Rudner’s face had darkened by now almost to the color of a copper beech, but he produced the key to the back room without another word.
“Thank you, Mr. Rudner,” Alice said. “And now perhaps you could help us get the motorcycle into my truck?”
A few minutes later they were sitting in the Chevy, pulling out of the parking lot. Alice rolled down her window and waved to Rudner, who stood fuming among the hemlocks like an angry troll. “Good-bye!” she called. Her cheeks were flushed with victory.
Isabel was elated. She felt as though the roof had been knocked off the top of the world. “So right can triumph from time to time,” she said. “Oh, Alice, you were amazing! When we were kids, I always thought you could do anything!”
“Child’s play,” Alice said, looking pleased with herself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Alice took 30 back toward Devon. “Marco’s working at Doc’s today,” she said. “Do you want me to drop you anywhere?”
“No,” Isabel said. “I’ll come.” It occurred to her that Alice wanted to be alone with Marco. “He’s thirteen years younger than you are, you know,” she said.
Alice didn’t answer.
“Alice,” Isabel said, “tell me you’re not interested in him.”
“Why?” Alice said. “Are you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Isabel said.
Alice parked in their parents’ driveway and they got out of the truck. The air smelled of cut grass and clematis, and the sun beat down on the asphalt. In front of them the long stone facade of the house crouched under the shingled roof. The overgrown dogwood outside the picture window was dying slowly of blight. “I’m never here when Doc or Dad isn’t home,” Isabel said, feeling the strangeness of it, as though they had stepped back through layers of time.
“It is quiet,” Alice said.
“When we were kids we were here mostly without them,” Isabel said. “It almost felt like Cicily’s house, didn’t it?”
“Not really,” Alice said. “Cicily would never have had a house like this. Everything in it exudes Rubin.” She walked around to the back of the truck and tugged at the handlebars of the motorcycle.
“Alice,” Isabel said, “do you think Cicily was happy when she got married?”
“Why shouldn’t she have been?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. “I always thought of her as so strong and independent. She didn’t seem to need anybody.”
“I guess.” Alice gripped the motorcycle from another angle. “But you can love someone without needing them.”
“Can you?” Isabel asked.
“Of course you can.”
Marco came around the side of the house. He was wearing jeans and a Georgia Tech T-shirt, and his face shone with sweat as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of mulch across the lawn. On top of the mulch, an old coffee can covered in aluminum foil was balanced. When he caught sight of Alice and Isabel standing by the truck with his motorcycle in back, he let out a cry of delight and the handles of the wheelbarrow slipped from his hands. The coffee can tumbled and hit the asphalt, and the Japanese beetles he’d picked off Dr. Rubin’s roses flew up into the air. Marco laughed and fell to his knees in the driveway, trying to catch or crush the escaping bugs. “You’re amazing!” he said to Alice. “You’re fantastic! How did you do it?”
Alice smiled, her face glowing with pleasure as she said, “Let them go, why don’t you? They’re just poor immigrant bugs trying to make a living.”
“Are you crazy?” Marco said. “They’ll eat everything in sight.”
Isabel was still thinking about what Alice had said. She remembered how, when she was young, life had seemed like a choice between the Cicilys of the world and the Docs, between independence and sentimentality. Now she stood in the bright summer air, listening to the buzz of the cicadas and the thrum of distant lawn mowers, seeing as if for the first time that life was more complicated than that. Her mother was a doctor, and Cicily had got married. She remembered the toast she had given at her parents’ anniversary party. Here they still are after forty years, she’d said, as if the very fact of their endurance meant something. Well, maybe it did.
Marco lifted the motorcycle down from the truck and started it. The engine roared to life. “Come on,” he said to Alice. “At least let me give you a ride.”
“What about helmets?” Alice said.
“We won’t go far. Just for a spin. Once in a while, everyone has to live a little dangerously.” Marco smiled.
“It’s the living part I’m concerned about, mostly,” Alice said. But she got on the motorcycle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
On Friday, Isabel drove down to Delaware to give her presentation for Soren Zank. The nature center was at the end of a pitted road that wound its way through thin woods and emerged at last at the top of a hill with a view down a mown field to a pond. Isabel was surprised by how quiet and peaceful it was, less than an hour’s drive from the city. The sky filled the slope of the hill, and the trees hummed with wind and insects.
It had been a long time since Isabel had gone frog hunting. The best time for it was in the spring after dark, when the mating frogs filled the watery ditches. These vernal ponds, dry all summer, were safe havens, free from fish that would have fed on frogs’ eggs. Only the occasional snake might hunt there, or the budding herpetologist with a flashlight. When Isabel was a student they used to take the frogs back to the lab and grind them up. It was the frogs’ DNA her adviser was interested in, mostly.
She went down the hill and looked into the green water. Reeds grew at the edge of the pond. A few big bullfrogs lounged in the mud, croaking lazily. A willow trailed its branches into its own reflection, which flickered, making shadows ripple across the surface. She caught a bullfrog and a green frog and put them into jars. She could hear the spring peepers starting up in the woods, but they were too high up and well hidden to catch. She did find a toad, though—Bufo americanus—in the grass, although it was not yet dusk.
At the top of the hill, a car bumped along the road and parked. Isabel recognized Soren’s black Saab and walked up to meet him.
“The naturalist returns from the field!” he said. “You’ll let them out again at the end of the evening, won’t you? What’s this big one here? He looks like he’s afraid someone’s going to turn him into frogs’ legs.”
Isabel was surprised that her cousin could not identify a common bullfrog. “They do use them for frogs’ legs,” she said. “But we’ll let him go, certainly. They’re just for the kids to take a look at.”
“And how are you, Cousin Isabella?” he asked meaningfully.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not caught in a glass jar any longer, are you? You’re free as a bird.” He took a step closer. “You look wonderful. Strong and healthy. Your poor sister is really laid low by morning sickness. Pregnancy makes some women radiant, but others are like fish gasping on the beach.”
She smiled at him, amused by the look in his eyes and gratified by the opportunity he seemed to be offering her. Not that she would take it. She didn’t want Soren, not even for a night or two. What a life Tina was in for, she thought, but all she said was, “I’m sure you’re very patient with her.”
They reached the house. Taped to the door was a large glossy poster with a picture of an eagle in flight, announcing a nature talk with Robert Lewes, Ph.D., author of American Raptors. The man’s name had been crossed out and someone had written in: “I. Rubin on Local Frog Populations.”
Isabel looked at Soren. “People do know they’re coming to hear about frogs,” she said.
“I’m sure the correction went out in our last newsletter,” he said.
She had brought a sandwich. Soren showed her a back office where she could eat. When she came out into the nature classroom half an hour later, about twenty people were there, mostly men and boys, looking around at the snakeskins and bird’s nests, giant pinecones and mouse skeletons and deer antlers arraye
d on the shelves along the walls. One girl, seven or eight years old, sat next to her father. She wore a T-shirt illustrating the footprints of wildlife, and she chewed on a thick strand of her hair. As Isabel carried her jars to the table at the front, one of the boys said, “What are all the frogs for?”
Isabel turned. There in the front row sat Simon Goldenstern and his two sons. It was the older boy who had spoken. He was looking at her suspiciously, his golden eyes blinking coldly.
“I know you,” she said. “You’re Bill, right? I met you at the zoo. The frogs are to look at. I just caught them down at the pond.” She looked at Simon, lounging in a chair with his long legs stretched into the aisle, one arm around his younger child. “I thought you were on urgent business in California,” she said.
“I’m back now. Thursday is date night for me and the boys. I couldn’t miss date night.”
“I thought we were going to hear about raptors,” Bill said.
Simon explained, “We didn’t realize the topic had been changed until we got here and saw the sign.”
“Frogs, birds, what does it matter?” Soren Zank said, overhearing. “They’re all just different threads in nature’s web.”
“Frogs are boring,” Bill said. “They don’t do anything. I wanted to hear about owls.”
“Manners,” Simon said. He turned to Isabel. “You’re the speaker, are you? ‘I. Rubin’?”
“I’m the speaker,” she said. “Maybe you won’t think they’re so boring by the end of the evening,” she told Bill. He wasn’t the most likable child, but he was interested in animals. Besides, anyone could see how unhappy he was. “One thing I like about frogs,” she said, setting down her jars and addressing the room generally, “is that you can actually go out in your backyard and catch them. You can’t do that with a hawk. Even a field mouse will get away from you every time, but you can go out to a pond and grab a leopard frog. You can find a salamander under a rock. You can even get your hands on a snake, as long as you’re sure it isn’t venomous.”
“We had a snake in our basement one time,” a boy said. “My mom called the fire department.”
“Snakes are cool,” Ethan said. “They can kill you and stuff. Cobras.”
“They don’t have cobras around here, stupid,” Bill said.
“Some frogs and toads are poisonous,” Isabel said. “In South America they have poison dart frogs—they’re beautiful, red and blue and yellow.”
“I bet none of those frogs are,” Bill said, looking skeptically at Isabel’s jars. “Poisonous.”
Isabel held up the toad. “Actually, this one here secretes a toxin, bufo toxin, from its parotid glands. These glands here on the head. Its cousin, Bufo marinus, who lives in Texas, has a poison powerful enough to kill a dog or a cat.” She was pandering to the boys’ interest in danger, and she knew it.
“Whoa,” Ethan said appreciatively. “Cool.”
Isabel held up the bullfrog. “Who knows what this is?”
A couple of voices called out the answer. Isabel looked to see if the girl was one of them. Was she here because she was interested in frogs, or had her father made her come? And why was she the only one? Had the world really changed so little? Every year more acres of the earth were covered with houses, and scientists could clone sheep, but still it was almost entirely little boys hiding snakes in boxes under their beds. What were the girls doing?
“This is the largest frog you’ll find around here. You can always tell a bullfrog because its eardrums are bigger than its eyes. It eats pretty much anything. It will even eat other frogs if it gets a chance.”
She passed around the jar. The real name of her presentation, she thought, was “Sex and Death in Frogs and Toads.” Love and death were the great subjects. She told the audience about amplexus and about the different calls frogs made, the mating call to attract a female and the release call if a male found itself mounted by another male by mistake.
A man in the back raised his hand. “What about the females?” he asked. “What kinds of calls do they make?”
“The females don’t call,” Isabel said. “All that noise you hear on a summer night is strictly for courting purposes, and it’s all from the males. The frog’s call is like a peacock’s tail or a man’s flattery. It has one purpose only.”
A few people chuckled, but Isabel could hear her own bitterness and was annoyed with herself. She told them about wood frogs, the earliest breeders of the season, which could be frozen solid for weeks in an icy pond with no ill effects. She told them about the dark side and the light side of a frog’s egg and that while hawks and snakes and raccoons would all eat frogs, only the hognose snake would eat a toad.
This time, Simon’s hand went up. “How do scientists know that?” he asked. “Do they sit around watching toads and writing down what eats them?”
“No,” she said. “They cut open the stomachs of all kinds of animals and see what’s inside.”
“You mean they kill them?” he asked in disbelief, or what sounded like disbelief.
“There are also ways of analyzing droppings,” Isabel said. “But in the past, scientists have often just killed them, yes.”
She told them how it was believed that the first sound ever uttered by a vertebrate was the trill of a frog. She took the frogs out of the jars and passed them around. They wriggled free and hopped around the room, and the children dove under the tables to retrieve them. The little girl in the footprint T-shirt caught one and brought it back up to Isabel.
“Do you like frogs?” Isabel asked her.
“They’re okay,” she said. “They’re not very smart, though. Not like my cat.” Isabel wondered if she had looked disappointed, because the girl added, “Metamorphosis is cool.”
Out the window, the sky was already growing dark. “Okay,” Isabel said. “Let’s grab these flashlights and go see what we can catch.”
It was a beautiful night, clear and warm and full of the sounds of frogs. “Hear that?” Isabel said. “That sound like someone thrumming a banjo? That’s a pickerel frog.”
“Get three or four of them together, they can start a band,” Simon said, and whistled the opening bars of “Way Down South in the Yankety Yank.” He stuck close by her as she searched the bank with her flashlight beam. “That was very interesting,” he said. “I must admit I was surprised. You never mentioned that you were a herpetologist.”
“I’m not a herpetologist,” Isabel said. “I’m a vet. Or I used to be. That’s what I did at the zoo when I worked there.” I wasn’t a docent, she thought, and moved away to look at a frog someone had found.
Simon followed her. “How’s Alice?”
Isabel looked at him in amazement. “You mean since you encouraged your friend Anthony to break her heart?” she said.
“Is that what you think happened?” he asked. “Is her heart broken?”
“All I know is, until somebody took my sister’s fiancé to California with him, everything was fine!”
Simon looked surprised and didn’t have an immediate answer. Before he could say anything they were joined by Soren Zank, who came over to Isabel and put his arm around her. “What a wonderful presentation! A fascinating glimpse into the private lives of frogs. Amplexus, eh? Very educational. I’ll never look at a frog the same way again.”
Someone tapped Isabel’s leg and she looked down to see the girl, a long strand of hair still caught in her mouth, her hands clasped tightly around a bullfrog the size of a softball.
“He’s a beauty,” Isabel said. “You must be fast.”
“I’m faster than my brother,” the girl said. “Of course, he’s only six.”
Isabel thought she would have liked to have a daughter like this, sharp-eyed and serious, with a wood nymph’s hair.
Gradually people said good-bye and straggled back up the hill to their cars. Simon and his children were among the last to go.
“Look,” Simon said. “I don’t know what you think I did, but I certainly didn’t do
anything I thought would hurt Alice.”
Isabel wished she hadn’t mentioned the California trip. She didn’t want to talk about what Simon had or hadn’t done out here in the dark with his sons listening and Soren somewhere nearby. “Forget about it,” she said.
“Well,” Simon said uncomfortably. “Thanks for the talk. The boys liked it. Even Bill liked it, didn’t you, Bill? He wants to ask you something, actually.”
Bill scowled up at his father.
“He wants to know if you know anything about owls,” Ethan said. “We found one!”
“Dad found it,” Bill said, scowling harder. “He gave it to me. Well, okay, here goes. My dad says you, like, used to be a vet or something? And he found this baby owl. I think it’s a saw-whet owl. It was on the ground under a tree, and he took it home to give to me. We’ve been feeding it meat and stuff, just like for a week. We got a book out of the library. My dad said you could maybe come over and look at it? We took it to our vet, the one we use for our dog. I mean, my mom’s dog. It used to be all of ours, but anyway, he said he didn’t know anything about owls. He was eating okay till a couple of days ago, but now he’s stopped and he just kind of sits there. I was going to bring him up and train him to sit on my shoulder like Merlin and Archimedes in The Sword in the Stone, but now I’m afraid he’s going to, like. Die.”
It was too dark to see the boy’s face clearly, but his voice was clear enough. Back in the room he had been angry and hard, but now, talking about the owl, he just sounded miserable.
“Of course I’ll look at it,” Isabel said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Simon lived in West Philadelphia, farther south than she and Theo had lived. On his street the houses were shabby without being dilapidated, brightened by pots of geraniums on the stoops. The address he had given her was for a faded duplex with sunflowers growing in the yard. Steps led to a sagging wooden porch that held cartons, bundled newspapers, potted plants, a rocking chair, and various balls, nets, mitts, hockey sticks, Roller-blades. The front door was scarred and streaked, but the glass in the fanlight was red and blue, and the house number tiles were lovely blue-and-white majolica. She rang the bell. Simon came to the door in jeans and a rumpled, untucked shirt, his big hairy white feet bare on the bare wood floor. He smiled and held out his hand with a jokey formality. “Ah, Dr. Rubin,” he said. “Come in.”
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