Both A Portrait in Two Parts

9780375422669

0375422668

Chapter 1 Although Dr. Rupert C. Barneby was apparently the most accomplished legume taxonomist since Bentham, and had prepared himself since childhood to that end, his work was a subject that I as a nonscientist could not readily discuss. This did not disappoint him. It was enough in 1975 that I came along as the partner of his new friend, Frank Polach. Frank and I had arrived in New York the year before, when we both were thirty, and Frank had begun work soon after as a plant information officer at the New York Botanical Garden. There, bearing an unrecognizable leaf sent by some anxious gardener, he approached the celebrated elder figure who was known, instantly and by everyone, it seems, as Rupert. The leaf was identified, and now Frank and I were on our way to the Botanical Garden where we had been invited to Rupert's for dinner so that I too might be presented for inspection. A visiting botanist will reach the garden today, I suppose, by cab from the airport or by car from the suburbs. I wonder how to convey the impact, on a provincial newcomer, of this dinner excursion that began, by contrast, with descent to the IND local at Twenty-third Street, change to the D train, and exit fifty minutes later to street-level air on Bedford Park Boulevard in the unfamiliar Bronx. Down the hill and across the railroad tracks stood the Mosholu Gate to the Botanical Garden beyond. Frank had told me that the garden once was part of the Lorillard estate; never, despite his description, could I have foreseen the freedom of ground and sky, the splendid if threatened optimism of the Museum Building, the acres of primeval hemlock (the woolly adelgid had not begun its destruction), or the precipitous river gorge we had to cross in order to arrive at the side door of Pierre Lorillard's old stone stable, its ground floor occupied by the garden security headquarters, its loft by Rupert Barneby. Here, at the head of the narrow stairs, we were welcomed to a room that fit beneath its pitched roof like the nave of a small Gothic chapel, stone walls exposed, deep casement windows encrusted with grime. On the floors were antique Bijar rugs, on the walls an oil by Miro, two drawings by Jackson Pollock, foxed prints of Astragalus (the legume genus, aSTRAGGalus, as we were later to learn, that was Rupert's lifelong taxonomic passion), and, lined up wherever there was an available shelf or ledge, the books that included rare floras, first-edition poetry, travel guides in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese. It was hard to believe, while seated at a refectory table on eighteenth-century Portuguese chairs, when served a gentle curry on hand-painted Spode, or while smoking after dinner the smuggled cigars, that we were destined ever to get back on the subway. Instead we soaked up the gossip, delivered in an English accent that was both unassuming and lyrically at odds with the occasional squawk from the two-way radio downstairs: firsthand gossip about Auden and Isherwood, Peggy Guggenheim and Marcel Duchamp (figures as otherwise legendary to me as Bentham and Hooker, George Forrest, or Redoute may be to botanists), and gossip, too, about a figure whose name we did not recognize but whose portrait, in the lightly Surrealist manner of a vanished era, hung in the bedroom-our host's own partner of forty-eight years, the late Dwight Ripley. My reaction to that evening was not original: greedy to learn and at the same time bristling with pride so as not to be influenced. The aesthetics of Surrealism, the habits of a discipline so foreign as taxonomy, had little, I thought, to offer me. Besides, like every other potential mentor, the sixty-three-year-old Rupert Barneby was inconsistent. He warned us, perhaps that very evening, against making "a deep plan" for our lives; if you have a deep plan, he said, you set yourselves up for disaster. It was advice that seemed congruent with his personality. Years later we discovered a d