The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up by Jacob M. Appel Read Free Book Online

4
    The Blue Rose Plant & Garden Centre occupied an entire city block on the far side of Seventh Avenue in a gap between two historical preservation districts. Until the late-1960s, the site had been home to Baumgarten’s Poultry Yard, the last
glatt
kosher slaughterer south of 14 th Street. One of Arnold’s first memories was of his father’s grandmother, whom everybody called the Baroness, taking him to Baumgarten’s to pick out chickens for the Passover
seder
. He’d never overcome his fear of the old widow. Her hands had been mangled in a childhood carriage accident, and she spoke only Yiddish and Dutch, not English, so she communicated with her great-grandchildren by gesticulating with the stump of what had once been her index finger. Arnold had watched in a combination of fascination and horror, but mostly horror, as she’d used the same disfigured digit to pass judgment on three caged hens. In the seconds that followed, the butcher—a cheerful and robust young
chasid
—roped the birds around the legs, as though wrapping a pastry box, and severed their heads on the wooden chopping block. The Baroness had made Arnold hold the carcasses in his lap on the subway ride home.
    It was easy, maybe too easy, to trace a line between that visit to Baumgarten’s and the botanist’s subsequentlife choices: abandoning Judaism for secular agnosticism, giving up red meat and poultry for edible flowers, marrying the blue-eyed daughter of a Norwegian laundress, herself the collateral descendant of baronesses, or their Scandinavian equivalent, although this connection came with neither fortune nor privilege. If the Baroness had known that her own great-grandson would wed a lapsed Lutheran, an artist who brewed tea from dandelion stalks, and a poor girl at that, the old refugee would have dropped stone cold dead on the sidewalk—which was what she did anyway, that same Passover, from a blood clot to her brain. What amazed Arnold wasn’t that he’d forsaken his heritage—Judith joked that the only roots they had were carrots and sugar beets—but that he’d ended up in business.
That
seemed implausible. As his father had always said, they were descended from an ancient and venerable line of hourly employees: bricklayers, pieceworkers, clerks. Arnold’s first foray into capitalism, a sixth-grade carwash, had run two hundred dollars in the red—not including the restitution his father kicked in when he forgot to seal the roof of a convertible. From that point forward, the Brinkman’s only son had seemed destined for university life. In the academy, it didn’t matter how peculiar or incompetent you were, whether you couldn’t tie your own shoe laces or believed the earth was flat—provided you contributed to the intellectual advancement of your field. Arnold knew of one prominent botanist, for instance, whoalso published self-help books on the therapeutic benefits of drinking one’s own urine. But in Arnold’s case, his scientific articles hadn’t proven terribly valuable. In the words of his tenure committee, they were “perfectly competent, but uninspired.” He couldn’t have agreed more. Who in their right mind would be inspired by the crosspollination genetics of winter wheat? What he’d wanted to do was to study edible flowers—but
that
wasn’t considered serious research.
    While Arnold had searched for another teaching post, a senior colleague of his, Hans Overmeyer, probably because the middle-aged professor had an unspoken crush on Arnold, had suggested they purchase the foreclosed poultry yard from the city and use the space for experimental botany. Overmeyer was interested in transplanting animal DNA into plants. He dreamed he might someday be able to produce blue roses from dolphin genes, or pink rice from flamingo feathers, but his first project—breeding glow- in-the -dark crocuses with the help of firefly chromosomes—struck pay-dirt in the mid-70s. For several months, while the rest of the nation