He said nothing to Amelia, eating in the kitchen with her and the four chattering children, grateful for the familiar, perky pottery dishes, for the room’s bright chromium sanity. But that night, as they were undressing for bed, in their room that faced the hill, he told her, and they discussed it in low, troubled voices. “It’s about the children that I’m…” said Amelia. She turned out the light, as she always did before she put on her nightgown, although there was no one up the hill to see. “Look!” she said, leaning on the window sill. The shutters that had been used to board up the summerhouse, Garner remembered, had been of the kind with a small half-moon cut out of the wood, and now, in each of them that made up the blank façade, there was a weak spot of light.
The next morning, he was leaning on his new power mower (almost paid for now), and looking at his shaved lawn with a warm sense of satisfaction, when the doctor emerged for his morning tour. To date, his and Garner’s over-the-hedge interchanges had consisted mostly of Garner’s murmured assents to the doctor’s pronunciamentos on the beauties of what lay before them—Bhatta had a way of conversationally appropriating the glories of the universe, and pointing them out to his listener (as if the latter might not have noticed them without his help) that reminded Garner of some ministers he had known. Sometimes, at his approach, Garner, out of a shyness he would have phrased as not wanting to “get too thick” with neighbors, waved and moved on to a distant task, but today he stayed where he was.
“Good morning, Misser Garner.” Bhatta advanced majestically. “I see you have been up early, and worked well.” He waved an expansive hand. “Now comes the beautiful time, har? No fuel bills!”
Garner nodded, paying a moment’s silent tribute to the landscape, in accordance with the doctor’s gesture. “See you put in a fine lot of roses there.”
“Yars. In my country, the cultivation is very simple. Plenty of manure, plenty of roses. But here there is only chicken manure—and very expensive. A commentary, har?” Bhatta smiled broadly.
Garner smiled also—an overcompensating smile of the kind one used with people who spoke a foreign language. He could never get over a feeling, of the worst provinciality, he knew, that Bhatta was not speaking English, even at the very moment he so excellently was. “See you closed up the summerhouse.”
“Yars.” The doctor took another turn at the landscape.
“You, um…you moving your practice up here?”
“I do not have what you would call a pract-ice, Misser Garner.”
“Oh…I see.”
“Um.” The doctor smiled again. “When I come to America to study medicine, I am very young, very enthusiastic. But when I finish, I find after all that I am not sufficiently—assimilated. For me, neurology is only part of a philosophy. I find I cannot sit in an office and take mo-ney for making cures. A little surgical, a little pharmaceutical housework—bang bang, one hundred dollars.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, I am not happy doing housework, Misser Garner.”
“But you do take some patients?”
“For a while I do many things. I give lectures, I write books, one time I even have a restaurant. But everywhere people say, ‘Bhatta, you have the secret of living, what is it?’ I tell them that it is only because in India, where life is hard, we have to learn early the connection between work and love. I tell them that it is only here, where mo-ney churns butter, that people have time to suffer, because they do not have this connection. But they do not believe me. So I let them come up here and learn.” He turned to look at Miss Leeby, who was standing on a ladder some yards away, clipping a hedge. “When they are grateful, they give gifts. For them it is therapy to give, and therefore it is possible for me to receive.” He turned back to Garner. “You understand how this is, Misser Garner?”
Garner had no immediate answer, but he saw, from the doctor’s expression, that a prompt one would have been a disappointment.
“Ah, you think it devious, perhaps,” the doctor said quickly. He turned away from Garner again, looking downriver with a benignant smile. “The air is so clear in America,” he said softly. “So very, very clear.” He beckoned suddenly toward Miss Leeby, who started obediently down her ladder. “Come and see Misser Garner’s beautiful new lawnmower,” he called. “How that woman works!” he said, sotto voce. “How she loves flowers!”
Miss Leeby came and squatted down over the lawnmower, her work-split nails moving expertly over it, her bun and prim, altar-guild face odd over her man’s shirt, dungarees, and dirty saddle-shoes.
“Is this not a beautiful machine, Leeby?” said the doctor.
“We ought to have one like it.” She looked up at him devoutly. “It would give me so much more time for the roses.”
“Well, perhaps Misser Garner will show you how to run it, one day.”
Garner nodded, half wondering whether the doctor would not suggest the wise therapy of his giving them the mower. Meanwhile, Miss Leeby had wandered over to Garner’s peony bed, and was kneeling there. “Why, you’re letting these choke!” she said, horror sharpening her high voice. “If you don’t thin them, the ants will be all over the buds!” She stretched a compassionate hand toward them, she had already taken a trowel out of a pocket, she was already beginning on them.
“Now Leeby,” said the doctor, shaking his head indulgently. “Cultivate our own garden, please.” He watched her move back to her ladder, chuckles shaking his shoulders, his considerable belly. “A happy woman, Misser Garner. When she first came to me, she was stone-deaf. Only a case of psychological deafness, as her hundred-dollar man took care to tell me.”
Over on the doctor’s driveway, Miss Daria had backed out the old car, and leaving the motor running sluggishly, was stuffing a battered peach basket into the luggage compartment. In the bright morning air, with her black net stockings and very short skirt, with her long curls bobbing above the withered femme fatale make-up and the embarrassingly evident underwear, she looked like a grotesquely debased little girl, but she moved with stolid competence. The doctor squinted at her appreciatively, but made no revelations as to the history of her cure. “Ah, they need me for the shopping,” he said. He waved. “They keep me stepping, those ladies. This morning, a lobster, no less, for the curry.” He caressed his belt buckle. “How they love to spend money, those silly girls!” With a salute to Garner, he started off, then paused. “You are a lawyer, eh, Misser Garner?”
Garner nodded. By a fraction, he felt, he had prevented himself from adding “Yars.”
“Ah, you must take curry with us some evening. I myself have a good many legal problems from time to time.”
Garner roused himself from the rhythmic sloth into which the doctor’s style of address had cast him. “Guess I’m like you, Doctor,” he said, with a grin. “’Fraid I don’t have my own practice either.”
But it was the doctor who had the last word. “Ah, how lucky!” he said. “How wise! You too have learned, then, how destroying it is to admit the connection between money and the work one loves!”
Garner watched him cross his lawn and enter the car. The car moved stertorously down the driveway and slowly past Garner. Bland between his two ladies, the doctor saluted once more. Garner leaned on his mower for a minute, then started rolling it toward his garage. It was not until he had emerged, empty-handed, looking absently about him for the next Saturday task, that he realized that he had not learned anything more about the woman on the hill.
That afternoon he went to the village to do the weekly shopping he and Amelia usually did together, leaving her immersed in preparations for the birthday party to be held for Sukey, their oldest, the next day. Ever since they had lived up here, a treasure hunt had been a traditional part of the children’s fetes; in the dime store he gathered together a collection of prizes of that familiarity imposed by the ten-cent limit—crayons, bubble pipes, harmonicas, string bags of marbles and jacks, packets of green paper play-money with which the children could play store in Sukey’s new cardboard grocery, so
me jointed plaster snakes, some rubber balls. At the last minute, groaning with lack of inspiration, he raised the limit to a quarter, and added some water pistols, and some pink plastic babies for the smaller girls. Then to the butcher’s, for the order Amelia had phoned in, and at last to the supermarket, where he scarcely needed Amelia’s list. The order was always roughly the same, it seemed to him—enormous renewals on the breakfast foods, the bread and the canned tomatoes (Grade C, the canny list reminded him), boxes and boxes of frozen vegetables (these were no longer an economy except of time, Amelia had worriedly said last Saturday—now that they needed two of a kind for enough servings at a meal), the same list of staples, the two dozen eggs. Not pullets, he remembered, although this was not down on the list, for he had been a good pupil, and he knew now, among other bits of lore, that the cheaper pullets worked out to no eventual good, because of their size. Poor Amelia, he thought, it was not her fault if her prideful instructions on the arts of domestic evasion had become repetitive—it was not her fault if the evasions had always to be the same. “Butter—or oleo,” the list said, leaving it up to him. Yes, perhaps it had better be an oleo week. He recalled the doctor’s phrase about money churning butter. A little dig at America. Where the living is easy, he had in effect said, it was often hard on people. Garner chuckled. He was a sharp one, Dr. Bhatta, even if one could not quite tell whether his manner came from a lack of the language or a way with it. And a nervy one—to deliver that kind of sermon from a seat on the stoop.
Garner had finished his list, pushed his overflowing wire basket to the end of the long queue at the cashier’s desk, and was idly betting with himself that his total would be somewhere between eighteen and nineteen dollars, when he saw, with a twinge, that he was directly behind Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Dee. The Dees were very thin, very old, and very poor—of a poverty that gentility held together like the black string tie that Mr. Dee wore to do his shopping, even in this weekend wilderness of sports shirts and dungarees. “Natives”—that is of the old Hudson Valley Dutch stock, as distinct from newcomers like Garner himself—they were, as cousins, both of a family that had given innumerable place-names to the county, but whose tenure had long since thinned with its blood. Mr. Dee had always worked hard in one of those clerkly jobs the exact nature of which no one ever remembered, other than that it had been in some outmoded business which had finally faded just as its outmoded employees needed it most. They lived now in the smallest house on the river road, a kind of baroque toolhouse, its tipsy turret supported by a wisteria vine thicker than either of the Dees, that was located on the edge of what probably had once been all Dee land. Cornered in this last briar patch of inheritance, Mr. Dee, county historian and fiercest member of the zoning board, upheld the conscience, ancient and present, of the road. For if he loved the town deeply, with the love that one gives only to the place that best knows who one is, he had an even more subterranean fright of the city, with whose approach his delicately guarded identity would no longer be known at all. And the town—and for this Garner too loved it—had been delicate with him indeed. It was aware that he had refused to register for Social Security, and no one had ever dared sound him on the subject of old age pensions. Quietly the town saw to it that he had a place on those important committees to which no suspicion of a fee could be attached; even more quietly it had made his name the sole contender for those still honorable civic duties for which he could be paid. He was a keeper of records, a taker of censuses, a watcher at polls. At one crisis in Mrs. Dee’s health, the historical society had found itself in sudden need of a commissioned sesquicentennial report; at another, the library had found itself similarly helpless without a part-time custodial appointee. But still, altogether, the fees must be very small. Once before, Garner had found himself in the aisle of canned goods, behind the Dees, and had averted his eyes, his ears, from the two pairs of hands, pale as thorns, hovering past the salmon to the sardines, from the two hatted heads bent in secret consultation over the price on the bottom of a tin.
Now, above Garner’s bulging basket and the Dees’ sparsely tidy one, their glances met. “Mr. Garner sir, good morning!” Mr. Dee offered his handshake, ghostly version of one that must once have matched the office with the fumed oak, the black leather davenport, the wine-dark cigars. Behind him, Mrs. Dee, gloved hands clasped, nodded only; she belonged, by both personality and era, to those women who enhanced their husbands’ dignity by echoing their actions but never equaling them.
“Well met, sir,” said Mr. Dee. “On the part of the zoning committee, I was just about to get to you on the telephone.”
Eighty, if he’s a day, thought Garner. Not the man for the latter-day “Ring you,” “Call you.” Or, more probably, no phone of his own.
Mr. Dee leaned forward. “You know, perhaps, of your new neighbor’s activities?” he whispered.
“Well…an unusual ménage, I gather.”
“Oh, that!” Mr. Dee smiled primly, raising a milk-blue finger. “Not our concern, of course. We are not that kind of meddler here. But of late years—I have had to acquire the habit of reading the Times’ real-estate section. Unfortunately, local transactions have grown beyond the local newspaper.” He coughed, remembering gently that Garner, a former city man, must have had a history of just such a transaction, and fumbling in the watch-pocket of his vest, held out a clipping. Garner bent over it. Under the heading COUNTRY BOARD, he read: Come to the house of the Pundit Bhatta. Great white house like castle. Crushed stone driveway. Roses everywhere you look. Build your own guest-house. Indian cookery and wisdom. Health through peaceable work. Contribution, $30 per week.
“I thought you and I might talk to the gentleman, first,” said Mr. Dee. “Explain to him that the tradition, in fact the law of the river road does not permit even two-family dwellings, much less any such communal development.”
“From what I know of him, he’ll do the talking,” said Garner. He felt annoyed, suddenly and sharply, less by the threat to his own property—although the thought of other poor creatures like the woman in the summerhouse, all sweeping the hillside like the seven maids with seven mops, was an unnerving one—than by the humiliated feeling that in this morning’s conversation with the doctor he had in some way been “sold,” been “had.” Some tricky sympathy in himself had responded to the kernel of what the man had said, had led him to conclude that if Bhatta sold nothing but confidence, he perhaps belonged, nevertheless, to that unique and complicated breed which believed in its own wares. He, Garner, had been “taken,” like those who listened to the talented swindler purely out of admiration for the spiel but ended up with the mining shares after all.
“I doubt if we can force the boardinghouse issue, Mr. Dee,” he said. “The road never has, you know. Because of the occasional hardship cases.”
“But it’s not that!” Mr. Dee pointed again to the ad, looking agitatedly around him, as if here, on this Rialto of screaming children, harried mothers, packhorse husbands, there were the very signs of the urban beast that waited, alert for the tip on a house that might be converted, a property that might be acquired as a wedge, a sudden amalgamation that might be made. “Build.” he whispered. “You see what he says right here. Build!”
Back of Garner, the long line murmured, ahead of him the checker shrugged her impatience. “Oh I do beg all your pardons,” said Mr. Dee. With a “No, allow me, dear,” to his wife, who had once again moved a tentative glove, he emptied his basket on the counter. He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet, and paid. “Perhaps I could walk down to see you tomorrow, sir, after church?”
Garner nodded, busy emptying his own basket. Then, as the Dees filed out, he called after them. “Care to wait, I’ll be glad to drop you and your things on the way.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Mr. Dee, “but Mrs. Borden has already been so kind.” He raised his hat, including the checker in his nod, and went out, followed by a clerk carrying the small box of goods. Behind him, Mrs. Dee turned once, and smiled.
That night, after the children were asleep, he and Amelia walked up the back hill, he swinging a lantern along the path, she carrying a basket of the toys for the treasure-hunt, which she had placed in the printed cotton bags they kept from year to year. Above them, the wood rose sharply, darkened even by day by an undergrowth of maple seedlings, dogwood, fern, by an ominous spreading of bush and brush whose names he did not even know. Thirty years ago, in the feudal time of gardeners and servants, the hillside had been worked and terraced, a carefully husbanded sampler of grape arbors and cold frames, of neatly curtailed dells. But now, in this suburban renaissance where people bought for the sake of the houses and the land was only extra and ignored, almost all the places along the road backed up against a dark encroachment like this one, where, here and there in the spring, an occasional old planting sparked with stunted fruit, or a sentinel iris pushed its spear through the honeysuckle, the sumac and the grass.
Tale for the Mirror Page 23