Now, in Bonnie’s absence, and after the noisy departure of the boys — in the presence only of the Flaxbaums’ peculiar houseplant — Flax indulged in an unusual activity: he googled himself.
His name came up just once, as he had known it would: on the website of Caldicott Academy, Godolphin, Mass., the private girls’ school where he worked. In a photograph, taken several years ago, Flax’s hair was retreating but not yet fleeing. His upper lip had not yet put forth its slim mustache. His plump cheeks did not show the two vertical creases that appeared whenever he produced a smile, and his glasses concealed the considerate gaze that had made many a slipshod student called in for a conference feel suddenly worthy, though worthy of what she could not have easily said. Maybe worthy of a conference with Flax; maybe that was enough. Most students responded to their conversations with Flax by paying more attention to their Latin grammars, by finding something intriguing in the ablative absolute, by renouncing their trots — one girl actually burned hers in a little ceremony behind the gym.
Under the picture the legend read Myron Flaxbaum, BA Brooklyn College, MA Columbia, MAT Harvard. Teaches first-, second-, and third-year Latin. Coaches the chess team. It was a tribute to the electronic world that this mild entry had brought him to the attention of the director of Unanticipated Seminars at King’s College on the Strand. What could he invent as a usual fee? More critically, what could he say in his lecture? Let us think for a moment (he thought). Perhaps I can work up something about the history of life — the big bang, the primordial soup, the development of bacteria, the emergence of creatures with a sort of brain and a sort of eye and some locomotion. I will reread Darwin and Linnaeus and Mendel and Richard Dawkins; I will review the Bible. I might require an agent…
And then, shaking his head violently (for him), he stopped considering this daunting task. He googled King’s College on the Strand and discovered that it indeed existed but that no Harry Worrell was named on its faculty. Perhaps Harry was blessedly modest. Flax then shrugged himself into his worn overcoat and checked his shabby briefcase, making sure it carried the books and papers necessary for today’s lessons. He tested the loose button on his overcoat — yes, it would probably hang on another day. He lifted from its hook the beret his sons had given him for his recent birthday — an accessory they considered a sartorial improvement on his old tweed cap — and slipped it onto his semi-bald head. He picked up the half-full cup of coffee resting on the computer table and brought it to a familiar dark corner and dumped its contents into a pot of soil and mismatched pedicels, bracts, peduncles, and leaves. Then he abandoned the flat to this plant’s caffeinated care.
II.
Nobody remembered where the plant had come from. It seemed to have been sitting forever in that ill-lit and (for a plant) unwholesome corner of the living room, on a little table whose provenance was also forgotten, protected by the scrolled arm of the brown plush sofa. The middle boy, Leo, suggested that the plant had been spawned by the sofa, which was called Jack, after Flax’s dear uncle who had lived with them for some years. Uncle Jack had shared a room with the youngest boy, Felix, and never got in anybody’s way, largely because he was usually occupying the sofa, sometimes flicking cigar ash in the direction of Plant. “A lovable schnorrer,” said Mr. Flaxbaum of Jack, though not as part of the formal eulogy.
Young Felix suspected that he himself had brought Plant home from the garden shop during an annual giveaway of moribund merchandise. Flax, devotee of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, entertained the fancy that Plant had once been a nymph changed like Daphne, although not into a laurel on a hill near Olympus but rather into an ill-favored thing rooted in a pot in their living room. Perhaps she had misbehaved when she still had legs and hips. Bonnie, who had received a classical education from the nuns, thought Plant was a household god responsible for luck, one of the Lares or one of the Penates. Why not? The family had been fortunate so far, unless you were silly enough to consider fat bank accounts and granite kitchen counters signs of luck. Even her Leo, who had a neurologic condition which might prove progressive but might not — even he was not unlucky, not yet, not yet, maybe not ever…Plant might be a succulent, Leo had speculated.
In a family discussion soon after Plant’s appearance, Bonnie remarked that it might have been a variety of primrose emigrated from the railroad tracks. Sean, the eldest, taking charge of a one-volume Encyclopedia of Botany no one had known they owned (“Sort of like the plant,” mentioned Uncle Jack), said that its pallor indicated that it might be mycotrophic, might “‘obtain nutrients from the soil by means of the fungi that inhabit its roots,’” Sean read aloud. Its rosettes made it a cousin to Anacampseros telephiastrum variegata, “‘also called Sunrise.’”
“Telephiastrum,” Flax repeated. “Greek, not Latin. ‘Casting afar,’ maybe. Go on, Sean.”
“Like Arsaenia, the tip of its leaf is ‘elongated, upturned, and coiled.’”
“Only one of its leaves,” Leo said. “The striped one is flat.”
“There’s a hint of a caudex just above the soil,” Sean said, and closed the book.
“What’s a caudex?” Felix said.
“An early manuscript,” Jack said.
After a while: “Taproot,” said Sean.
“Our guest has lots of characteristics,” Felix said. “Some growing out of others.”
“Some mutually exclusive,” Leo said.
Plant’s supposed taproot had never been examined (they didn’t want to kill the thing). Sometimes it produced tiny flowers in hues of lingerie. Sometimes it put out scramblers which crept to the edge of the pot and then disintegrated. It was probably a hybrid. “Who isn’t?” Sean inquired (biology was one of his AP courses). It troubled no one, and it endeared itself to no one. In that way it was different from the little terrier the family had acquired from the pound some years ago. Buddy liked to chase cars. It was only a sometime habit; they hoped he’d outgrow it. Otherwise he was affectionate, recognized the boys by name and also Uncle Jack, who gave him candy in secret. He seemed numerate; Leo thought Buddy might learn to count, or at least to feign counting, like Clever Hans. But math lessons never got started, because one misty morning the fit was on him, and he came to grief with a Camry. Poor Buddy…Plant persisted, like the busy Flaxbaums themselves — like Flax, Bonnie, Sean, Leo, Felix, and the incarnation of Uncle Jack.
III.
The next morning, Tuesday: “Do you want me to print out Professor Harry Worrell’s invitation?” Flax asked Felix.
“Thanks, no,” Felix said. “Have you answered it?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, maybe I’ll take the next communication if it comes by mail.”
Felix was a scrupulous collector, not a catch-as-catch-can hoarder. He didn’t care for documents, though he did admire stamps. But his taste was mainly for odd items like fancy buttons and bicycle bells and orphaned circuit boards that might come in handy sometime; and he also liked things with a peculiar beauty, like the last garnet inch in a flask of cough medicine, or his own vermiform appendix, deftly removed from his cecum and preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. He picked up crosses on chains in secondhand shops — they reminded him of his early childhood when he’d attended Masses with Grandma Reilly, his mama’s sweet mama. Felix might never have indulged his scavenging habits — or might have been reduced to collecting Pokémon cards — if Uncle Jack hadn’t died and abandoned his half of the shared bedroom. Over the next few years the boy built some shelves, bought a glass aquarium, discovered in a junkyard a small office safe and repaired its lock with Leo’s help. There Felix kept his crosses. The aquarium now housed some goldfish, two, three, four, or five of them, their number depending on their own luck and on a larger fate which Felix didn’t understand and which he guessed was a mystery also to his dependents. They conducted repetitive exercises under Felix’s benign attention. He fed them flakes that looked like dried cilantro. He gave them the names of Latin poets in honor of his father, but whenever one of them was found floating without purpose, he retired the fish while recycling the name. He had thus been guardian of numerous Virgils and Juvenals. Mr. Flaxbaum was comfortable with the monikers but he thought the group as a whole ought to be called by its appropriate Linnaean taxon. So Felix posted a little sign: C. auratus auratus.