As he stood alone in the immense library of his college a week after Michaelmas term, mourning the arrival of his sixty-fifth birthday and contemplating the mild, pristinely white light pouring in through the high arched windows, the senior scholar reflected that over the years he had added no accomplishments at all to those his father had instilled in him as a child. And these had been few enough: mastery of classical languages, knowledge of antique literature, and skill in the hybridization of phalaenopses. Moreover, he thought, closing the volume of Statius that had lain open on the table before him at no particular page for ten minutes, in none of these spheres had he ever equaled, let alone surpassed, that saturnine, perpetually weary man, whose image he could now summon up in memory only as a spectrally pallid face casting a disappointed gaze over the top of milky spectacles.
Then again, he mused, he had finally succeeded, as his father had repeatedly failed to do, in producing a durable orchid from two seemingly incommiscible breeds: one a small ruby lithophyte—rupestrine, riparian, originally plucked from granite scree winding in a sleek purple ribbon along the banks of a Chinese mountain river—the other a cream-white epiphyte—philoskiastic, with petals of almost carnal lushness, roused long ago from a moist mossy bed among the blue shadows of a Malaysian forest. And the issue of that unlikely exogamy had been truly lovely, reminiscent of a delicate Phalaenopsis aphrodite, but with an elusive peach patina misted by faint red stippling, most concentrated at the blossom’s center and wholly dissipating just short of its petals’ edges. It was a feat of natural magic before which his father might have felt, and even deigned to express, real admiration; but by then the old man was long dead.
