Telling the Bees (8 page)

“All that I care about in the world is right here with me,” I said softly—so softly, in fact, that I am not altogether certain even today that Claire heard me.

“That’s the beauty of it, Albert. Don’t you see?”

When I shook my head, she placed her lips close to my ear, barely whispering, “I’m the ship. You’re the mooring. There’s something to be said for knowing our places in the world.”

I believe she must have read something in my eyes of the confusion I felt when I turned to face her because she gripped my hand tightly and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. Then she turned, picked up her valise, and ran swiftly into the night.

I had taken some bittersweet pleasure over the years wondering at the sights she’d seen, the people she’d met, the unimaginable things she’d done to calm her restless spirit. I had imagined Claire going off to find all manner of high adventure: riding the trolleys in New York, dining at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, booking passage on the famous
Orient Express
. When she returned home less than six months after she’d gone, she never spoke a word to me about where she’d been. She made it clear I was never to ask. This is why I had believed many wild and improbable things about Claire, but never in all the intervening years between her absence and Detective Grayson’s unexpected revelation had I imagined she’d run away from home to become a department store clerk in Detroit.

“Mr. Honig?” The detective’s voice seemed to float like a feather just beyond my reach. “Mr. Honig? Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, placing my honeyed bread back on my plate uneaten. The sweet orange tang seemed suddenly less appealing than it had only moments before. “You’re telling me that Claire went to Detroit?”

“Apparently so,” he said. “Funny how Margaret was the only one of her bunch that ever traveled much beyond Detroit.”

“I suppose so,” I said, though
funny
is not the word I would have chosen. Detective Grayson folded the remainder of his bread in half and swallowed it all in one large bite.

“Would you like another piece?” I said, sliding my plate across the table. “I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

“If you’re sure you’re not going to eat it,” Detective Grayson replied after only the slightest hesitation. “I’m going to have to tell my wife about this. She’s always bugging me to eat something besides junk food for lunch. This stuff’s good for you, right?”

“As my father used to say, ‘A little sweet honey is good for whatever ails you,’” I told him.

“I don’t doubt it,” the detective said, downing the last of his lemonade. “Say, I almost forgot. Margaret’s daughter didn’t know too much more about Claire or Hilda other than what I’ve already told you, but she said she thought they had some relatives living down South, in Mississippi or Alabama, maybe. You wouldn’t have any idea who that might be or how we could get hold of them now?”

I reflected on the nature of lies and the sins of omission.

“No,” I said, finding the weight of my silence more bearable than Claire had once predicted I would. “No, I’m sorry, Detective, I don’t.”

Ten

C
ELTIC LORE:
Bees are the purveyors of wisdom from the otherworld; when a bee flies into a house, a stranger is coming.

T
hough my bees kept me busy during the bright daylight hours following Claire’s and Hilda’s untimely deaths, the gray light of dawn and gathering dusk provoked me to inward reflection, and at these times I found myself most unable to quell the sense growing within me that even though I had washed my hands of the Straussman family years before, they had not relinquished their hold on me.

As was quickly becoming the pattern, it was several more weeks before I heard from Detective Grayson again, and in the intervening time I found myself rising even earlier than had been my custom, to pace my bedroom lost in old memories and forgotten plans, and then again at night lingering in my parlor chair long past my bedtime, rereading passages from familiar philosophical treatises. Other times I perused our family Bible, or leafed through the scrapbooks of newspaper articles and photographs of historic events, noteworthy exploits of hometown acquaintances, and quoted words of wisdom from famous men that it had been my dear mother’s habit to collect in chronological volumes until her death.

“An idle mind is the devil’s playground,” she used to say any time she saw me lolling about with nothing to do. It was my mother who taught me my letters before I’d turned three. By the time I was five, she was helping me sound out words in the books she had cherished when she was just a child.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
was our very favorite, so much so that I took to rolling my britches up to my knees in imitation of the young lord’s fashion of the day.

“Little Lord Albert,” my mother used to call me once upon a time. There was a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that my mother insisted I learn just to teach me elocution.

“Repeat after me, my little lord,” she’d say, patting my knee as we sat side by side on the davenport after dinner.

There was a little girl, / Who had a little curl, / Right in the middle of her forehead. / When she was good, / She was very good indeed, / But when she was bad she was horrid.

It took me some time to reconcile the letters and sounds to fashion a rhyme between
forehead
and
horrid
, but my mother said this would serve me well someday. Truth be told, I had by that time begun to prefer young Jim Hawkins’s adventures to the subtleties of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s rhyme schemes. But of course I soon put such childish fancies aside as I began to explore more serious literary pursuits. I have my mother to thank for that as well, as she was the one who first took me by the hand and walked me the mile from our house to the public library.

“Anything you want to know, my little lord, you will find here,” my mother said, introducing me to Mrs. Bass, the head librarian. Mrs. Bass was reluctant to allow me to explore the library on my own, at least at first. She taught Sunday school along with my mother, and I believe she thought I might be drawn like many boys my age to some of the racier books on the shelves. I assured her I had no such interests.

I asked her to show me to the poetry section on my first visit, which she did with a prim nod to my mother, who kissed me lightly on my cheek and thereafter left me alone to build upon the literary foundation she had laid.

As I reflect now upon those dark weeks that followed Claire’s and Hilda’s murders, I find myself returning to a quotation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that my mother had pasted in one of her scrapbooks: “The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

And kept in darkness, I should like to add. Though we had not spoken for more than a decade before their deaths, I found myself struck at last, that melancholy autumn, by the finality of our estrangement. Late into the chill of a particular evening, six months and twelve days after they had died, as I sat on my front porch stitching a patch onto the knee of my worn dungarees, I found myself staring into the dying light for impossible signs of activity from within my neighbors’ sealed house when I caught a glimpse of a dark figure standing in the window of the parlor. It was just for an instant, but it was enough to cause me to grip the arms of my chair until I felt the rough wood bite into my palms. I confess I had been having trouble sleeping through the night and so it is possible that I may have dozed off for a moment or two. But whether I did or not is beside the point. I reacted with the same instinctive gasp of horror and pity I invariably feel, if only for a second, when I mistake a shard of blown tire from a distance for the body of a cat that has been thrown to the side of the road by a speeding car. In those unguarded moments of distant perception, what we think we see, real or not, causes us to feel what we do. And once we’ve felt whatever we’ve felt, we can’t take it back.

Claire tried to tell me that more than once. To my regret, I dismissed her emotions as vehemently as she dismissed my empiricism. Perhaps we should have listened to each other more.

I do believe now that I may have been the only one who might have lifted the shroud of pain that cloaked the dark interior of the Straussman house while anyone worth caring about still lived within, but for any number of reasons I did not.

In my own defense, I can only say that Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote that there are three things necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do. Until recently, I thought I knew my mind in this regard, but when I take into account my lifelong connection to the Straussman family I find my personal salvation wanting on all three counts.

Eleven

S
WARM:
A natural method of honeybee propagation when a collection of bees that includes a healthy queen breaks off from the mother colony to establish a new, independent hive.

B
ee fever” is what those of my generation used to call it when a man fell in love with honeybees and got himself his first hive. Strictly speaking, I never had to take the plunge myself, as there have been beehives in our family for at least three generations. I suppose you could say I was born with the fever already aboil in my blood, passed down from father to son, and to son again, and I never had to do any more to stoke the fire of this singular passion than to step outside my back door and observe our bees busying themselves around and about any of the dozens of hives we’d always kept.

Happily, my mother was readily persuaded to share my father’s dispositional affinity for bees. They were wed in June of 1915, directly after my mother graduated from high school and my father was nigh on his twenty-first year. Though bee fever isn’t as common in a woman as a man, neither is it rare enough to seem particularly odd that hardly had their wedding vows been spoken that my mother took to hurrying through her household chores—cooking and cleaning, bustling beyond the norm even among the hardworking farmwives of her day—in order to join my father out at the hives by midafternoon. Together they would fuss and fret over a listless queen one day or fight off an invasion of small brown ants the next.

It seems somehow stranger to me, coming from the bloodlines we did, that my elder sister grew up unaffected by our family’s affection for bees. While she would cheerily confess to a fondness for the fruits of our tireless labor, she found little pain in leaving the hives behind when she chose to marry and move back up the Pacific Coast to where her husband found permanent employment in the shipyards of Washington State.

I suppose my sister was not so much rejecting our parents’ way of life as she was following in my mother’s reverse footsteps by abandoning her childhood home to follow her husband’s penchant. Convinced by my father of the advantages of a warm, dry climate over their native Oregon’s cold, wet coast in terms of optimum honey production, my mother had wholeheartedly endorsed his decision to migrate southward in the second year of their long and happy marriage. In her own cheerful manner, she helped my father scour the sprawling bean fields and orchards that blanketed the coastal plain south of Los Angeles for the ideal location to establish strong hives and a good home for the family they hoped to raise together. After a considerable search, my parents chose a ten-acre parcel of land with a small orange grove to the rear of the property in the county named after those selfsame groves that to their delight were situated directly beneath a well-traveled flyway of wild bees from two different directions. The east side of the property abutted a Santa Fe Railway depot and switching yard, and the west bordered the Straussmans’ farm, which abounded with walnut and almond orchards fronted by an imposing clutch of peppertrees that shaded their single-story wood-frame bungalow.

Although there already was a small cottage, not unlike the Straussmans’, on our property when acquired, it had suffered noticeable flood damage the previous winter. Unfortunate as the flooding from the Santa Ana River had been to the community, however, it allowed my parents to purchase the property and existing building at a discount.

My father used the money he’d saved on the property to order a new Sears Roebuck and Co. two-story, six-room bungalow, known familiarly as “The Sherbourne.” Like all catalog homes of its ilk, the materials and plans—including all lumber, millwork, laths, shingles, pipes, gutters, sash weights, hardware, and paint—were shipped, as advertised, directly to the nearby freight depot in two boxcars. My parents lived in the original cottage, which was eventually converted into a honey shed, during the two years it took to build our new home. My father took pride in its sturdy design after the fashion of the day, with its gabled roof, wide clapboard siding, and large front porch. He found it pleasing to sit on the porch swing he built after the house was finally done and relish the evening breeze that blew in from the ocean after a hard day’s work.

“This is built to last,” he would often say, smacking his hand on the beam that supported the porch roof.

I am sure that when the Straussmans moved into their home only a few years before my parents built theirs, they were just as convinced of its enduring legacy.

My mother died more than forty years ago, on by far the hottest day of what had been an uncommonly hot summer. My father followed her to the grave thirteen long years later on a cold winter’s day, leaving me alone to honor their memory in the house they built.

When I think of my dear mother, which is often even after all these years, I think of her standing by the stove, an apron tied around her midriff, a tea towel draped over her shoulder, and a light dusting of flour covering her hands, as she watches over a batch of chicken frying in the cast-iron skillet her mother gave her as a wedding present.

“Go set the table,” she would call out to my sister and me as the chicken browned. “Hurry up, now.”

She rarely had to call us twice. My father was another matter. It wasn’t that he consciously ignored her, but I think he found it most difficult to relinquish those quiet moments at the end of the day when he used to sit by himself on the front porch swing gathering his thoughts.

My father once told me, in a rare conversation we shared on that very swing, that he knew he would marry my mother the very moment she offered to help him change a super. He told me that he had first spoken to her only the day before when by chance they sat next to each other at church and after the service she invited him to join her at her Bible study class the following evening. He had at first politely declined, explaining that one of his hives was full to the brim with honey ready to harvest. He told her he didn’t think he could manage to tend to his beekeeping chores that afternoon and still find time to accompany her to her evening class as well.

That was when my mother offered to help my father with his chores, though she didn’t have the faintest notion of what a super was or what it entailed to lift a full one off a buzzing, teaming hive of one hundred thousand or so riled honeybees and replace it with a fresh one primed with empty foundation frames.

My father didn’t know my mother well enough at the time to know that once she set her mind to something, she seldom saw fit to change it, or that she clearly had seen something in his shy but steady ways that appealed to her.

I didn’t mind my father’s silence. I will admit the sound of another voice might have been a comfort in the long, hard days we spent together changing supers and harvesting our honey, especially after my mother died. But I believe this may be the reason why I’m not particularly lonely these days, not missing a voice I never grew accustomed to hearing.

I do not wish to imply by this that my father was a distant man, nor was he a mean or vindictive man like some I have seen who use stony silence as a weapon, every bit as withering to a child’s spirit as a harsh word or a hand raised in anger. I believe my father could be quite instructive when the need or the want for speech arose. He just chose not to waste words on idle chatter.

My mother was hardly a chatterbox, but she seemed to crave human conversation, and she demonstrated right from the start an uncanny facility for deciphering the language of bees. As did Claire.

And my mother, bless her soul, possessed an uncanny talent for sizing up people and situations in order to take whatever action she deemed fitting for the circumstances at hand. I believe that is why she and Claire got on so well.

Upon learning of my invitation into the Straussmans’ house for tea on the day my father and I had been summoned to take care of the “bee problem,” my mother decided that common courtesy dictated a reciprocal invitation to the Straussman sisters. While my sister Eloise was closest in age to the offspring and so should have been the natural bearer of this neighborly gesture, she rather indignantly pointed out that since I had been the beneficiary of our neighbors’ hospitality I should shoulder the unenviable task of inviting them over to our house on Friday afternoon for some of my mother’s honeyed scones and lemonade.

I was surprised when my mother agreed. Knowing that I had inherited my father’s tendency toward reticence, she took the precaution of writing out a formal invitation to our young neighbors, in what seemed to me an unusually flowery script, before sending me off to deliver it directly after supper.

It was Hilda who answered the door when I knocked the second time, the first and somewhat softer knock having brought no response whatsoever.

“This is for you. And your sister,” I believe I stammered, and then I thrust the note my mother had written in her hand.

Wordlessly, Hilda unfolded the scented paper. And, after reading the invitation, she just as wordlessly turned and closed the front door behind her, leaving me standing dumbfounded on the unlit porch.

Given Hilda’s less-than-forthcoming response, I was surprised to see my mother bustling about our kitchen Friday morning preparing for the afternoon get-together with the Straussman sisters that my sister and I were convinced would never take place.

When we returned home from school that same day, we found a plate of my mother’s fresh scones laid out on the dining room table along with two small serving bowls filled with orange blossom honey and homemade currant jam.

My sister shook her head as if to say “She’s gone mad as a hatter” when my mother entered the room carrying an iced pitcher of lemonade and four crystal tumblers on her best silver tray.

“Mother, what makes you think they’ll come?” Eloise said. “We haven’t heard a word from them all week. They’re really a couple of odd ducks, the way they keep to themselves. Even when they’re at school, they never talk to anyone besides each other. I don’t think they have any friends at all.”

“All the more reason to open our doors and our hearts to them,” my mother had replied, setting down the tray and arranging the tumblers in a semicircle around the pitcher that she had placed in the middle of the table. “Poor dears . . .”

My sister and I had been right, of course. The Straussman sisters never arrived that Friday, or the next Friday, and still my mother was prepared, I think, to send off yet another invitation to our neighbors’ house had not my father issued a rare opinion as to what he termed to be my mother’s “strange fixation with the Straussman sisters.”

“You’ve got two growing children of your own to fret over,” he said. “And those girls have a perfectly fine family of their own to take care of them.”

“How would you know, Walter?” my mother responded. “They’ve got a father who’s hardly ever home, and that mother of theirs . . . well, you know how I feel about her. Sitting on that front porch in her fancy chair all day long like the Queen of Sheba—and those girls waiting on her hand and foot. It’s bad enough she and her husband don’t attend church, but to deny those poor girls the Lord’s teachings just because of what a few old busybodies had to say after the boy . . .”

“You don’t know that’s the reason,” my father interrupted just as my mother appeared to be working herself into what my father used to call one of her moods. “Just let it go.”

But as was her nature, my mother seldom let anything go once she’d gotten hold of it in the first place.

“Hello, Claire,” my mother called out cheerily when she observed Claire lingering beyond our hedgerow on her way home from school the following Monday. Hilda, who stood silent watch from the roadway, started like a filly at the sound of my mother’s voice and dashed clumsily down the road to her house with Claire trailing somewhat more slowly behind her.

Yet my mother swore Claire smiled back when she greeted her. And within another week, Claire accepted my mother’s entreaty to join her on the front porch for a nice cool glass of lemonade. Eloise stayed upstairs in her room the whole afternoon. I know because I saw her watching from her window.

I believe Hilda kept a silent vigil by the roadside the entire time Claire sat with my mother, but I can’t say for sure as the passage of the years has only served to accentuate Hilda’s considerable insubstantiality in my recall.

“She seems such an old soul for such a young girl,” my mother remarked after spending a half hour on the porch with Claire that first afternoon. They chatted, I suppose, about the sort of things the fairer sex find interesting and I myself can only imagine. My mother declined to reveal the details, but the next afternoon Claire came directly around the side of our house bold as you please to join my mother on the back porch, where together they sat quietly watching my father and me add a new super to our number two hive as they sipped from dewy glasses of lemonade.

I still can picture how cool and refreshing those lemonade glasses looked from afar as my father and I labored under the hot sun that day. And the next day and the next.

“It’s a slow process, gaining that girl’s confidence,” my mother confided to my father one evening after supper when she thought I’d gone off to bed. I had slipped out onto the back porch to watch the stars, however, which I do on occasion even now when I have trouble sleeping.

“Do you know what that dear girl said to me this afternoon, Walter?” my mother said, and without waiting for my father to reply she lowered her voice so that I had to strain to hear her. “She said she sorely misses the sound of the bees in her parlor wall. She said she found something comforting in the hum of activity that she heard as she went about her daily chores. You know, Walter, I do believe she’s bitten by the fever, but she just doesn’t know it yet.”

I could not hear my father’s response, but I did hear my mother’s musical laughter burst from the parlor like wind chimes on a summer breeze, fading down the hall and up the stairs, as the lights in our house blinked out one by one.

Two days later, my mother convinced Claire to venture off the back porch and take a few tentative steps toward the hive we were fretting over that particular afternoon, but, try as my mother might, she could urge her no farther. They reached the same impasse every day for the next week or so until my mother remarked loud enough for both my father and me to hear that it looked like a rainstorm was brewing and, despite his protest that the skies looked clear to him, she dashed indoors.