,” Milo said, leaning over to peer between the toilet-paper blankets.

  “It’s a baby pallid bat, a rarity,” I said, heading toward my room to escape the tension just beneath the surface of conversation.

  Milo called me back.

  “Just a minute, everyone,” he said, always pleased to take center stage. “Listen here. Steven has a new op-ed piece on the editorial page this morning.”

  I looked over at my brother, but his face told me nothing. His arms were folded across his chest, an almost smile turning his lips, an expression of mild interest in his eyes. Lisha, standing beside him, leaning against the sink, looked homicidal.

  “You didn’t tell me, Steven, ” Julia said. “You always tell me about your op-ed pieces.”

  “He didn’t tell anyone,” Lisha said.

  “I only found out last night that the Post was printing it today,” Steven said. “And, Julia, you’ve been away.”

  “Overnight. Less than twenty-four hours. You had plenty of time to tell me.”

  “A full column,” Milo was saying. “Very impressive. So listen up, everyone.”

  I took note of the room—Steven and Lisha standing behind Milo so he couldn’t see them. My father had taken a chair, pulling it away from the table into a corner, isolating himself as he was inclined to do. Julia stood at attention right in Steven’s line of sight, and Faith, the food page folded under her arm, leaned against the wall next to the telephone.

  Only Bernard wasn’t paying attention, concentrating on adding more brown sugar to his oatmeal.

  Civil Rights?

  The Freedom for Democracy Act (FDA2) states as its purpose the uniting and strengthening of America by providing appropriate tools to intercept and obstruct terrorism. In the name of protecting American freedom, the FDA2, enforced under the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, has had, among its many successes, the following: