Telling the Bees (11 page)

Sixteen

A
RTEMIS:
The Greek goddess of the hunt, forests, and childbirth, she was often portrayed as the virgin protectress of young girls, who ritualistically sacrificed their tunics, toys, dolls, and all youthful belongings to her as a farewell to their youth on the night before their marriage. Her priests were generally eunuchs, and her priestesses were virgins called the
Melissae
, meaning honeybees.

I
n the dark months following Claire’s death, my thoughts drifted like desert sand around the regret of hours that had transformed fleeting days into long weeks and months, and on into irretrievable years of stubborn silence.

It all seems so foolish now, but throughout the drift of those wasted years I peevishly clung to the belief that as long as the silence could be broken, should either of us choose to do so, then the silence was somehow less complete.

But we did not speak, choosing instead to cultivate in the hothouses of our solitude all the real and imagined slights like so many rare and exotic orchids, and then all at once, in no more time than it took to stuff a dirty red bandanna inside a human mouth and fasten a careless strip of silver tape across it, the choice was rendered moot and the silence eternal.

And so I am left with nothing but memories.

When I was still in my teens, I used to sit out on our back porch late into the evening watching for signs that Claire was out and about, and I often overheard my mother lament to my father that she was afraid for “that poor dear girl.” I knew without her saying so that she meant Claire.

“You have a daughter, Elizabeth,” I heard my father say more than once.

“But she’s not like me,” my mother always replied.

I am not exactly like my father either. I wonder sometimes if this is the dichotomy of hope that all parents face. The wish, on the one hand, that their child, will carry their own dreams forward while at the same time hoping they will do so somehow better, yet, on the other hand, not so much better as to lose sight of who they are and where they came from.

My father’s consternation that night, however, was more straightforward. He worried about what he considered to be an unseemly meddling into other people’s affairs.

My mother had other concerns. While hesitant to defy my father’s wishes outright, she often wondered aloud whether it might not be best to at least question the girl after she noticed, just as I had, what looked to be bruises on Claire’s delicate wrists and forearms and another on her jawbone.

“She’s fifteen. Surely she’s too old to be getting those kinds of marks from innocent roughhousing,” my mother had pointed out rather indignantly to my father as they sat together in the parlor one evening after dinner. “As God as my witness, they look to be deliberately made.”

“Spare the rod, spoil the child,” I heard my father firmly reply after a long moment’s consideration. His voice seemed to punctuate the rhythmic squeak of my mother’s wooden rocker.

“That’s what the Good Book says, Elizabeth.”

“But does not the Bible also say, ‘As ye sow, so shall ye reap’?” my mother had said in rejoinder. Regrettably, I could not hear my father’s response to this as Eloise, who was old enough to know better, chose that most inopportune moment to intrude upon my solitary stargazing with a shouted invitation to join her in the dining room for a game of checkers, which I declined despite her loud and repeated entreaties.

My parents’ conversation had long since concluded by the time I finally was able to quiet my sister by promising to play one game with her later that evening, so I can only assume my mother eventually deferred to my father’s entreaty, at least for the time being, as I did not hear them discuss the matter again for the rest of that summer.

As had become the cycle, Claire’s mother had ordered her once again to stop coming around to our house to “dally,” as she put it, in our family’s apiary shortly after my parents’ initial conversation. But the ban was only haphazardly enforced after a time, and by the following winter Claire had more or less resumed her daily routine.

“That poor girl didn’t seem to be herself last week. She seemed so pale and distracted,” my mother said to no one in particular as she passed a bowl of mashed potatoes to my father when the subject of Claire’s sudden absence came up once again the following spring. “Did either of you see Claire at school at all last week?”

Eloise never warmed to Claire the way my parents and I did. And Claire had likewise avoided any significant conversation with Eloise, having confided in me that she had been angered many years earlier when she chanced to overhear my sister and some of her schoolmates mocking Hilda’s rather awkward attempt to join in one of the girls’ schoolyard games.

“Just because your mother teaches Sunday school doesn’t give that snooty sister of yours the right to act all holier than thou,” Claire had fumed.

Of course I agreed with Claire that my sister had acted insensitively, but in her defense I also ventured that Hilda had hardly given Eloise, or anyone else for that matter, much in the way of neighborly encouragement.

“She may not say much, but that doesn’t mean she can’t hear what people say about her,” Claire had snapped back. But then, just as abruptly, her demeanor softened and her eyes took on that distant cast they often did when she spoke of her family. “You know, Hilda wasn’t always this way. When she was small, my father used to call her his little chatterbox.”

I tried to picture the eerily silent young woman I knew as a loquacious child, but the image would not form in my mind. Claire, I believe, must have read something of the skepticism in my face.

“Well, it’s the truth, Albert,” Claire said defiantly. “You could hardly get a word in edgewise with her when she was little.”

“I believe you,” I said, not wishing to rile her further, as Claire could work up quite a lather when she believed her family, especially her older sister, was under attack.

But even if what Claire had said was true, what was there to do about it? Claire stared into my eyes as if searching for the answer to my own question, and when I faltered under her gaze, I could not help feeling that I had somehow come up short.

This is why I felt it was my duty, though I hadn’t been asked directly, to inform my mother on that particular occasion that I had not seen Claire since the previous Thursday.

“Now, Elizabeth, don’t go getting yourself all worked up over nothing again,” my father said. “She’s probably just come down with a cold.”

“Fiddlesticks!”

“I said leave it be, Elizabeth,” my father insisted in a tone at once so cold and firm that even my sister looked up from her dinner plate.

“But Walter . . .” my mother started to object.

“I tell you that girl can take care of herself,” my father insisted. My mother’s mouth snapped shut and remained uncharacteristically so until the conclusion of the meal. She remained noticeably taciturn for another day or two, her sunny disposition returning only after Claire reappeared on our doorstep the following week. My mother welcomed her back with a flurry of hugs and warm words of affection that seemed excessive even for her normally demonstrative self. My father, however, maintained his usual dignified demeanor. And Claire, for her part, seemed unmoved by either response and volunteered no more concrete explanation for her extended absence than to say she hadn’t been feeling well, which I suspect both my mother and father interpreted according to their own inclinations.

We probably wouldn’t have noticed the new set of bruises on her at all, since Claire tended at that time to favor long sleeves and high necklines, had she not chanced that day to snag the back of her sweater on an overhanging bramble as she was carrying a load of new foundation frames from the honey shed to our number sixteen hive.

Claire was wearing a peach-colored pullover sweater and she had gotten entangled in a particularly awkward spot right between her shoulder blades. Not wanting to drop the frames to extricate herself, she had called out for help. My mother and I had come running at the sound of her voice in distress.

Quickly assessing the situation, my mother ordered me to relieve Claire of her burden. I am sure my mother saw the discoloration at the base of Claire’s throat at the same moment I did because I heard her gasp just as I did when she tugged at the stubborn snag at the neckline of Claire’s sweater and a mass of angry purple-and-yellow splotches just above her collarbone was revealed.

Of course having witnessed Mrs. Straussman’s dauntingly mercurial verbal assaults on numerous prior occasions, I am sure my mother naturally presumed, as I did, a propensity for physical violence as well. I assume as much as neither of us spoke directly to Claire or to each other about what we saw or suspected. Which is not to say we weren’t concerned about Claire’s welfare, but there was only so much we could do under the circumstances. My father was quite firm in his directive that we should refrain from meddling in the Straussmans’ affairs.

Times were very different back then. My father was not alone in his sincere belief that what went on between family members was nobody’s business but their own, nor was he swimming against the tide of common wisdom when he exhorted my mother not to go stirring up a hornet’s nest in her own backyard.

“You’ll just get yourself stung like before,” my father had said. “And the rest of us right along with you.”

“But you can’t expect me to stand by and do nothing.”

“That’s exactly what I expect you to do, Elizabeth. You have no more proof now than you did with that boy of theirs. What makes you think it would be any different this time?”

This time.

I could not know what my mother could have done about the tragic circumstances of Harry Junior’s death. But I could imagine myself Claire’s heroic rescuer—her knight in shining armor who stood up for her when no one else would. But what I allowed myself to imagine, and what I could realistically be expected to act upon, were two entirely different matters.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Claire said as we strolled together through her family’s walnut grove, stopping to pick up the ripened nuts that had fallen to the ground and deposit them in the customary bushel basket she’d brought along as a ruse should her parents inquire where she’d gotten off to. The last of the sun’s rays were glinting through the tops of the trees. It could not have been more than a week after my mother and I had discovered the unsettling bruises on her neck.

“I could say the same of you,” I replied.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her hair seemed to hang rather more limply than usual across her forehead and pale cheeks.

“Perhaps if you drank a glass of warm milk at bedtime,” I ventured, “that might help you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” she said.

And then she said nothing more for several minutes until we found ourselves standing in a small clearing to the rear of her family’s property.

“I used to hate when Father went away for work, but I loved it when he came back home,” Claire said. She set her basket on the ground. “Hilda too. She used to look forward to his presents.”

When it appeared that Claire might never speak again, I cleared my throat, and then she told me that the previous March her father had brought Hilda home a beautiful china doll with long red curls and a green satin dress. Claire said that instead of reacting with her customary delight to her father’s latest gift, Hilda had taken one look at the doll and thrown it right back at him. Claire said it hit the wall behind her father’s head and its face shattered into what had seemed like a thousand pieces.

“Father never said a word,” Claire said. “He just turned round and went straight to the dining room and poured himself a glass of whiskey from the bottle he keeps on the top shelf of the hutch. I think he thinks he’s hiding it from us up there. He forgets that Hilda and I do all the dusting since Mother’s taken ill.

“Mother made me pick up the broken doll because Hilda refused to come out of her room until she heard Father leave the house,” Claire continued. “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I brought it out here.”

I nodded, more out of sympathy than understanding, as I could no more imagine what had possessed her to dispose of a lifeless object in so eccentric a manner as I could see myself asking her why she had chosen to share the details of Hilda’s tantrum with me. Clearly her mother wasn’t the only Straussman prone to violent fits of temper. Having been the recipient of my own sister’s not-inconsiderable wrath on occasion, it made me reconsider whether the sister, and not the mother, might not be the actual source of Claire’s torment.

“Father gave me a present on his next trip home,” Claire said, and again I nodded, if for no other reason than I imagined the gesture was just enough to signify interest in her disclosure without implying outright understanding. “It was a china doll almost just like Hilda’s. I used to keep it on top of my bureau, but it seemed to upset Hilda so much that I finally put it in my underwear drawer.”

Claire reached into the basket and withdrew a bundle from beneath the walnuts she had gathered. Slowly she unwrapped the cloth to reveal a china doll with long golden locks and a blue satin dress. Then she reached back into the basket and took out a gardener’s trowel.

“When I finally fell asleep last night, I had a dream,” Claire said. “I dreamed there was a herd of horses grazing in the orchard behind our house. White horses with flames for manes. They were frightening to look at, but somehow I wasn’t afraid. I ran straight to the biggest one of all and I reached up and grabbed the flaming strands of his mane and I pulled myself onto his bare back. I could feel the flames crackling all around my fingers, but I didn’t care. I knew the pain would not begin until I let go, so I held on for all I was worth, and the horse took off running through the trees.”

“I didn’t know you liked horses,” I said.

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t like them at all.”

After a moment or two, she began to dig a hole, clearly not the first she’d dug at this spot. I saw a small cross, roughly fashioned from twigs tied together with long grass, that appeared to have fallen over beside a dry mound of dirt.