William looked at his wife. The idea of humor in gardens was not something he was familiar with. He spent his time with war crimes, refugees, international human rights. He said, “Humor.”
“Anyway, at least it’s not all military array, like your Parisian gardens. None of the lilies are standing at attention.”
“Libb, sweetheart, don’t start in.”
“Right. Well, the surprises, then.”
“There has been rain in the past few days,” William admitted. “It’s green. There are flowers. Do you think they’ll have gin?”
“I don’t know how to put it. Something strange. One usually doesn’t see this sort of thing. Not in a suburban garden.”
“Do you think they’ll have decent gin?”
“The way the path seems to go into a dark passage by the yew but there isn’t any way out and suddenly you’re face-to-face with the statue.”
“What statue?”
“With the head that moves to face you—it seems to, anyway. Some god of the Greeks or Romans. You would know which one it is, you did classics.” Olivia led him toward the bluestone path.
They found the statue. “I don’t think it moves,” William said. “How could it? There isn’t any seam. It’s carved in stone.”
“It must have been the wind making shadows,” Olivia conceded.
Olivia had come to hate all things French ever since William had been assigned to the Paris office of his firm and had to go there for several days every month. She knew this was a failing on her part. All wise and reasonable people loved Paris. But she felt suffocated by the formal gardens, maddened by the boulevards, baffled by the language. She was heartsick each time her husband came back from his monthly trips to the Paris office. It was the way he smelled when he returned that made her sad. An intricate and expensive perfume clung to his shirts, his skin, his fair hair. That scent turned him into a stranger who tried to mimic the gestures and voice of Will Barlow. If she knew the name of this fragrance, that wouldn’t make anything more bearable, she knew that. Still, she had searched, haunting and sniffing at department store perfume counters until the smell of any perfume at all made her retch. Unable to find the name, she had denied herself permission to mention it to him.
“The French,” she said whisking her fingers through the pinkish lace of a bloom with no fragrance. “I know. I’m sorry. But this place is so astonishing. Look at that tall feathery thing. No. Above you…” How could he not see it? “Which of them created it, do you think, Pindar or Celia?”
“We could ask them,” William said.
Olivia could see that he was relieved at the way they had skirted the topic of Parisian gardens, part of the geography of the unspoken and unspeakable.
He touched her arm to make peace. “It would be something to talk about.” The only thing they had been able to agree on while driving in from Concord was their not knowing what they would talk about with the Cohens.
Olivia took his hand.
An almost invisible bird, a small piece of hopping dirt, purposed along the edge of the flower bed, eyeing for beauty or looking for worms. Olivia watched it as she walked with her husband toward the yew and the puzzling statue. We count those birds as nothing, she thought, the small dun-colored ones, and prefer to keep our wonder for the spectral glory of cardinals, or the ungainly grace of cranes. Goldfinches and even jays delight us, but are they so different from these common little brown birds which we think of as vermin? Astonishing accidents of pigment, size, plumage: Why do they elicit our wonder?
* * *
—
“HOLD ON, ELIZA. Settle down. I know what to do.”
Eliza, usually solid and clear-eyed and calm, was blotchy with bridal panic. Thoughts of tomorrow’s pomp and spectacle had spooked her. She was sitting on a stone bench at the end of the garden, between her twin brother, Harry, and her beloved, Adam.
“Look, sweetheart,” Adam said, kissing her on the ear. He nodded at Harry. “We have our minister here. Why don’t we elope?”
“What do you mean?”
“Right here, now, up in the attic.”
Eliza looked up. “Elope in the attic of your house? How? What about the wedding tomorrow?”
“We do it now, in the attic, and that will just be for us. At the other wedding, tomorrow, we will go through the forms, to give pleasure to the parentals. The one right now is what counts.”
“So they will think they are watching us get married?” She looked at Adam. She gave a tentative smile. “Hal? An attic wedding? Can you?”
“That is what attics are for,” said Harry.
They asked Leah, Adam’s ancient grandmother, to be their witness. She was dressed this evening in dark mauve and held herself with the straightness of a marble column. For her, posture was not a task, as it was for the inebriate, the unwell, the pained. She had never had trouble with her back. She did not take naps. They had heard that she had been sent from England to Paris in the dangerous and grief-astounded 1920s—to paint. It was said that she tore men apart, and women. Now, in her nineties, Leah appeared to them courteous and formal and harrowing, knotted by scars of loss and strengthened by love. It was Leah, they knew, who had named Adam’s father Pindar and had taught him Hebrew and Greek when he was a child. Pindar’s father, also a classical scholar, had always been mostly absent, appearing at rare moments, unannounced and sometimes inconvenient.
“Terrific!” said Leah. “Eloping is the only way to go. Of course I can make it up the attic stairs. Better cart me off right now if I can’t. I would be honored to be your witness. As for secrecy, you will find me silent as the hour before dawn. But what about your sisters, Adam? Shouldn’t we get Sara off the roof?”
When they got up to the attic, Adam went to the window and opened it, whistling softly at Sara. He sat on the ledge and leaned out so that he could see her better.
“Hey,” she said, swiveling around to look down at him.
“Hey, yourself,” he answered. “What are you doing up there?”
“Watching all of you,” she said. “Did they send you up here to get me to come down and mingle? I know it’s horribly rude of me to stay here, but the light is too perfect.” She gave a smile that forgave everything, demanded forgiveness, and knew that one could hope for but not demand such a thing.
“Of course they told me to come and get you to mingle, but I’ve got something much better in mind, a much better invitation.”
“To join you all down there.”
“Yes, that is a possibility.”
“I’m not much of a joiner,” she said, waving a hand as though to flick the idea away.
“I know,” he said.
Sara had always been solitary in her interests and passions. All through their adolescence he would chastise her for it. You silly, he would say. Don’t be such a lonely ecstatic. And yet he had always found this aloneness of Sara’s attractive. His younger sister Naomi was the opposite, collecting strays when she couldn’t find a humanitarian group to join.
“You know,” he said, sweetly teasing. “We could all come up there and join you. We could bring our supper and our wine.” He looked down at the ground and felt slightly giddy.
Sara laughed. “You would turn to jelly up here on the roof. Aside from that, it’s a lovely idea. But what’s your better invitation?”
“Lizzie and I are eloping. Right now. Here in the attic. Come in and join us?”
“My friend Dennis is here. Should I get him?”
“Actually, we’re all up here and we’ve got to be really quick. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” she said. “Besides, you two haven’t even met yet.” She unfolded herself and stood slowly and shook her legs to wake them up. Then she stepped along the slates to the dormer window where Adam was sitting. As he got up from the windowsill she climbed inside to join
him.
* * *
—
IN THE ATTIC, Adam pulled the string of the single lightbulb dangling from the rafters. The room smelled of sun on old wood and unexpected spices. Turning to his grandmother, he said, “Is it too hot for you? Let me open more windows.”
“Air would be lovely,” said Leah. “But we have to be quick and not too rowdy, so they don’t hear us.”
Adam opened the dormer windows on the other side of the tall peaked room.
“You see, Liz?” Harry said. “We can do it right here.”
Again Eliza smiled. Perhaps they had found the way out. They stood under the embroidered bedspread that Adam’s parents had brought back from India several years earlier and had hung over two beams to air out. The red and gold cloth hovered over them, glinting with little mirrors, shifting now in the breeze from the windows. It smelled of fenugreek and clove, as though the aromatic powders from the bazaar had been trapped behind the tiny mirrors to be released only when the cloth was touched or shaken by the wind. Leah held one of its corners, rubbed it between bony fingers. “Your grandfather Gabriel, Pindar’s father, loved this smell…,” she began. Then, remembering what they were gathered for, “Sorry, dears. Another time.”
“It should only take a few minutes,” Harry said. “I’ll cut whatever I can. You’ve got the rings?”
“Damn. Can we do it without? They’re down in my room.”
“It’s best to get them,” Harry said. “You see, there’s always this question of where the actual ceremony resides—for Christians it happens during the vows, but for the Jews it’s during the exchange of rings. For Jews, if one of you dies right after you give each other the rings but before other things are said, it’s okay. You’re married.”
Adam ran downstairs. He came back, slightly winded, with the two small leather boxes and gave them to Sara.
“You are all,” Harry began, “my dearly beloved.”
Eliza bit her lip. Adam fingered the pencil in his pocket then put his hand on Eliza’s shoulder.
“We are gathered here in the sight of God, and of this witness.” Harry raised his eyes, then added, “and of this small dark bat…”
Eliza shook her head.
“…to join together this man and this woman in marriage, a sacred and joyous covenant, ordained by God, signifying a mystical union—not to be entered into lightly, but reverently, discreetly, soberly, and in the fear of God.”
Eliza put up her hand.
Harry stopped. “What is it, Liz? You said that ‘God’ would be okay.”
“No, no. It’s not that. It’s the bat: It’s called a big brown bat. Also, I’m piss drunk. Will it still count?”
“Your mind when you decided to marry was sober. Your flesh just happens not to be, at the moment. Most people are out of their heads during the actual ceremony. I can leave out ‘soberly’ if you like.”
“Hurry, my dears,” Leah said. “These things have to be quick.”
But there was no time for Harry to reword anything. The attic door opened and his mother stood at the threshold, observing the scene. Philippa Barlow refrained from stepping in, as though the room were sacred or unclean. “There you are,” she said. “Everybody’s been looking all over for you, Eliza, Harry, Adam. Hello, Sara. Surely you can practice your charades later. Oh, Leah, I didn’t see you. Imagine dragging poor old Mrs. Cohen all the way up here.”
“Oh, they didn’t drag me, dear. I climbed most willingly and on my own two feet.”
Philippa looked as though she didn’t know what to reply. She turned and went down the stairs. Chagrined and docile, the clandestine wedding party followed her from the attic. Adam turned out the light. As soon as his mother was out of hearing, Harry said, “Meet at the pond in ten minutes. We can finish up there.”
* * *
—
HEAT DRIFTS UP from men and women standing by the drinks table. The bracelets on the perfumed woman’s arm and the gold chains around her neck bounce spangles of light and sound.
* * *
—
WHEN PINDAR CAME back outside after his nap, he found his garden taken over by three generations of Barlows. Celia had given them all drinks. She was helped in this by Borsuk, who had transformed himself for the evening into an old-world butler. This had shocked the Cohens, but they did not know what to do or say. Weeks earlier, when Pindar had asked him to help out with the dinner party, he had wondered if Borsuk would put on clean clothes but had not dared to suggest it. Now the gardener had found himself a tuxedo, and he hovered about looking knowing and clean and helpful, with well-scrubbed fingernails and a bit of pomade in his collar-length graying hair.
Pindar found Celia and leaned toward her. He wanted to give her a kiss, but he didn’t want this to be observed by the Barlows. “I fell asleep,” he muttered. “How long was I gone?”
“Eons,” she whispered, bending toward him. “The first minutes are always sticky.”
“That’s why I had to leave.”
“It seemed like they all got here at once. I think it was choreographed—so none of them had to be with us alone.”
“Sara? Is she down yet?”
“Finally. I saw her with Adam and Eliza.”
“Naomi?”
“No sign.”
* * *
—
STEPHEN BARLOW WATCHED the group of young people following Philippa out of the Cohen house. How furtive they were. Adam with his bewildered eyes, deep-set, circled and liverish. The young woman beside him was probably his sister, Sara, who did something with some sort of pests. She had the same red hair as her brother, only brighter. There was a younger sister, somewhat strange—he had met her once, briefly, but she had not appeared yet. His own lovely Elizabeth looked a bit of a mess. As though she’d been crying, though she was not that sort. He had never really understood his daughter’s choice to work with animals. Large animals, small brains. Or was it small animals, small brains? And his son Harry. He sometimes wondered whether, perhaps because they were twins, Harry and Eliza had each only received half the normal brain allotment. Of course he loved them, but it was harder to be proud of these two. His three older boys were robust and straightforward and adult. He had never been able to pin Harry down and get him to say exactly what he was doing and exactly what he believed. Leaving law school for seminary, and then to be sent down for something undisclosed. A private matter, the dean had said. And then the boy had sidestepped into another seminary on the West Coast. Possibly it wasn’t even Christian. Harry darted among disciplines as shamelessly as that bat up there flinging itself on the purple flowers that hung down from the eaves.
Stephen Barlow was very conscious of his position as father of the bride. He kept trying to warm to these Cohens, but it would have been much easier if only they realized how strange they were. Celia, the dumpy little woman with Brillo for hair: Could she really be a good critic of English literature when she spoke with an Eastern European accent and dressed like a farmer’s wife? And the husband, Pindar, for Christ’s sake, standing there hunched, chewing on his own lips. He studied obscure or nonexistent languages, unknown to Athens or Rome and lacking any halfway decent literature. What was the point of building even a brilliant life around fragments? What did that have to do with practical contributions to society? What good did Celia’s literary criticism do, in the scheme of things? It wasn’t just that the whole family was so academic, nor that they were all so physically strange: Pindar, with his patriarchal beard and the posture of a buzzard, Celia with her billows of hair and bosom, Adam with those haunted shadows under his eyes, Sara with her exotic interests, angular Naomi—was that her name?—with her look of private startle. It was that their view was limited. This was what made academics so peculiar, of course, and here was a whole family of them. It stood to reason that one was condemned to putter or dabble if one
spent one’s whole time nosing around texts that had no real use and could not see further than the page. It was sad, Stephen Barlow felt, the way these Cohens were missing out on the vastness and clarity of the real. He and Pippa and their three older sons were bathed in this clarity. The documents they spent their time with all led immediately to societal covenants and the way people interacted with one another. He with his corporations, Pippa with her estates, William, their eldest and the one he was proudest of, in international law, then Cameron in intellectual property and young Barnes forging ahead in prosecution: They all knew how humans connected, across the continents and down the ladders of the generations. They knew what people did to and for one another. Every day they talked with people who bared their holdings if not their hearts, which they often hid with great deviousness and guile. But these were actual people, or corporations acting as people, not glimpses of clay shards with their ambiguous scratches and poke-marks, not serpents or insects or whatever they were, not squawks and rhymes and prayers. Pippa, for example, could calculate in a glance the tax burden on the Cohen property here, could estimate the whole estate before and after the death of the elder Cohens. Nothing of terrific value within the house, though Pindar’s mother, Mrs. Leah Cohen, was rumored to be linked somehow to the English branch of one of the great Jewish banking families. Stephen Barlow had discounted this gossip until he caught sight of the small photograph in the Cohens’ front hall of a four-in-hand carriage drawn by two teams of zebras, although when he looked more closely he could make out that the left front animal was not a zebra but a black horse. Eliza would know if that was where you put the lead animal, and if you needed a horse for that spot, a horse perhaps being more tractable than a zebra? Rather eccentric, wasn’t it, to drive zebras? Was it original? Or was it simply a hobby for the overmoneyed and underemployed? But then all hobbies, like all obsessions, made little sense to outsiders. He would get to know these people, but he wished there was some way to do it without all these festivities, some way one could get them to really sit down and have a decent chat about things that mattered.
The Garden Party Page 6