Oh, Maddy. He almost spoke aloud. The girl was squatting by wild irises, examining them as though she expected them to speak. In that moment he loved her very much and felt the burden of his absences like stone piled upon his back. She ran impatiently ahead. “Madelon, Madelon,” he murmured, his heart graying with self-reproach.
In the fall of 1985, on the basis of a single paper in the International Journal of Tropical Plant Ecology, Wick Colter achieved a level of international status few of his teachers—and no fellow graduate student—had known. He had anticipated the reaction, and he accepted congratulations from his colleagues with rehearsed graciousness, fearful lest he seem foolishly enthusiastic about his own work. The paper’s publication resulted in a growing stream of invitations to lecture and consult, some prestigious and many of them lucrative.
Colter’s fortunate path—when he finished a Ph.D. at Oregon State he was offered and took a position on the faculty; with his lecture and consultation fees he was able to double his salary; his wife’s parents helped them buy twenty-four acres on the Calapooia River in the foothills of the Cascades—this path to good fortune for Colter began accidentally. He’d called on a botany professor one morning and was scanning her shelves for a book when the professor’s phone rang. It was a student at another school, phoning to say she had to drop out of a field trip scheduled to depart in four days for Peru. When she hung up, the professor asked, almost perfunctorily, if Colter wanted to take the student’s place. He said yes, though he had no compelling reason to go. He described it later as intuition.
Colter assembled a research project in a couple of days, bought and borrowed personal gear, and left on time with the others. They flew to Lima, then to Pucallpa on the Rio Ucayali. From the river they headed into the jungle, to a region near the Brazilian border. Colter spent three weeks collecting plants in the family Comistelliacae, many of them in the genus Ellox. He had been told that Comistelliacae was a confused family, that its taxonomy would benefit greatly from the attention of even such a provisional plant evolutionist as himself.
Colter collected with a thoroughness and concentration, and with a tirelessness, the other graduate students found intimidating. When he returned to Oregon State, Colter immediately wrote to every scientist who had written about the evolutionary biology of Comistelliacae. He learned three botanists were just then finishing revised descriptions of three separate genera in Comistelliacae; but none was aware the other two had completed their work, publication of all of which was imminent. Colter also heard back from two plant ecologists in Nigeria, whose revisions in the systematics of three separate families of plants in the parent order Rolandales were about to be published. Colter waited until all four of these articles were in print—one in a very obscure journal, and two of the three others in foreign journals—before he submitted his own paper to the International Journal of Tropical Plant Ecology.
Colter’s suggested revisions of the single genus Ellox formed the core of his paper. In his concluding remarks, however, he drew together the work of the other five scientists to, in effect, redefine Comistelliacae, the family to which Ellox belonged. Much less forcefully, but very effectively, he redefined Rolandales, the order that contained and was dominated by Comistelliacae. It was a meticulous and intelligent paper, but would not have been nearly as important had Colter not benefited from the rare convergence of informative papers in his narrow field, and had not the other scientists done their work so well.
That Colter’s article became famous for being a great piece of luck did nothing to compromise his scientific reputation—except among those who were jealous. To his credit, Colter continued to work energetically on the systematics of Rolandales, taking full advantage of the position he had been given.
In the months and years that followed publication of his paper, Colter traveled with increasing frequency. He made repeated collecting trips to Peru, to West Africa, to Indonesia. He flew to conferences in Europe, in South America, in Japan. He had not meant to neglect all else in his life; he felt compelled by the importance of his work and a growing awareness of his own influence. But, increment by increment, relations with his family began to slip; and his life at the university became attenuated. In defense, he would trade on his reputation, apologizing to his wife for his long and repeated absences, but insisting upon them; and begging off, again, on administrative responsibilities at the university.
When Madelon was born, Colter believed the child would fill the empty space he had created at home; when he understood how absurd this was he felt humiliated by his own stupidity, by the haste and shallowness of his thought. When his graduate students began interrupting his late night research at the herbarium, he realized the disturbances were the result of his own disregard, his rarely kept office hours.
Colter was not willing to change. He enjoyed the deference accorded him outside his home and away from the university, the favors extended to him by strangers. He felt guilt over the neglect of his students, at the shirking of his duty to serve on university committees; and a more intractable guilt knowing his daughter saw little of him and that the management of his home was left almost entirely to his wife. But he learned to ignore compunction, his culpability. Renowned at twenty-nine, he continued to hunt recognition.
“What’s this, Daddy?” Madelon pointed to a cluster of pale lavender flowers.
“That’s bittercress, honey. Cardamine pulcherrima.”
“And this, what’s this?”
“That’s …” He couldn’t get the name. He had to think. Even then he wasn’t sure. “That’s miner’s lettuce. It’s Claytonia perfoliata. Can you say that, Claytonia perfoliata?”
The girl pronounced the words effortlessly.
They continued together on a trail through the woods, the girl yards ahead. He passed a cluster of skullcap, purple flowers that reminded him of lupine, but he could recall neither the popular nor the scientific name. On the way back to the house he brooded; it was clear he’d forgotten the names of half a dozen or more flowers that grew around his home. His mind, he realized, was attuned to the hundred categories and subcategories of Rolandales.
“Maddy,” he called. “Here, take these to your mother.” He held out a bouquet of Indian pinks.
“Mommy says we shouldn’t pick flowers in the woods,” said the girl diffidently.
“Well, Daddy’s business is flowers, and Daddy knows what to pick and how to pick, so the flowers come back the next year. It’s all right.”
“We have flowers in the garden, Daddy.”
“Take the flowers, Madelon. And give them to your mother.”
“Yessir.”
He felt reduced and imperious before the child. He wanted her forgiveness, for picking the flowers and for more, for his heedlessness.
The anger that was coming and going in Wick Colter caused people to avoid him. He interpreted their avoidance as disenchantment and he became more obsessive about his work, pursuing esoteric and evanescent lines of thinking solely in an effort to impress. The papers based on this work did not pass peer review. He took the lack of endorsement as a sign of their disappointment in him, a measure in itself of his self-absorption. He began thinking less of advancement and more about a way out.
“I’m thinking about resigning,” he said to his wife one night in bed.
“Resigning?”
“I’ve been doing a terrible job, just using the place, really, for the past two years. It’s dishonest.”
“Wick, if you’re—”
“No, it’s all right. I’m fine. I’m actually thinking about starting a new business with Terry Rademon. I’ve told you some about this. A few of these plants we’re working on, they can be developed commercially for reforestation in Brazil.”
She did not answer him. He felt the cold penetration of her doubt and the rickety scaffolding of his self-deception. He began again with her.
“You know the other day, out in the woods, I couldn’t think of the names of half a dozen plants. Dumb. I felt like I haven’t been in the woods in years.”
“You haven’t.”
“Well, let’s not let that get around.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. You haven’t been out there. It’s Maddy, now, who knows. She knows every plant that grows here. She asks you what they are to humor you.”
“Thanks.”
“What do you want from us, Wick?” She was angry and rolled over to face him. “We live here, you don’t.”
“This is my place, too,” he said.
“It’s just some place you occupy. Your life is out there somewhere, Djakarta or Manaus, or the herbarium. You don’t know, don’t understand, where you live anymore. All this prestige you have to have—what good is that to us? How does it help? How does your daughter benefit, knowing how ignorant her father is in his own woods? And if you say one word about your income I’ll sock you.”
“I understand, Alice. Believe me, I see what you mean.”
“Do you? Do you see that you have traded in the love of your daughter, for this thing, this authority of yours? It’s the center of your life—not Madelon, not me, not your home.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly what’s happened. I’m anxious, you know, about these last few papers—”
“Listen to me. When you were young, growing up here, you could describe every plant in these woods. You could pick them out in the dark. In the dark! You remember the night we drove up Quartz Creek with the lights off? You named them all—pearly everlasting, fireweed, bull thistle. Coral bells. You knew by their shadows, how they dipped in the wind. You were here then. Now, you look around, it’s not part of you anymore. Why should they remember you when you can’t remember them?”
“What’s that?”
“These plants. What grew up between you. It’s that you trade on, it’s that you’ve used to get where you are. What if it was in their power simply to forget you?”
“Are you being serious?”
Colter lay quiet, listening to his breathing.
“I could not be more serious,” she said, laying her arm across her forehead in exasperation.
In the silence that followed, Colter concentrated as he had not in years on unlatching a door that had kept him from entanglements, from harm. He felt as though he were trying to break through his own chest. He remembered Marilyn Webber. He had never told Alice. Nor about Janet Carson. He had spent a single night with each woman, that was all. He had not fallen in love, he would say to defend himself, but, later, it only made the sense of infidelity in him worse.
“Alice, do you know where Haskin is?”
“Haskin?”
“The flower book.”
“It’s in Madelon’s room. It’s in the stack of books on her table.”
“I’ll be back,” he said. He pulled on his pants and shirt and put his shoes on, sockless. The spine of Haskin’s Wild Flowers of the Pacific Coast gleamed in the reflection of the night-light on his daughter’s small table. He knelt by her bed. “Please, Maddy. Forgive me,” he whispered. He rose and went softly out of the room.
He sat at the kitchen table for a half hour, looking at the photographs and reading the descriptions and names of the flowers on the worn pages. He closed the book, took a flashlight from a kitchen drawer, and went out. The moon was full behind an overcast sky. The lawn was wet with dew. When his eyes adjusted, he took the path he’d walked with his daughter days earlier. The first flowers he came upon were western trillium. He leaned down and fingered the leaves, the last few wilted flowers, once white, now purple. He came next to a patch of hellebore. He saw it sidelong in the dimness. The woods grew darker. He squatted at several places on the path, but he had to guess at the flowers that came under his searching hands.
At a clearing there was more light. He recognized purslane and wood sorrel. He lay on the ground to bring his face close to the soil and inhaled the cold, damp perfume flowing there. He felt the prickers of trailing blackberry against his wrist. His delicate fingers found the pendulous flowers of wild bleeding heart. He recalled the first time he saw spotted coralroot, the first time he smelled deer-head orchid.
He lay in the clearing until he was stiff from the night air, then got up and walked back to the house. He returned the unused flashlight to the drawer, stood reading some pages in Haskin’s book, then put out the light and went upstairs. He was in bed some minutes before his wife spoke.
“Do you know what she found today?” asked Alice.
“What’s that?”
“Eburophyton austinae. She took me. I’d never seen one before.”
Wick Colter recalled the page in Haskin exactly, the paragraph on the phantom orchid he had memorized as a boy: “It is truly a phantom, for which you may seek for years, and then, when least expected it suddenly stands before you in some dim forest aisle, a vision of soft, white loveliness, that once seen can never be forgotten.”
“Me either,” he said.
He felt the straight edge of his wife’s hand against his thigh. “You only have to ask her.”
“Yes,” he answered, “though it might easily come to more than that if I’m to get home.”
Was it night alone, sitting the open windowsill, he wondered.
“You smell like the woods,” she said.