What Cicily liked best was the bird house, the bright birds in their airy rooms hung with ferns and bromeliads. “Imagine where they’ve been,” Cicily would say. “Up with the angels!” The air was warm and humid there even in the winter. Tiny humming-birds whirred by, and big, plump, showy pheasants sat in the paths. Cicily would whistle to the canaries, her head cocked on her long neck the same way the birds cocked their heads. “Pretty bird, pretty bird,” she would say and stretch out her hand.
Back home at the Rubins’, she put out seed and suet and watched through the kitchen window to see who came. In good weather she sat on the terrace while the girls played around her. Often she consulted a Peterson’s guide she had found on the Rubins’ shelf. “Ti-dee,” she’d call to the goldfinch perched on the fence. “Ti-dee-di-di,” and the finch—or cardinal, or chickadee—would seem to look at her with its beady eye as though wondering what kind of strange, oversize bird she was. Sometimes they would even answer her—or seem to answer—calling, in any case, after she called, and then Cicily’s face would light up with pleasure.
These were some of Isabel’s best memories. Always it seemed to be springtime, the new green leaves on the trees and the air rinsed clean by winter. She and Alice would swing or play games with complicated rules that Alice would invent and strictly enforce: “No—it’s Wednesday, so the mommy has to wear the hat.” (Tina, in these memories, was in the house napping or so small she was just a bundle in Cicily’s arms.) And always, on the wooden bench, Cicily sat with the sun on her face, tranquil; the still center of the world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Isabel knew things were going well between her sister and Anthony, but she didn’t expect him to show up for brunch at their parents’ house. Neither, apparently, did Dr. Rubin. “Anthony!” she said as the two of them came, smiling, through the door into the front hall. “How nice! Nobody told me you were coming.”
Anthony had the handsomely creased face of an aging television star. Beside him Alice glowed, as pale and lustrous as the string of pearls she wore around her neck.
“Alice didn’t think you’d mind,” Anthony said, one hand spread lightly on her back.
“Of course not! How could we mind? Come in, come in, we’re delighted. Only it is generally polite, Alice,” she went on when Anthony had gone through into the kitchen, “to let a person know how many guests to expect.”
Alice smiled. Her mother’s words floated through her as though she were a cloud. “I’ll go set another place,” she said.
Dr. Rubin turned to Isabel, who had got down on the floor to pat the dog. “It’s a good thing I told you to get two dozen bagels. She might have given me a hint.”
“What do you mean, a hint?” Isabel said, scratching Prince on the chest. “Someone’s coming for brunch, his name has three syllables?”
“Of course it’s a good sign,” Dr. Rubin went on.
“What’s a good sign?” Tina asked, slipping in through the front door and catching the end of her mother’s remark.
“Alice brought Anthony to brunch, Tina, what do you think of that! For a while I thought you’d get yourself settled down before she did, but maybe not.”
In the flurry of excitement over Anthony, the Rubins nearly forgot about Soren Zank. He pulled up half an hour late in a black Saab convertible and had to knock several times before anybody heard him.
Soren was a big, sturdy, broadly built man in his mid-forties with shaggy, reddish brown hair and a full, curly beard. He looked like a cross between a Viking and a Hassid and was dressed expensively in clothes that might have been designed for mountain climbing. Dr. Rubin greeted him warmly, but Soren ignored her extended hand and threw his arms around her. “Hello, hello! Cousin Evelyn, I feel like I know you already. There’s nothing like family, is there? And these must be your daughters, one more beautiful than the next.” With a happy smile he proceeded to embrace each of the sisters in turn, like a big, good-natured golden retriever that likes to put its paws up. Isabel found herself crushed against him before she could step back and was held, not longer than was appropriate, but very close. He shook Judge Rubin’s hand, and Theo’s, and that of Anthony Wolf, whom Dr. Rubin described, keeping her options open, as a friend of the family. She added that both men were, coincidentally, from the state of California: “And so I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about!”
In the dining room Soren seated himself next to Alice, who was looking particularly radiant. “Did your mother ever happen to tell you,” he said to her, “that your great-grandfather Hiram Zank was called Fiery Hiram because of his hair? You and I are clearly twigs from that tree.” He had a slight accent that lent him an allure he would otherwise have lacked, reminding one continually that he was European.
“I always thought it was because of his temper,” Dr. Rubin said.
“In that case, Alice can’t have any of his genes,” Anthony said, smiling.
“Are you talking about Alice?” Tina said. “My sister?”
“Soren,” Dr. Rubin said, “did you know Tina does massage therapy? Does Swedish massage really come from Sweden, or is it one of those misnomers, like French fries?”
“I have no idea,” he said, and, turning back to Alice, asked, “And what kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer,” Alice said.
“Ah,” Soren said. “Not just beautiful, but intelligent, too.”
“Have some salmon,” Dr. Rubin said. “Soren? It’s Scandinavian. Well, Norwegian, to be specific. Do the Swedes smoke salmon? You never see it.”
“Thank you very much,” Soren said, “but actually I’m a vegetarian.”
Dr. Rubin was upset. “I should have asked, but it never crossed my mind! It’s not as though it were beef, obviously. Some vegetarians do eat fish, don’t they? So many young people these days won’t eat red meat at all, I always wonder how they get enough iron. I’m sorry, can I make you an egg?”
Soren assured her that he would be perfectly satisfied with bagels and cream cheese and grapefruit. “I love the bagels here in Philly!” he said. “In California they’re like balloons. Except in L.A., but I never go there if I can help it. I like a slower pace of life. All anyone thinks about in Los Angeles is money.”
“You’ve done quite well for yourself, though, I understand,” said Judge Rubin, who was accustomed to being direct. “In computers, Evelyn says.”
Soren helped himself to another bagel. “Who would have guessed how the whole thing would turn out?” he said cheerfully. “Those of us who fell in love with programming back in the eighties, we weren’t doing it for the money. We were just fooling around, trying something new. Pushing the envelope. I was in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”
Judge Rubin smiled skeptically, but Dr. Rubin’s mind was still on the previous subject. “The girls, of course, went through their vegetarian stages when they were teenagers. Alice used to refuse to sit at the table when meat was being served. I’m sure she only did it to annoy me, and of course if Alice did it, Isabel and Tina had to do it, too.”
“I can’t imagine why we would have wanted to annoy you,” Isabel said.
“It was just the times,” Alice said. “The seventies. It was a cultural thing, like wearing those gunnysack dresses, remember them?”
“And peasant blouses,” Isabel said. “We were so disappointed that we had missed the sixties!”
“Ah, the sixties,” Soren said nostalgically, but Dr. Rubin, who was not interested in a discussion of that decade, which for her had passed in a fog of pregnancies and forty-eight-hour hospital shifts, interrupted him.
“Tell me about your plans,” she said. “These waste sites you’re cleaning up.”
Soren’s face lit up. The topic of his foundation was dearer to him even than his recollections of the sixties (also something of a fog, although for different reasons). He talked at length about the money he had donated, and the money he had raised, and the money he had spent, and the projects he had tak
en on, and his vision of wetlands restoration. He talked about PCBs and DDT, about CO2 and arsenic and leukemia rates, about herons and red-backed salamanders and invasive rushes. Despite his evident passion, it was difficult to put together any clear picture of his actual activities, aside from spending money as vigorously as possible. Judge Rubin asked him various clarifying questions, particularly with regard to the problem of a fertilizer factory that was continuing to dump waste water upstream from a marsh to which Soren was particularly committed. Whether he did this because he thought he might get a responsive answer, or because he hoped to influence Soren’s plan of action, or simply from the long habit of interrogation, it was impossible to say.
“The thing about a project like this is that it makes you feel your life is worthwhile,” Soren explained, his curls shaking with his enthusiasm and his cheeks glistening through his beard. “It isn’t easy to make the leap from the drive to make money to the drive to give it away, but once you cross that chasm everything appears to you in a different light. Speaking for myself, I feel I’ve started my life all over again at ground zero.”
“Isn’t that a mixed metaphor?” Theo broke in.
“What?” Soren said.
“A mixed metaphor. Shouldn’t it be ‘starting all over again at square one’?”
“Theo,” Tina said, “is uptight about how people talk.”
“Of course, Soren isn’t a native English speaker,” Dr. Rubin put in quickly.
“Who wants another bagel?” Isabel said, passing the basket.
“I think what you’re doing is great,” Tina told Soren. “Most people get so tied to their jobs, their one little world, they can’t make the jump to the next thing. I’ve been thinking of trying something new myself. Maybe in finance. I think I have the head for it.”
“Money is very interesting as long as you don’t get too hung up on it,” Soren said. “Most people only think about getting more, not about what it can do.”
“I think people think about what it can do,” Anthony said. “They think about how it can buy them a bigger TV, or a nice vacation at the shore.”
“Exactly! What it can do for them,” Soren said. “Not what it can do for the world!”
“Most people don’t have enough money to think about what it can do for the world,” Anthony said.
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” Soren said. “You make a good living?”
“Everyone thinks doctors are so well-off,” Dr. Rubin broke in as the conversation hit close to home. “And yet we’re getting squeezed all the time. HMOs, malpractice insurance. Do you have any idea what I pay in premiums every year? It’s terrible in obstetrics. People will sue you at the drop of a hat. Of course, you feel for the poor parents. They want someone to blame, and the lawyers descend on them like vultures.”
“Still,” Soren said cheerfully, bringing the conversation back to Anthony. “If you gave away ten percent of what you make, that would be something. I bet you could afford more—thirty percent! What would that be, fifty grand? What would you have to give up? A fancy car? A country club membership? But think what you would gain in exchange! A sense of peace and a feeling of self-respect.”
“I have self-respect,” Anthony replied. “I spend all day taking care of sick people.”
“Of course! But you have to address the root causes. Why do you think people get sick? Because the planet itself is sick!”
“Are you saying,” Theo broke in, “that you think people back in the stone age didn’t get sick? That hunter-gatherers never fell ill?” Anthony’s tone had been affable, but Theo didn’t bother to keep the prosecutorial edge out of his voice.
“Of course they did!” Soren exclaimed. “But that was part of the cycle of nature!”
“It’s natural for people to get sick,” Anthony said. “We’d like to cure them anyway. That’s what we call civilization.”
Soren looked at him with dislike. He was predisposed to like most people, but this self-satisfied doctor epitomized a type he was fed up with—suave men who confidently told him that he didn’t know what was he talking about. Soren had never finished college, but he had learned what he had needed to know. People told him he didn’t understand ecology, but it wasn’t as complicated as they wanted you to think, any more than computers were. Grasping the essentials was what mattered. A circuit was on or it was off. An ecosystem was clean or it was dirty. Of course, there were a thousand details to be worked out, but they were only that—details. “What some people call civilization,” he said, “others call corruption.”
“If everyone is done talking about money,” Alice said before the argument could escalate further, “I have an announcement to make. Anthony and I are engaged!” Her words seemed to float and shimmer in the air above the table.
Dr. Rubin’s voice rose above the general clamor of congratulations and chairs being pushed back and kisses and embraces. “Oh, Alice! I’m so happy for you!” she said.
Judge Rubin looked pleased as well. He kissed his daughter and shook hands with Anthony. “Every happiness,” he said in a voice in which only someone who knew him well could have detected a tremor.
Only a little red-faced (he had always colored easily), Soren smiled as he kissed the bride—with a forgiving good grace, he felt. When he looked closer, he saw she was older than he’d thought, anyway. Whereas the sister with the bright, dark eyes was younger and also better dressed. He liked women, and he was not excessively picky. One type attracted him as much as another, and he prided himself on perceiving what was interesting even in less obviously alluring women. His cousin Isabel, for instance, had a very nice body under her unflattering clothes, and her thick, curly hair suggested sensuality. He shook hands politely with the groom-to-be. There was something familiar about the man, but he couldn’t place it. The others were beaming and exclaiming, all except for Tina. She was looking at Soren’s shirt, a short-sleeved button-down in guava plaid. “Is this organic cotton?” she asked, seizing the material in her fingers.
“Mostly,” Soren said. “There’s some kind of synthetic, too, to make it dry faster. It’s a fly-fishing shirt.”
“Do you fly-fish? It takes very sensitive hands, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Soren said. “Catch and release, of course.”
For Isabel, the engagement was the best possible news. She couldn’t help shedding a few tears as she embraced Alice. “Be good to my sister or I’ll come after you,” she found herself telling Anthony, although she hadn’t meant to say anything like that. Everyone laughed except for Alice herself, who sat in her chair like a beatific queen while her subjects bowed down and paid court all around her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After the excitement had died down a little, everybody went outside for a walk in the woods. “I want to show Soren our own little stream,” Dr. Rubin said, leading the way through the backyard. Isabel lingered to look at the flowers Marco had planted along the fence and the herb garden he’d laid out near the driveway. Oregano, thyme, tarragon, and parsley sprouted around a potted rosemary shrub, but Isabel doubted that her mother, who was too busy to cook very often, would make much use of them. That was Marco, doing good work for people who didn’t appreciate it. Dr. Rubin would have been just as happy with a bright clump of indestructible black-eyed Susans.
Now Doc’s voice drifted up through the yard. “I-sa-bel! I-sa-bel!” she called, and for a moment Isabel was a child again. Or rather, she thought, going past the pink and white rhododendrons, it was that she was a child still. All three of them were, despite their women’s bodies, and they always would be as long as their mother was alive, whether they got married or not, or had children of their own, or moved away. They were her creatures—and their father’s, too—as much as they were themselves. The trick was to learn to live fully within the constraints. To find freedom within them, as had the great sonneteers.
“There you are,” Dr. Rubin said as Isabel came onto the path, and then, turning back to Soren, added,
“Isabel is wonderful at identifying wildlife. I can hardly tell a squirrel from a chipmunk myself, but Isabel has a knack for it. And of course, all her training is in wild animals.”
Soren looked at Isabel inquiringly.
“I used to be a vet,” she said.
“She worked at the Philadelphia Zoo,” her mother added proudly.
“So in a way you followed in your mother’s footsteps,” Soren said, pleased to have made the connection. “I think it’s so interesting how things run in families. You’ll have to come do a program at my foundation. We have these little ecology talks. People bring their kids. It’s very nice.”
They were walking up the hill now, Dr. Rubin, holding her husband by the arm, leading the way. “Do you think they’ll want a rabbi or a justice of the peace?” she wondered. “I hope Alice will wear my grandmother’s veil, even though Isabel didn’t want to.”
“Animals deserve medical care as much as people,” Soren said to Isabel. “We’re all part of the same cycle of being.” He used the term entirely unself-consciously.
“Are you a Buddhist?” she asked him.
“Not technically.”
“Are you a vegetarian for health reasons or environmental ones? Or moral ones?”
“I don’t separate those things. They’re pieces of a whole. I don’t believe in participating in the killing of nature’s creatures.” He raised his big hands as he spoke, as though to indicate the glory of the natural world all around them, here in the thin, suburban woods. His blue eyes glowed with feeling, and Isabel found she couldn’t help liking him.
Nonetheless, she couldn’t help teasing him a little, either. “A stalk of wheat is one of nature’s creatures, isn’t it?” she said, smiling.
“Yes.” Soren seized the chance to explain his point of view. “And of course, you have to eat the fruit to spread the seed. Death is a part of the pattern. But I try to avoid the worst offenses. Slaughterhouses, for example, are an abomination.”
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