It was strange. She’d never been much comfort to Margery, but her mother had been a solid presence in her life, like a piece of furniture that stands in the way of everything else. Whatever Margery did, her mother would be there, sitting in her chair at the window, the light shining through to her tender scalp, a cup of tea gone cold on the table. After her death, Margery had felt even more sheared off from the rest of the world. She’d also had another growth spurt. Her frocks hung inches above her ankles, and she was always cold. Sometimes her aunts stared up at her as if she were growing on purpose, just to be difficult.
By the time she was eighteen, her room was like the study of a mad biologist. Insect books everywhere, drawings pinned to the walls, her notes and journals, not to mention all the beetles living in her homemade insect houses and jars. She bought a sweep net for her birthday, and the moment she woke up, she went out. When she searched for beetles, she wasn’t too big anymore or too strange. How tiny the world was when you were pressed up against it, how delicate and meshed and constantly changing. Crawling on hands and knees, eyes stitched to the ground, she thought of nothing except beetles. She disappeared, and so did people.
Then two things happened. She saw her father. And Barbara told her about the Natural History Museum.
Near to her aunts, there was a park with a lake and a bandstand, and in the summer there were often concerts. Margery was at the park one afternoon, on the trail of Aromia moschata, commonly known as the musk beetle, more than an inch long, rich green in color, thin as a stem, and with very long antennae. One of the few beetles to emit a nice smell. Also, frequently found on willow trees, of which there were many alongside the lake in front of the bandstand. She knelt and began to search. Time passed. A bird called. She looked up.
Her father was sitting on the other side of the lake. He was listening to the music with one leg stretched out. Until that day she’d forgotten one of his legs was stiffer than the other, and so he always sat that way. Everything in the park parted and disappeared and suddenly there was nothing except Margery by the lake and him by the bandstand. She felt incredibly warm, and happy, really happy. All she wanted was to watch, to be with him like this, both with him and not with him, until a little boy came into view, giving her father a ball, and then a woman, offering him a sandwich. Her father smiled kindly and took both.
It was as though a whip had been cracked somewhere deep inside her. Fury filled her mouth. A pain so bitter she could hardly breathe. How could he have walked through the French windows all those years ago and abandoned her? She was his daughter. Had she meant nothing? She stayed, nailed beneath the willow trees, her head dizzy, her mouth contorted, while the band played, and her father watched, and people came and went, and the woman fed him sandwiches, and the boy nestled up close and sometimes threw his ball then brought it back, until the concert seemed to be over because people were clapping and the woman packed up her picnic basket and the little boy put away his ball, and they helped her father to his feet, and left.
He wasn’t her father. He was someone else’s. A little boy’s. But it had upended her to see again what she’d thought she’d left behind.
She went back to the park every concert day. She knelt by the lake; she waited. The man with the boy never returned. She wrote to several hospitals, inquiring about her father, but there was no record of him. She searched old newspapers at the library and found nothing there, either. What she did find was a reference to her brothers.
Benson: Archibald, Hugh, Howard, Matthew. Killed 1914. Mons. Unknown graves.
It was like learning something in her heart that she had known in her head all along. They were dead. Of course they were. Not only that, so was her father. And not to have accepted something so obvious felt like neglect of the worst kind. The chasm inside her opened even further. She walked away from the library, where the early-evening sun threw her thin shadow in front of her, and she watched this strange elongated figure with the small faraway head and was so overwhelmed with shock and grief, she had no idea who it was. She didn’t even know where she belonged. All she felt was blankness. If she could, she would have walked and walked and walked until at last she trod herself into the earth and disappeared.
“You should visit the Natural History Museum,” said Barbara, a few months later. “Go on. Stop mooching, and get out from under my feet. Plenty of beetles there.”
Margery did as Barbara told her. She was too scared not to. Barbara drew a map on the back of a Sylvan soap flakes box, and Margery held it out in front of her, like a prayer book or strange divining rod, following it step by step while dressed in a frock that was now a bit small and a peculiar hat. Arriving at the vast Gothic building with its towering dark walls, its turrets and spires and hundreds of windows, she almost turned away. It was too magnificent. Then a crowd of schoolchildren swept past, and at the last minute she followed.
Inside she saw the skeleton of a blue whale. She saw polar bears behind glass. An aviary of colorful birds, suspended midair as if frozen in flight. The ostrich, the lion, camels, an elephant. Animals she’d read about but never dreamed of seeing. She climbed the vast stone steps and followed a long corridor where her feet echoed and, without even asking for help, she turned a corner and found herself in the Insect Gallery.
Was this how Howard Carter had felt when he opened the door on Tutankhamun’s tomb? For a moment she had to shut her eyes. It was almost indecent, there was so much beauty. Beetles mounted in glass cases and displayed in drawers. Hundreds of thousands. Silver beetles, black beetles; red, yellow, metallic blue, and green beetles; mottled beetles, hairy beetles, stippled, spotted, striped, burnished; antennae like necklaces, mustaches, windshield wipers, clubs; antennae as slight as wispy curls, bobbled antennae; beaded, horned, spiked, and combed; thin bodies, fat ones, round as a bead, slim as a stem; long legs, short legs, hairy, branched, paddle-shaped or pincer.
Beetles that lived in the roots of trees, beetles that lived inside dung, beetles that fed on rose petals, beetles that fed on rotting flesh. Twice the size of her hand; no bigger than a comma. Why did people lift their eyes to the sky in search of the holy? True evidence of the divine was at their feet or—in this instance—pinned in glass cases and drawers, in the Insect Gallery of the Natural History Museum. She went from one to the next. Dizzy. Ecstatic. Overwhelmed. But nowhere did she find her father’s golden beetle of New Caledonia.
The first time she looked up was when the bell rang for closing time. Watching her from the door was a short older man with one of those puffy faces that suggest there might be a handsome one hidden inside it.
“Do you like beetles?” he said.