Telling the Bees Read online

  “Summer nights aren’t nearly as fragrant now,” I said.

  “I know what you mean,” Detective Grayson said. “Heck, even thirty years ago, when the wife and I bought our first house—it wasn’t far from here, by the way—there were still plenty of orange groves, and strawberry fields, and nice big yards and schools and parks and little corner grocery stores where parents didn’t have to worry their tails off just to send their kids out to buy a quart of milk.”

  “Times have certainly changed,” I agreed. And indeed I was so engaged in our conversation that I had forgotten all about the manila envelope the detective had been gripping so unobtrusively under his arm until he slipped it out and glanced back toward my unlit house that by this time sat swaddled in evening shadows.

  “Kids today have no idea how nice this neighborhood used to be,” he said, running his stout fingers along the edge of the envelope. “Now there’s nothing but apartment houses and strip malls and gas stations everywhere you look. It’s a damn shame, if you’ll pardon my French.”

  I thought for a moment that I might confess to the good detective that I wasn’t altogether sorry that the old stands of avocado trees—which had been nearly as common as the orange groves once were—had likewise disappeared. Honey made from avocado blossoms is a deep dark brown and thick as tar. So dark and thick, in fact, that although the flavor is sweet as any other honey my bees produce, its pitchlike appearance dissuades most people of its palatability. Even I found it nearly impossible to sell.

  “Yes, it was lovely here once upon a time,” I said. I pulled a red kerchief from my pant pocket and wiped my brow to signal the end of another good day’s work. By this time, we had made our way back to the rear of my house and were standing at the foot of the stairs.

  “So tell me a little more about the Straussman sisters,” the detective said, startling me just a bit by the abrupt change in subject. “If I recall, they were early risers like yourself.”

  “I suppose so. At least, in their later years,” I said. “Claire wasn’t so much an early riser when she was younger, though. In fact, I recall a morning many years ago when I nearly broke her window tapping on it, so eager was I to rouse her with news of a wild swarm my father and I had spotted on our morning rounds.”

  “I’m not much of an early riser either,” the detective said, tucking his shirttail back into his waistband, which was too tight by half an inch, as we trudged up the porch stairs and on into the kitchen. “Good thing the wife is a morning person and that she knows how to make a good strong pot of coffee or I don’t think I’d ever get up.”

  “My mother was an early riser,” I said. I crossed to the sink and picked up the bar of Lava soap on the basin’s edge and began to scrub off the day’s dust and grime as I did every evening before starting my supper preparations. When I turned back around to face Detective Grayson, I saw that he had removed a dozen photographs from the manila envelope he had been carrying and had laid them out on my kitchen table in three neat rows of four each.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Honig, I was hoping you could help me out here,” he said. “We’ve been having a devil of a time locating any next of kin for the Straussman sisters. Or even anyone besides yourself who seems to know much of anything about them.”

  I finished drying my hands and set the kitchen towel back on the counter as I allowed my eyes to quickly scan the photographs. There was only one I didn’t recognize, but just a few over which I wished to linger.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of making copies of the pictures we found on your neighbors’ mantelpiece,” the detective said. “Do you recognize any of these people here?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Excellent,” he said, looking up from the photos to stare directly at me. “So what can you tell me about these good people here?”

  Eight

  CASTES: In apiculture, the three types of bees that comprise the colony, or the adult social structure of the hive, are workers, drones, and queen.

  Though I had often seen these photographs displayed on the Straussmans’ mantelpiece, having so many memories laid out in an evidentiary grid was another matter entirely. In the moment it took to compose myself, I wondered at the extant capacity of light-inflected silver to reach beyond the grave.

  “That would be Mrs. Straussman. Mrs. Marvella Straussman,” I said, pointing to the top left-hand photograph in the group.

  In the photograph, taken more than forty years earlier, Mrs. Straussman was seated in the large wicker chair that had for many years been the sole piece of furniture to grace my neighbors’ front porch. In her broad left hand, which had grown gnarled from the ravages of arthritis, she gripped the shaft of her badger-headed cane that leaned like a scepter across her knee and the arm of the chair. Her right elbow was crooked across the other armrest.

  “This was Claire and Hilda’s mother. She passed on in 1956. Complications of diabetes, I believe.”

  Mrs. Straussman was a large woman, and in the photograph, as had become her custom in her later years, she wore a dark high-necked dress that billowed down over her ample breasts to the tops of her black ankle-high shoes. Her thin gray hair was pulled tightly in a knot on top of her head, and her wide face was cast almost entirely in shadows, which—and I mean no disrespect—was probably just as well, as her features had grown increasingly bloated and mottled from a combination of sundry ailments.

  “That would be Mr. and Mrs. Straussman,” I said, moving on to the second photograph in the row, an infinitely more pleasant portrait of a young woman—just a girl, really—still in her teens, with plump rosy cheeks and a soft, wavy haircut. Dressed all in white lace, she held a small rose bouquet in one hand and with the other clutched the arm of a taller, fine-boned young man in his middle twenties who wore a starched white shirt, a diagonally striped tie, and a dark suit with a carnation in his lapel. Both bride and groom wore the unsmiling expressions fashionable with formal portraitures of the time, which would have been right before the start of the First World War.

  “They were married in Saint Louis, I believe. Shortly before they moved to California,” I added, though I’m not quite sure why I said it, or even why I recalled such a detail at the time.

  “So this was the whole family?” Detective Grayson said, picking up the next photo in line and holding it to the light as if to get a better view. Mrs. Straussman was seated this time in the great wing-backed chair that used to dominate the corner next to the fireplace in the family’s sitting room. Grown slightly heavier since her wedding photograph, though still not unappealingly so, Mrs. Straussman wore a long-sleeved, straight-waisted dress, most likely made of wool or some other such sturdy fabric. It flared out just below the hips into a loosely pleated skirt trimmed in a curlicued embroidery of sorts. In her arms she cradled a baby, swaddled in a pale hand-crocheted blanket and topped by a tiny lace bonnet. To one side stood a solemn, plain-featured toddler, wearing a white knee-length sailor dress, white stockings, and white shoes. The older child’s stubby fingers were loosely intertwined, allowing her hands to straddle Mrs. Straussman’s right knee. Off to the other side, and slightly to the rear, stood Mr. Straussman, clad in a dark suit and fedora. His left hand rested on the back of his wife’s chair, his right hand fingered a long, chain-link watch fob.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is all there was of the family at that time.”

  “When do you suppose this was?” Detective Grayson said. “I’d make it to be about 1925, maybe ’30, by the way they’re all dressed.”

  I shook my head and pointed to the baby in the picture.

  “Earlier than that,” I said. “Claire can’t be more than three or four months old here, and since she was born in 1920—June twenty-third, to be precise—I would have to say this photograph dates from sometime in the fall of that year.”

  Detective Grayson nodded and put the photograph back on the table. He picked up the next one in the grid and handed it to me. “So who’s this kid?”


  I stared at the sepia-toned portrait of the small, wide-eyed boy with ringlets of light curly hair. He sat perched like one of Botticelli’s cherubs on the arm of an overstuffed davenport. No more than two years old, the boy wore the kind of white baby shoes that doting parents used to bronze as keepsakes, white kneesocks, short pants, and a light-colored shirt with large dark buttons. But unlike Botticelli’s laughing seraphs’, the child’s countenance was as somber as his elders, and his pose appeared just as formal, in its own way, with his little-boy legs crossed at the ankles and one chubby arm artificially draped across the back of the sofa.

  “This was Claire and Hilda’s older brother,” I said. Though I never knew him in the flesh, it seems strange the boy’s name did not leap readily to my tongue. I stared a moment longer at his preternaturally large, sad eyes. “Henry, I believe his name was. No, that wasn’t it,” I stammered. “It was Harry. Harry Junior. He died before I was born.”

  Detective Grayson frowned but did not speak. He had withdrawn his notebook and ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket. He clicked the pen several times.

  “What happened to him?” the detective asked. I took a moment to consider how best to answer. Everything I knew about him was only so much hearsay.

  “As Claire explained it to me,” I said, “Mrs. Straussman was playing with the boy in the front room when she thought she heard someone knock on the kitchen door and she went back to see who it was.”

  I explained to the detective that since we lived so near the railroad depot, it wasn’t at all unusual at that time for the occasional tramp to inquire after odd jobs. But there was no one at the door, at least according to Claire’s account, and when her mother returned to the room she found the boy lying unconscious on the floor. After her initial efforts to bring him around failed, she frantically rang up the doctor, and, as the story went, the doctor hurried over to the house, but it was already too late.

  “Claire said her mother left Harry Junior alone for only a moment, and just as quick as that he was gone.” I put the photograph back down on the table. “He couldn’t have been more than two or three years old. Claire often said she didn’t think her father ever quite got over young Harry’s death. Or her mother either, for that matter.”

  “How long ago would that have been?” the detective asked.

  “Let’s see . . . 1915, maybe 1916 at the latest,” I said, and the detective scribbled this information down, too.

  “And you say no one ever figured out what killed him?” he said.

  “Not to my recollection,” I said. “There was some speculation it might have been pneumonia, but no one seemed to recall him being particularly ill at the time. Of course this was all before I was born. Before Hilda and Claire came along, even. And you have to understand that in those days families didn’t talk about this sort of thing. What little I know of the poor boy I heard many years later from Claire, who likewise heard the story secondhand, from her father. And this being a particularly painful subject, Claire said her father did not elaborate beyond the bare facts, even when she pressed him as far as she dared.”

  “So there wasn’t any formal inquiry?” he pressed.

  “Not that I’m aware of. But again, Detective, back then it wasn’t uncommon for a family to lose a child, or even two, before they reached maturity. Tuberculosis was not uncommon. Flus were pandemic. This was before penicillin. Before so many advances in modern medicine. My own dear mother lost a baby at birth. We nearly lost her as well. It’s a wonder she even consented to try again. Had she not wanted to give my father a son, I doubt I would even have been born.”

  The detective seemed to consider how best to respond without making too big a fuss over what he rightly perceived to be a most personal revelation on my part.

  “That’s a shame,” he said at last, though he did not specify the particular shame to which he referred. The detective stared at me a moment more as if he had something else to say, but perhaps I misread his intent as he turned back to his notebook and underlined the last few words he’d written before moving on to the next photograph.

  Thankfully, this one brought back much happier memories. Though the face in the snapshot was shrouded by a large beekeeper’s hat and veil, the young girl beneath was only too easy to recognize.

  “That’s Claire, wearing one of my old bee hats,” I said, smiling from the memory. “I remember the day I took this picture, with my mother’s Brownie camera, out in our backyard.”

  “And when was that?” Detective Grayson asked.

  “The spring of 1932.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I explained that although we had lived next door for many years, Claire and I had not become friendly until after my father was summoned to the Straussmans’ home to remove a wild colony of bees that had taken up residency in their parlor wall.

  “Claire was frightened of the bees at first, but she was fascinated by them as well,” I said. “So much so that shortly after my father had rid her family’s home of all its unwanted guests, she began to stop by our house after school to watch us tend our hives. She told me some years later that she had grown so accustomed to the constant hum the bees had produced while they were living in her parlor wall that she began to miss it once they were gone.

  “Still, she was hesitant to come close to our bees until my mother presented her with one of our spare beekeeper hats and netting and a pair of white cotton coveralls and a shirt that no longer fit me.”

  I recounted how my mother had tucked Claire snugly into this borrowed outfit, and my father had taken her by the hand and led her to within a few steps of our gentlest hive. Even after all those years, I could not suppress a smile.

  “Unfortunately, a robust party of field bees chose that very moment to return to the hive, and poor Claire went skittering back to the porch like a beetle across a hot stove. She refused to come any closer to the hives again for at least another hour or more.”

  I chuckled at the memory before remembering that the good detective’s initial reaction to my bees that late afternoon had been no less skittish.

  “Most people are fearful of bees until they get to know their ways,” I said quickly, hoping to defuse any unintended affront. I offered that such trepidation had been growing among the general public ever since reports of great hordes of killer bees advancing northward from Latin America had surfaced.

  “While I have yet to see one of these so-called killer bees—or Africanized, as they are more properly called—I am nonetheless certain that their reputed lethal nature is greatly exaggerated.”

  I set the photograph of young Claire back in its place on the grid.

  “Did you know that in Guatemala they now call these fierce creatures bravo bees?” The detective did not reply. I sensed a growing restiveness in his demeanor, as he had begun to rub a muscle in his neck just below his left ear with practiced precision. “But I digress, as surely you are more rightfully concerned with the lethal activities of our fellow man.”

  “I’m afraid so,” the detective said, releasing his neck and reaching unexpectedly for a photograph in the bottom row instead of the next one in line. The picture, which appeared to be one of the more recent of any there, was in color, and showed a smiling young serviceman, a Marine, in full uniform, standing next to a large military-style helicopter.

  “Tustin, 1975” was inscribed in a photographic studio’s gold-stamped imprint in the bottom left corner of the picture.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  Though the uniform was unfamiliar, there was no mistaking the young man’s dark wide-set eyes and the flash of his brilliant white smile, which was made all the more dazzling in contrast to his coppery skin. I shook my head, slowly, sadly, not knowing quite what to say or how to say it.

  The detective, whose growing impatience may have affected his perceptiveness, misread my silence for ignorance and replaced the photograph on the table and reached for another. Out of res
pect for the dead—or at least that is what I told myself then—I decided it best to let sleeping dogs lie.

  “That would be Claire and Hilda’s cousin, Margaret, from Detroit,” I said after a moment that stretched to eternity and back again as I directed my eyes toward the snapshot of a slender middle-aged woman in a bright floral dress that Detective Grayson handed me next. My mind, however, remained riveted on the young soldier in the previous photograph. I had often wondered what had become of David Gilbert. I certainly did not believe Claire’s assertion that he had returned to Alabama to live with his grandparents because I believed that there had never been any such Alabama relations. But there had been no opportunity for me to press the issue with her. It had been ten years since I’d last spoken to Claire face-to-face, and our final, long-ago conversation had been disastrous, to say the least.

  “Mr. Honig?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. I sat down at the table, more to allow myself a moment to clear my head than out of actual fatigue. The detective settled into the seat next to me.

  “Do you know how to get in touch with this woman?” he said, tapping the photograph.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” I said. Margaret had seemed so old when I’d met her in 1963, but decades had passed since then, and what I saw now was a mature woman, to be sure, but one with a youthful, almost defiant tilt to her hip as she posed beneath the shade of the Straussmans’ front porch.

  “I’m not even sure she’s still alive,” I said. “It’s been so long since I saw her last.”

  “Do you remember her name then? Or whether she had any children?”

  “I’m sorry, Detective Grayson,” I said, regretting even as I said it, the number of times I’d already had to apologize for my ignorance in the short span of time I’d known him. “I believe her name was Margaret. I think she was Claire and Hilda’s cousin. I only met her once when she came out to California for Mr. Straussman’s funeral, and that was . . . oh my goodness . . . thirty years ago at least. I remember her only because she was the sole family member to attend the funeral outside of Claire and Hilda, Mrs. Straussman having passed nearly ten years earlier. Margaret stayed on at the Straussmans’ house for a few days after the funeral, but the only time I spoke to her was when my father and I stopped by after the services to pay our respects. We brought a jar of eucalyptus honey from our special cache. I remember that Claire told Margaret that she bet she had never tasted anything this good back in Detroit, and Margaret had agreed. That is how I know where she was from, but that is all I know.”