The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  When Celia heard Dennis laughing near the statue she came to greet him and introduce herself.

  “Oh, you caught me dancing with this faun fellow! I am so glad to finally meet you,” he said. “Your plume poppies are glorious,” he said. “The whole garden is. I hope you will walk me through it when there’s time.”

  “Of course I will.” Celia almost hugged him for his appreciation. “I’m so glad you like the poppies. I can give you some if you like, but they are complete thugs. Hooligans! They escape wherever you put them, they multiply and take over. You really have to keep an eye on them.”

  “I can do that,” Dennis said. “I would love some.”

  * * *

  —

  HEARING ADANNU BARKING in the distance, Adam Cohen looked out the window of his room. He had showered and shaved and combed his hair, which seemed a darker red in its wetness. Tall, skinny, and naked, he had put on his wire-rimmed glasses but hadn’t yet found anything else to go with them. He wondered how to describe the light of the candles his father had lit—not yellow, not white, barely visible gleams in the late sun of the garden. The candles stood on holders like bound sheaves of harpoons, made by a friend who was a blacksmith. Adam had not yet written about working metal, firing it red-hot, white, the fire inside the forge, the forging inside the fire, the hammering, tempering, quenching, twisting—the clangor and hiss of the black iron, smithed among the ringing gerunds. He longed for a couple of hours alone in his room with yellow pad (faint lemon) and yellow pencil (school bus). A fit of sudden shyness and sleepiness. He had spent the night here in his childhood room and had kept waking with the thunder, unable to place himself. He wished he had a more solid footing for this day. Why did people throw rice at weddings? Why not pearls? Vowels and consonants?

  Down below, his mother carried a ceramic pitcher of water to the wooden table, then went over to the stone wall and said something in Pindar’s ear. Pindar leaned toward her to ask her something then rubbed his beard on her cheek.

  Coming back toward the house, Celia noticed Adam standing at his window, still not dressed, or only half-dressed. “Hey,” she called softly. “Harry Barlow is here already, and so is Sara’s Father Lombroso. Stephen and Philippa will be here any minute. See if you can get your sister off the roof. And get some clothes on. Not in that order.” To herself she added, “Jesus Christ! This place is like a fucking asylum.” What was wrong with these children of hers? Celia wished that they would all come down to earth and simply have dinner: Sara from the damn roof, Adam from his room, Naomi from wherever the hell she was. Ground level: That’s where dinner parties happened. Or at least began.

  Adam looked toward and through his mother and the garden beyond her, giving her a benign smile, tapping the air, catching its pulse. He would put on his clothes, fetch Sara from the roof. Then he would mingle with the guests, which always sounded pejorative or obscene.

  * * *

  —

  LEAH COHEN SHUFFLED across the grass to the bench at the edge of the woods. Holding the arm of the bench, she lowered herself until she was sitting. Watching Eliza under the birch trees had filled her with undirected yearning. This came so often to her now: wanting without an object, desire without direction or limit of time. When Leah was young her desires had been sharp and focused and temporal. Her pulse would quicken and then came the feeling of hunger mixed with vague melancholy. Now the whimpers of the shoeless girl in her green socks and burgundy dress brought to mind another sound, thrilling and plaintive, electric almost—the humming of strings, rackets, shuttlecocks….

  It had been in Oxford, where she grew up; it was May 1919. Leah had been too tall as a girl, her beaked nose balanced by the masses of dark hair she wore loosely on top of her head. Her friend Miriam, at eighteen, was more cosmopolitan and wore her hair bobbed. The two girls had been painting in the studio, a shed at the back of the garden of Miriam’s family’s house. It was one of those yearning and gentle days of late spring, suddenly warm, when the air turns greenish yellow, so thick is it with pollen and bloom. Leah had been frustrated by her painting, which had turned puzzling and bothersome, dark, with an immense purple cowslip looming and dangerous in front of the cavern and the distant storm menacing the ships in the sea beyond. She wanted to get away from it. “What about taking a walk?” she said to Miriam, going to the door and looking out. “Or even badminton? There’s not a breath of wind.” She jabbed her brush into the cup of turpentine and then wiped it on a rag.

  Leah and Miriam burst outside, laughing as they ran to the sunporch to get rackets and shuttlecocks. Miriam’s family had gone off for the day; the gardener had gone home; it was the cook’s day off.

  It was natural that in the heat of the May afternoon, as soon as she missed her shot, Leah took off the blue painting smock that covered her clothes. Resuming play, Miriam swung wildly. The birdie went into the net and she in turn used that moment to de-smock.

  Perhaps that was what started it. In any case, without either of them saying anything, when Leah next lost a point, she bent down, unstrapped one of her shoes, and placed it by her smock. And Miriam, when she lost, countered with a shoe of her own, tossing it over to the side. Leah forfeited the next shot on purpose to get rid of her other shoe. Miriam soon kicked off her second one to join the others in a heap at the edge of the lawn.

  After heated unbuttoning, Leah’s blouse of eyelet lace went next, followed by Miriam’s high-necked cotton blouse with frills, which had proved anyway to be much too warm.

  Green air and giddiness took over, under the hypnotic pluck and whir of flight; for the girls, in giving wing to the feathered cork, had also given it a voice, and when it bounced from their rackets it was as though it were a living thing, whose volition was to go higher and higher into the afternoon sky, and its flight made the strings of the rackets also seem alive, resonating and vibrant.

  Soon they were both naked—entirely, stark: full-breasted Leah with her olive-hued skin and long dark hair coming out of its pins, Miriam with her pale skin and bobbed hair, boyish and slim-waisted. Still they kept playing, furiously counting, gasping for points, keeping score.

  * * *

  —

  SOMEWHERE NOW SOME animal barked three times, and this brought Leah back to the Brookline garden where the old wooden bench at the edge of the forest had grown very hard.

  This garden had once been hers, these woods and their spring-fed pond. In the rambling three-story house beside the garden she had brought up Pindar and his sisters. In the early years her husband, Gabriel, was there, too. Then he began lecturing in Europe, traveling more and more until it seemed as though he was always saying goodbye. Leah was besieged and tormented with his leaving. Over the years she learned to make a kind of peace with her loneliness, though she never got used to the act of parting. When she turned sixty she gave the house with its woods and gardens to Pindar and his family. Leah was closer to him than to his two sisters, who lived in California. She expected him to telephone almost every day and was delighted each time he did. He still exulted to her about his ideas, his wife, his latest translations of those strange old Mesopotamian recipes, which often didn’t seem strange at all.

  When she left the house in Brookline, Leah moved to Cambridge; she rather liked living alone. Now that she was in her nineties she had a housekeeper who came in for an hour each weekday, and Pindar had arranged for a girl from Eliot House at Harvard to come on the weekends and help her in the kitchen.

  Leah spent her days writing her memoirs and visiting with friends. These elderly ladies, with an occasional listing gentleman in tow, would roam the museums of Cambridge and Boston and then spend lunch together in that delicious fond analytic gossip that records and invents civilization.

  The stairs in the front hall creak as oaken floorboards talk to nails. Walls shift as the day’s warmth rushes out and coolness from the garden flows in to take its place.
Couches exhale. In the attic, objects made of suede and velvet stir. Forgotten horsehair mattresses sigh and wonder. Something flutters.

  * * *

  —

  A CAR DOOR slammed. Pindar Cohen stooped and knocked the ashes from his pipe onto a rock, then slid it into his pocket, where the heat of the bowl against his leg spoke of pleasures he could not have until this party was over.

  Eliza’s parents bore down on him now, marauding tentatively through the garden without noticing the purple haze of lavender, without commenting on the creamy rose with its delirious name. There was no word in English, Pindar realized, for these people, for his relationship to them. He would not call them his mirror in-laws, for that implied a reflection that he did not feel. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them; he did. But there were so many of them. They brought forth a shyness in him that he didn’t know he had. He wanted a word that stressed the distance, their mutual unrelatedness. They were half an hour early. Negative in-laws. Out-laws. They were stealing his time.

  Pindar offered his hand, hoping to forestall kisses. Philippa Barlow’s bracelets jingled as she took his hand and said something formulaic and kissed him anyway. Stephen Barlow shook hands with hearty and unintelligible mumbles and then patted Pindar’s back in a gesture that Pindar found ambiguous. He wondered if it meant that Stephen’s being taller implied all sorts of other superiorities—financial, intellectual, moral. Pindar searched for a suitable retort. Instead, he said, “I must say, it’s wonderful to see you both.” Then he realized that he had seen them that very morning at the wedding rehearsal in the church. “Come,” he said. “Let me get you something to drink.” With a speed implying medical emergency he escorted them over the grass.

  “Gin and tonic…here you go. Bourbon for you? There. Listen, this is so rude, but would you two excuse me for just a moment? Can I leave you here in the garden? There’s something I have to take care of.” Pindar backed away from them, smiling and waving. He refrained from running into the house.

  When he had gone, Stephen Barlow said softly, “How cramped these gardens are. No lawns to speak of. No open vistas.”

  “Not all gardens have open vistas,” Philippa whispered. “You know that. You’ve been here. They don’t do lawns, just grassy strips between the nooks and bowers.”

  “Well, I find these little nooks and bowers limited.”

  “No, darling. It’s you.” Philippa paused, then said, “How sudden that was! He looked like a puppet being dragged offstage.” She had no idea that Sara Cohen was overhearing them from the roof. “Strange little man. Like a goat up on hind legs. Apparently he gives brilliant lectures. Isn’t that peculiar?”

  “Everything is peculiar,” said Stephen Barlow.

  * * *

  —

  INSIDE, PINDAR RAN to the kitchen, where Celia was talking to Chhaya, the cook. The room smelled of chopped scallions, the one member of the alliums not forbidden tonight.

  “They’re here,” Pindar blurted. “Could you…?” He started up the stairs. “I’ll be…” He gestured toward the garden and hurried up the stairs.

  In the bedroom, panting, he lay down on the bed. He just needed to stretch out for half a moment to collect himself. The arrival of guests, particularly ones he wasn’t close to, often had this effect on him. Lots of people run away the moment guests come, he told himself. Women go off to the kitchen; I go off to bed. It’s very common.

  The shades were closed and the bedroom was dark and sweet. Pindar only meant to rest for a moment, but his lack of sleep the night before made it impossible to stay awake. He dreamed that a man was standing by his head. Although the man’s face was turned away from him, Pindar knew he had a long Babylonian beard. The man was telling him something extremely important but before he could make it out someone was tugging at his feet. A gust of wind slammed a door somewhere, and he woke to find a small dark-haired girl pulling at him, saying, “Grandfather. They want you downstairs. The people are here.”

  When he sat up the girl was gone. As far as he knew, he wasn’t anybody’s grandfather. Perhaps she was one of Chhaya’s nieces. He went to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water. How long had he been asleep? A quarter of an hour. Celia would be distraught. The buttons of his dark blue shirt had come undone. He combed his gray hair and ran his fingers through his beard. The Barlows had been dressed up. He found a tie, a bright yellow paisley. They would probably notice that he had not been wearing it earlier, but he didn’t care. Celia had given it to him, and he needed her hand on him during this dinner. He refused to wear a jacket. It was almost midsummer.

  * * *

  —

  STEPHEN BARLOW’S SON Barnes walked with his wife, Larissa, into the Cohens’ garden. Their awkward ten-year-old, Harriet, ran ahead of them, loping with the uneven gait that she had newly adopted, perhaps in order to mirror the discord of her parents. Her wavy black hair was not quite brushed and her white blouse had come untucked. She had always been the sort of child who provokes every passing adult to try to smooth her prickly intelligence and gentle her gaze, but now they wanted to groom and straighten her as well.

  Larissa, who had recently taken to calling herself Issa after the Japanese poet, and Barnes, who had always—from childhood and against his will—been called Babar, had been plotting their divorce all morning. Their bitterness toward each other shone on their skin like varnish, coating them inside and out. Barnes was shy and getting shyer. He didn’t know if this was the cause of his marital distress or the result. Doubts hovered over him like midges. He no longer made phone calls easily, except to people who would expect no real conversation, just dates and times of meetings, like the dentist or getting his car serviced. He had not told his family that he had just quit his job as a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office. How could he argue and declaim in court when all he could really do was mumble. He did not know what would become of him, or of Issa. He feared for his daughter, Harriet: Her mother was venom, her father going mad. He had to get away.

  Far ahead of her parents, Harriet galloped up to her grandmother Philippa Barlow and grabbed her around the hips.

  “Oh Lord, child,” said Philippa, holding her drink out from her body so as not to spill any on her flowered dress. “Where did you spring from? Where is your hairbrush? What are you doing?”

  “Just hugging you. Mummy and Daddy are getting their drinks, but that isn’t going to help them. They’re in a dreadful mood.”

  Philippa bent down and smoothed Harriet’s black and uncombed hair. “Has no one in your family,” she murmured, “ever heard of barrettes or rubber bands?”

  “They try, honestly they do. But I keep losing them. It’s more than they can handle.”

  Philippa put her drink down on a flat rock and held on to her granddaughter as though to save them both from drowning. She knew that Barnes and Larissa were in marital upheaval, and presumed it was due to some kind of mischief on Larissa’s part. She felt stabbed by their unhappiness and wanted to shield her granddaughter from it.

  A sudden breeze carried the sounds from a neighbor’s party up the road. Philippa listened, still hugging Harriet and stroking her hair. A jazz trumpet sounded from beyond the woods—joyous and plaintive—along with a sizzle she couldn’t identify and the thumping of a drum too low to hear except with her bones.

  * * *

  —

  “AH, CELIA, WAS that your dog we saw as we came in?” asked Philippa Barlow. “What breed is he?”

  “Yes, that was Pindar’s Adannu. He’s part mutt, part mongrel. His name means ‘a moment in time’ in”—here Celia hesitated and changed course, suspecting that Philippa wouldn’t know what Akkadian was—“in one of Pindar’s ancient Mesopotamian languages. The cat, who you’ll see most often in the garden, is called Shamhat, after a character in the Gilgamesh epic.” She decided not to mention that Shamhat was a temple prostit
ute who civilized the feral Enkidu by means of her sexual artistry. “Do you and Stephen have pets?”

  “No cats, but we have a pair of border collies, from the same litter, actually. They’re called Talisker and Macallan.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Celia a bit vaguely.

  “Single-malt scotches,” Philippa said.

  “Ah,” said Celia with a broad smile.

  * * *

  —

  THE OLDEST BARLOW son, William, and his wife, Olivia, stood off at the side of the lawn. “You got your drink?” said Olivia.

  “It’s just wine. It seemed too soon for anything else.”

  “Did you see the garden?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s completely gorgeous. In its own odd way.”

  “It’s cluttered, winding; you can barely see the sky,” William said.

  “Yes, but something is going on. Something—”

  William cleared his throat. He always gave a small cough like that to avoid saying what he thought, or simply when embarrassed.

  “No, no,” Olivia said. “You’re wrong. It’s not a mess. It’s genius.”

  He gestured here and there with his wineglass.

  “Well, you’re right, it’s taller and more overblown than we’re used to.” Her voice caught and she hesitated before adding, “It’s sort of mysterious, actually. Beautiful. Look at the humor of it.”