Henrietta and Her Moths
ANDREA BARRETT is the author of Archangel (a finalist for the Story Prize), Servants of the Map (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Ship Fever (winner of the National Book Award), and other books. This story will appear in her forthcoming collection, Natural History. She lives in the eastern Adirondacks near Lake Champlain.
For a club gathering late in the spring, Henrietta chose rosy maple moths, which Marion loved. A moth like a flower, a moth like a doll: the body furred in soft yellow, legs and feathered antennae bright pink, dark eyes shiny above pinkandyellow wings. She had some pupae just ready to open and the afternoon’s program planned, before discovering she’d have with her not only Marion but also her two other nieces.
Elaine she could cradle, tightly wrapped, in the crook of her left arm, freeing her right hand to handle specimens and write. Marion could sit at the worktable with the four young lepidopterists currently in the club, but Caroline—how hard it was to keep track of her! She sat at the table, knocked a jar over, jumped up and rummaged through the bookshelves, sat again and watched Sadie wield a small brush, accidentally crushed a chrysalis, burst into tears—she was five, Henrietta reminded herself, still a little girl—and was consoled only when Henrietta pulled out a special low chair and set a screen partway around it, making Caroline a private corner.
“If you could help me,” Henrietta said, “I want to put you in charge of your sister. You,” she said firmly, depositing Elaine into the same calico-lined wooden box where Marion had once napped. “No one else. It’s a lot of responsibility but—”
“I can do it,” Caroline said, leaning protectively over the box. “Just me.”
When Henrietta was small, she’d loved the small square building behind the house: the workshop where her father dreamed up mechanical devices and built the patent models he sent off to Washington. A trickle of income from his most successful inventions still, years after his death, kept the family afloat. A few years after Henrietta started teaching at the high school, she decided that she’d work there just as he had—what could be more natural? Once she’d cleared the workshop out, polished the windows, and repainted the floor, it didn’t need much else. A coal stove, a sink, some shelves; she paid a handyman to install those. Then, delighted with the result, she moved in most of her specimens. Lovely, said her mother, who often complained of the clutter in the house. Perfect, she said, when Henrietta further transformed the building into an insect nursery.
Although really, Henrietta thought, her mother had to defend it. Otherwise, she might have seemed to be criticizing her daughter. The neighbors called it “the caterpillar room,” and while a few were charmed, others stopped crossing the back yard and Mrs. Weatherwax avoided the house entirely. Let them fuss, said Henrietta’s mother calmly. She showed curious visitors how the marvels inside were arranged. Caterpillars, chrysalides, cocoons, and eggs; breeding cages and glass jars filled with green branches; winged adults drinking from sugar water–sprinkled moss and everything neatly labeled: White-Lined Morning Sphinx. Hog Caterpillar
