Telling the Bees (20 page)

But Claire showed no sign of fear. In fact, she broke into a broad smile, and her voice was strong and clear as she intoned for the third and final time: “Little brownies, little brownies, your mistress is here.”

Hilda, meanwhile, had raised her hand to her mouth as if to stifle any sound that might escape, and I noticed that a few bees had broken away from Claire to circle the space above Hilda’s head. And then, as if satisfied that Hilda posed no threat, the bees circled back around to Claire to rejoin their sisters, who clustered now upon Claire’s head and arms and upper torso. Finally, when it looked as though Hilda would burst from stoppered horror, the bees began to depart in a slow stream toward the Straussmans’ blossoming almond grove to the west of the clearing.

“I’m fine,” Claire assured Hilda, who had begun tugging at the collar and sleeves of her sister’s summer blouse convinced she would find a sea of welts on the exposed skin of Claire’s neck and arms. Even I had to admit I had been worried.

“See? No stings,” Claire declared as she turned her arms over and back again. “They just wanted to get to know me.”

All these years later, I still wonder if her bees were the only ones who ever truly knew Claire. I do know that as hard as I tried, I always seemed to come up short in her eyes. I suppose it also goes without saying that despite Claire’s oblique encouragement, very little new blood was introduced into my immediate family—or hers, for that matter—and what did flow served to disrupt rather than strengthen either.

From the very beginning, David Gilbert never stood a chance.

When David Gilbert returned home from his ball game, elated by a game-winning clout that had crowned him hero for the day, he found Claire, beside herself with anger and despair, bent over thousands of drowned bees floating in the water-filled hive pans.

“One thing!” Claire had wailed as I crossed the break in the hedgerow. Her voice seemed unnaturally shrill in the absence of the customary background hum of her hives. “All I asked you to do was one simple thing.”

“I swear, Aunt Claire, I was going to take care of it right after the game,” David Gilbert said sullenly.

“One thing,” she repeated. “And for what? A game?”

“It’s not just a game,” he countered, a brash note of defiance shading his words. “It’s baseball. The Big Train got his start here. Right here. Do you even know who Walter Johnson is?”

“One of your silly ballplayers?”

“Your bees are what’s silly, that’s what!”

“My bees?” she said, her voice rising like white-hot ash.

“I hate them,” he said. Though she raised her hand to the boy, to her credit Claire did not strike him.

“I hate you,” she said instead.

And I watched David Gilbert’s eyes flitter and his jaw set as Claire drew a quick, sharp breath as if she could somehow call back the only three words that I ever saw her regret.

Judgment, as my father would say, is the province of the Lord, and so I would not for the life of me condemn Claire outright. I will say, however, that had I been faced with a similar disaster, I can only pray that I might have acted with more Christian restraint than Claire was able to muster toward the boy that day. As it was, my well-intentioned attempt to intervene on his behalf was met with nearly the same level of fury that his original transgression had provoked.

“Boys will be boys, Claire,” I said as delicately as I could, though I must admit I possessed no particular affinity for typical boyhood pursuits such as our national pastime. Clearly David Gilbert had not intended to harm the bees, I tried to tell her, but to no avail.

“You stay out of this, you pompous old busybody,” Claire said to me. And then she turned to the boy and grasped his thin shoulders and called into question his intelligence and his trustworthiness. For a moment I feared she would shake the very life out of him. Instead, she simply sighed.

“What were you thinking?” she said at last, her voice sounding more weary than angry. “What were you thinking?”

“Nothing, Aunt Claire,” he said sullenly as Claire released her grip on him. “Nothing at all.”

Which I believe was true enough, as I do not believe there was any conscious intention on David Gilbert’s part to blatantly disobey Claire’s command. But as is so often the case when a child does not understand the reason behind a particular dictum, he may not foresee the harm in skirting around it. To his way of thinking, he had merely done the next best thing by filling the trays with water instead of oil.

“The bees are drawn to the water, David Gilbert,” I explained as calmly as I could once I was sure Claire’s anger had truly abated. Clearly this was a point of bee nature that Claire had neglected to impart to him. “They fly into the pans for a drink, but they can’t stay afloat for more than a moment before their wings are soaked and, unable to fly away, they soon drown. Bees don’t like the smell of motor oil. They try never to land in oil.”

“I’m sorry,” David Gilbert had said, his eyes downcast and his hands jammed deep into the front pockets of his dungarees. “I didn’t know.”

I turned to Claire, expecting her to acknowledge the boy’s apology, which appeared sincere enough to me, but the silence was broken only by the buzz of a solitary field bee that flitted nervously above her hive mates’ watery grave. David Gilbert looked from me to Claire and back to me again, and then he turned and walked slowly into the house. Thinking to console the boy, I took a single step forward.

“I told you to stay out of this,” Claire said to me, and then before striding purposely into the house and slamming the door behind her she said, “One thing! One thing! That’s all I’ve ever asked.”

It was Cicero, I believe, who observed that no snares are ever so insidious as those lurking as dutiful devotion or labeled as family affection. You can escape from an open foe, but when deceit lurks in the bosom of a family it can pounce upon you before you have spied it or recognized it for what it is. I believe Claire cared for David Gilbert in the only way she knew. What I didn’t yet see was that the family ties that bound her to this desolate little boy were already stretched as fine as spider’s silk.

Thirty-one

W
ORKER BEE:
The sexually undeveloped female who under normal circumstances performs all the necessary chores to maintain the hive save one: producing offspring.

H
ow does a friendship unravel? One thread at a time, I suspect. Claire and I continued to wave to each other across our yards. From time to time we found reason to chat about the goings-on around us as neighbors, but once I’d made the mistake of intervening on young David Gilbert’s behalf the fabric of our conversations grew ever more threadbare.

“Did you hear they’re tearing down the old Pickwick Hotel?” I remember Claire saying to me one day when we met on the street. I was walking home from the pubic library. I’m not sure where she was going. I may have forgotten to ask. I know it must have been sometime in 1975. This was during the first big redevelopment phase of the old downtown. Nearly all the old buildings—the Fox Theater, the Office Barbershop, the SQR, Rexall Drugs, Hurst’s Diamonds—were all being razed to make way for a gleaming glass-fronted city hall complex and new central business district.

David Gilbert had graduated from high school ten years or so earlier and had long since left the family fold.

“I can’t believe they want to tear it down,” she said. “It’s a real shame.”

“I suppose so,” I agreed.

I had no intimate knowledge of the Pickwick Hotel—or any other hotel, for that matter—having never spent a night in any room but my own. I had come to admire the Pickwick’s distinctive architecture, however. Its Spanish-style bell tower had been, for much of my childhood, the tallest, most distinctive structure in sight. I believe there is something about the perceived permanence of long-standing edifices that reminds us of our younger, better selves, while at the same time they play on our desire for mythic immortality, for at least as long as they stand. Though I’ve never been to Notre-Dame, I imagine this is the reason why more than half a millennium after its completion even those who do not believe in God find themselves awestruck standing beneath its soaring Gothic arches.

Not that the Pickwick could hold a candle to the architectural significance of Notre-Dame, but I believe there was still something of the tragic landmark of memory and desire that drew David Gilbert back to his childhood home on the unfortunate day in 1981 that marked the absolute end of my friendship with Claire. He’d returned home after nearly twenty years away, hoping, I think, to forge anew his familial bonds by seeking any scrap of information about the mysterious Suzanna Gilbert, around whom he had constructed a most tragic mythology of genealogical redemption. Having begun a family of his own, he said he wanted to start it out on firmer footing than he himself had known as a child. He told Claire and Hilda, in the vernacular of the day, that he wanted to “get in touch with his roots” and to show his family that despite everything that had gone before he had turned out okay.

Who is to say what ill wind blew me into the midst of this brewing storm? I hadn’t even realized Claire had company that day until I arrived at her doorstep. Having been cloistered inside my honey shed all morning extracting a new crop of jasmine honey from my numbers seven and eight hives, I hadn’t noticed the unfamiliar vehicle parked out on the street in front of the Straussman house. It was only by happenstance that I decided to stop over at lunchtime to bring Claire a jar of the honey and to tell her about a new foundation frame manufacturer that I had found advertised in my monthly supply catalog.

As I told Detective Grayson the day he asked me point-blank about the nature of the relationship between Claire and David Gilbert, things seemed distant, a bit awkward, yet calm enough when I first arrived at the Straussman house that afternoon. David Gilbert, his wife, and daughter were sitting in the parlor with Claire and Hilda. Hilda was pouring steaming black tea into the gold china cups they saved for company, passing one to David Gilbert, and one to his wife, while he recounted for Claire and Hilda the story of how he’d met his wife through her brother, who was a “buddy,” as he put it, from Texas, where their military unit had been stationed.

In exchange for my gift of honey, I was politely invited to join this unexpected family reunion for tea and cookies, and while I declined the offer of tea I graciously accepted a small plate of shortbread cookies, which Hilda handed to me without comment.

I settled into the Straussmans’ parlor divan, which despite its age had retained its velveteen nap nearly unblemished. David Gilbert explained to the small gathering exactly how he and his wife had met. He related that she had traveled with her parents from Mexico to attend his military base’s annual Memorial Day celebration and parade and that she had caught his eye when she’d waved at her brother, who was marching next to him in the parade.

“The rest,” David Gilbert said, nodding to his wife, who nodded demurely, “is history.”

“So I see,” Claire responded, smiling not at all unkindly at David Gilbert and his newly announced family but clearly still measuring the situation.

“She was by far the prettiest girl there,” he recalled proudly, nodding, it seemed to me, more deferentially to his wife thereafter. I noticed that his wife whispered occasionally to him in Spanish when he seemed to embellish a point beyond her idea of the simple truth as he narrated the ensuing details of their brief courtship. His wife seemed to understand the English language well enough, from my observation, but she appeared less confident with the spoken word, unlike her dashing young helicopter pilot who had always been far more loquacious than any other Straussman I knew save Claire.

Courtship history accounted for, David Gilbert next announced that he and his family had just been reassigned to our local Marine outpost, which had been converted after World War II from a staging base for dirigibles to one for military helicopters. His new base, which he’d been assigned to the previous spring, was only a scant few miles from the childhood home he’d fled without so much as a proper good-bye as soon as he had come of legal age. He told Claire that with the passage of time had come forgiveness. He told her—most earnestly, it seemed to me—that he’d truly come to regret his callous abandonment of the only family he’d ever known and he hoped that he and they could patch up their differences and try to become friends. Rather ceremoniously, David Gilbert then presented Claire with a framed photograph of himself posed in front of a Marine helicopter as a small token, he said, of his sincerity.

“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” he said. Claire somewhat awkwardly took the photograph after a moment’s hesitation and placed it on the mantle next to the photographs of her deceased parents.

Predictably, the little girl had grown bored by this extended conversation. Long before the photograph exchange I noticed that she had begun to fiddle with the porcelain knickknacks on the mahogany end table next to the divan where I sat. So did Hilda. Just as it appeared inevitable that the delicate figurines would be damaged by the child’s play, I was relieved to see Hilda approach her directly and ask if she would like to know a secret. What little girl could resist?

“Yes, ma’am.”

Taking Hilda’s thick hand in hers, she permitted the older woman to lead her from the parlor and into the adjoining sunporch. It was, to my eye, much more cheerful, and as they would say today, more “child-friendly,” being less formally furnished with durable wicker furniture, handmade throw rugs, and various species of potted plant. Thankfully, the child and her temporary guardian were still exploring the unexpected mysteries of this agreeably spartan room by the time the conversation in the parlor veered sharply away from reconciliation.

“I don’t want to cause my mother any problems,” David Gilbert was saying when I turned my attention back to the conversation at hand. “I can understand what it must have been like for her in those days. All alone with no one to turn to but you and your family. Believe me, Aunt Claire, I’m grateful for all your past kindness. And Aunt Hilda, too.”

“You’re more than welcome,” Claire said with an unmistakable air of finality that seemed to signal that, at least for her, the subject had been politely but decisively concluded.

“But, Aunt Claire,” David Gilbert said, clearly recognizing Claire’s unspoken intent but unwilling to let the matter drop, “I just want to know where I came from.”

“This is where you came from,” Claire insisted. Fine lines converged at the corners of her eyes as she spoke.

“You know what I mean, Aunt Claire,” David Gilbert said evenly, his frustration reciprocating in the childish set of his tawny jawline.

“I know there’s no good reason for you to go dredging up the past now,” Claire rejoined. “What’s done is done.”

“Look, I don’t want to cause my mother any problems,” he repeated, his voice taking on an extra layer of urgency that made me recall the reckless indiscretions of his youth. “I’m not angry with her or anything like that. I just want to know who I am. I want my daughter to know who she is. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

Strangely, at that moment I found it hard to understand my own ambivalence toward David Gilbert’s wish to establish for his still innocent daughter a viable link to her matriarchal past. I could not help wondering whether the old saw that genetic traits skip a generation was true or not. Meanwhile, the tenor of the conversation was becoming ever less cordial, and I began to wish I hadn’t retained such casual access to Claire’s home or her affairs. To say I grew uneasy by the accusations that were cast that afternoon would be an understatement of the most ineffable magnitude. I could no more imagine what it must have felt like to be accused of rank ingratitude for all the bountiful blessings of my own birth and upbringing than I would deign to call my dear mother cold and unfeeling no matter what the provocation. As Wittgenstein so rightly noted: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”

And so I strove mightily to hold my tongue. I truly believed it wasn’t my place to interfere. I set down the plate of shortbread cookies Hilda had passed to me earlier and stood to make my exit as gracefully as possible, but Claire would have none of it. She turned to me and demanded that I support her charade, which grew more and more indefensible with each passing moment.

“Tell him, Albert,” Claire demanded.

“Tell him what?” I replied, appalled already by the task I feared she’d set before me. I remember quite pointedly that she once told me she knew better than to ask me to lie for her, but sadly she was unable to keep her own counsel.

“Tell him his mother’s probably forgotten all about him by now,” Claire said. “Tell him it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.”

To lie. It is a verb with so many meanings. To recline. To be buried in a specific place. To have sexual intercourse with. To speak an untruth.

“Like you?” I snapped before I knew what I was saying.

“And just what do you mean by that?” she said in that haughty tone of voice I had always found so unbecoming.

“What I mean is, which do you propose that I start with—the sleeping dogs? Or the lies?”

I lamented the rashness of my words as soon as they had escaped from my lips. With God as my witness, I never intended to say what I did, but regrettably I said it nonetheless.

David Gilbert, who had remained silent during this short exchange, turned his back on Claire and directed his next question to me. “You know more about my mother than you’re letting on, don’t you, Mr. Honig?”

“I suppose I do,” I replied. His eyes narrowed, and I sensed he was processing the thoughts he’d not yet dared to articulate. “And I suspect you do, too.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said, oddly mirroring Claire’s demanding tone, and regrettably, still in the heat of the moment, I remained less circumspect than I perhaps should have.

“You must have heard the rumors when you were younger,” I responded. I saw Claire’s eyes dart quickly from me to David Gilbert and back to me again. I saw also in that instant that she knew I suspected her secret and her eyes commanded me, and then silently begged me, to say no more. But it was already too late.

Sophocles wrote that a lie never lives to be old. But, just as surely, its death is seldom applauded by those who would live the lie. Understandably, Claire tried for a moment more to deny the truth by discrediting the truth teller.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, David,” she said, smoothing an errant wisp of graying curl from her eye. “He’s just a ridiculous old man who has nothing better to do than listen to the idle gossip of anyone who’s ever bought a jar of his precious honey.”

“Please, Aunt Claire, don’t . . .” David Gilbert said quietly, his voice faltering just a bit.

But she would not relent. “I made a promise to your mother . . .

“For God’s sakes, Albert,” she said, turning to me. “How could you? How could you even begin to give credence to those vicious old tales? I thought we were friends.”

“I only say what I say because we are friends, Claire,” I said. “You know I speak the truth.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you on the nose, you pious old fraud,” she retorted. It was odd how that one remark could so put into perspective the passing of the years. Yes, I was getting older. But so had she. I could see it then in the pale blue-veined hands that she waved in front of my face for emphasis. Those same sweet hands had once seemed so supple and smooth when they had reached for mine so long ago. But then, she had always reached for more than she could possibly hold.

“Claire, I saw you,” I said as gently as I knew how, wishing I had the strength to grasp those hands. To silence their wild fluttering dance with a calming gesture. Of friendship. Of faith. Of loving concern. “I saw you with that man—you know who I mean—in the orange grove just outside the Harmony Ballroom. You were together, and I saw what you did.”

I believe that, in time, Claire might have forgiven me for attempting to debunk the lie of David Gilbert’s parentage. Knowing his persistent nature, it was sure to come out sooner or later, if not from me then from someone else. What she could never forgive me for was revealing the source of my knowledge. It destroyed her, I think, to know I had witnessed the terrible shame of her lie. She was silent for a very long time as I watched a palpable chill overtake her features.