The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  I’m not frightened, I said.

  Bully for you, she said. I’m terrified.

  • • •

  I sat there most of the night. If I walked back into my bedroom, if I pulled the curtain and left him, again, in the dark, he might disappear as Randall disappeared, a note on the pillow for me to find long after he’d gone, Sorry to have been a bother, or something equally obsequious.

  He breathed in the slow, even rhythm of a man sleeping. I unlaced his boots and slipped them off, pulled the quilt firmly around his shoulders in a nurselike gesture, smoothed his hair, dared to, then, touch the rough black stubble of his beard, to feel the faint pulse in his neck. I took his folded jacket and unfolded it, searched the pockets for anything and found a flask, and my name and address written on a piece of lined blue paper. I opened the flask and drank, though I’m ashamed to tell the truth of it, the bourbon— why not? Anything seemed possible: your father in a room that had before this been only mine. I tucked my bare feet underneath me, back in my watching chair, and pulled my own quilt into a cocoon, waiting. There are times when you understand that your life is turning somehow, propelled by circumstance. Earlier I had walked, disheartened, into an aspen grove; now I sat here with him. I was restless. I stood and drew the curtain again, fidgeted until the dark became impenetrable. If I had lit a candle, I might have seen the numbers on the walls, thousands of them, big, orange numbers in a random sequence, or at least a sequence I couldn’t understand.

  “Can you hear them?” Randall whispers.

  “Who?” I say.

  “Shhh,” he says. “I’m listening.”

  I shut my eyes, catch my breath.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say.

  “No, you can’t,” he says. He holds my hand, pressing my fingers, one by one, to his lips. “They’re counting,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Shhh.”

  He puts one of my fingers into his mouth. I feel his tongue, warm, and want to pull my hand away but I do not want to at all. I clamp my eyes tighter, squeeze the darkness there into a red, burning light.

  “Yes,” I say. “I hear them.”

  “Yes?” Randall says, kissing my wrist now, where the veins are, where the skin stays translucent.

  “Yes,” I say. He has reached my neck, my face—his leg to my leg, his thin chest to mine. Soon he will tug me in an easy way to the cold, dirt floor, push my good Easter dress above my hips.

  • • •

  I wake to find your father near me. Who has drawn back the curtain? The room is bright with moonlight, or very early morning. It is still quiet. He is on his knees and kissing my shoulder where the bone curves toward the neck, and I have never, quite truthfully, been kissed there, and his finger hooks my sweater like a fish hook, pulls it out of his way and he smells like something vaguely sweet, bourbon, and his head is outlined in light the way a shadow will be sometimes and he is too close to tell the color of his hair or whether his face is thin or round or what, exactly, he’s saying, because it might be anything until it’s Daphne and it doesn’t matter then because I’m already sinking, washed over by the tide of him, his hand now on my skin beneath my sweater so that I feel if I turn too quickly he might break me in two, my watery insides draining out the way they’re already draining, the way he’s already broken me when he pulls what is left, slipping, slippery in his hands, to the floor.

  · Book Three ·

  1

  I knew much of Ruby’s life before Sterling’s confession. Randall and I had fit it together from the clues we found exploring the house, the letters Sterling kept in a locked tobacco box in his study. Our favorite was Ruby’s from Paris—the one Randall had included in his package to me. I would read it often the summer following the news of Randall’s death.

  Ruby had sailed to Paris. Well, not to Paris, actually, and not sailed; this was 1926. She took the Mauretania, which held hundreds, or it looked like hundreds in the newspaper clipping included with the letter, grainy, the size of my palm, cut from a newspaper that had long ceased to publish. August 21, 1926. The International something. It said they had docked at some port in France I never heard of, though I imagined gray, narrow streets and laundry hanging out to dry: sea birds taut on the line. Their destination, it said, was Paris, destination a word as glamorous as baby, or milliner, or the name, Ruby.

  The newspaper clipping came away on my fingers in dust. This that summer, when I did little else but shuffle through Randall’s package, believing I might have missed something, that I might find a diamond ring looped to the spool of red thread or taped to the back cover of The Gardens of Kyoto.

  I looked for Ruby in the newspaper photograph, hoping to find her among the waving passengers thronged onboard the Mauretania, her grand hat dotted with confetti, summer snow; but she was absent from the crowd.

  • • •

  Of course, I had already searched the photograph, nearly as many times as I had read the letter. Once, even, Randall took the magnifying glass his father kept in his study with the Oxford English Dictionary and, holding it up to his face like a detective, announced that the hunt could officially be declared over: he had found her.

  He passed the magnifying glass to me and pointed with one of his slender fingers to a spot where a woman in what appeared to be a fox stole held a parasol over her head, presumably against the sun, and stared out toward the water away from the crowd.

  She would have had no interest in the huddling masses, he said.

  I peered at the woman with the fox stole, who looked nothing like Ruby, the Ruby in my mind or the Ruby I eventually met.

  She’s too old, I said.

  She was older than my mother, he said. She could have been forty. When I met her she looked like she was a hundred.

  You were two years old, I said. He had told me all this before: how she had come for a Christmas visit, how she had brought a train on a real track and smelled of snow and perfume, how after she had gone, Sterling boxed the train and track, insisting it be saved for future Christmases, though Randall never saw it again.

  I remember everything, Randall said, and I knew, from the magnified expression on his face, that it would be better not to ask how. He seemed to be considering the same question, then he shrugged and said I was right, searching for Ruby on the Mauretania would be a futile exercise, that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what she looked like.

  You, I said, though I instantly regretted it.

  • • •

  She would be dressed to the nines, stepping up the gangplank to join the other passengers as streamers curled to the brackish harbor water below. In the distance the outline of the Statue of Liberty stands against the mist soon to be burned clear through by an August sun that has scarcely risen or set, everything conspiring to be a part of the theater: passengers in evening clothes, though it isn’t yet noon; men and women who have come from parties, from cotillions, from jazz clubs and restaurants uptown, from dinner engagements, the opera. She maneuvers through them with the urgency of someone late for an appointment. She will not linger here with the noisemakers; she will go straight to her room. Her head aches and she feels the tiredness and nausea that have become too familiar. Perhaps it is lunacy to make the trip, to insist on this annual crossing as if nothing has changed, as if she were still simply Ruby, a successful single woman, a member of the Cosmopolitan Ladies, a New Yorker. No. She will get to Paris and conduct her business. And now she will smile for the press thronged at the base of the gangplank, shouting at her to look their way, to hold her hand up just a bit to right her hat—what did she call that one?—against the hot, dead wind.

  It is then, perhaps, that he first notices her, though several days pass before he summons the courage to introduce himself.

  They have been seated next to one another in the dining room, this not uncommon, as they are both traveling alone. The other guests at the table appear to know him, though it seems no one has gotten his name. They call him Doctor, an
d, one or two, Professor.

  He speaks in a kind of mumble, swallowing his sentences before they are completed.

  The boat lurches and he spills his wine.

  “Apologies,” he says. “Please.”

  “Don’t bother,” she says, dabbing the wine with her napkin. She sounds rude though that hadn’t been her intention; she feels weak; conversation is a great effort. She hasn’t much of an appetite, nor interest in wine. Indeed, she has so far spent most of the trip indoors, in her cabin, sketching. The sketches are tacked to the thin, pine veneer of the walls and she often lies on her narrow bunk, widening and narrowing her eyes for different perspectives, staring at the charcoal lines. On the darker days of the crossing, she believes she has lost all talent.

  “What?” he says.

  “I’m sorry?” she says.

  “You said something about a child’s drawing.”

  “I did?” she says. “My God. I really should have stayed below. It’s nothing. Truly. I was just thinking out loud.”

  He does, on closer inspection, have large eyes; luminous in the shaky candlelight.

  “Are you an artist?” he asks. They serve fish: thin slices of salmon and new potatoes, someone says. She might blanch. She waves her hand over her plate. “No, thank you,” she says.

  “I’m sorry?” she says to him.

  “I thought you might be an artist. There are so many onboard— you haven’t noticed?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Final chance for the Expo, I’m told. Last night I met a Japanese gentleman who bends bamboo into the most extraordinary shapes. He couldn’t get over his good fortune. Said they had invited him and paid his way. His shapes are poetry, I believe. Or some form of it. I plan to go there after. Japan. Once I’m through with this. One was called Pebble in a Pond and you could almost see the ripples. A basket. But I’m babbling and here I asked you the question, didn’t I?”

  “I’m not an artist,” she says. “I design hats.”

  “How extraordinary.”

  “Not really. No, not at—”

  The group at the end of the table shout to him; they are attempting to amicably settle a debate, they call, on the genus of hydrangea.

  He answers their question and slightly bows to their applause. His tuxedo seems too large, too broad in the shoulders. He wears it as one wears an overcoat, shrinking within, although anything would seem too large on him. He has the gaunt look of someone who has recently recuperated from a long illness, though he has shaved—all the men do for dinner—and his cheeks are flushed and smooth. He blushes as they applaud, the blush deepening as he stands, again, at their insistence.

  Perhaps she then notices the wine stain on his sleeve.

  “I have no idea as to the right answer,” he whispers, sitting. “I just wanted to be done with it.”

  In the corner of the vast room a string quartet tunes their instruments. Soon the dancing begins; waiters clearing dinner plates, pouring a sweet German wine, rolling dessert carts among the tables—chocolate éclairs, ginger snaps and sorbet, strawberries, scones, crème fraîsche—braking the wheels against the rocking sea. The ship cleaves waves, rides high then thumps hard on the flat black water. He points to her empty plate. Perhaps they should step outside, he suggests. From here it looks an almost full moon. Waxing full. The air might revive her.

  This has taken enormous courage, which she recognizes.

  “I’m exhausted,” she says.

  “Of course.”

  He stands, all the men do, as she excuses herself. Someone from another table calls her name. Earlier she had promised him a dance, hadn’t she? “Tomorrow,” she says. They have all begun to blur: the men in their tuxedos laughing, smoking, arguing; the women, fading beside them, their rhinestone-studded dresses tinkling loud as these chandeliers would in storms. She grips a chair and steadies herself, though no one notices until she folds to the floor, lying cold between two tables, her ankles oddly crossed, modest in her descent. Waiters rush to her, as do those seated at her dinner table and the professor, who someone again mistakes for a doctor. He goes along. He knows her well enough, doesn’t he? He lifts her to a chair, unbuttons the top buttons of her dress. He asks the others to move away and holds the water glass to her lips, watching her eyes, beautiful, flutter open. He would like to touch her thick, black hair.

  She drinks the water. It’s nothing, she says; she must be overtired. Still, she agrees when he offers to escort her back to her cabin and, still faint, lets him guide her.

  • • •

  “I think they’re very good,” he says. He stands with his suit jacket off, his back crisscrossed by suspenders, his hands deep in his pockets, staring at her sketches, moving from one to another as if he were in a museum.

  She watches him from where she sits, feet up. “Really,” he says.

  “They help me think. They’re not intended for viewing.”

  “The line is strong.”

  “I thought you were posing as a doctor, not a critic.”

  “I’m not posing as anything. I’m just a passenger on a boat to Paris.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest—”

  “I like to sketch. I did quite a bit during the war—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waves it away.

  “I published a little book. It’s the reason I’m here. They want me to speak at the disarmament convention in Amsterdam.”

  “So, you’re a pacifist.”

  “No. I’m a horticulturist who happened to publish a little book that is beloved by pacifists.”

  She smiles. He is a bit like Sterling. Bookish that way.

  “Well, thank God that’s over.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Thank God.”

  He crosses the cabin and sits next to her and she thinks she might press a better crease in his trousers, that she might soak the sleeve of his white shirt in salt water to remove the stain. “I could find you a real doctor, though, if you’d like. I thought I should get you out of the dining room as quickly as possible.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m in a delicate way, and the smell of cigars no longer agrees with me.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “Please don’t look so shocked, it’s depressing.”

  “I don’t look shocked.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Of course you are. Anyway, let’s not discuss it. Tell me about your little book, as you call it. What’s it about?”

  “Flowers,” he says.

  “Flowers?” she says.

  “Yes, flowers,” he says. “And please don’t look so shocked. It’s depressing.”

  • • •

  Who knows the truth of it? Randall and I had read the letter countless times, memorized the name of the hotel embossed in the faint gray crest at the top of the stationery.

  Made a new friend on the Crossing, it began,

  who has introduced me to this wonderful little hotel in the Latin quarter. A professor of something; a horteculturalist (sp?) who is off to study Japanese gardens. Apparently he stayed here during The War for a while, in the same corner room with the same corner window that looks onto the same square in which bubbles a broken fountain, its statue that of cupid, he claims, though I believe it might just as easily be a forest nymph. Don’t be jealous, baby. He seems to have no interest in women, nor men, for that matter. Claims The War beat it out of him. He is one of The Damaged, as you would say. The kind you have so little tolerance for, frightened as a lamb. Terrible to watch him drink a glass of wine. But a professor, a man who loves flowers. Truly. I like him. You would, too.

  On warm days like this one she puts her toes in the cool fountain water and reads a book or writes a letter. This is where she is now, she writes. If she looks up she can see the window into her own hotel room, its window box of geraniums; inside, water drips incessantly from the bathtub faucet, but she cannot bear to give up her corner spot or the
yellow porcelain tiles of the bathroom floor. She would like to bring some of this porcelain home, but that’s Paris, isn’t it? Always wanting to carry it back with you in your suitcase.

  The streets, this square, smell of fresh rain, the rest of the city, the Parisians, buoyant, the talk only that of the Expo. The future. Modernism. They say it’s the first time they’ve felt hopeful since The War, though I don’t find much to admire in what’s left of it along the Seine. I’d rather just stare at the bridges. To me, everything shrieks and is far too large, like an overgrown brat nursed on heavy cream; the Huns were behind it, naturally, though they’ve again done something to anger everyone. I can’t remember what. Of the amusing things I found a glass fountain that appears to have sprouted from the ground, and a fabric designer with whom I have literally fallen in love. I have indulged in an outrageously expensive bolt of brushed linen with the most vivid, hand-painted roses, a gift for Jeannette, who adores roses.

  It went on. She had come up with one or two good ideas, inspired as always by the city. Just the look of it! Fruits and breads and cheeses in the shop windows, buckets of flowers at the Saturday market, freshly ironed antique lace along the Boulevard Saint Germain. You should wash it in milk, she’d been told, as you should wash in milk wool worn by children.

  But she had news, this the reason for her letter. She was pregnant, she feared. No, in fact, she knew. She wanted to tell him, to give him time to think about it before she returned. They would discuss it then.

  And there, surely, Sterling must have heard her refusal, his heart sinking at the abruptness of her disclosure as it would sink on seeing her again when she returned from Paris. He had waited with the rest of the crowd for the passengers to disembark, but she was not among them. She lay below, knees drawn to her chest. When she stood at last she stumbled a bit then got her footing; so odd to lack motion, to feel the boat at rest.