Just back of the house there was a large plateau where the garden officially ended, and it was here, in scuffed, already traditional places—in the hollow tree that held the swing, in the ledges behind the children’s tent, in the dry channels of last year’s squash vines, that he and Amelia cached the bags, not too well hidden, where the children might find them the next day. They looked lovely in the starlight, with their dim paisley scrolls and freckles—like the fey nesting of some wild and improbable bird. He swung the lantern in an arc above them—an efficient department store lantern, bought for those evening hours when he cadged a bit of time to chop wood, to fix the fan-belt on the pump. Silly or not, with its fake oil-lantern shape, it felt good to swing it in this ritual that their years here had already built for them, above these places which for the children were long since familiar and old.
Back at the kitchen door, Amelia stumbled in ahead of him, murmuring that the children had worn her to a frazzle, in and out of the house all day. He doused the lantern, and sat down on the porch steps, looking out at his acre, his back hill. At times it made him feel like an interloper, a defaulter. It came scratching at his door, not like the wilderness, but like a domestic animal, crying to be tended. This year he would have to burn back the brush, for sure.
Sometime before morning, he got up from bed to latch back a banging shutter. For a moment he thought he saw a figure move across the grass and merge behind the summerhouse. He waited, but saw nothing but the movement of the trees, stirring in the pre-dawn wind. He was about to go back to bed when he saw, down the long hall that led to the front windows, the first eastern flake of light. This was one of the privileges that went with living where he did, one dearly bought and seldom used, the privilege of watching the sun rise on the river from his own window, his own realm. He watched the yellow light shake itself into prisms on the leaves of his horse chestnut trees, waited until the red ball heaved itself out of the river at a spot where, if he remembered correctly, he had the right to seine shad. Then he went back to bed.
When Mr. Dee presented himself the next morning, Garner was alone, Amelia having gone to pick up Sukey at Sunday school, taking the others along for a ride. Neither Garner nor Amelia was a churchgoer, but Sukey’s recent request to go had been acceded to at once, lest she be damaged in her natural craving “to belong.” All the other city émigrés along the road were always making these little forays into the art of belonging—for this too was felt to be one of the privileges of living here. Watching as Mr. Dee picked his way toward him, carefully setting his freshly blacked shoes between the mud squelches that winter had raised on the poorly surfaced road, Garner wondered what it would feel like to be he, inhabitant of that lost steel-engraving world into which one had been born with all one’s affiliations incised.
On the doctor’s porch together, a few minutes later, they waited while the door chime sounded somewhere inside. It was an elaborate chime—a four- or five-tone affair.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Dee, shaking his head. He stared up at the cathedral-like architraves of the front door. “My understanding is—someone gave him the place!” he whispered.
A second sound, of steady hammering, blended with the repeated peal of the chime. Mr. Dee blenched. He looked side-ways at Garner’s Sunday morning garb of T shirt, army surplus slacks, and sneakers, dropped his glance covertly to his own dark vest, carnelian seal. “I understand also, however,” he whispered, “that his own credit is very infirm.”
Miss Daria opened the door. Her gaze met Mr. Dee first, approximated him. “Good morning,” she said, in a businesslike voice that went oddly with her waxed lashes, her dazzling blouse. “You’ve come to see about the rooms?”
“Indeed not!” said Mr. Dee, in a high voice. Garner, intervening, asked for the doctor.
“Come in,” she said, unsmiling, and led the way like an usher, through a hallway formed by the first arc of a spiral staircase, into a vast double room, where, in an oasis of furniture set against portieres that divided the regulation sitting room and parlor of such houses, the doctor sat, drinking tea. He had, Garner thought, almost an air of being “discovered” drinking tea. Indeed there was an air of theatrical arrangement, a floridly seedy, “rented” flavor to the whole scene. Garner looked about him, reminded that Amelia would want to know. Kemtone paint, in a number of purposefully intense, but somehow failing colors—pink, orchid, acid green—had been applied to the imperially molded ceiling, the high, cracked walls, and had been wreathed, like tulle around the ravaged throatline of an old beauty, up the underpinning of the spiral stairs. On a hotel-Moorish table, set among several baronial but battered plush chairs, incense bloomed suddenly from a pot, as if it had just been set burning. There was a determined attempt at Oriental mystery, but except for two huge ivory-inlaid teakwood screens, it remained a fatally auction-room Oriental. It was, Garner decided, remembering Miss Daria’s blouse, perhaps “the ladies’” idea of mystery.
“So, Misser Garner, you come to see me after all.”
Garner introduced Mr. Dee, in the latter’s capacity as board chairman.
“Ah, zoning,” said the doctor. His nod was sage, managing to indicate that he drew upon a vast, physicianly stock of unsurprise. He shook Mr. Dee’s hand, looked down at it searchingly for a moment, then gave it back to him. “Good arteries,” he said. “You will probably live forever.”
Mr. Dee, withdrawing slightly, bent down, not without a certain pride of spryness, to detach a bit of dried mud from his shoe.
“Very bad, yars, the road in front of my house,” said Bhatta. “Perhaps now it is spring, the village plans to repair.”
“On the contrary, sir.” Mr. Dee straightened, squaring his frail shoulders. “Last thing we want here is the heavy, beer-truck kind of traffic. Let them go round by the state road.”
“Ah?” said the doctor. “Of course, here in this house we do not smoke or drink. Alcoholism is a very characteristic symptom of Western neurosis. But I do not think it responds to superficial restraints.” He moved a hand toward his cup. “Darjeeling. A very soothing type of addiction. You will join me?” He clapped his hands together, but the sound was barely audible above an increased din of hammering in the rear of the house. He looked sideways at Garner, veiling a brown gleam of amusement with one lowered eyelid. “T-t-t. Those busy ladies.”
“You mistake me, sir,” said Mr. Dee. “We guard only the community, not its, er, personal habits. This is a unique preserve we have here. No coastal railway, one minor factory. On an international waterway, if you please, and dangerously near the city. One false step—why there are garden-apartment interests that watch us night and day. You have only to look at the other side of the river—”
Bhatta nodded, impressed not so much, Garner thought, by the phrase “the other side of the river,” whose weight of local scorn he might not realize, as by Mr. Dee’s competitive flow. He waved a slow hand toward the back of the house. “Well, as my unfortunate ears inform me, we are building our own Eden here. All night Miss Leeby insists on finishing the new bathroom, for the arrival of some guests. We have this evening a double celebration. First, the anniversary of Indian independence. Second, the arrival of my nephew from Allahabad, who comes to study medicine. I will get Miss Leeby to stop and bring tea.”
“No, really we can’t stay,” said Garner. A fluttering endorsement of this came from Mr. Dee. “We came merely to—”
“To be delightful and neighborly, of course. So you must allow me. Meanwhile make yourselves at home—there is material here and there that may interest you.” Bhatta motioned toward the piano, toward a pile of books in a corner, various framed papers on the walls. “Also, I must hear more of this zoning. Like this gentleman, I am also an enemy of progress.” He chuckled, and rose slowly. The plush chair fell backward from him, its withered ruffle exposing its bowed legs, like the comedy sprawl of an old character actress. “Not with his admirable structure, however.” He tapped the back of one of his hands sadly with two
fingers of the other. “Adipose. Hypertensive. Probable final history—embolism,” he said, smiling, and left the room, leaving the chair upended behind him.
Mr. Dee moved closer to Garner. “Slippery,” he whispered. Chin sunk in his hard collar, he meditated, delving further, perhaps, into the penny-dreadfuls of his boyhood. The carnelian seal rotated slowly. His peaked face came up, triumphant. “Very slippery article. We’ll get nowhere with him. An injunction, I fear. If we can only find out precisely what his activities are.” He moved along one wall, examining. At an exclamation from him, Garner followed. He was reading a long card, in elaborate but somewhat amateurish print, held to the wall by passepartout. It was a restaurant menu. Under the title NEW INDIA RESTAURANT, a long list of curries followed, using a number of badly spaced different kinds of type. Maharajah Curry (for two) $3.50 headed the array. Leaning closer, Garner deciphered an italicized notation to the right. With Turban $5.00. The list declined in rank, price, and size of print as one neared the bottom, where it rose again with a final entry added in typewritten capitals: Mahatma Ghandi Curry—One Dollar.
“Good God,” said Mr. Dee. “Do you suppose he’s running a restaurant?”
Garner, his mind full of turbans—would they be in the curry or on the customer?—was already standing in front of the next display. It was a very ordinarily framed diploma, granted in medicine to one Pandit Bhatta, from Iowa State University.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Dee. He looked up at Garner, his wrinkles focusing shrewdly. “There is an Iowa State University?” On Garner’s reassurance, his head sank. “Dear me.”
Above an old upright piano there was a large poster drawing of a veiled woman in an attitude of prayer, seated on a pedestal formed by the block letters DESIRES. On the music rack below, a single sheet of manuscript music lay carefully open, its many migratory arpeggios blackening the page. Both poster and music were signed Bhatta.
They had reached the pile in the corner, fifty or more copies of the same book, a small volume, again by the Pandit, published by the Nirvana Press, with a flyleaf of other titles by the same author. Entitled Rose Loves, it seemed to be half poem, half paragraphs of meditation, apostrophes which had, here and there, an oddly medical turn of phrase. A description of the circulatory system swelled into diapason: So the phagocytes swarm in my veins, stars eating stars; the ganglia make little rose-connections along the capillaries of the brain. I rise above. Swung by my dervish blood, I can return to the tree-towns of childhood, suspended above the city’s begging bowls I swing like a monkey from tree to tree.
A folded piece of paper dropped from between the leaves of the book. Garner picked it up, reinserted it, placed the book on the pile of others, and pretended to be studying the ivory inlay in the nearer of the screens, as the doctor entered, followed by the two women carrying the tea things, and a young man, who ran to pick up the fallen chair.
“Ah, Misser Garner, you admire the screens?”
“Yes, very beautiful work.”
“Yars. Very valuable…Miss Daria here wants me to sell them. For three hundred dollars, although they are worth much more than that. Eh, extravagant miss?” Miss Daria, engaged with Miss Leeby in settling Dee and Garner in chairs and passing round the cups, kept her face bent, expressionless. The doctor shook his head at her, including his guests in his mirth. “Probably for…two hundred, she would sell them, that girl!”
It was remarkable how, even as the two women served out the tea, the doctor, with fluently hospitable gestures, maintained the impression that he himself dispensed it. He introduced the young man, his nephew, with a flourish that gave the effect of the latter’s having been created on the spot for this purpose. The nephew, a slender brown young man in neat Western clothes, exhausted his cup in two rapid inhalations, and was quickly served again.
“He is very enthus-iastic,” said the doctor, looking at him meditatively. “Very anxious to get on.”
“Gate on,” said the young man, nodding repeatedly, with the grinning intensity of the foreigner who wishes to make it known that he understands. He rolled his eyes in an exquisite spasm of comprehension. “Gate on!”
The doctor looked at Garner. Again his eyelid drooped. “It is a Pres-byterian college—Allahabad.”
Mr. Dee picked up his cup. “Indeed?” he said, with a vague, reflexive politeness perhaps engendered by the cup. “Mrs. Dee and I are of course communicants of the Dutch Reformed.”
“Of course,” said the doctor, with an equal flexion. At a signal of his hand, the two women departed, followed by the nephew. “Very interesting,” said the doctor, turning back to Mr. Dee. His eyelid lifted suddenly. “Reformed—from what?”
Mr. Dee set down his cup, at which he had but sniffed. “It refers to the Dutch settlers, sir. This is an early settlement. Very early.”
“Ah, ah,” said Bhatta. “And I come to it so late.”
Mr. Dee lifted his chin above his collar. Under his parochial gaze the doctor’s little pleasantry vanished, incense into ozone. “You understand, therefore, the board’s concern over your plans?”
“Plans?” The doctor’s shoulders vibrated to his smile. “They sprout around me like roses—these plans. But I myself—”
From under Mr. Dee’s carnelian seal, the newspaper clip was withdrawn, and laid on the Moorish table. “Yours, sir?” he said. He sat back. A thin pink elated his starved cheek. He coughed once, and then again, and the cough had a dry, preserved tang to it, an old flute long laid away in the musty confabulations of lost authority.
“T-t-t,” said the doctor, studying the clipping. “Always in such a hurry, those terrible ladies.” He chuckled. “A man’s castle is not his house, har?” He leaned forward to place the paper back on Mr. Dee’s side of the table, studying him. “You would like yourself to build a guest-house here, Misser Dee?”
“Garner—” said Mr. Dee. It was a measure of his feelings that he did not append “Mr.,” and of his arteries perhaps, that they held.
“Dr. Bhatta—” said Garner. “Perhaps you’re not yet…aware of the road’s laws on this.” He hesitated, then, squirming like a boy under the tutorial glare of Mr. Dee, he repeated them: no commercial enterprise, no subdivided renting, no double dwellings. “And no additions to existent buildings,” he concluded. “Except of course for members of the same family. It’s a—” He stopped. “Well—it’s a hopeful attempt to keep things as they are.”
“It is a real phil-osophy, this zoning,” said Bhatta. “How lucky for me that Indian families are so large.”
“Not large enough, sir, I think, to include all the readers of the Times,” said Mr. Dee.
“What a peaceable world that would be,” said the doctor. He sighed. “Then, perhaps the Tribune. But certainly, first the Times.” He cast a sudden glance at Garner; it was the practiced side glance of the dead-pan joker, that mere facial cracking by which he chooses to honor a chosen auditor. “But you need not worry, Misser Dee. Miss Leeby is very talented—you should see the new bathroom. But she is not yet capable of a gar-den apartment.”
Mr. Dee stood up. He bowed, and his bow too had a stored flavor, like the cough. “As Mr. Garner would have to tell you legally, it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Prin-ciples,” said the doctor. He studied his hands, as if he had a number of such concealed there. He sighed, looking up at Garner. “The distance from a priori to a posteriori, that is the history of the world, har, Misser Garner? That is what I keep telling the ladies. Love is infinite; therefore its services should be. Then they come running from the kitchen to tell me the curry is finite.” He stood up, turning to Dee. “It is a Christian dilemma also. You have had experience of this, perhaps…in the Dutch Reform?”
“Do I understand sir…?” Mr. Dee’s voice dropped to the whisper reserved for indecency. “That you charge for meals at these celebrations?”
“No, no, Misser Dee. It is like the party some people ask us here at New Year’s. The ladies to bring casseroles. The m
en to bring bottles. It is the same with us. Only without bottles.” He paused. “Perhaps you will stay today. A special occasion. No casserole required.” He too bowed, with a plastic gesture toward the rear of the house, and Garner became aware that the noise from that region had been replaced by a powerful, spice-scented breath of cookery.
Mr. Dee flushed, and moved stiffly toward the door. In the nacreous light from its one high pane, his nostrils quivered once, membrane-pink, and were pinched still. “I thank you, sir. But Mrs. Dee has something very specially prepared.”
As the doctor opened the door for them, Garner spoke. “Matter of fact, Dr. Bhatta…my wife and I did want to ask you. It’s, er…it’s about the lady who seems to be living in the summerhouse. Because of the children, we were—naturally a bit concerned.”
“Ah, Miss Prager. Yars.” The air coming through the door was balmy, but the doctor’s face seemed to Garner for a moment as it had seemed on their winter encounters in front of the stores—as if it denied any imputation that it could suffer cold. “Tell your wife there is no cause to be concerned,” he said. “Miss Prager will not touch anybody.” His voice lingered on the word “touch,” and with this his glance returned to Garner, its customary air of inner amusement regained.
“Summerhouse!” Mr. Dee pecked past both men and angled his head outside the door. Turning from what he saw, he confronted Garner. His chin sank into his collar. “So you already knew, sir, that we had a case in point there!”
An elderly limousine rolled slowly up to the doctor’s gate. It stopped, motor running. Its klaxon sounded once—not with the tut-tut of present-day horns, but with an “Ay—ooyah” Garner had not heard for years.
“Ah, how kind of them!” Mr. Dee waved a gay, an intimate acceptance toward the car. He nodded stiffly at the doctor. “If you don’t mind, Garner, perhaps you’ll walk me to the car?”
Tale for the Mirror Page 24