A Student of Living Things Read online

  Table of Contents

  A PLUME BOOK

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  I. - AUGUST II : THE MORNING OF MY BROTHER’S BIRTHDAY

  II. - APRIL 4: MINOR IMPERFECTIONS

  III. - APRIL 5: MUTATIONS

  IV. - MAY 3: INCOMPLETE METAMORPHOSIS

  V. - THE EVOLUTION OF SOPHIA LUPE

  VI. - ADAPTATION

  VII. - SYMBIOSIS

  VIII. - BENJAMIN IN THE FLESH

  IX. - THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 22

  A PLUME BOOK

  A STUDENT OF LIVING THINGS

  SUSAN RICHARDS SHREVE has published twelve novels and twenty-six books for children, has coedited five anthologies, and has written a memoir, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven. She is a professor at George Mason University and has received several grants for fiction, including a Guggenheim Foundation grant and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. A former visiting professor at Princeton and Columbia universities, she lives in Washington, D.C.

  “Shreve has captured the post-9/11 zeitgeist, spiked it with random acts of domestic terrorism, and used insinuations of global warming to turn up the heat in an already muggy Washington, D.C. Part family drama and part psychological thriller, it is something else, as well: an old-fashioned epistolary romance. Its enigmatic characters and its intimate contemplation of love, loss, and the scope of the imagination will remain with the reader well beyond the last page.” —The Seattle Times

  “Provocative. Tantalizing. A cross between a thriller and a murder mystery.”

  —The Washington Post

  “This utterly compelling story of people’s ability to both terrorize and console one another has it all—the personal, the political; the family, the self; science and art—all spun together beautifully with the unexpected quirkiness of both character and writer—the kind of unique presentation of human experience that makes reading a delight.”

  —Elizabeth Strout, author of Abide with Me

  “A Student of Living Things is a sheer pleasure to read. It is elegantly written and ingeniously plotted, glittering with insights into human vulnerability and madness. The losses and hopes in the story force one to ponder long after the last page was turned.”—Ha Jin, author of War Trash

  “Susan Shreve’s A Student of Living Things is a timely reminder that nothing can replace the endless pleasures as well as necessary perils of a good work of fiction.”—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

  “A highly topical and immensely satisfying novel.”

  —Margot Livesey, author of Homework

  “Just try to put this book down.”—Publishers Weekly

  FICTION BY SUSAN RICHARDS SHREVE

  A Fortunate Madness

  A Woman Like That

  Children of Power

  Miracle Play

  Dreaming of Heroes

  Queen of Hearts

  A Country of Strangers

  Daughters of the New World

  The Visiting Physician

  The Train Home

  Plum & Jaggers

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Viking edition.

  First Plume Printing, July 2007

  Copyright © Susan Richard Shreve, 2006

  Illustrations copyright © Kate Shreve, 2006

  Illustrations copyright © Rosanna Bruno, 2006

  Musical composition copyright © Timothy Andres, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  CIP data is available.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-69606-0

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Too small, no more

  For

  Theo and Noah, new treasures

  and

  Russell and Bich and Jessica

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my editors Carole DeSanti and Hilary Redmon and all the team at Viking and especially thanks to my agent Gail Hochman for her tireless work and commitment and straightforward good sense. Thanks to my long-suffering in-house reader Timothy Seldes and to Porter Shreve and Howard Norman for their excellent advice on this book.

  I am lucky to know and love the gifted composer and pianist Timothy Andres, who provided the musical scores for this book.

  My daughter Kate introduced me to her love of science, which provided the central metaphor for A Student of Living Things and brought me into the far outer circle of that exciting and mysterious world. She and Rosanna Bruno are responsible for Claire’s artwork in “The Lifeguard Chair” sections.

  Thanks finally and always to my family—Po, Bich, Eq, Rusty, Caleb, Jess, Kate and Timothy, my agent for life.

  I.

  AUGUST II : THE MORNING OF MY BROTHER’S BIRTHDAY

  Today is my brother’s twenty-seventh birthday. It’s only seven in the morning, one of those hot, brown, swampy days in Washington, the air so thick it’s difficult to breathe. Children drape like damp cloths over the fire hydrants, around the lampposts, too weary to play. The long-suffering National Guardsmen, half asleep in their fatigues and sidearms, lean against the cool marble of government buildings.

  I’ve arrived early at the Eastern Market, since my mother will be coming for a special lunch this afternoon—the first time she has been to my apartment since I moved away from home. She’ll brin
g her sister, my aunt Faith, and perhaps her son, my cousin, who lost his leg four years ago in an explosion.

  “His leg but not his life,” my mother says every time his name, which is Bernard, comes up.

  My mother would prefer to recognize the day of my brother’s murder. It’s in her character, just as it’s in my father’s to celebrate the day of Steven’s birth, to slip over the evening of April 4, when my only brother was shot on the steps of the George Washington University Gelman Library, where he was studying for his law exams. My father likes to think the years will continue to accumulate to Steven, although our memory of him is locked in at twenty-five. I understand the feelings of both of my parents and neither of them. It’s the way with parents—just as you think you know them, they slide away like mercury breaking into slippery bits that would take endless patience to reassemble.

  I am no longer a patient woman.

  The market is southeast of the Capitol, near Union Station, and is open every morning from 6:00 A.M. until 2:00, although recently the vendors have been closing down quickly at noon, loading their trucks and beating it out of town during the lunch hour, when trouble, if it’s going to happen, usually begins.

  This morning I wander through the stalls, pleased to be in the company of people, pressing against women who lean over the wooden tables with their fruits and vegetables to weigh. We smile back and forth, familiar to one another, since most of us shop every day, buying little, only sufficient to last through breakfast the next morning, a sense of transience about our lives.

  For months before Steven was killed, there had been a silent civil war, fear creeping under the skin, a menacing suspicion of one group of people for another, a distrust of the outsider in a city of outsiders.

  Now we’ve been in a state of emergency for almost three weeks—the National Guard circling the city of Washington—something that has happened only once in recent memory, during the riots that broke out after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Now there seems to be an actual civil war, difficult to describe.

  “Who to trust?” my mother asked at a recent Sunday dinner, turning the front page of the newspaper facedown. “It’s as if everyone is the enemy or could be.”

  “This country isn’t a safe house, Julia,” my father said.

  “Then I want to move,” she said, getting up from the table, clearing the plates, turning on the water to rinse them.

  “Where would we go?” I asked.

  “Away!” she said with conviction, as if she knew a route.

  “Try these.” A withered, prune-faced woman, burned dark by the sun, gives me a taste of artichokes mixed with chickpeas and spices. It’s delicious.

  I love these small Jerusalem artichokes and think I’ll make a salad of them for lunch with sweet tomatoes and maybe mango, which is ripe and not too soft, even in this heat. The goat cheese is light, and I get a small piece of it rolled in herbs and crusty olive bread and roasted red peppers, which the vendor says she makes herself.

  I think a lot about food, especially sweets and fruit, the rosy fruits in particular. Peaches and plums and cherries.

  Every morning since Asa was three weeks old—and he’s almost three months now—I walk from my apartment along East Capitol past Lincoln Park to the market, and, walking, I babble to Asa and think about food. I buy, of course, but very little. I don’t eat that much myself, skinny with nerves, and Asa is still nursing. But I imagine putting meals together, elaborate meals to which I’d invite strangers who would become friends, women with children and single men and fathers and soldiers, some of the people I see day after day at the market. We speak, but I don’t know their names.

  “I’m having a lunch party,” I say to the woman vendor who gave me the artichoke dip to taste.

  “Very nice!” She pops a raspberry into my mouth. “Good?”

  “Excellent,” I say.

  “Who’s coming to your luncheon?” she asks.

  “My mother. Do you know her?”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s small with curly hair, which hasn’t gone gray yet.”

  I’m proud of that about my mother. Her hair, still dark at almost sixty, gives me a sense of permanence.

  “I know your mother, of course,” the woman says. “She comes with you on weekends, all the way in town from the suburbs.”

  “Her name is Mrs. Frayn,” I say, to place her as a friend.

  People in Washington know about our family because of Steven. Not that it’s unusual for a young man to die here. Many have been killed in the twenty years since we moved from New York City, when Steven was seven and I was three. But then the violence was personal, drugs or guns or gang warfare or domestic quarrels, and in the last few months it’s a random bomb or arson or a staged accident, and several are injured or die at once.

  Steven was assassinated in the late afternoon, and he was alone, except I was standing beside him. It wasn’t an accident that he was the one chosen.

  “It’ll be my mother’s first visit to my apartment,” I say to the woman vendor for no particular reason, except I feel I owe her something personal about myself since she gave me a raspberry. I’m careful about these things, avoiding obligations, wishing to keep a balance with people even in matters as small as this.

  “Your father’s coming to lunch, too?”

  I shake my head, a reserve settling over me. It isn’t her business about my father’s plans, but I answer anyway, which I know isn’t necessary, but I have that need to respond to any question.

  “Learn to say shut up,” my mother says to me. “Two words. Very simple.”

  But I never do.

  “My father’s working,” I say, although it isn’t exactly true.

  My father’s a professor of medicine at George Washington University, where Steven and I went to school and graduate school. He’s on summer holiday from classes, but today he’s probably in his hangar rebuilding an airplane that has taken up most of our backyard since I can remember and much of my father’s time, especially since Steven’s death. It’s an old World War II fighter plane that he bought at an auction, and he’s in the long process of restoring it to its original shape.

  But he wouldn’t come to lunch at my apartment in any case.

  Our house is in the suburbs just over the northern city line, where the land flattens, spreading into the horizon now dotted with high-rises and strip malls and corporate headquarters. Before there were houses, our suburb was a flatland forest, slightly higher than the swamp city of Washington, with scrubby trees and low brush, a kind of primordial look about the land, as if nature had had its way with it once and could again.

  Ours was the last of the old suburbs to be built, because the land to the north is the least hospitable, so the houses are more temporary in structure than other suburban houses, put up quickly to accommodate scientists like my father who come from all over the world to work in laboratories at the National Institutes of Health. We have a one-story rectangular house, with the hangar taking up much of the garden, which wouldn’t be a sufficient garden anyway, the soil too sandy, water at a premium, especially in the summer months. In the summer my mother takes a white plastic chair with a cushion out to the garden, puts it down beside the hangar, and reads her newspapers.

  There’s a study and three bedrooms: one for my mother and father, one that was Steven’s, one belonging to my father’s brother, Milo, who’s a concert pianist down on his luck. When Milo moved in, my father built a little house to the side of our house but attached to it, opening from the kitchen. That was my room from the time I was twelve years old.

  “You must understand that I can’t come visit you in your apartment, Claire,” my father said to me when I was packing up to move. “You should be living in my home.”

  I did understand. Perhaps he was more upset than he knew that I was having a baby out of wedlock, because we’re an old-fashioned family, although not religious, holding to the daily rituals of an orderly life, and for good r
eason.

  But I know it isn’t the baby—he’s glad to have this baby, although he’s never asked who the father is and would be distraught to know and doesn’t in general believe it’s a good thing to bring a baby into a troubled time. But it is life, and he knows that or he wouldn’t be rebuilding an airplane, hoping that once it’s completed he’ll be able to fly it. Of course, he doesn’t consider how he’ll fly or where he’ll be permitted to take off and land or what rules of the air would apply to a novice with a rebuilt warplane. And that’s the point. One doesn’t think of these things, or babies would never be born in wartime.

  My moving was a failure to him. I think he was embarrassed that his family couldn’t hold together under one roof after Steven died. He thought it was a reflection of his weakness. But he’s not a weak man, and he misses me and wishes I were there every morning at breakfast, both for his pride and my company. Milo can be sullen, and my mother is argumentative, and I am sunlight to him, though God knows not so bright as the days we’ve been having this summer.

  My father isn’t the one who asked me to call the baby Steven. My mother did. But, typically, she said it was at my father’s request and he didn’t want to impose; nevertheless it would mean a great deal to him, and after all, what immortality is there for the dead unless the living hold on to their names?

  I suppose I believe that, too. If I believe in any immortality, it would have to be the passing on of names of the dead to the babies, as the Jews do.