The Butterfly House. Marcia Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ laughed it off, but secretly I wondered if it were true. I had no way of knowing.

      “If your father were here,” I said, “he’d meet Danny on the front porch with a shotgun.”

      She dropped her lipstick into a tiny shoulder bag and snapped it shut. “Well, he isn’t here. But I’ll tell Danny that if he lays an unwanted hand on me, you’ll hunt him down and see that he makes an honest woman of me.”

      “Making you honest is too big a job for anyone, let alone a jockhead.”

      Cincy smiled and shot me the bird.

      I watched them drive away in Danny’s dad’s new Chevrolet, feeling that I’d failed as a parent.

      That semester my science teacher, Mr. Jenkins, directed us to choose a research project. For me there was no question about a subject. I consulted Lenora, and she handed me an issue of Nature magazine with an article about Old World swallowtail butterflies. One of them was Pharmacophagus antenor, found only on the island of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. It was the only African swallowtail known to feed on pipevine, and its evolution was speculated to reveal links to the age when the earth’s plates shifted and separated to create the continents.

      In the photos, the antenor’s black wings appeared delicate and narrow. The forewings were marked with white spherical spots that melded along the bottom of the hindwings into rounded crescent-shapes of pale yellow to red-orange. The antenor had a wingspan of five to six inches and a life cycle virtually undocumented by science.

      “This is neat,” I said, returning the magazine, “but I don’t see how I could make a science project out of it.”

      Lenora sat on a tall stool on the sunporch, methodically examining the leaves of a willow branch for eggs. The porch was warm with rare November sunlight, and butterflies fluttered overhead. Most species couldn’t fly unless the temperature was near eighty.

      “Remember Zoroaster, the Morpho rhetenor?” she asked.

      I recalled the iridescent blue beauty Cincy had introduced to me on my first visit.

      “It was from French Guiana in South America,” she said. “That red-and-black one up there,” she pointed, “is from Asia.”

      I looked up, nodding, but I still didn’t get it.

      “How would you like to be the first American ever to raise a generation of Pharmacophagus antenor and document its complete life cycle?”

      The light came on. “You could get one of those?”

      Her eyes sparkled. “The university research facility obtains lepidoptera specimens from approved foreign sources under a special permit for scientific study. That’s what the quarantine area is for,” she said, nodding toward the one end of the porch sealed off by a glass door. “I have an acquaintance in Florida that I met at a conference who’s offered to fund research to investigate the relationship of that species to other members of the swallowtail family.”

      I loved it when she talked like a scientist to me. Ever since I’d learned she did actual scientific research on her sunporch, I’d spent more and more time there. And made straight A’s in science class. I knew her income depended on grant money from various sources.

      “You could be my research assistant,” she said. “I want to put the immatures—caterpillars and pupae—under the dissection microscope and compare them to some specimens we could get on loan from Sarasota or maybe Yale.”

      “Far out,” I whispered. And it was—far out of my limited range of understanding about her work. But I understood quite clearly that she was offering to include me, to share with me the mysteries of the butterflies. My chest inflated to the point of exploding. “How long would it take to get them? I’m supposed to do the project this semester.”

      “It might take a while,” she admitted. “Only eggs or pupae can be transported successfully, and we’ll need to import the Madagascar variety of pipevine, too. I’ll see if the university has a contact in Madagascar, and tell them it’s a rush so that our research will be ahead of Britain’s. That always pulls their chain. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture might give them trouble about importing the plants.”

      “Couldn’t the caterpillars eat American pipevine?” “Maybe, but not the first generation. Later on, if we get a second generation going, we could see if the larvae will adapt to the pipevine that grows farther south in the States. Or maybe try the ginger plant we have locally that’s related to pipevine.” “So if the government vetoes the plants, the project is off?” Her eyes took on a devilish light. “Not necessarily. There are other ways. In France you can buy lepidoptera eggs, pupae, even food plants—cash and carry. Smuggle them through Customs in your handbag, if you’ve got the nerve.”

      My eyes widened. “Have you ever done that?” She pursed her lips like a kiss. “I’m not at liberty to say.” My grin stretched so wide Lenora laughed at me. I was practically hopping. “This is so cool! Can you call the university now?” “Shouldn’t you talk it over with your teacher first? Better find out if he’s willing to be patient, in case your project doesn’t get moving until the semester’s nearly over. And there’s always a risk that the specimens will die without reproducing.”

      I waved it off. “I can talk Mr. Jenkins into it. No problem. I’m his star pupil.”

      She smiled, approving my rash confidence. “If we can nurse a few through the pupal stage and get the adults to lay eggs on domestic pipevine or ginger, though, it’s possible we could keep the generations going indefinitely.”

      Her voice held genuine excitement, and I let myself believe that part of it was because we’d be working together. I ran to bring her the phone, nearly tripping over its twenty-foot cord, so she could call her friends at UO.

      On a Saturday morning, the two of us drove to a forested valley in the Cascades in search of wild ginger. Lenora wanted to begin cultivating it on the sunporch so we’d have a supply at hand. She thought we could buy pipevine at a nursery in Portland.

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