The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  “I’ll knock for you punctually, seven A.M.”

  I looked at him; in remembering I see an old man, his wise eyes fogged by cataracts. He had relearned to walk through sheer force of will, and studied law with the same determination. But old age had begun to defeat him. I see him holding on to that notebook as if it were Randall himself. He had no one left. He had lost his son. I see this now, but at the time I did not. I saw instead someone imperious, someone I wanted to hurt.

  “Why didn’t you like him?” I said, so cruelly it is difficult to tell you the truth of it.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said; he was halfway out of his seat.

  “I said, why didn’t you like Randall? He never thought you liked him,” I added, softer, wanting to shoulder my impudence on a dead Randall.

  “What do you mean?” Sterling said. “He was my son.” He sat down, again, though his two hands gripped the curtained edge of the table. I could not see but I imagined his bad leg turned out in the way it did when he was tired, a kind of moored rudder: it took great effort, Randall had told me, for Sterling to hold it as if it were an ordinary leg.

  “But if Randall hadn’t been born, you might have stayed with Ruby,” I said.

  “He had no idea.”

  I looked down at the table. “Yes, he did,” I said. “He knew.”

  I felt the dread, the sudden regret, of having spilled this secret, spilled being such an appropriate word to describe my immediate remorse. My feet were wet with it, my head, my heart, dry; I couldn’t breathe and instantly wished that I might take the words back, might suck them in as easily as they had spilled out. I would have in a heartbeat.

  “I was not aware of that,” Sterling said, his voice weakened. I understand now that at that moment he let go of the thin hold he held on his son’s life. If I had been brave enough to look up, I would have seen him falling.

  5

  Sterling quickly excused himself and I followed a few paces behind. He limped out of the dining room and turned the corner to the stairs. The proprietor had shut off the lights in the tiny foyer, and I hesitated there, as if I were contemplating taking one of the magazines from the crowded table up to bed with me, or signing the guest book. I did neither. I stood in the dark of the foyer and thought about what I had said, and what I should do next. I don’t need to tell you that I missed Randall terribly.

  Somewhere nearby a clock ticked loudly. I saw the ledger still on the check-in desk, imagined the names of the traveling salesmen neatly written in blue ink, the record of their night, their where-abouts, firmly set. My thoughts were jumbled, bumping and lurching, returning to the Japanese fable like a needle skipping over the nicked surface of a record album: And the rats of Nagasaki met the rats of Satsuma and asked one another how things were and dis covered that there was nothing to eat in either Satsuma or Nagasaki. There was no use in going to Nagasaki nor any use in going to Satsuma, so they decided to jump into the sea and drown. The first rat began to cry chu chu, and jumped over with a splash. Then another rat cried chu chu, and jumped over with a splash.

  Why had this made Randall laugh so? What else had he said about the blue moon?

  Moths clung to the screen door I closed quietly behind me. I let my eyes adjust to the dark, a dark that would be unfamiliar to you; there were no streetlights, no lights from any city, no highways in the distance, nothing at all, really, except where I stood and what stood before me: a stone path to the road, the road, the plowed fields, the blue moon.

  The Dew Drop Inn marked the southeast corner of Sudlersville, where Route 52 crossed Route 34; to get to Randall’s house you followed 52 east from town, past the cemetery, the post office, and several farms. That’s the direction I headed, walking, no sound but the cicadas, the late-July heat still oppressive though the sun had gone down hours ago. I stopped at the cemetery, thinking I should pay respects to Jeannette’s grave, though I couldn’t seem to find it. Perhaps it had sunk, as Randall always predicted it would, back to the ground, Randall saying the way the gravestone tilted one day it would no doubt fall flat and before long be grown over with that thick moss. It did seem the graveyard had been forgotten. It housed mostly Civil War soldiers, anyway, a monument to them in the middle of the cemetery ringed with a low wrought-iron fence and a handful of dirty American flags, miniature, the kind once carried by children on Armistice Day.

  • • •

  I can’t tell you how long it took me to reach Randall’s house. I know I was exhausted by the time I got there, wishing for the ease of the biplane, the way we swooped down to bump along the fields. Still, I never considered turning back. I’m not sure what I expected to find, or whether I even expected to find anything. I know I walked in my good shoes, my mother’s linen suit from Bergdorf’s. From time to time, when I felt too tired, I tried to picture my mother as a girl my age. She had married at nineteen, my father twenty. They stood in the courthouse—this their description—and got it over with; in those days after the Influenza and the Great War, they would say, people weren’t sentimental.

  Nearly there, I removed my good shoes and began to run. I had earlier pulled off my stockings, not wanting to ruin them, and so I ran now in bare feet along 52, my stockings in my skirt pocket. If anyone had seen me, what would they have thought? I was nearly sixteen; I had my hair bobbed; I ran in the middle of the night down a dark road, ran, quite truthfully, because I felt if I did I might reach the house in time to find it whole, again: I would run straight through the front door—open for me as doors are open in dreams—and bound up the back stairs, ducking my head to turn the corner, to fit through the passageways, bursting into Randall’s room to see him reading as he always was, his head bent low to the page, his back to the bookshelf that lined the window seat. He would look up suddenly—he had been reading, after all—and he would not be a ghost, and he would not be a dead boy. He would simply be Randall, his hair as red as mine. “You’re here,” he’d say, as if I were the one who had disappeared.

  • • •

  But no dark could resurrect the house. I came upon the same scene I had earlier visited, only now, in the nighttime, the wreckage looked oddly natural, and had you driven by you never would have suspected there had been a Randall’s room, a Randall’s house. The piles of brick appeared a part of some chaotic landscape, the few remaining oaks casting strange shadows, blue as the moon, across the corpse of the foundation. Whoever had bought the house, bought the land, really, had carted off the beaded glass from the cabinets in the pantry, pried loose the brass hinges and clear crystal doorknobs from the pine doors, striping everything believed to be of value, leaving only the old bones of the place, and the ghosts.

  I would like to say I saw them that evening, but I did not. I waited, it’s true, wishing them to appear. I sat, leaned against the Gallery of Maps wall, keeping my eyes open though I was terribly tired. I invoked the name, Romulus. It seemed to have a power all its own. But nothing came to me save the dark and the swollen sounds of night. I pulled my knees to my chest and fell asleep despite my best intentions, waking to the first light. You have seen it, haven’t you? The sky shot through; a hole right in the center widening as you watch, your breath held, waiting for I don’t know what. Someone to step in from the other side; to greet you by name: all you have lost or all you’ve never known before. It’s a feeling you want to spackle into form, to somehow will to life, to give a name: Romulus, Randall, Eliza. And so you wait, breath held, for a wondrous thing to happen, the feeling a scaffold you climb anchored to nothing more than an ordinary morning, and I suppose hope.

  • • •

  I had Randall’s diary with me. I had carried it in my suitcase on the ferry crossing, wrapped in my flannel nightgown. I carried it now tucked into the interior pocket of Mother’s linen suit jacket. I had thought that I might share it with Sterling at dinner, that I would, at some particularly poignant moment, reach into my jacket as if searching for a tissue, or a mint, and pull out the small record of Randall’s
life, perhaps still familiar to Sterling as the tiny, empty book his wife had given his son one Christmas. I knew Christmas had become a lonely time for them, that after Jeannette’s death the two would try, unsuccessfully, to banish the cold from the living room, lighting a fire in the drafty fireplace, sitting in the wing chairs, or on the rose-covered sofa. This is how Randall explained it. We were too few, he said, for Christmas.

  But the Christmas of the diary must have been a warmer one, Randall’s thin, pale hands carefully unknotting the ribbon, examining the hard diary cover, the painted gold script words My Diary and the blue-lined white paper, each page dated and then not, then blue-lined pages with no dates, with no other commitment than the promise of their own needy blankness.

  Anyway, I did not show the diary to Sterling. Instead I chose to puncture his news with my secret, or Randall’s really. And then run the mile or so to what had been Randall’s house, through the night dark expectant, apprehending nothing more than a jackrabbit perched on the stone step, its long ears flat against its miniature head, listening. Perhaps the emptiness of the place is the reason why I broke my own rule of reading only one entry per day, or perhaps it was for no reason at all, only time, somehow. Soon after I waked I took the diary from my jacket pocket and read what had been Randall’s life in its entirety, beginning to end.

  6

  There is a garden in Kyoto meant to be viewed at night in shadows. An emperor willed it so; he could only tour his gardens after dark, or perhaps it was that he could only tour his gardens with his mistresses after dark. I can’t remember. The point is, the entire thing—the pathways, the fountains, the lakes, the cherry trees—is an illusion: colorless shadows without scent cast by large paper cutouts. A scene set from a drama created by the emperor’s gardeners specifically to his wishes, changed for the seasons, rearranged— bare trees for trees in full bloom, lakes with frothy waves, lakes still, blossoms far too large to grow in that climate.

  I have often imagined the emperor strolling alone, his mistress several paces behind him, her face entirely covered as was the tradition. He is careful, knowing that if he trips, if he stumbles, his foot might come down hard into a shadow pond, his hand might reach for a shadow limb, and then—instantly—the illusion will vanish, replaced by nothing more than shadows.

  Imagine how slowly he must walk, one foot so carefully, so deliberately in front of the other, as if he is following a real path.

  7

  I wish I could say that I learned much about Randall from his diary, that I found something I might have taken back to give to Sterling in the morning, to offer him at breakfast. But there was little, of course; this is the way it always is. He was a boy, after all. Barely seventeen years old. He had reached the volume P in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, and one of his last entries was on Magellan’s discovery of Patagonia, how Magellan had stumbled upon what he called Tierra de Patagones, land of the giants, and how he had captured two of them, a man and a woman, to carry back to Spain for the queen. They died the first day out— they were given last rites by the priest onboard though they did not speak Spanish—and were wrapped in one of the ship’s sails and tumbled to the sea. Chu chu, Randall had scribbled at the end of it.

  Of what I remember: a catalog of important stories to read compiled by Miss Thomas, the librarian, expressly for Randall: James, Henry: “The Beast in the Jungle”; O. Henry: “The Four Million”; Hawthorne: “Rapaccini’s Daughter”; and others. And great lists of resolutions: lift weights, make friends, correct Mrs. Statler’s grammar, learn Ellen’s middle name.

  Victoria, I could have told him. After Mother’s mother.

  • • •

  I returned to the Dew Drop Inn as I had come, along 52, first attempting to cut through the fields—the land there flat, one farm joining the next in an odd quilting pattern, easy to follow the seams in the right direction toward where you want to go and find yourself, eventually, there. But the grass glistened wet with dew and I felt suddenly cold; remember I had spent the night out of doors, slouched against the one wall still standing of Randall’s house.

  There had been nothing grand about it. The house, I mean. It was beautiful in the way houses were once intended to suggest beauty, to hold your admiration in the tiniest of details. The beveled moldings—dark wood, perhaps walnut—were like elaborate empty frames to the white-painted walls long since yellowed. The rarely used formal staircase had a carved banister, the grip a griffin’s claw in whose talons writhed a copper snake that had at one time served as a lamp, its shade at a perpetual angle of disuse. The only light on the staircase came from the one small stained-glass window, perfectly round, with squares of reds and yellows and blues transforming the round view of Sudlersville’s soybean fields to something vaguely European. Perhaps whoever bought Sterling’s house cut that stained-glass window from the wall and carted it off to one of those places that specializes in selling such things. But I don’t think they valued the griffin’s claw, or the serpent’s patina, or the dark, river stones that formed the chimney, a wisteria so thickly entwined among them the stones had come loose and when the fires were lit the chimney leaked smoke, Randall even claiming that one spring morning the entire thing erupted in blossoms, the flowers pushing the stones to the ground in a great heap.

  Still, it was difficult to leave the property, knowing, as I knew, that I would never return. I imagine that in subsequent years what brick wasn’t carted off was worked far down into the soil, and that the shattered glass lost its danger, wore to the smoothness of an old penny. I know the new owners intended to sell the fugitive cage to a museum somewhere. Sterling had told me this at dinner. The land would become a corn or soybean field, Sterling said, and now, I suppose, it is simply the ground beneath several houses, each with a young tree planted next to a smooth blacktop drive.

  At this point in my life, I had not yet been to a funeral. Randall was presumed dead; and Sterling had, perhaps for this reason, decided not to memorialize him, though given the solitude of their lives, it may have been enough for Sterling to sit in Randall’s room for a while, enough for Sterling to simply say his name. Still, turning away I had the feeling I would later feel at funerals of leaving a grave, of walking from the dead out into the living. This is the best way I know how to say it.

  • • •

  I went straight on 52. The sky had begun to lighten, though plenty of dark remained in it. I must have walked quickly. I seemed to be at the graveyard, the bend in the road, in no time, and once around, I knew, I would be back in view of Sudlersville: the flickering vacancy sign for the Dew Drop Inn, the gas station marked by the winged horse where one huge Ford truck seemed to always be parked. The post office.

  The graves were tucked within the maples, out of reach of the sun. Better for the dead, Randall would say. They’ll forget what they’re missing.

  I slowed my pace, thinking I might search again for Jeannette’s slanted tombstone in the light, but I was cold, as I have told you, my ankles wet from attempting to cut through the fields. I wonder now, if I had stepped in, what we would have said to one another, whether I might have made amends for my rudeness the night before, or explained myself better, or perhaps given him the whole story. Beyond me Sterling stood within the graveyard, his arms seemingly at his sides. I was at too great a distance to see the tilt of his head, or the exact nature of his expression, but I will say that as I got closer I saw that his hands were clasped in what is universally regarded as prayer, and that his eyes were shut. Perhaps he had seen me; or perhaps he had no idea. I continued on, diary in hand, passing out of the maple overhang, rounding the bend to the scene I’ve described: the commerce of the intersection and the few homes in town, their kitchen lights already glowing yellow against the rising blue fog.

  • • •

  I passed Sterling’s door on my way to my own room at the Dew Drop Inn, and saw that he had left the key in its lock. I put my hand on the cold metal and felt the click of the tumblers, re
eling somewhat from the danger. What if he suddenly returned? What if he had never left at all, if he were standing behind the open door, hiding under the bed? What if I had only seen a ghost of Sterling?

  But the room was empty, entirely still. Sterling’s trousers hung on a hanger hooked to the open door of the armoire, their pockets turned inside out. A soft-bristle brush, a tortoise-shell comb, and a billfold sat on the nightstand between his two narrow beds, each made as neatly as they had been when we first checked in, the white, puckered bedspreads pulled tightly beneath the box springs, pillows flat and hard.

  I felt suddenly exhausted, and contemplated lying down on one of Sterling’s beds to sleep. They seemed more appealing than the bed in my own room down the hall. Instead, I set Randall’s diary on one of the pillows, as if it were the thing that needed the rest. It looked precious there, like one of those rare books you’ll see under glass, away from the oil of fingers or bright light, or anything else that might fade the ink. I knew that this was another terrible betrayal of Randall, that he had given me the diary precisely because he did not want his father to see it; still, it was one of the few times in my life when I have done something on impulse that I have never regretted. It almost seemed as if I were bringing Randall back to Sterling, leading Randall in and asking him, as a favor to me, to just sit for a moment in his father’s room.

  8

  She does not notice him. He takes one of the wooden deck chairs for reading, his glasses low on his face and she stands nearby, against the railing, looking out at a sea that on this morning seems too calm, as if somewhere else a storm has drawn the rougher waves. Her thoughts, understandably, are elsewhere. She has already decided to refuse marriage. Sterling is an honorable man and it will be his first question. Still. Jeannette might agree to keep the baby, or at least keep the baby for some time before they can find someone to adopt him. Him, she thinks. She is entirely sure. A boy. She will write Sterling of it—informally, without panic. She will maintain an even tone: she is an independent woman in Paris. She is a professional, a member of the Cosmopolitan Ladies. She has never intended, not for one minute, to marry. Ludicrous, all of it. How could she have been so stupid?