The Killing of Butterfly Joe Page 10

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘Or we could do it another time.’

  ‘I just need to finish setting these two. It’ll take a few minutes.’

  She had a setting board on her desk and was taping the wings of a butterfly with strips of paper. There was a little groove in the board to lay the body of the butterfly in so that it wouldn’t be crushed and to allow the wings to spread naturally. Isabelle’s jaw was slack with the concentrating, her tongue darting at her top lip, her eyes widened and narrowed at the tiny movements required to set the butterfly without damaging it.

  ‘Where did you learn how to do that?’

  ‘Directions for Making a Collection by Benjamin Wilkes. Would you pass me that magnifying glass?’

  I handed her the magnifier and she examined her handiwork.

  ‘How long does each one take?’

  ‘If I get it right, then maybe five minutes to pin and tape it. Then a few days for it to set.’

  ‘Looks fiddly.’

  ‘I’m doing it the old way, pinning the forewings sloping backwards in the natural manner. Present day collectors set the dorsum – the trailing edge – at right angles to the body to expose more of the pattern of the hindwings. But I prefer this method. It’s more natural. It’s actually the old British method. The one . . . my father favoured.’

  There was the tiniest hesitation before mentioning her father, but she mentioned him. The F-word.

  The two butterflies she was setting were small but brilliant, with stripes and spots of turquoise on black velvet wings.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Blue glassy tigers. Male and female.’

  ‘How can you tell which is which?’

  ‘In this case the male is the slightly prettier one. In the wild they’re easier to distinguish as the males usually patrol a fixed boundary while the females go where they please.’

  ‘Unlike this household?’

  She smiled at my dig at Joe.

  ‘My father specialized in the Neotropical region. The most colourful and spectacular species. As well as some of the rarest.’

  ‘So those were caught twenty years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They look as good as new.’

  ‘These little envelopes are miracles of practicality,’ she said. ‘They used to just press butterflies in books, like flowers. But the specimens never lasted. A specimen can last indefinitely in these. So long as you keep the pests away. That’s the big challenge for most lepidopterists.’

  ‘You don’t get bored?’

  ‘I do my best thinking when I’m setting.’

  ‘Thought any good thoughts today?’ I asked this without agenda but she blushed again.

  ‘Oh . . . Many things. And nothing. I’m . . . no. I am trying for a scholarship to Yale. And I have to write a five-thousand-word essay.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘You won’t want to know.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘It’s . . . Well. More theology, I’m afraid. I’m comparing and contrasting the different expressions of faith in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.’

  ‘As you do.’ (I had seen The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina on her bedside table. Looking at those books had made me momentarily envious of the inner life she was enjoying and that I, not so long ago, had exchanged for the experiential pleasures promised by Joe.)

  ‘I’ve not done the Big Russians yet. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?’

  ‘Oh. I couldn’t choose between them. I admire them both so much.’

  How facile she made me feel. She wanted to get inside the heads of great Russian novelists, I wanted to get inside her sister’s knickers.

  ‘So what are the differences? In a sentence. Save me reading those big doorsteps.’

  ‘Well. You should read them. If you care about literature and have aspirations to write. It’s hard to say in a sentence. Tolstoy does the panoramic so well and the prose seems to come easy and elegantly. Dostoevsky’s thoughts pour out with less polish but more passion. And he gets a little deeper into the troubled side of his characters. They are both men of faith but I think their responses to the claims of Christianity are very different. Which is what I’m proposing in my essay.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well. . . . Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’ How the angel of my better nature stirred in her company!

  ‘OK. Well. It’s my opinion that Tolstoy’s faith was more theoretical, deist and actually unorthodox, whereas Dostoevsky’s faith was more intimate, Christ-centred and orthodox.’

  ‘Tolstoy Bad Theology, Dostoevsky Good?’

  ‘Ha! Joe might put it that way. It’s hard to know for sure what people really believe. Even those who are capable of expressing themselves better than others. What people write or even say isn’t always exact testimony. Nearly done here.’

  I was happy to wait, standing there watching her carefully tape the wings of butterflies whilst talking about God and great writers or the third instar of papilios. Mary was right: Isabelle was out of step, not just with her generation but with these times, which are brash and boastful and preoccupied with the need for instant gratification (‘if it feels good do it’). But how original that made her. And it was certainly easier to appreciate Isabelle’s quieter qualities when she was not sat next to her noisier sister.

  ‘I actually wanted to say sorry if I offended you in some way the other day,’ I said. ‘When we were talking about beliefs. I was being glib.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit strident.’

  ‘I was brought up to have an opinion on everything – including things I don’t know about. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘Thank you for saying so. My head was elsewhere.’

  ‘In Russia?’

  ‘In Russia. But in other places, too.’

  I quite liked the idea of being in those other places with her – wherever they were.

  ‘I thought Mary was being mean to you and I didn’t want you thinking I agreed with her.’

  ‘Mary likes to disagree with people. It’s her way of working things out. She was probably trying to impress you. I think she’s taken a shine to you. And you seem to have taken a shine to her.’

  Isabelle said this without any trace of the envy I thought she might be feeling – or that Mary had hinted at. I laughed a phony, pathetic laugh. ‘Really?’ My fake surprise brought the most sudden and profound change of colour to Isabelle’s face: a mortified purple.

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s presumptuous of me.’

  ‘No. She’s . . . attractive. Feisty. She has a strong personality. But I don’t have feelings for her – in that way. I’m flattered though.’

  Was that relief in her eyes? Let it be so!

  ‘Mary can give the impression she’s a confident, free-thinking young woman but really she’s an insecure girl. More vulnerable than you might think.’

  I felt transparent again, my intentions exposed. It sounded like a gentle warning. Was she protecting her sister or me? Or herself?

  ‘I don’t have designs on her if that’s what you mean. She’s not my type.’

  I am slightly ashamed of my cold, chameleon opportunism. How quick I was to lie in order to keep the field open. I was prepared to demean both sisters in order to play them off against each other: when I was with Isabelle, Mary was a needy nymphet; when I was with Mary, Isabelle was a pious prude.

  ‘Can a person really be a type?’ she said. ‘In novels, perhaps. We name types of things but every living creature is essentially unique.’

  I had, once again, been put in my shallow puddle. With Isabelle there was a test (I was always failing): the challenge of the unobtainable. I really needed to up my game in her company.

  ‘I . . . suppose we create types for convenience. Because life is too short to really find out who someone is.’

  She seemed to like this.

  ‘Yes. All categorization is shorthand. I think it’s why I chose arts over s
cience. Taxonomy is as much about our need to order things as understand them. If not more. You probably think I’m a type, too. I can see that you do. It’s all right. I confess to doing the same with you.’

  ‘And what type am I?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘You are . . . a charmer. Clever. Maybe a pleasure-seeker.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I think you want to be all things to all people.’

  ‘A people-pleaser?’

  ‘Is that rude?’

  ‘No. It’s true enough,’ I said.

  I’m not sure I liked the type she’d defined. Charm is a dubious quality to have. It implies a certain attractiveness and emotional intelligence, but requires guile and guile is demonic angelic. Clever is great at school and dinner parties but it suggests a lack of depth and was not the intellectual endorsement I was hoping for. As for pleasure-seeker. Well I couldn’t really argue: I was a hedonist. Pleasure was my true goal, and pleasure at the expense of others a necessary part of that philosophy.

  On the way to the library I decided to act as if I was seeing the room and its treasures for the first time in order to let her have the pleasure of showing it to me. (People-pleaser that I am.)

  ‘These chests are incredible. Were they here when you came?’

  ‘Joe found a cabinet-making specialist in a place called Hancock, a Shaker community. We sold some rarities to pay for them. But it was worth it.’

  Isabelle opened a drawer.

  ‘I presume there’s a system?’ I asked. (What taxonomist could resist answering such a question?)

  ‘Yes. My father used a specially devised standardized system to record locality, frequency, early stages and collection serial numbers of every insect he captured. Every little envelope he’d send back carried the information. And he made a note of every single specimen he caught in his notebooks. He had a thing for aberrations. We have some species here that are not even in the Smithsonian.’

  The collection – ‘one of the most extraordinary on earth’, I would later learn – was wasted on me. To my uneducated eye, the butterflies were wonderful but no lovelier, no more brilliant, than the butterflies we would soon be selling to gift stores and florists out on the road; but in the company of this Keeper I was happy to be educated. Isabelle was sensitive enough just to show me the highlights, including the wonderful and slightly frightening Queen Alexandra birdwings that made up – along with the Hesperon, Homerus and Chika –the Big Four rarest, most valuable butterflies in the world.

  ‘We have all nineteen of the Appendix I butterflies. That is butterflies that it is a criminal offence to trade. Back then it wasn’t an issue. But mankind is voracious. Species are dying out.’

  ‘So how come your father didn’t set them himself?’

  ‘He never had the time. He was working in far-flung places and specialized in very large specimens. He would send the rarities back until he had time to mount and set and frame them. Ma would put them in his “collection chest”.’

  ‘The trunk she pulled from the flames?’

  Isabelle nodded.

  ‘She paid a heavy price for saving them.’

  ‘She knew they were valuable. It’s only in the last few years that we realized just how valuable.’

  Isabelle walked to the far end of the room and pulled out two drawers.

  ‘If there is ever a fire again – these are the bugs to grab.’

  To my eye they looked like the blue morphos that were being raised on the farm and that were the business’s most popular seller.

  ‘Blue morphos?’

  ‘Almost. But with something extra.’

  I looked and couldn’t see anything, spectacularly different other than a little appendage between the wings.’

  ‘They’re five-winged blue morphos. A new species. As far as we know, they are the only examples in the world. For a long time, it was considered to be a myth, a phantasm, like a Moby Dick of the skies. Rumours of its existence fluttered between the halls and drawers of the great museums and around the conventions of the great collectors. But no one had one or had seen one. Then my father found these. Twenty-four of them.’

  The name card said ‘Morpho wolffii.’

  ‘Morpho wolffii?

  ‘Wolff is my father’s surname. Ma reverted to her maiden name after they divorced. And we did the same.’

  ‘You don’t seem to mind talking about him. I thought there was a prohibition.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘You don’t remember him I suppose.’

  ‘I have a vague memory of a man with a beard and long hair in shorts and sandals. I remember the trunk. It was like a treasure chest. When you opened it you were bedazzled by all the colours. Even in their envelopes. They were nearly all jungle butterflies so the colours were powerful and vivid. If you squinted you could imagine that trunk was full of sapphires and rubies, diamonds and emeralds.’

  ‘Do you . . . regret not knowing him?’

  ‘What’s done is done. I sometimes think I am connecting with him in some way, when I’m setting, but I’m not sure what they tell me about him, other than the fact he was obsessed with them, that he travelled a great deal, that he was meticulous. I can admire that part of him. It will be sad to see it go.’

  ‘Go?

  ‘Joe thinks he’s found a buyer for the whole collection. Mind you he’s said that before. He’s been trying to net the big deal – the deal that changes everything – for years. But he seems certain this time.’

  ‘Do you mind? After all the work you’ve done putting it together?’

  ‘It would be good for us to not have to chase after money all the time. To escape the hand to mouth. Joe carries a heavy burden but he doesn’t always show it. And there’s no point in having these things in drawers, unseen.’

  ‘How much would it be worth?’

  ‘I don’t know. Joe thinks it’s a lot. But it’s hard to know if the numbers he’s quoting are Joe numbers or real; they seem a little too much to me.’

  ‘What sort of numbers?’

  ‘I don’t even know.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A year ago he sold a set of the Big Four for fifty thousand dollars to a Japanese collector.’

  ‘Jesus. So . . . the whole collection . . .’

  ‘It could be a lot.’

  ‘But you don’t seem that keen.’

  ‘If it was up to me I would give them to the Smithsonian.’

  ‘That’s noble of you.’

  ‘Yeah. But as Ma would say, “Nobility don’t pay the fuckin’ bills.” ’

  Isabelle’s impersonation of her mother’s husky twang and expletive was surprisingly accurate and reassuring: her loyalty wasn’t blind and her sense of humour wasn’t dead. And when Isabelle swore it was rarer and just as beautiful as an Alexandra birdwing!

  ‘What about Mary?’

  ‘I don’t think she really cares. She’s never shown any interest in butterflies.’

  Isabelle started to move along the canyon of mahogany, closing those lovely silent sliding drawers.

  ‘Have you ever wanted to see your father? In all this time?’

  She didn’t answer yes or no but I took it as a yes. ‘I wrote my father a few years ago. When I was sixteen. I don’t know what I was trying to do. I posted it care of Princeton. It was silly. I shared blithe and bland facts about my life.’

  ‘Why is that silly? Seems perfectly natural to me.’

  ‘My problem was how to be honest about what I was doing around Ma who, as you know, would not countenance any mention of my father let alone correspondence with him. ‘I still respected her position. And Joe’s too. But Joe had some memory of our father. I did not. I was curious to know something. I still felt unfaithful writing those letters. And asking Clay to post them for me.’

  ‘Did he ever reply?’

  Isabelle hesitated.

  ‘Isabelle?’

  ‘Ma found o
ut in the end.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Clay told her. In his hierarchy of loyalty Ma is first. Ma said I couldn’t have anything to do with him as long as I was under her roof, or until I was twenty-one.’

  ‘And when are you twenty-one?

  ‘In the fall.’

  Just then Mary appeared without warning. I’m sure she’d been eavesdropping. ‘Izzy been showing you her true loves?’

  Mary was wearing just a T-shirt and knickers, her hair tied to one side. She directed the barbed words at her sister but the looks were for me. Isabelle closed the drawers and left the room, unwilling to fuel this fire.

  ‘Ma wants to see you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘How’s her mood?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Hard to say. She might shoot you, she might hug you. Take her an iced tea. That’ll keep her sweet.’

  Mary was stood in the doorway. She lifted her brown leg across it, barring my exit.

  ‘Remember what you vowed.’

  ‘I do.’

  * * *

  I set off to see Edith without trepidation. She had become a little sweeter towards me over the last few days; my combination of self-ridicule and directness played well with her. I was confident in my ability to charm people of different temperaments, even the tightly strung ones. She must have heard the creak of the floorboards for she said ‘come in’ before my knuckles even rapped the door. Because of her troublesome legs, she spent most mornings in her vast bed with four carved posts, which she used as a desk, spreading invoices, orders and bills around her. She was sat propped up with several pillows and looked the queen of her realm. The room’s original fittings and fixtures were intact. The only anomaly was a big television propped on a chest at the end of her bed. She was half-watching a romantic soap while doing the admin. I set the iced tea on the bedside table and stood, unsure of my next move. She continued to look from paperwork to television.

  ‘Mrs Bosco?’

  ‘No one calls me that except AT&T and I ain’t friends with them. Making money outta people just talking. Call me Edith or nothing.’

  ‘I brought you an iced tea.’

  ‘Sit.’

  There were no chairs in the room, other than the cushioned bench in the bay window. There was a single cot bed the other side of Edith’s. Later, Isabelle would explain that she would sleep in it on the nights her mother had the fire-fears, reading her to sleep with psalms or National Enquirer articles.