This new learning was both gratifying and disturbing. Everyone ought to have a proficiency concerning which they could claim the honor due anyone skilled, the respect appropriate to every form of learning. For Miriam, as these proficiencies grew, the garden grew, and as the garden grew, she flourished. She became active in the Friends of Woodbine’s Gardens, a group of ladies who met once a month to exchange enthusiasms, information, and neighborhood gossip — quite a lot of gossip if Joseph’s ears were any measure. Nonetheless, he had to be happy his mother was finally a member of the community, had friends, as well as a familiar, much-approved, ongoing enterprise.
Yet Skizzen had no such friends, his connection with the college had become purely formal, he was close to no one and, if anything, moved farther away every day like the sun in winter. Was he improving his mind as she was? were his fingers more agile today than they had been a year ago? did he glow with pride when his students excelled or when one of his observations was published? no and no and no, the answer came. Only his madness progressed, along with the museum that was its most persuasive evidence. It was an advancement that came through accumulation not selection, repetition not interconnection or — he feared — any deeper understanding.
He had once thought that the many terrible deeds of men might be understood by positing some underlying evil working away in the dirt of each life like the sod webworm. Perhaps there was an unrequited urge at the center of the species, a seed or genetic quirk, an impulse, bent for destruction, a type of trichinosis or a malignant imbecility that was forever ravenous. It might be just possible that we were killing off the weak to make the species strong. The young men can shoot one another. Those left standing can rape and murder the enemy’s mistresses, whores, and wives. Dead men cannot fertilize, or dead women bear. Then maybe our wars worked to keep our increasing numbers in check. But that hope turned out to be Heinrich Schenker’s doing, who had put these ideas in Skizzen’s head by insisting that for every harmonic composition there ought to be such a hidden center — a musical idea from which the notes that would be heard emerged, and were thereby governed, the way words issue from a mouth when the mouth moves on account of a consciousness that is formed, at least in part, by a nature as obdurate as an underground god at his forge hammering the white-hot blades of his weapons.
Nicotiana, or the Tobacco Flower, best in C+ soil.
Joseph enjoyed the progress of the seasons, especially that period in earliest spring when the trees showed the tiniest red tip at the end of every twig — just before they grew a furl of green. The color was like a tentative chirp from inside an egg until you turned your head a moment, perhaps to confront invaders — cabbage whites like tossed confetti or dandelions as orange and unacceptable as yolks where they disgraced the grass — only to find that while your attention had been withdrawn, the entire tree had burst into an accolade of bloom.
Music, above all, is what drew Joseph Skizzen to the garden, particularly on those days, as crisp as radish, when the birds were establishing their territories. The air seemed to sense the seeds and the seeds to grow toward the songs of the birds. Joseph thought he knew the plants that had sought out the twitterers, and those that had risen for the wren, or a fern that turned, not to the sun, but toward the chatter of the chickadee, so quick were the petals of its song, so sharp so plentiful so light, so showy in their symmetry, so suddenly in shade.
Astilbe, he said to his own ear. There’s a name that could be played — uh-stil bee — a plant that could be sung.
But the robins wanted worms, and the whitethroats wanted grain; he had read of a hunting season specifically designed for doves; the honeysuckle was rapacious; one stalk of bamboo was soon twelve; and violets choked grass while looking cute. Miriam yanked weak plants from the earth and thinned the strong as if they were Jews, but Joseph could not tease her in those terms — not an Austrian. So he suggested that perhaps a little food … No, not worth the bother, she’d reply while troweling a plant that had prospered in its present position for removal to a place where it would look better. I need to force these to flower, she would say while wielding a pair of snapping clippers. Deformities were dispatched without remorse, as readily as the infected or those that reverted to their prehybridized days or whose blooms surprised her by being magenta. Creams and pinks that had been together several years were ripped asunder because they were no longer thought to complement one another, and poisons were planted in otherwise wholesome specimens to kill whoever might later eat a leaf.
Miriam wanted a dog that would pursue rabbits. Joseph reminded her that dogs were copiously indiscriminate poopers and adored digging in beds of bulbs while pretending to bury bones, when they really dug just for the hell of it. She then proposed acquiring a cat until Joseph reminded her of their poor rapport with birds. Their moon times are meant to be filled with another kind of stalk. Had she forgotten how they yowled at night? in the afterglow of ruins? after the bombing stopped? Miriam begged him to dispatch a garter snake that wore a streak of gold like a zipper down its back, because the snake surprised her hands when they uncovered its concealing leaves; but Joseph demurred, defending the reptile’s reputation. I promise you, he said, this fellow is harmless and beneficial. Miriam responded with a dubious look. This Eden needn’t be a haven for snakes just because the first one was.
You can’t improve on God, observed the professor.
He worked before hybridization, responded the faithful.
I’m not a Saint Patrick for hire either — to scare them all away.
It’s all Scheiss about him, Ireland, and the snakes. Anyway, I wasn’t about to pay a saint wages. Saints work for nothing.
In lieu of larger help, Miriam released throngs of ladybugs from mail-order boxes. She also had to be persuaded about the virtues of spiders and praying mantises. Webs she abhorred, although she knew the results of their operations were desirable. These loud lemon-colored garden spiders think they own the plants they hang their webs from and pretend to be flowers themselves, as if suspended from sunlight and air.
In the alleged state of nature, Joseph would begin, it is said to be a war of all against all. I know you are teasing, Joey. No one can go against gardens. So let me be with my beauties, at peace with nature and all this world’s tossing and yearning. Despite a pledge to cease and desist, Joseph heard himself repeat to his mother how unnatural gardens were, how human-handed every rose was, how thoroughly the irises were trained, how the prizes plants won in their competitions were like those awarded after a proud parade of poodles, each clipped like a hedge. She should not ignore the size of the industry whose profits depended upon fashions in flowers and fads that were encouraged by the press or those ubiquitous catalogs which provoked fears of diseases, worms, and insects that could only be controlled by the poisons, hormones, and fertilizers they recommended. Nor should she make light of the myths extolling the harmless healthiness of gardening, even alleging its psychological superiority to every other avocation. She should notice how the seed companies’ bankrolls grew more rapidly than their marigolds, despite extensive artificial breeding; she should also admit the plants’ reputations were puffed and as pretentious as their adopted stage names — moonglow, for instance. The garden, he felt compelled to suggest, was like a fascist state: ruled like an orchestra, ordered as an army, eugenically ruthless and hateful to the handicapped, relentless in the pursuit of its enemies, jealous of its borders, favoring obedient masses in which every stem is inclined to appease its leader.