The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  One place she liked to imagine, but which had nothing to do with her stories—for some days, while she sat there with the cats in the pleasant gloom, she pondered not her visions but her life—was Silvergate, the estate in England where Rosie was born, and where Rosie’s father and grandfather had been gardeners. Susannah remembered, with effort, concentrating so hard she got headaches, what she had learned about the place when she was little. There wasn’t much to recall—mainly conversations she had overheard between Rosie and Peter, cozy chats about Rosie’s childhood that used to infuriate Susannah with their intimacy, their exclusiveness.

  Not that she ever so much as hinted at her desire to be part of them, or let on that she was listening. She would be deep in a book in one room while Peter and her mother chattered in another, but she had picked up certain things, and over the years she retrieved them from the back of her mind: Silvergate, in Kent, which was in the south of England, and her brother Peter was named after her grandfather who was named after the old man—the earl? baronet?—who inherited the place in the 1890s; and the gardens were beautiful, and vast, and designed by her grandfather’s father Massimo Liliano—what a wonderful name!—who was cheated of the credit for it; and there was a famous hedge clipped into fancy shapes, and a lily pond, and every kind of flower, and a huge patterned rose bed; and there were sheep whose wool used to catch in the wooden fence supports they scratched their backs against, and little Rosie used to collect it into soft, oily, dirty balls, and she had her own strawberry bed, where the berries tasted better than anything—anything—even the ones she grew out behind the house; and Nonna Anna (who died when Susannah was eight) wasn’t blind then, and she used to make yellow pasta, hanging it in strands to dry all over the kitchen, on ropes strung across the room and on broom handles propped between two chairbacks; and this was in the gardener’s cottage where Rosie was born in the back bedroom, delivered by Nonna Anna because it happened so suddenly, on the birthday of Rosie’s mother, whose name was May after the month, and who said to her husband when he came rushing in from the garden to find his baby girl already born, safely flannel-wrapped in a wicker cradle, asleep, before he or the doctor or the midwife could get there, and his wife and his mother beaming and laughing, proud of what they’d accomplished all on their own, “Thank you for my birthday present, Peter!” and they named her Rose.

  That was all—not much, though for a long time it was enough. Susannah used to ponder it, feeling a furtive happiness and trying to fill in the blanks, picturing it all in her head with the help of bits of England gleaned from movies and television and books. When she came across Pemberley, Darcy’s Derbyshire mansion, in Pride and Prejudice, her excitement was so intense that, gripping the book in both hands, she split it halfway down its paperback spine.

  On the long trip East, Susannah and Ivan made love once, twice, three times every night, bombarding her womb with possibilities. Ivan was full of ideas about how to manage it a third, a fourth time, how to assist the little fellows—as he called, affectionately, his sperm—on their epic journey. He jammed pillows under her pelvis, massaged her belly, proposed standing her on her head, made her assume fanciful positions that sent them both into giggling fits. Susannah became sore and tired (tired? Ivan seized on it, hopefully, as a pregnancy symptom), but their forced lovemaking could still ignite her sometimes. Unbelievably, there they’d be, going through the familiar motions at two in the morning, at a campsite in, say, Ozona, Texas, for the second or third time, and it would suddenly be good, better than ever. She and Ivan would gasp with joy and kiss hungrily and fiercely, and then move slowly, very slowly and carefully, making it last, before the little fellows exploded inside her, and she and Ivan rocked together, ground their bodies together in uncomplicated ecstasy on the narrow bed, while the cats waited politely, whisker-washing on the floor until they were done.

  “There,” Ivan would say, stretching out beside her. “That must have done it. Don’t move, don’t move, let the little fellows swim, quietly, quietly, come on, guys.…” It gave their lovemaking, Ivan said, a whole new dimension, a sane, determined, purposeful quality. “Grown-up lovemaking,” he called it, and when she accused him of being an unregenerate Catholic he protested, and explained to her with great seriousness that his ex-religion had nothing to do with anything, that in fact there could be no greater blasphemy than an ex-priest making babies—don’t move, Susannah, lie still—that it was the life force he was talking about, primitive nature in the raw struggling to perpetuate the species. That’s what he liked—not to mention the immediate, tangible result of grown-up lovemaking, i.e. the possibility of little Virginia or little Louisiana, of diapers and rubber duckies and solace in their old age.

  They progressed steadily in straight lines, screwing their way across the country, aiming to see a bit of it. But they never stopped, except to eat and sleep and buy gas, letting everything go by: strange and wonderful vistas, mountains, and flat, flat stretches of dirt, promises of interesting sights advertised along the roads, state capitols and art museums and parks and hiking trails. They preferred to make haste slowly, so that each day was like the one before it: rise, let the cats out, breakfast in the van on thick slices of the whole-grain bread they brought along (getting staler and staler as they progressed east but made palatable with peanut butter and honey and gulps of herb tea); then collect the cats and get on the highway, drive until late afternoon (lunching en route on fruit and nuts); find a gas station and a campsite and, their resolves to stay pure and healthy broken down under the stresses of boredom and cold weather, tracking down a McDonald’s or a Pizza Hut for dinner. And then Susannah would, maybe, write for a while, or peacefully daydream, while Ivan went out to talk to people or listened to the radio. And then baby-making, and then sleep, with the cats curled around and between them.

  Susannah had plenty of time to think and daydream. Those twelve days on the road were themselves like a long dream, a strange dislocated period of time for her, during which they moved steadily east, never still, and the days blurred together and even the hours, so that she was surprised, at times, to find the sun setting, the day’s destination reached, the van pulling into a campsite, and Ivan saying, “I sure could use a pizza or something.”

  She would think back later on the trip and remember sex, highways, and the story she was writing, but there was much more to it, of course, than that. Ivan seldom let her drive, and during the long hours on the road, while she sat beside him in the van, they sometimes sang old songs in two-part harmony. They were good at it: “Juanita” and “Moonlight Bay” and “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” But mostly they talked—he talked, while Susannah chewed her cuticles and looked out the window at distant skylines, mountains, storm clouds. What Ivan talked about was the future—the restaurant and what it would lead to, the importance of self-sufficiency in this day and age, the fun of the reunion with Duke. He didn’t mention the reunion with Rosie, but she knew he had that in mind. He ruminated endlessly on the restaurant, manipulating the money, designing menus in his head, assigning roles as if they were playing a kids’ game: I’ll be the manager, Duke’ll be the cook, you’ll be the waitress—until, of course, you become the Mommy. Ivan seldom had a past tense; he didn’t talk to her any more about his life before they met, or about their first year together when they’d been groping through their experiments with drugs, clinging to each other in confusion. Only her childhood interested him; she knew very little about his. She had a feeling he used hers to cancel his own, but that was unconfirmable. On the road he spoke only of the future, and Susannah wondered if that was good or not—it was fine to be hopeful and optimistic and full of plans, but was he staking too much on this move? Would they be better off back home on Dimmick Street with a steady income and better weather, and her dimly lit room which she missed sorely, and her father dying just a few miles away?

  Sometimes, she stopped listening to Ivan’s monologues and just looked at him. There were times when she couldn’t stop l
ooking at him and appreciating not only his head and profile silhouetted against various kinds of sky and landscape but his optimistic soul, his steady, good-humored voice going on and on, his rambunctious affability. Ivan. At such times, she would feel light-headed with love for him, with gratitude for the odd fortune that had given him to her. She never wanted to lose him, and not only because she loathed change and upset—she loved him. She would put out her hand and touch his flannel-shirted sleeve with one finger, as if testing his reality, and he would look at her, still talking, and smile, and turn back to the road. He was a conscientious driver, keeping his eyes alternately on the speedometer—they went a steady fifty—and on the road, gazing with a small frown out the wide tinted windows that he wiped clean every time they stopped.

  When they drove through towns, searching out restaurants and gas stations, Susannah looked with interest at the people on the streets, hungry for faces after the long hours of highway and scenery. Some of the people she saw would, she knew, stay with her a long time, maybe turn up in a story. There was a cat-faced black man in front of a restaurant where they had corned beef sandwiches one night, who said, “Howdy, folks” to them; fleetingly, Susannah thought it would be fun to know him, even be his girlfriend; she liked his mad look, his funny chuckle and wide-open eyes. And in a knot of women coming out of a store there was one about her age in a red head-scarf and an old raincoat, with an intelligent, humorous face, and Susannah thought, I would like to be her friend. And a nice waitress in Mississippi; and a middle-aged couple, look-alikes, with cropped gray hair and sensible shoes, who camped next to them at a place in Tennessee; and a boy of about fourteen with a pale, beautiful face and hair dyed pale green and brushed straight up like spiky grass, who filled their gas tank in a little Virginia town. Susannah devoured their faces, and other faces, missing her friend Carla and the long walks she used to take from her apartment to Carla’s where she sat listening to gossip about people she didn’t know—Carla’s landlady, her son’s nursery school teacher, her sister, her sister’s friend Diana who worked as a jockey, her old college roommate who had become a nun. Carla loved to talk, Susannah loved to listen. When she left, after pots and pots of tea, she would walk home watching the people she passed and pondering Carla’s tales, all of whose characters were as real to her as her own friends, or the people in the stories she wrote.

  But she wasn’t bored, alone in the van with Ivan all those long, changeless days, and they never quarreled. Susannah wondered whether she would come to look on that trip as an idyllic time, when Ivan didn’t nag at her or deceive her or tell her to grow up.

  Once, when they were crossing the interminable space of Texas, Susannah looked out at the setting sun: pure brilliant orange fading to pink (rose madder, mallow pink, ocher, helianthin) with the distinct black of a row of trees outlined against it.

  “Death,” she said to Ivan, speaking before she thought. It was not a word he liked, not a word it was easy to associate with him. He always seemed to her to represent life; even the way his dark hair sprang from his brow, the way his beard curled crisply around his chin, so eager and healthy, spoke of life. He looked, she had always thought, especially in the mornings when he liked to prowl around naked until it was time to get ready for work, like a god.

  “What?” He took his eyes from the road to look at the sunset. “Did you say death? Why death?”

  “I was thinking of my father, I suppose,” she said apologetically. “And I read somewhere, I can’t remember where”—you can never remember where, he sometimes said, but this time he was silent—“that the souls of the dead are held captive in natural objects like trees until, I forget, there’s some way we can release them—”

  “Your father’s got a long time yet, Susannah.”

  She looked from the black trees to his profile. “No, he doesn’t, Ivan. He could go any minute.”

  “Well. At least he’s getting the best possible care.”

  “And then I read, I think some Indian tribe has this belief, that the dead live only as long as they’re remembered. That as long as there’s a living soul to remember them they never truly die.”

  “He’s lucky he can afford a place like St. Theodore’s,” Ivan said. He always followed his own train of thought, and laid it out patiently until her mind veered to meet it. “Your Dad couldn’t be in better hands.” He reached over and patted hers, clasped tight in her lap around Keats, who slept there in a neat furry ball. “Quit worrying about your Dad. Think about the coming generation.” They left the black trees behind; buildings and a low-lying hill blocked the sunset. “Concentrate on getting pregnant,” Ivan went on. “I’m convinced it helps.” He grinned. “The power of pregnant thinking.”

  She was grateful to him for trying to cheer her up. He was always either cheering her up or getting impatient with her when it didn’t work. He couldn’t believe she was, in fact, contented enough most of the time without his efforts. It’s because I don’t make jokes, Susannah thought. She had never learned to be funny, though she could laugh at other people’s jokes. She turned her hand to clasp his and looked at his forehead, nose, beard, the planes of his cheeks against the sunset colors. “Do you think that’s why people have children, Ivan? Because of death?”

  He merely frowned straight ahead at the highway. A little later he said, after a silence, “Don’t be so morbid, Susannah,” and she was sorry she had brought up the subject. She felt she had ruined the sunset for Ivan. But when they stopped for the night and went out for a spaghetti dinner he was as jolly and talkative as ever, and teased her about getting tomato sauce all over her chin.

  They were traveling the southern route because it was February, but they ran into snow in Arizona and a blizzard in New Mexico (where they were stranded for two days at a deserted campsite, dozing and listening to the radio in the van, with the heater on full blast and in the distance reddish mountains rising from black evergreens). There was sleet and freezing rain in San Antonio, the city immobilized while they, old New Englanders, scoffed at its inability to cope—no plows, no sanders, no snow tires—and holed up in the van another two days, until the temperature rose, miraculously, overnight, into the fifties, and foiled the ice, turning the roads black and wet, with streams of melt running urgently in the gutters. They also encountered a heat-wave in Baton Rouge, hurricane warnings in Mobile, and violent rains in Knoxville, where they had to pull over for three hours and wait it out, munching on granola and reading. “All we saw of the country was the weather,” Susannah said afterward to Duke.

  And superhighways: Route 10 out of Los Angeles through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where they started climbing north, through Alabama, nicking the northwest corner of Georgia, and picked up Route 81 in Tennessee, following it through Virginia and Pennsylvania, and then east on Route 84 to Connecticut. Up north, it was a fairly snowless winter—Pennsylvania and New Jersey surprised them by having no snow cover at all—but it was cold. Toward the end of the trip, to prevent having to sleep in the van (where despite the cats and the heater and their strenuous sex life they woke with toes and noses totally numb, too cold to pee, too cold to talk), they drove longer and longer each day, not stopping until dinner time; and once, through Pennsylvania, driving in shifts all night, so that Connecticut loomed, after the leisurely southern leg of their journey, frighteningly close all of a sudden. They were in New York late one afternoon, they were crossing the Hudson, they were in Danbury by rush hour, and they pushed on and arrived in Chiswick for dinner—Connecticut, where, even longer ago than Susannah had taken her vow to remain childless, she had sworn never to return. Well, vows are meant to be broken, as Ivan always said (referring to his leaving the priesthood), sounding as he sometimes did like a popular song from the fifties. But it was probably true. If people change, and change, shedding skin after skin throughout their lives—and Susannah believed they did—it becomes necessary to review such matters as vows. Particularly those taken in early youth, like hers
, which she made at ten, after she traveled in a taxicab at a terrifying speed down the Connecticut turnpike to the New Haven Airport where she got on an American Airlines plane, clasping the bag of stuffed animals she’d been collecting since she was a baby, her talismans against airplanes, homesickness, terror, whatever demons awaited, vowing never to come back, never never never. As the plane soared into the air, she turned to the nice stewardess, who had come to sit buckled in beside her because she was young and upset; Susannah’s face was filled with such misery and anger that the stewardess recoiled in shock and then put her arms around her and let her cry on her trim bosom, and when that was done brought her a lemonade and a ham sandwich. By that time, Connecticut was lost beneath the clouds—forever, thought Susannah, not having yet learned about the fragility of vows.