The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  But it wasn’t like that with Susannah’s father; he meant what he said, and when he told her, in effect, “Go, with my blessing,” she knew he wanted her to go, and she did. During all his hard-lived years, he’d learned to tell the truth, if nothing else—or so he’d said to his daughter, more than once, and she believed him, she could see he was telling the truth, that he wished as he always had to spare her pain if he could. Go, he said, but promise me—and Susannah promised, and he cried, and then smiled his rare smile, and the creases in his cheeks deepened. While he didn’t, wouldn’t, say Now I can die in peace, she sensed the words forming in his head. Hoping, despite what the doctors said, that he would live long enough to know his grandchild, she squeezed his hand and left him for good.

  Susannah and Ivan Cord came east for a number of reasons, some of them mutual: they were sick of California; they missed New England, where Susannah hadn’t been, except for one brief visit, since she was a child and Ivan since he left the seminary; they had what sounded like a good opportunity to go into business with Ivan’s old buddy, Duke; they needed a change.

  But they also, both of them, had private reasons, secret ones. Susannah wanted to improve their marriage, and had the idea that if she took Ivan east he would stop screwing around. Ivan wanted to get Susannah away from her father—who, even dying, he considered a bad influence on her—and to look up Rosie, her mother, in Connecticut. He didn’t tell Susannah this, but she knew it; it was part of an old story. He had told her, many times, that she had made the wrong choice when she had elected to follow her father out west, where, once he inherited his mother’s money, he rapidly ceased to be the model of propriety Susannah had so sorely needed. Instead he gave up the responsible position he had once been proud of, as one of the chief legal counsels of a large insurance company, and began to devote his life to women and booze, severely shortening that life in the process and leaving his daughter largely to her own devices—or to the devices of a series of far-out schools where she learned to make goat cheese and tie-dyed saris and to act out her feelings in role-playing sessions, but was never taught to discipline herself.

  Susannah’s version of her biography was simpler. “He loved me, Ivan,” she always told him. “And my mother didn’t.”

  “Susie, was it love to let you rattle around by yourself in that house for weeks at a time?”

  “I wasn’t alone, there was always a housekeeper.” Her voice was sulky; he called her Susie only when he felt she was being unreasonable, and she hated it.

  “Was it love, then,” Ivan started over patiently, “to leave you alone with a Mexican housekeeper—a succession of Mexican housekeepers, who couldn’t even speak English—”

  “Some of them could, and some of them were nice.”

  “—to ignore you, to let you bring yourself up, practically, or stash you away in some rotten school for problem children to get you off his conscience, not that he ever had a conscience, and then forget to pay the bills.”

  “You’re distorting everything,” she said, hopelessly. She never won these arguments, and they left her depressed, doubting, confused: was she then so simple, so weak, so deluded? But she went on doggedly. “That’s not the way it was, at all. He loved me, no matter what. I always knew that, Ivan, and that’s what was important.”

  “May I ask how you knew?” he said sarcastically. “You’d have to be damned subtle, it seems to me, to figure it out from the evidence.”

  “Maybe I am damned subtle, Ivan,” she said. “You just know when someone loves you.” Just as you know when someone doesn’t, she might have added, but she stayed silent.

  She hated those conversations about her parents—and there were many of them, especially when she and Ivan were newly married, conversations that often took place when they were high. She hated having to summon up her wits at such times to defend her father, particularly since, as Ivan was always pointing out, she was incapable of a logical defense—not, said Ivan, that one was possible. F. Lee Bailey couldn’t get her father off; Clarence Darrow couldn’t have done it. Edwin was a terrible father, and yet Susannah hung in there, defending him anyway. No, he wasn’t like other fathers, neither like the good old reliable daddies who took their kids to ball games and hovered over their homework (the kind Ivan would be), nor like the wealthy, neglectful, California caricature fathers who gave their spoiled offspring everything but love and a value system (as Ivan was sure Edwin had been). He was, it was true, a careless, sad, destructive man—doomed, Susannah thought, a doomed man—but one who communicated such love, such simple, wholehearted acceptance of all that Susannah was, that there had never been a time, she told Ivan, when she hadn’t felt secure, bound together with her father against anything, everything, the world.

  “You must see how unhealthy that was, Susie,” he would say, gently, and hand her a fresh, neat joint, made by him for her, as if to help her see, since she refused to see it on her own, the unhealthiness of her relationship with her father. She knew Ivan had come to consider himself her savior, a kind of substitute for her sensible eastern mother and an antidote to her profligate western father who was now dying, painfully, of what Ivan no doubt considered his just desserts—cancer of the spine—and was still doted on, in spite of everything, by Susannah. And she and Ivan were traveling east, away from him and toward Rosie Mortimer—toward her mother.

  It was always hard for Susannah to think of her—and she thought of her often—as my mother. The words embarrassed her, as if they were shameful, denoting a curse on the family instead of a mere biological fact. To herself, she had begun to think of her mother as Rosie because that’s what she was on her television show, which Susannah and Ivan watched faithfully. Susannah once referred to her as Dad’s first wife, a circumlocution that caused Ivan to yell at her to grow up.

  He had repeatedly tried to make Susannah get in touch with Rosie, to write to her, call her, smooth things over with a fan letter (wouldn’t that be a gas?). Or let him call, write a letter—a telegram? He loved “Rosie Mortimer’s Garden.” He thought Rosie was amazing for her age, couldn’t believe she must be nearly as old as poor Edwin (who was only fifty-five when they left him, but prematurely aged by booze, painkillers, pain), and held her up as an example to her daughter. Now there’s a woman who takes care of herself, who cares about herself, he used to say—and he should have known Susannah better than to think such comparisons would inspire her to greater heights of fastidiousness or chic. Instead, when Ivan got on one of his reform kicks, she sank deeper into sloth and slackness, refused to wash her hair, lost weight, wore an old pair of baggy cotton pajamas around the house, and sat up in bed with the cats all day, reading and writing stories, her glasses slipping down her narrow nose—behavior which sent Ivan out to look for a California girl with clean blonde hair and tanned hairless legs with roller skates at the ends of them and earphones on her head. Or so Susannah imagined his women to be, simply because women like that were so plentiful in California, as ripe for the plucking as the fruit on the trees in their backyard.

  In Connecticut, she thought, there wouldn’t be so much opportunity, and they’d be working together where she could keep an eye on him—and then, if little Louisiana did come along, that would keep him busy. Just as she had once vowed never to have a child, she had also promised herself never to marry. After Ivan sent that promise scuttling away, she made herself another—never to let her marriage break up. Susannah’s life had been hemmed in by these nevers, these melodramatic resolutions, and then complicated by the breaking of them. She was always starting over, determining to mend her ways, trying to burn her bridges behind her and failing. As a consequence her life had always seemed to her chaotic and pointless, the endless abandoned good intentions only making matters worse. But she was beginning, belatedly, at the age of twenty-seven, to accept that pattern as hers. Must every good life, every well-lived life, be as orderly and groomed as her mother’s appeared to be? She was also descended from her father. She told this to
Ivan once when he was preaching at her, and he called her hopeless and stomped out to find some tidy roller skater. But he came back, as always; and she was, as always, glad. Ivan’s comings and goings were part of the disarray she welcomed in her life, and her failings were part of the missionary zeal he required in his.

  It had excited her, when she met him, that Ivan used to be a priest. She wasn’t a Catholic, never had been. Even her Italian grandfather hadn’t been, though her great-grandmother had practiced her own brand of Catholicism, which required her to go to mass on special occasions: on Christmas, Easter, Palm Sunday, and Ash Wednesday, on the feast of St. Blaise (February 3) so she could get her throat blessed, and on her name day—the feast of St. Anne on July the 26th. Susannah had been raised without any religious trappings except the old crèche, with its chipped plaster sheep and golden-haired angels and smiling infant, made in Italy and brought from England by her grandparents in the Thirties, that was set up beneath the Christmas tree every year. She didn’t count the Quaker school she had attended for six months when she was twelve, or the Episcopalian boarding school she finally graduated from, though she had sung hymns in the choir for two years.

  Ivan’s history was part of what attracted her to him, aside from his good looks and his interest in her. Those two things would have been enough; his years in the priesthood were something extra, something secret and special and forbidden. Sleeping with an ex-priest just suited the rebelliousness she cultivated; their affair, and the first spaced-out years of their marriage, were the dregs of the brattiness that had been part of her, it seemed, since birth.

  During the years before their watershed trip east for her grandmother’s funeral, Ivan had been, like Susannah, a drifter, pill-popper, odd-jobber, welfare case, pothead, but once they returned to California, buoyed by the promise of Susannah’s legacy and by the glimpse of normal life they had seen in Duke and Margie and their babies, things changed. Susannah steadied herself against Ivan’s new incarnation as solid citizen, she let him save her, she settled down to be a wife—though she had as singular a version of settling down as her great-grandmother had of Catholicism and Ivan had of fidelity.

  In Los Angeles, Ivan worked at a place called Ancestral Heritage, Inc., where he put his meticulous, accomplished, unimaginative painting style to good use doing portraits of imaginary forebears for social-climbing Californians. Ivan specialized in faking a stiff, primitive, early-eighteenth-century style that was much in demand. Working from a photograph of the customer—usually some arriviste from Manhattan Beach or the Marina—he would play around with the features, shortening a nose, raising a forehead, thinning a mouth, until he had a face that might have been an ancestor: Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Ephraim (see the resemblance around the eyes? the twist of the lips?); or Grandmother’s old Aunt Amelia (they say she married a full-blooded Chock-taw, and isn’t she the image of our Tiffany? Look at the chin). Then he transferred it to canvas and put a waistcoat and a cravat on it, or a dress with prim neck-ruffles and a cap, and then it was passed on to someone else at the studio to be “antiqued,” and then framed in “distressed” wood, and then delivered to the delighted descendants of bogus Aunt Amelia and mounted on the fashionably stark-white moldingless walls of their waterfront condo, there to speak eloquently of roots, values, and money.

  It wasn’t a bad living, faking ancestors. The job supported the two of them, which was fortunate because, after a disastrous and mercifully brief attempt to work in an office in downtown Los Angeles, Susannah stayed at home with the cats and wrote stories. Ivan never begrudged her this privilege, even before she began to sell her stuff; he believed in her talent—blindly, since he seldom read what she wrote, having no taste for the fantastic, but never hesitating to put himself and her into separate art camps, the phony and the real. “Real artists are always slobs,” he said in his generous moods, but it was obvious that he wished, since Susannah was home all day, that she’d keep the place cleaner, maybe work in the garden a little (look at your mother!), fix herself up more, make an effort. Shave her legs, at least.

  Susannah wished she did, too. She promised herself she would reform, and sometimes she did for a while. There was a time, not long after her father got sick and entered St. Theodore’s, when she rose early every morning, showered, put on a sundress which she had washed and ironed herself, and spent the day cooking, cleaning, poking through cookbooks she got from the library, weeding the vegetable garden Ivan put in (he was always putting in vegetable gardens, and he would weed and water them himself for a while, then—inevitably—turn them over to Susannah, and they would first turn into jungles and then, slowly, sadly, wither and die). She was very happy during that month, making lentil soup and banana bread and nice fruit salads. She used to drive up to see Edwin nearly every afternoon and come home on the freeway during rush hour, completely unruffled either by the heat or the press of traffic or her father’s deterioration, which was, from day to day, horribly apparent. During those drives, those hours in the kitchen, those scrubbings in the shower, she never had a thought in her head.

  She got over it, though. Her slovenliness, partly the result of years of living with Edwin—who had never cared how she looked, who approved of or ignored everything she did, who hired people to clean up after her—and partly a response to Ivan’s grumbling and Ivan’s infidelities and Ivan’s prissiness, was deeply ingrained, as much a part of her as her long nose and her blue eyes—and what Ivan would call her artistic temperament.

  The walls of their apartment (the second floor of a ramshackle frame building on Dimmick Street, with a weaving studio downstairs and a skeletal macrobiotic couple upstairs) were filled with Ivan’s paintings—not of ancestors but of domestic landscapes, quaint solitary little gingerbread cottages set in deep woods, beautifully painted, with a sound grasp of color and design, but looking always in the end like greeting card art, or children’s book illustrations. Gnome homes, fairy huts, little houses in the big woods.

  He was self-taught, having taken up painting when being a priest began to go wrong for him, and considering how short a time he’d been at it his technical abilities were truly remarkable. But he was always modest about his work, aware that for all its proficiency it lacked even a flicker of greatness, and that prettiness was his stumbling block. The paintings, worked on sporadically but, when the mood hit him, obsessively, were the oil and canvas equivalents of his California girls, just as clean and tidy and empty.

  There was one Susannah liked, though. He had attempted for a while to break out of his mold by adding a touch of fantasy, and one such experiment was a painting of a hut that seemed to be emerging from a chaos of sunset clouds, an elusive little structure seemingly constructed of vapors in the process of solidifying. The twilight, rose-gray colors were lovely, and the indistinctness of the scene intrigued Susannah, but what she liked best about it was the hint of someone, something, watching out the windows—a rarity for Ivan, who, except for his ancestor portraits, never painted people. They hung the painting in their bedroom, and it was a constant source of inspiration to Susannah—not the actual scene, but the potentiality of it, the sense of infinite possibilities beyond those clouds, behind those windows. Ivan liked the painting, too, but it seemed to puzzle him; he grinned at it when it was first hung and said, “Did I do that?” He was very happy to think it inspired Susannah, and that she saw it as the auspicious start of a new, more mature style. And yet it never led anywhere; he went back to banal prettiness, and the painting itself, which he called “Cloud House,” was really, taken alone and not seen in relation to his other things, no more than a superior sort of decorative art—hopeful and important and inspiring, Susannah supposed, only to herself.

  She used to sit on the bed for hours and hours, with the shades drawn, and Ivan’s painting glowing faintly, mistily on the wall, and imagine things: people, usually, and bits of conversation and ways to describe faces, voices, gestures. Tags of poetry ran through her head, fitfully remembered from
her college courses: “Fled is that music, fled is that music.…” The line rang and rang through the long afternoons, and so did “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” and certain words she liked—intercontinental ballistic missile, duenna, martello tower, Sri Lanka—and colors from Ivan’s paintings—vermilion, rose madder, heliotrope.… The words had powers to create landscapes around themselves, strange places she had never seen, except maybe as marijuana dreams in her spacier days: underwater vistas with pale plants whose fronds reached wispy fingers out at slippery fish and faceless swimmers; or rocky, dry, hot stellar landscapes, sometimes with a figure—who? what?—lurking, waiting; or desert places where sand blows, and banks itself against the base of a mountain, and then on the horizon after millions of years of nothing but sand, something moves.

  These visions, colors, skeins of words got themselves transformed, eventually, into science-fiction stories, a term Susannah rejected as not descriptive of her work but the one editors used whether she liked it or not. She wrote very slowly, and only after weeks of sitting, like a hen on eggs, in her darkened room, watching the quality of the light subtly change around the sides of the window shades, thinking of nothing but that light. Not even thinking of it, just taking it in, her brain purposely emptied out, but differently from the emptiness of that dutiful domestic month—empty so it could fill. She sat caught fast in her stories where the drudgy details of daily life never intruded, where no one ever washed dishes or ironed a shirt or pulled weeds. She forgot to eat, forgot Ivan would be coming home and she would have to slap dinner together, idly petting Keats or Byron or Shelley, whichever of the three cats had achieved the place of honor on her lap during that day’s feline power struggle, maybe reading a little but not in any sustained way, opening books at random, mostly poetry or the long Victorian novels she was partial to; and after a couple of weeks of this she would rise one morning and hatch four sentences, a paragraph, and spend the rest of the day reading and sitting and thinking. And the next morning her paragraph would lead to another, by some lovely and unfailing principle of incubation and growth that always astonished her, so that she might end that day with a page, even two. And by these tiny increments, like sand blowing against the base of a mountain, something in the end got built, and she gave it to her friend Carla to type, and then to Ivan to mail, and it always, now, was sold. The stories didn’t interest her once they left her keeping. The checks, of course, were nice; they went for luxuries, things she couldn’t afford because she and Ivan were hoarding every bit of spare cash—books, dinners out, little presents for Ivan and Edwin and Carla and Carla’s little son. But the real reason she wrote stories was for the odd white, or yellow, or greenish light that filled her room, and the visions that came with it. And because she didn’t want to work in an office.