I began my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Jessie Rose Rubiman, still living in Newton, Texas, and still heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise: “Mention his name one more time — know what? I’m still considering finding out where he lives, coming into his bedroom while he sleeps and chopping off his doohickey. That’s what that son-of-a-bitch’s got coming to him.”
I ended my investigation by calling Information and obtaining the telephone number of June Bug Shelby Hollow: “Night watch? Wait — I won a free Indiglo Timex?”
Unless June Bugs were skilled actresses in the tradition of Davis and Dietrich (suitable for the A movies, not the B or C movies), it seemed evident that the only moth flying through this sticky night, doggedly figure-eighting (like a confused kamikaze pilot) around every porch light and lamppost, refusing to be deterred even if I switched out the lights and ignored her, was Hannah Schneider.
That was the startling thing about this business of abandonment, of finding oneself so without conversation, one’s thoughts had the entire world to themselves; they could drift for days without bumping into anyone. I could swallow Dad calling himself Socrates. I could swallow The Nightwatchmen too, hunt down every whisper of their workings like a private detective desperate to find The Missing Dame. I could even swallow Servo and Hannah as lovers (see “African Egg-Eating Snake,” Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.). I could assume Baba au Rhum hadn’t always rattled and Mmmmed; back in the stringy-haired summer of 1973, no doubt he’d cut an arresting rebel figure (or resembled Poe just enough that thirteen-year-old Catherine decided to be his Virginia forevermore).
What I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t stare at with the naked eye, was Dad and Hannah. I noticed, as the days drifted past, I kept tucking that thought away, saving it like a grandmother for a Special Occasion that would never come. I attempted and sometimes succeeded diverting my mind (not with a book or play and, yes, reciting Keats was an idiotic idea, boarding a rowboat for refuge in an earthquake) but with TV, shaving and Gap commercials, prime-time melodramas with tan people named Brett declaring, “It’s payback time.”
They were gone. They were giant specimens splayed in glass cases in dim, deserted rooms. I could stare down at them, ridicule my stupidity for never noticing their blatant similarities: their awe-inspiring size (personas larger than life), brightly-colored hind wings (conspicuous in any room), their spined caterpillar beginnings (orphan, poor little rich girl, respectively), taking flight solely at night (their endings swathed in mystery), boundaries of their distribution unknown.
If a man bemoaned a woman as noisily as Dad (“commonplace,” “strange and wayward,” a “sob story,” he’d called her), behind Curtain #1 of such severe dislike there was almost always a brand new Sedona Beige Love parked there, big, bright and impractical (destined to break down within the year). It was the oldest trick in the book, one I never should have fallen for, having read all of Shakespeare, including the late romances, and the definitive biography of Cary Grant, The Reluctant Lover (Murdy, 1999).
BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE. Why, when I forced myself to consider Dad and Hannah, did that old moving box crash into my head? They were the words Dad almost always used to describe my mother. After the fuss of battement frappés and demi-pliés, the Technicolor Dream dress, those words often showed up like unwanted, impoverished guests at a splendid party, embarrassing and sad, as if Dad were talking about her glass eye or absence of an arm. At Hyacinth Terrace, her black eyes like clogged drains, her mouth stained plum, Hannah Schneider had said the same frilly words, spoken not to the others but to me. With a stare pressing down on me, she’d said: “Some people are fragile, as — as butterflies.”
They’d used the same delicate words to describe the same delicate person.
Time and again, Dad handpicked a cute slogan for a person and rudely bumper-stuck it to them for all ensuing conversations (Dean Roy at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville had been the uninspired “sweet as candy”). Hannah must have heard him say it once when describing my mother. And just as she’d blatantly recited Dad’s favorite quotation to me at the dinner table (happiness, dog, sun) and planted Dad’s favorite foreign film in her VCR (L’Avventura) (Hannah was now dusted, cast in ultraviolet light; I could see Dad’s fingerprints all over her), she had tantalizingly tossed me that phrase, thereby letting bits of her dark secret, the hot one she’d clutched tightly in her hands, fall through her fingers, so that I might see it, follow it like the barest trail of sand. Not even when I was alone with her in the woods did she have the guts (Mut, in German) to let go of it, throw it all into the air so it showered over our heads, got caught in our hair and mouths.
The truth they’d hidden (Dad with Fifth Symphony ferocity, Hannah messily) that they’d known each other (since 1992, I calculated) in the movie-poster sense of the word (and I’d never know if they were Il Caso Thomas Crown or Colazione da Tiffany or if they’d flossed their teeth next to each other three hundred times), it didn’t garner a gasp from me — not a whimper or wheeze.
I only went back to the moving box and sat on my knees, running my fingers through the velvet splinters, the antennae and forewings and the thoraxes and torn mounting papers and pins, hoping Natasha had left me a code, a suicide letter identifying her traitorous husband just as she’d identified the part of the Red-based Jezebel that indicated it was repugnant to birds — an explanation, a puzzle to pore over, a whisper from the dead, a Visual Aid. (There was nothing.)
By then, my CASE NOTES filled an entire legal pad, some fifty pages, and I’d remembered the photograph Nigel had shown me in Hannah’s bedroom (which she must have destroyed before the camping trip since I’d been unable to find it in the Evan Picone shoe box), the one of Hannah as a girl with the blonde floating away from the camera lens and on the back, written in blue pen, 1973. And I’d driven the Volvo to the Internet café on Orlando, Cyberroast, and matched the gold-lion insignia, which I recalled from the pocket of Hannah’s school uniform blazer, to the crest of a private school on East 81st Street, the one Natasha had attended in 1973 after her parents made her quit the Larson Ballet Conservatory (see www.theivyschool.edu). (Salvaveritate was their irksome motto.) And after staring for hours at that other photo of Hannah, the one I’d stolen from her garage, Rockstar Hannah of the Rooster-Red Hair, I’d realized why, back in January, when I’d seen her with the madwoman haircut, I’d felt that persistent itch of déjà vu.