Stephen Barlow inhaled happily as his three older sons strode into the garden talking of the hurried nine holes they had just played. He would invite them out for a foursome tomorrow. He wanted to play all day with them. They humored him, but he let them, for it was one of the main ways that he knew his sons; not that they talked much out on the course—they didn’t try to bring conversation in—it was more that they revealed themselves by stance and swing and gesture in a way that seemed unself-conscious and almost animal in its naturalness. Hell’s bells. Tomorrow was the damned wedding. No golf unless the boys would consent to get up at six. And Pippa was in such a state.
* * *
—
STEPHEN BARLOW WAS pouring another gin and tonic for Pippa at the wobbly wooden table in the Cohens’ garden. “It’s like a third-world country here,” he said softly.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“No Wall Street Journal on the front hall table. No Economist.”
“Good Lord. You’re not here to inspect their reading matter.”
“No front hall table, even,” Stephen went on. “There’s just a grotesque tree stump, gnarled and indented. It’s smoothed and polished, so it was probably placed there, not blown in by the last hurricane, but you can’t be sure. There is a pile of mail on it. But it is not a table,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I promise you it is not a table.”
“Oh, darling. Do dry up,” Philippa replied. “How can you be so narrow-minded? A proper table in the front hall is not really a marker of the developed world.” Then, conciliatory, she asked him, “Whatever are we going to talk to them about?”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s a bit like being among the forest animals. Do you think the dinner will be acorns and grubs?”
“Oh, stop.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean: Do you think there’s any way of stopping it? Do you think Lizzie’s going to be happy with them?”
* * *
—
PHILIPPA BARLOW WAS frightened by all the members of the Cohen family, even Pindar’s mother, Leah, who did not seem to have been properly neutralized by her extreme age. Pippa had heard that Leah was over a hundred. Could that be? Could such people come to wedding rehearsal dinners? Could they still chew their food? Even Leah had done something anomalous, Pippa couldn’t remember what it was exactly—before the war? between the wars?—in Paris or London. Eliza had told her that none of the Cohens rode, or played any sort of games. What was life like without games? Probably they played word games requiring obscure dictionaries. But those weren’t actual games, that was just talking while sitting. She wondered if dictionaries would appear at the table tonight, as party favors or instead of dessert.
Pippa’s sister, Charlotte, had told her over lunch about a new article that Celia Cohen had just published somewhere. “The woman is startlingly brilliant,” Charlotte had said. “God, Pips, I don’t know how you even dare speak to her.” Pippa would have preferred not to know this about her hostess. The article had been about an aging New York poet nobody could understand, something about yellow tulips, and that other one, a Scot with his pitchforks, or was he a Welshman? If only Charlotte would get here, then Pippa could relax and travel in her wake. But Charlotte always came late to parties; she liked them to be well oiled and smoothly rolling before she showed up.
It was perplexing to Philippa that her only daughter, her Eliza, should be so wildly other. What on earth would she do with a poet? Adam Cohen with his owl eyes was sweet and clearly loved Eliza. He had even demanded that she make a prenuptial agreement with him, which no one had expected, but he was unsettled in life and thus unsettling. True, he had just landed a job at Wellesley, but poets did not really support families; they drank themselves to death and then jumped off bridges. Philippa knew that Eliza was unusual: Animals worshipped her. She attracted them even though she dressed like a heretic. Even that dog of the Cohens had followed her out of the woods. The girl must give off some smell or vibration that attracted the beasts to her. But that she should then turn around and follow them, taking care of distemper or peering into hooves and mouths and reaching into unthinkable places for difficult births? If Eliza really insisted on making her life among steamy dung heaps, hardscrabbling in squalor with poets, well, there was nothing for Philippa to do but to send her off to her new life in beauty. In white. When that was done, then possibly the bear trap of worry that for years now had clamped between Philippa’s shoulders would let go. She pulled her shoulders up to her ears, then rotated them back and down, trying to loosen her machinery.
* * *
—
“ARE YOU STIFF? Shall I rub?” Cameron, Philippa’s favorite, had come up behind her. He massaged her shoulders. He did this partly to soothe his mother, and partly because he felt guilty for having done a bit of exploring in the Cohens’ house. He had been looking for the bathroom and, missing the one by the stairs, found himself upstairs in Celia’s study. He felt perverse but almost justified in this trespass, welcoming the chance to figure out who these people were, this clan that his sister, Eliza, was marrying into. Five minutes alone in someone’s room, poking through their books and their papers, could tell you more than any number of cheese cubes and cocktails.
The smell, for one thing. Celia’s study smelled of some pungent flower—he didn’t know the name, slightly astringent—and the roasted-paper smell of very old books, and the seared ink of photocopied pages. There were stacks of papers, neat cardboard files, filing cabinets. He hadn’t expected so much order, or that her computer would be the most recent model. A gray writing book with green spine and corners sat beside it. He turned to the last entry; it was dated three days earlier:
Of course when we open a novel there’s the sudden hovering presence of the author—a spirit inhabiting our room, talking into our mind’s ear. This ghostly presence is what is meant by ES when she talks of authorial instruction. She talks of vivacity of the scene we imagine under such instruction. But even the authors, even the dead authors—don’t they, too, have a certain vivacity? What is the nature of this whispering companion?
WEDDING PARTY:
Tell Borsuk to mow garden first, then the back meadow; clip roses by gate; check fishpond for dead.
Take dog for shampoo.
Cut Pindar’s hair.
Check wine. Will they need gin?
Naomi???
Cameron smiled at the note about gin. He was part of “they,” but he preferred wine, although his parents would need the gin, and his brothers, except for Hal. He didn’t know what Hal drank. Absinthe.
Turning the page, Cameron found the seating plan for that night’s dinner. An earlier arrangement had been crossed out: It showed two tables, all the Barlows at one, the Cohens at the other. In the latest version, Cameron noted that Adam’s sister Naomi was to be opposite him. She was the youngest. There was some mystery about her, some shame or glory.
After finding the bathroom, Cameron went downstairs and drifted into a book-lined room. There were three leather reading chairs, each with its own standing lamp. Three hassocks. A long greenish couch, a bit clawed on the edges. Pindar’s study opened off from this room. Here was the chaos Cam had been expecting. Lingering pipe smoke. A boxy computer fought for space among splayed books and papers on the desk. An ashtray filled with spent tobacco floated like a raft on the top layer of mess.
Cameron looked up suddenly, feeling that he was being watched. But it was only a statue, in the corner: a shockingly graceful tree trunk carved into a limbless torso, with a marble head, a perfect oval, on top. Heroic in size, Greek in stillness. Contemplative. But it filled Cam with questions: How was the head attached? Would the whole thing topple if pushed? What was it doing there? A warm breeze lifted the curtains behind the desk.
“What are you doing here?”
Cameron jumped back. “Hello. Who are you?” Always best to question the questioner, in this case a girl who looked to be about nine years old. She had the smooth dark hair and translucent face of a child who spends too much time indoors.
“Are you from here?”
“That depends, doesn’t it?”
“Well, are you on our side or their side?”
“Which is which?” he asked.
“Are you looking for books in broken languages?”
“Not really,” he said. “Are you? Do you read them?”
“No. But they are here. I’m ten. I had an illness. Sometimes I still feel like a bletted medlar. If you know what I mean.”
“Not exactly,” said Cameron.
“Medlar, with an a,” the girl said.
“I still don’t.”
“It’s a fruit,” she explained. “Ripe and wretched.”
“I see.” He paused. “Shouldn’t we be joining the others?”
“Run along, then,” she said, as though he were the child. “I shouldn’t really be here; I started out in a different gathering, but it was too loud and I like this one better. Perhaps I’ll join you in the fullness of time.”
Cameron retreated to the dining room, then down the steps to the garden, where he found his mother looking stiff in the shoulders.
Outside, standing by the makeshift drinks table, Philippa Barlow raised a gold-braceleted arm to her head. Something veered and flapped. “Why are the bats out so early? Is that the one we saw before?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Barnes, her third-born, who sighed all the time these days. “That one’s still up there in the trellis; see it all folded and crimped?”
“Where’s Eliza gone to?”
“I don’t know. Harry’s off somewhere, too. And Adam.”
Seen from above, the canopy of oak and maple and pine is pierced by the pond, which looks back at you like some green eye, knowing and ancient. The air above the pond dives into clefts of coolness, then rises up at the warmth of the margins. Down the path, filigrees of blackflies and mosquitoes dance in the heat waves given off by men and women and their domestic fires. Joyous bats dart about.
* * *
—
STRAIGHT AS A goddess, Leah sat on the old stone bench beside the pond, witnessing the new attempt at the clandestine wedding. Her granddaughter Sara sat beside her. Young Harry Barlow stood facing Adam and Eliza, who had a look of tentative mischief. In the undergrowth robins sang of water; in the rushes bullfrogs croaked of love. The cardinal whistled to his mate. As Harry rushed through the ritual words, Leah wondered what he would look like clothed only in leaves. His hair was so dark it was almost blue. Could he dance? she wondered. She would follow if he started any dance at all. She could see him wreathed with grapes, standing on a boat with curving prow, the mast encircled with vines, all the sailors already transformed into dolphins. Leah gazed at Harry and plucked absentmindedly at the ivy growing over the bench.
“…lawfully be married, speak…”
“Stop! Come back! Eli!” came the strident call of a ten-year-old girl. “You can’t go there! Grandma said we mustn’t go to the pond. Besides, it’s got poisonous frogs. If they touch you, you’ll die…certainly before morning.”
The intruder was Laurie, William and Olivia Barlow’s daughter, chasing her little brother, Eliot, who had run silently up to the water’s edge.
“Hello, Uncle Harry, what are you doing?” chattered Laurie. “Auntie Eliza, Grandma Pipps said that if we find you we should tell you to come back to the party in the garden or she’ll…chop your toes off with a guillotine.”
Eliza’s bare toes clenched. Adam put his arm around her. Resigned to this latest interruption, Harry folded his notes for the ceremony and put them in his pocket. He smiled and offered his arm to Leah, who lifted herself from the bench and stood like a caryatid. She held on to Harry as the young children shepherded the adults back to the party.
Laurie said to Eliza, “Grandma doesn’t understand why you can’t simply mingle. She says it’s God’s own duty. At parties.”
Returning from the pond, Harry tried to walk sedately holding Leah Cohen’s arm. Her purple silk dress fell in swooping layers. He couldn’t tell if it was very old-fashioned or extremely modern. Adam and Eliza followed them, still holding hands. Laurie was in the lead, while little Eli raced around the four adults. He was three years old and had never, in public, talked. He appeared to be clever, he could grunt and laugh and babble, but he would not say a word. William and Olivia Barlow took him to speech clinics where the experts said not to worry, that often these things straightened themselves out in time—as though the little boy’s larynx was knotted or kinked and simple elongation due to growth would fix it. His parents had learned to avoid mentioning Eliot’s muteness. William, who blamed himself for the boy’s silence, tried not to think about this problem. Olivia worried about it constantly.
* * *
—
PHILIPPA BARLOW WAS delighted when her father, Nathan Morrill, asked her to take him to the kitchen so that he could watch the cooking. His presence at the party, while necessary, was also a bother. He fumbled and spilled—no fault of his own, poor devil—and had a tendency to leer at the girls and women. Philippa was relieved to be able to put him aside for a bit.
“This is Mr. Morrill,” Philippa said to the small Asian woman with the odd-looking meat cleaver. “Would he be in your way here if he watched you cook for a bit?”
“He’s fine here,” said Chhaya, who took one look at him and thought, Poor old monkey. She put down her knife and told the old man her name. “Where I come from it means ‘shadow,’ ” she added. “And also ‘light.’ ”
Philippa settled her father in a chair.
Nathan Morrill was only eighty-nine, but in him a process of unweaving had begun. His appreciation at times outran his comprehension. He still delighted in his everyday pleasures but didn’t always understand the links and connections that brought them about. Some days, he forgot where coffee came from—the kitchen, surely, but before that? Some days he ate his butter separately from his toast. But then sometimes he faked this opacity, so as not to have to deal with things. And sometimes he simply hurt all over and brilliance or even translucence was not something he could imagine or invoke. Today, however, was one of his good days, and he held on to clarity with a fierce greed.
As soon as Philippa had gone, Borsuk appeared. “Here,” said Chhaya, holding out a stalk of asparagus to him. “Tell me what you think.”
“One moment,” said Borsuk. Going to the sink, he washed his hands. Then, taking the stalk, he ate it and smiled. “Perfect,” he said.
“Would you like a drink?” Chhaya said to Nathan Morrill.
“Oh. Bless you. What do you have?”
“What would you like?”
He squinted at her. “What are they hiding?”
“You mean from the guests?” she said. “They don’t hide liquor, here. Just chocolates: the El Rey and the Bendicks. Impossible to buy now, only from England.”
“I’ll have some scotch whiskey, then, and some El Rey.”
“Sorry about the chocolates. Cannot do. Scotch, yes.”
Nat Morrill stood up.
His lurching manner startled Chhaya. She backed around the kitchen island, keeping it between her and the old man, who grinned as he shambled toward her, fumbling at his pocket with a hand that seemed too large to find its way in. Extricating his wallet, Morrill poked with stiff straight fingers in the bill compartment. “Here you are, my dear,” he said, taking out a twenty-dollar bill. “Would you kindly give us chocolate?”
Chhaya appeared not to see what he had done and went to the cupboard to get a glass for his whiskey. “Ice, sir?”
“Too old for ice: pierces new channels in all the
ancient fangs. But I do need the El Rey.” He flicked the bill against his fingers. Chhaya did not look. He tapped the money in his palm.
“No bribes,” she said. “Not from strangers.” She handed him the drink. “Most people do not know about El Rey.”
He looked at her sharply to see if the word strangers was an invitation of some sort. Should he offer to know her better? “Where are you from, my dear? Where is your family?”
“Basically, not matters for discussion,” she said, standing still and straight.
He lifted his glass with both hands and drank. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am an offensive old turkey. If you would let me sit here and watch while you cook, it would give me indescribable pleasure. I will play quietly with my drink. If I cannot be from time to time in a working kitchen, my soul gets derailed. I was a great cook in my day.” He paused and held his drink up to the light, then gulped at it. “Do they have gingerbread where you come from? I’ll wager you had green ginger with your mother’s milk, but in savory form, not sweet. Not gingerbread. Not in your country.”
“This is my country now,” Chhaya said quietly. “I know your gingerbread.”
“I doubt you know my exact gingerbread,” he replied. “You see, mine has three gingers: powdered—which is an abomination, but it’s in there; fresh—at least half a cup, minced fine or grated; and finally crystallized—for nuggets of burning clarity.”
“What else?” Chhaya said, alert now, as though setting it all down on the chalkboard of her mind.
The Garden Party Page 7