Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman

jet-and-velvet thing—did you get an award?”
    “It’s a button from Felix’s collection. Leo sewed it on.”
    “It was once Great-Aunt Hannah’s,” Jan recognized. “It decorated a mauve toque.”
    “I remember!” Flax said. “She had a shelf of fancy hats.” And the conversation drifted away from Unanticipated Seminars and the Mystery of Life and Death and entered the comfortable area of family history.

VIII.
    That Saturday morning, shapeless in her flannel robe, Bonnie tiptoed into the living room, not bothering to close the bedroom door. She took a brown bottle from her pocket. It held the extract of the P. vulgaris root, a variety of primrose. This liquid was the Czech preparation solutan —a nostrum against bronchial asthma and bronchitis. She poured some solutan into Plant, practicing a version of homeopathy. “Take some of your own medicine.” Her cousin in Prague supplied the stuff to Reilly, the chemist, his shop not far from the Zizkov Tower. The Irish are as disseminated as the Jews; Flax had noted this. Concealed behind a half-closed door he had frequently watched Bonnie dose Plant. This morning he was watching from bed. “I love you,” he whispered to his wife, who couldn’t hear this unoriginal unbeatable declaration. Of necessity he whispered it also to P. vulgaris flaxbaum, who might be developing a rudimentary tympanum within that coiled leaf, who knew, Linnaeus and Darwin and Dawkins hadn’t figured out everything; and Plant, like the rest of the family, was entitled to its secrets. He often wondered what unanticipated being Plant was destined to become. But he wondered even more frequently what kept the organism going—cilantro, mouthwash, slain numerals, coffee, a Mitteleuropean nutraceutical, the last ashes from Uncle Jack’s cigar? A mystery, isn’t it, Blessed Harry.

Puck
    T he statue—hollow, bronze, about three feet in height and about thirty pounds in weight—wasn’t the sort of thing Rennie usually bought. And for an excellent reason: it wasn’t the sort of thing she was able to sell. In the antiques business you couldn’t just follow your whim; you’d go broke in a month. At Forget Me Not, Rennie’s shop, she dealt in French clocks, and English silver, and pottery made a century earlier in a Boston settlement house—a set of those plain plates now fetched more money than the immigrant potters had made in a year. Forget Me Not was known for its Regency teapots and Victorian jewelry and hat pins from the 1940s, bought these days by collectors or—who knew?—murderers.
    Rennie herself was known for discretion and restraint. She allowed certain customers to use the telephone to get in touch with a detective or a divorce lawyer—cell phone calls can be traced, the customers nervously confided; may I…? Old ladies came in with valuable saltcellars; circumstances had forced them to part with the family silver. Men bought pendants for women not their wives. Elegant matrons wept over sons in jail. Rennie kept such facts in her head like diplomatic secrets. And this caution had led, through the years, to a general prudence: she did not tell any customer anything whatsoever about any other customer. It was one of her two cardinal rules.
    The other rule also involved keeping her mouth shut: she refused to give advice. “Advice is the province of psychiatrists and hairdressers,” she said. “Me, I’m just a rag-and-bone woman.”
      
    The statue belonged in a chamber of oddities. Rotund, almost naked, male—at least, fig leaves hinted that the figure was male—with a little jacket over his shoulders and a top hat over his curls. He carried a spear in one hand and held a mirror aloft in the other. His face was round and merry.
    Ophelia Vogelsang had staggered in three months ago with this fellow in her arms. “From Uncle Henry’s apartment,” she’d crowed, as if saying “from the Vanderbilt collection.” She set the statue on the floor and sank onto the striped