Garden of Lies

by Eileen Goudge

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This, that’s what.” Marie got up, yanked open a drawer full of old rubber bands, plastic baby bottle stoppers, strips of twist ties. She rummaged in back, then pulled out a handful of letters, wafer-thin blue airmail envelopes tied together with grocery string.

  The top one was stamped with half a dozen postmarks and addressed to her in Brian’s tight, spiky scrawl.

  Rose’s temples began to pound thickly. There was a humming, staticky noise inside her head, and she suddenly felt quite dizzy.

  She reached out with a trembling hand to take the bundle of envelopes from Marie, and the solidness of it after so many days and nights of empty longing, the cool crinkly paper against her skin, her name scrawled in Brian’s hand leaping out at her, sent the dizziness spiraling up and up.

  Oh, merciful God, he didn’t forget.

  “How did you get these?” she managed to ask in a shaky voice. But for one delirious instant, she didn’t even care. All that mattered was the letters in her hand. Her heart was racing. Oh God, dear God, he loves me, he still loves me.

  Marie folded her bony arms across her chest. “I did what you been nagging me to do all these months. I was out shopping, and I thought what the hell, okay, I’ll drop in on the old lady just this once. And boy was she glad to see me. Just couldn’t stop talking. The words weren’t so clear, just like you said, but I got the meaning [210] all right. She hates your guts, Rose. All she could talk about was you, how you leave her alone all day, how you ignore her when you’re there, don’t feed her what she likes, how you wouldn’t give two Hail Marys if she fell down and broke her hip trying to make it to the bathroom.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rose said, the dizziness settling now, becoming something cold, hard. “What’s that got to do with Brian’s letters?” She clutched them in both hands, and it seemed at that moment that if she let go of them, she would sink right into the floor.

  Marie’s mouth curled down in a thin sneer. “All that time she was going on about you, I could see how scared she was. Scared you’d leave her someday, and she’d have no one to complain about. Scared shitless of being alone. But she made one big mistake. She figured I was on her side, so she told me about the letters, even where she’d hidden them.”

  The drumming in her head was so loud Rose could scarcely hear what Marie was saying. Nonnie? Letters? She felt as if she were watching Marie on TV, one of the soap operas Nonnie consumed one after another like potato chips in the darkness of her living room.

  “Mrs. Slatsky brings the mail up in the afternoon,” Rose heard herself responding, her voice dreamy and disconnected. “Nonnie looks forward to it. Even the junk mail. The Rexall flyers. And those window envelopes that say you may have won a hundred thousand dollars in some sweepstakes, but you won’t know until you send—” Rose dropped her face into her hands. “Oh God, Marie, I can’t believe it. She wouldn’t do this to me.”

  But even while she said it, Rose knew that Nonnie would. It all made such perfect, hideous sense.

  What an idiot I’ve been, hoping that someday she’d show that she really does love me. Thinking anything I did for her could ever make any difference.

  She remembered the shock she’d felt, years and years ago, seeing a photograph of her father with a cut-out space beside him, like what’s left after you punch out a paper doll along the dotted lines. That horrible naked hole had been her mother. Nonnie had cut her out with a pair of scissors, as if she’d wanted to obliterate even her memory.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Marie, backing away, [211] looking a little frightened now, like a kid playing with matches who starts a fire and doesn’t know how to put it out.

  Rose stared down at her hands, clenched into fists on the stained Formica tabletop. She was paralyzed with anger, smashing through her like a tidal wave.

  She thought of Brian, people shooting at him in some jungle on the other side of the world, and of him sending her letters, waiting for her to answer, lonely, afraid, maybe even desperate. Four months. She’d written to him at least every week, but then she’d had to stop sending her letters. She hadn’t dared continue, those letters had been too full of hurt and anger. All that time, Brian no doubt wondering if she had forgotten, or didn’t love him.

  Fury surged through her, making everything black. Black as death. Black as evil. Black as the rotten heart that beat in her grandmother’s withered chest.

  Rose thought about killing Nonnie then, placing her hands about Nonnie’s scrawny neck and choking her until that black heart of hers stopped beating.

  “I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago,” Rose said.

  “... deliver us from evil, now and forever. Amen.”

  Rose stared at the frail white-haired figure knelt in prayer on the scuffed cabbage rose linoleum beside the bed. That huge, dark, Victorian monstrosity of a bed which had given Rose nightmares as a child, gleaming dully under a sallow coat of varnish cracked and fissured with age. A single dim lamp burned on the marble-top nightstand, throwing a sulfurous glow over the narrow cell-like room. Above Nonnie’s bed hung an ancient plastic crucifix, split and yellowed like the teeth of a very old dog. Below it, a framed mourning wreath under glass made from the braided gray hair of Nonnie’s dead father.

  Rose had spent the last few hours on one of the old-people benches that lined Ocean Parkway, reading Brian’s letters over and over, laughing and crying, people staring at her as if she were a crazy bag lady, then walking until her anger had worn down to a smooth steel nugget, lodged like a cold bullet in her heart.

  Now that bullet began to heat, a dull red glow in her chest.

  [212] You sanctimonious old bitch. How dare you kneel there praying. As if you had any right to God’s mercy.

  Nonnie started a little and glanced up. Her mouth puckered, as if yanked tight by a drawstring. The light caught her glasses, flashing Rose’s reflection back at her for an eerie second.

  “So. Miss America, she finally remembered she got a home,” Nonnie croaked, her pale eyes behind the sparking lenses full of disdain. “Come here and help me up.”

  All those hours, Rose thought, working with her, helping her walk, teaching her how to speak again. I should have left her to rot.

  “Help yourself up, you old bitch.” Rose was shaking now, knees rubbery, heart pumping with rapid shallow beats.

  “What?” Nonnie’s white head cocked to one side, birdlike. The startled rictus of her mouth hardened into a thin glistening slash. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. Or better yet,” Rose said, clutching hold of the doorknob for support, “why don’t you ask God to help you up? All these years of praying, all those Hail Marys and Our Fathers you’ve been stuffing in like quarters down a parking meter, you might as well get something for it.”

  “Filth!” Nonnie hissed. “How dare you speak such filth in my house!”

  Rose watched her struggle to pull herself up by the bed frame, only to collapse again onto her knees, a sound like the sharp rap of knuckles against the door of an empty house.

  Rose felt cold, so cold. Even in this room, overheated, stuffy, smelling like the inside of a medicine cabinet.

  “Your house,” she echoed, her voice arising cold and even from the still eye of her fury. “Yes, that’s right, Nonnie. I don’t belong here. You never wanted me from the beginning, you probably wish I’d died in that fire with my mother. Marie asked me once a long time ago why I let you treat me that way, why I didn’t just leave. You see, you made me feel so dirty I thought if only I could make myself clean you would love me the way you loved Clare. But the dirt wouldn’t come off. And now I know why.”

  She gave her grandmother a long look that was hard as flint, then said, “Because the dirt wasn’t on me. It was on you, all along.”

  Nonnie grasped the bed frame once again, hauling herself up. [213] The massive headboard creaked and swayed, tapping out a disjointed Morse code against the
plaster wall behind it.

  Now she was on her feet, groping for the cane leaned up against the wall, now facing Rose, a rusty old blade of a woman, twisted and hobbled with arthritis, yet still somehow a threat.

  “Slut!” she shrieked, her face strangely contorted—the stroke had left one side paralyzed—like something made of modeling clay being pulled in opposite directions. “Trash straight outta the gutter. Yes, I know what you do behind my back ... lying with that boy and Lord knows who else. That’s where you were tonight, wasn’t it? Lying with a man like a cheap slut. Jus’ like your mother and your slut sister, shaming me, shaming my son’s good name.”

  Rose felt her hatred glowing, a ring of embers around her heart.

  “So you kept Brian’s letters. You hid them so I would think he didn’t care about me.”

  Nonnie’s pale eyes glittered with malevolent triumph. “Yes, I hid them. May God’s will be done. And the Wicked shall repent or be struck down by the Righteous.”

  “God, oh God.” Rose covered her face with her hands, the horror of it closing in on her, overwhelming her suddenly, like the darkness of a closet clicking shut on her. Only this time the darkness was inside her too, the black hole in her chest where her heart had once been.

  And Nonnie’s voice hissing on and on like some devilish serpent.

  “Sure, you ask His mercy now. But it’s too late. He’ll punish you. Just like He punished Angie. He made her burn for her sins of fornication. Then we shall see. How the Mighty are risen and the Wicked scorned. And what good will your precious letters do you then, slut? What good, eh?”

  Something snapped in Rose, as sudden and swift as a rotten footbridge giving way, hurling her into a black murderous space where there was only the red sun of her rage.

  With a cry, Rose lunged forward, right arm swinging outward, elbow cocked. There was a high-pitched whining in her ears, a taste like blood in her mouth. And all she could think about was hitting Nonnie hard enough to knock the head right off her scrawny shoulders.

  [214] “Bitch! You lying evil old bitch!”

  But something deeper than her hate stopped her from striking Nonnie, something sane and decent buried in the bedrock of her soul.

  Instead, she reached up and snatched the crucifix from the wall, yanking its blackened nail free in a skittering hail of plaster chips. She hurled it across the room at the heavy dresser hulked like a sentinel against the wall, straight into the clutter of medicine bottles and amber pharmaceutical vials. A splintering crash. Bottles and vials crashing about, flying against the spotted mirror that hung over the dresser, spinning over the edge, bouncing and rattling off the linoleum. A bottle of Pepto-Bismol tottered onto its side, oozing a sludgy pink creek down the dresser’s chipped veneer side. The reek of peppermint rising in a sweet-sick wave.

  Nonnie let out a shrill yelp, and sank down on the mattress as abruptly as if her cane had been kicked out from under her.

  “There’s your God,” Rose cried, looking down at the shrunken old woman on the bed. Her blood sang high and wild in her head, and she felt oddly weightless, as if she’d just heaved a huge and terrible burden from her shoulders. “Let Him take care of you now.”

  April 28, 1969

  Dear Brian,

  I’m not sure how to begin this letter, or even how I’m going to finish it. My hand is shaking so much I can hardly hold the pen. And I can’t seem to stop crying. I just finished reading your letters for the fifteenth or sixteenth time. And can only hope when you receive this you will forgive me for not writing sooner. You see, I didn’t get your letters until yesterday. Nonnie had hidden them from me. Does this sound like a Gothic novel by Charlotte Bronte? Well, I don’t think even Charlotte Bronte could do my dear sweet grandmother justice. But if there is a bright side to all this it’s that I finally got up the nerve to do what I should have done years ago: leave.

  Last night after THE SCENE I packed everything I could fit in one suitcase. I’m staying with my friend April Lewis just temporarily (one of the girls at the office) until I can get my own place. It won’t be much probably, on what I make, but oh Brian, just the thought of it, my own place away from Nonnie, it’s like a dream. I still can’t believe [215] I’m doing it. Neither can Nonnie, I’ll bet. I called Clare last night from a phone booth on my way to April’s. I told her what had happened, and before she could say “I’ll pray for you” the operator broke in and told me that would be another twenty-five cents. I almost laughed then, I really did, except that I was too mad. I told Clare that if she didn’t want Nonnie to starve to death or fall downstairs and break every selfish bone in her body she’d better pack her halo and climb down from whatever cloud she was on, and come take care of Nonnie herself. And you know what? I don’t think God will hold it against me one bit.

  You want to hear something even crazier? This morning when I got to work (I’m writing this on my lunch hour) my boss, Mr. Griffin, said he had good news for me. He talked to an old friend of his who’s in charge of a scholarship fund for older people (that’s me!) who want to go back to school, and now it’s practically all settled. I’m going to college! Yes, me! The money isn’t much, just enough for tuition and that kind of thing, but Mr. Griffin has promised me as much free-lance typing as I can handle, so I won’t starve in the meantime. I’m very excited about all this, and also very scared. Am I smart enough? Will I be laughed out of the classroom on the very first day? I called Molly just now, and she says I’m being completely stupid, which I suppose means she thinks I am smart enough. God, I hope so. Otherwise I’ll be the oldest, dumbest freshman at NYU.

  All this must sound a little weird and radical to you, but I promise it’s all for the best. When you come back, we can start all over, and it’ll be just you and I, no more Holy Martyrs. No more Vietnam. Brian, I miss you so much sometimes I just don’t think I can stand it another minute. Is it as bad over there as they say? You don’t say much in your letters about what it’s like, the conditions, the fighting. Is it because you don’t want to worry me? You write that you love me and miss me, but if you’re suffering and don’t tell me, that separates us even more. I’d rather worry than be shut out. So please, please, tell me everything. I pray for you every day, every minute. But most of all, I pray this letter reaches you before you give up hope on me.

  Love Always, Rose

  xxxxxxxoooooooooo

  [216] P.S. I’m enclosing a Polaroid snap April took of me last night even though I look like something the cat dragged in (don’t show this to any of your buddies if you can help it). And don’t ask why I’m wearing only one earring. It’s sort of a good-luck charm, like a four-leaf clover. Two would spoil it, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m wearing it for you. I won’t take it off until you come back to me.

  Chapter 12

  VIETNAM, 1969

  “You ever think ’bout what happens after you dead?” the black kid from Alabama asked softly from behind in the darkness of the trail. “I mean, goin’ to heaven and all that kinda shit?”

  “No,” Brian whispered back. He slapped at something crawling on his cheek, he couldn’t see what. The rain-swept darkness of the jungle was complete. He moved guided only by the quiet squelching of Matinsky’s boots just ahead.

  It was long past midnight. His platoon had been marching on boonie patrol since four that afternoon, and he felt as if a hundred years had passed between now and then. Five or six kilometers back, one of the men—Reb Parker—had stepped on a Bouncing Betty mine that literally blew him in half. He died with his boots on ... except that his legs just didn’t happen to be attached to his body at the time.

  No, Brian didn’t believe in heaven. But he sure as shit could imagine what hell would look like: endless wet corridors of jungle, waist-high elephant grass that sliced at your hands and arms like razor blades, never-ending rain, and everywhere the death-stink of rot.

  “Why not?” the kid pressed, edging up alongside him. Brian could just make out the broad brown features under his camo
uflage helmet, and smell his breath, acrid with chewing tobacco. “You Catholic, ain’t you? I seen you crossin’ yo’self.”

  “It’s not a given.”

  “Givin’ what?”

  “It means just because I’m Catholic doesn’t mean I accept everything the Church tells me.”

  “You believe in God, doncha?”

  “I’m not sure anymore.”

  [218] “Man, don’t say that. I got the willies bad enough as it is.”

  “This your first boonie patrol?” Brian had been on half a dozen so far. He pulled Recon his first day in country, but Alabama had just joined the platoon.

  “Man, I wish it was. I been humpin’ these woods so long, I figure my number’s due. This here’s my third outfit. Cain’t pull snake-eyes every time.”

  Brian paused. “Listen. Do you hear it? The river. We’re almost there, I think. We’ll be okay once we get there. That’s our PZ.”

  “That’s just the rain you hearin’, boy.” The kid, whose name Brian had forgotten, laughed softly. “Been nothin’ but rain since they shipped me up-country. Lord, I’d give my left nut for a pair of dry socks and a smoke. Any gooks out there, you ain’t gonna hear ’em ’cause they don’t wear no boots. They ain’t so busy dreamin’ ’bout dry socks they goin’ get their fuckin’ heads blown off.”

  He chuckled softly, and the chuckles turned to a stream of hysterical giggles, muffled so it came out sounding like the high whine of tracer fire. Brian wondered if the kid was losing his mind. Christ, weren’t they all, one way or another?

  You think about dry socks, so you won’t think about dying.

  You hear the river, so you don’t have to think about how far away it might still be.