“Very. He filled the niche of a kind of peripatetic forager of patchy habitats—like a high-class, curious tramp or rambler.” He paused, looked thoughtful, and went on. “Maybe he sought to escape some past, somebody? It seems as though he was always after something, anyway. Butterflies filled that need to a substantial extent in summer, and the market we provided gave him a modest grubstake. I could always weasel some funds from museum sources to buy his best material, just as I set aside a little fund for the purpose of scouring the amber markets in New York for spectacular specimens and new species. But beyond that, I know little of him.”
“How about his name?” Mead asked, unwilling to let it lie.
“I asked him the origin of his interesting first name once in a letter. I think you’ll find his reply in the files—let’s look now!” At that sudden inspiration Winchester wheeled about and the two of them stalked over to the prof’s rank of filing cabinets. “Carson, Hampton . . . great picture-winged fly man in Hawaii . . . Carson, Rachel” (ignoring Mead’s incredulous “Golly, you knew her?”) “. . . should be in between—yes, here it is.” A thin sheaf of letters emerged from the gray filing cabinet in the great paw of George Winchester. “Here, you may as well read them all, since you’re reading the journals. Please make a photocopy of each, charge it to my account, and put them with the journals. Then return these precisely here. I’d not like to lose the originals.”
The letter in question began, “Dear George,” and went on: “Since you ask, I’ll tell you what I’ve been told about my name. My parents had five children, of which I was the last. The first four were named for their birth months—April, May, June, and August. Those were fairly ordinary names. So when I came along, the pattern stuck, and I was called October. Only sometimes I think it was an expression of the bleakness my mother felt as a recent widow during that lonely Depression autumn of 1932.”
“And that,” said George, “is all I know of October Carson’s early life. And that he wandered the West for some ten years or more.”
“And since? What’s become of him?”
“I honestly don’t know. The letters tell nothing, and the journals stop just over three years ago. That same fall, I received a large package containing the journals and a very extensive consignment of butterflies from all over the West. There was a brief note that I must not have saved, asking me to send payment to general delivery in Allenspark, Colorado . . . I’d never have remembered that, except that I used to frequent that part of the Front Range when I worked out of CU’s Science Lodge above Ward.”
“So that was it?”
“I sent the museum’s check, it was cashed, and then I heard no more. I’ve never known whether he simply resumed his scavenging rambles, minus his butterfly net, or vanished somewhere, like Gauguin in the South Seas. I hadn’t thought about Carson for many months, until you mentioned the journals just now.” Winchester sighed and smiled high in one corner of his mouth. “So you see,” he mused, “I’m just as curious as you are.”
“I’ve just begun the journals. But with your permission,” Mead said, forgetting his resolution, “I’d like to read the rest. Maybe I’ll catch some clues.”
“If you have time, feel free. Just don’t let it become a detour from your important work. Do let me know what you discover. Well, I must get home, James. Jane and I have a rare date with the TV. Peter Freulich’s going to appear on The Tonight Show, with yet another Carson, not yet represented in my files—and I want to see him. You know his important work on fritillaries and their population biology, but did you know we cofounded Natural Limits to Growth?”
“NLG—really!”
“Yes, and his famous book, Nuking Ourselves, has gained even more notoriety than his scholarly work and has had him on the talk shows ever since. He’s a special favorite of Johnny Carson, who really seems to get the message. In any case, you’ll be needing to see to our mutual friends down the hall.”
For once, Mead didn’t feel a bit like seeing to the noble roaches. He’d been learning some interesting things from their nighttime revels, but now, spurred on by Winchester’s revelation and invitation, he was truly piqued by Carson and eager to learn more about him. So, after a perfunctory feeding and cleaning, he made a fresh path in the snow across to the museum, gathered up the journals, and returned to Osborn, his tracks already covered. As the snow swaddled the world outside, Mead took to his tower with the first volume of Carson’s journal and a flask of hot tea from the Bunsen. He followed as Carson carried on across the pallid, frigid sagelands, eking food and shelter from his chancy pursuits through the coldest winter in almost forty years.
10
Mead’s own winter passed too. His mental distance from New Mexico and his mother grew with the sum of the weeks. She wrote no more; his father sent short notes instead with family news of the light sort and the occasional check folded inside. The pain of his mother’s frost became the kind of dull background ache that one mostly forgets, most of the time.
Something else troubled Mead when he thought about it, but in a very different way: that one young woman’s smile, from his first visit to the department. He’d scarcely dated anyone in New Haven and was stewing in a stale winter’s brew of his own testosterone. A remarkable face, he thought, the one he’d glimpsed flitting out of George Winchester’s office that first day at Yale. He’d been right about her being part Asian—Hawaiian, in fact: some indigenous, some Japanese. Her smile infected him, made others smile; also made him want to kiss her mouth and lick her teeth. As he thought such thoughts, Mead realized he had been too long in the roach room at night, too long cooped in his monastic tower. When he next encountered Noni Blue, he asked her out, and she accepted.
After their first date, a movie and a drink, Mead walked home across the Old Campus. “I suppose that’s grad school for you,” he muttered, a touch of disgust in his voice. “I’ve thought about Noni all year, so here I am, on a rare night away from the roaches, facing her across our beers, and what do we talk about? Bloody committees!”
But that was natural. Few aspects of life affect the postgrad quite as much as the faculty committee. Your fortunes, fun, fury, and future rotate on the whim and judgments of this arbitrary posse of pedagogues. Given a sympathetic tribunal, life can be worth living. But let one or two be petulant prima donnas, and you may be screwed, regardless of scholarship. Mead had heard of committees that greased the skids, others that gummed up the works, but never one that failed to put up a few hoops to jump through. Along such runnels ran the conversation of James Mead and Noni Blue on their first date. “Committees!” Mead croaked again an hour later, trudging up the steps of the tower. “Couldn’t I have thought of something more romantic?”
So the next time, he spoke of hissing roaches and their marvelous courtship rituals. That hadn’t been quite right either.
On their third date, over coffee, Mead let out much more than he’d intended. They’d been getting to know each other, and Noni said, “Tell me about your family. And where you’re from, besides just New Mexico.”
“I was born in Las Cruces,” Mead began. “Dad worked on rockets at White Sands—nothing nuclear, but they were getting ready. We moved to Albuquerque a few years ago when he got a job at the university. Mom’s spent her whole life so far on me and my two brothers. Wants to paint, but never quite gets the brushes out, you know?”
“Or gets the lead out?” asked Noni. “My mom was like that—until she left.”
“My
