“Why do they have those names?” Mary Claire asked her.
“They’re named after poets,” Susannah said. “I took a course in college once, and read their poems, and liked them. They were all three friends,” she added, wondering if she was remembering right.
“I like Shelley best.”
“The name, you mean,” said Mary Grace.
“Oh, yes—the name—I like all the cats,” Mary Claire said, and the twins petted each cat in turn, scrupulously refusing to have favorites lest they hurt feelings.
She found she could relax with the twins by the process of recalling herself at that age—five going on six. She could remember the long blissful excursions with her father—bike rides or car trips, neither of them caring where they went as long as they could go far enough to wipe away for a while the hard silences of home. Susannah would tell Edwin about school, her teacher, her friend Ellen, her feuds with the other girls, her difficulties with numbers, her joy in learning to read. He always listened carefully, asking questions—not too many, and all the right ones, so that you knew he really cared about the answers. Their conversations were keepsakes to put away and treasure, and at night, in bed before sleep, she used to clutch her old plush tiger or her floppy-eared dog in her arms and go over and over them, committing them to memory just in case, just in case.… She always knew—so did Peter—that her parents would split up, and she had dreaded losing her father. She could still recall with precision the sensation of scared joy that filled her when they did separate and she was allowed, after all, to go west with Edwin.
She telephoned Peter one night after the twins were in bed and Duke and Ivan were drinking beer in the kitchen. She sat on the landing wrapped in a blanket and dialed Peter’s number. She had talked to him twice from California, feeling he should know about Edwin’s condition, and then about her migration back to Connecticut. They were, in a way, friends, and always had been, though they had often hated each other and had fought, bitterly, as children—little caricatures of their parents—and whenever Susannah heard Peter’s voice, or had a letter from him, it was as if something that had been pinching her was eased and made comfortable, some weight removed, a missing piece clicked into place. My brother, she thought—and just as the words my mother seemed so strange and unwieldy that she sometimes stammered over them, my brother sounded right. She loved to say to people: my brother in Connecticut, my brother Peter who’s in graduate school at Yale, my brother back east.…
“Peter? It’s me—Susannah. We’re here.”
The stair landing seemed to be at the center of all four winds. Susannah got colder and colder as they talked about the trip, the restaurant, movies, Peter’s writer’s block, Edwin, the weather. She loved talking to Peter, she could have sat there forever discussing the new Woody Allen film if she hadn’t been freezing. She pulled the blanket tighter around her feet, tucking them in.
“I’ve got to hang up in a second, Peter, this phone is in the coldest spot in the house—”
“Call me back in the spring.”
She chuckled and said, “I just want to ask you, though, about—I mean, does she know we were coming?”
“Mom? Oh, yes.”
“You told her?”
“I told her.” He sighed, and she waited for him to go on but he said nothing.
“I assume she’s not exactly overjoyed,” Susannah said finally.
“It was a surprise to her.”
“Did you tell her about Dad?”
“Oh, no—no. I never do mention him to her.”
“No, I suppose not.” Susannah sighed herself, wondering what had happened to their pleasant conversation. “Well … I suppose I’d better go thaw out my feet.”
“Okay. I suppose I’d better go and do some damn thing.”
“Peter, are you all right? You seem sort of glum all of a sudden.”
“No, I’m fine, I just wish you and Mom would … I guess I mean that I wish she wasn’t so—”
“What?”
“Touchy. Close-minded. I don’t know.”
“O God, why did we ever come here?” Susannah hit her frozen feet with her closed fist; it hurt, and she rubbed first one foot, then the other. Tears tickled her nose.
“She’ll get over it, Susannah. You know how she is. And I’m glad you’re here. I’m sorry if that hasn’t been coming across, honey pie.” Susannah smiled and wiped her eyes—honey pie. “I’ve been having kind of a hard time myself with this damned dissertation, and with other things.” He snorted, meaning it for a laugh. “Too numerous to mention.”
“Oh, Peter.”
“Don’t worry. I just want you to know I’m glad you’re here, and I think it’ll work out with Mom. She can be terrific, Susannah, but I don’t deny she can be a bitch, too. And she’s getting old. Set in her ways.”
“Well, I didn’t move here for the purpose of reconciling with her, Peter. I’m not all that keen on it myself. It’s Ivan who thinks it would be so neat.”
“Maybe it will be. Who knows?”
Susannah shook her head. “It doesn’t sound neat, Peter, it sounds damned messy. Oh, why can’t I just have a regular, supportive mother, who’d welcome me and back me up a little? She’s always—” A flare of anger, with tears behind it, rose and then subsided. She sighed again. Who was she angry at, anyway? A face on the television, a woman she hadn’t seen—except for a few dazed, painful moments—in seventeen years.
“Don’t worry, Susannah. I’m pretty sure it’ll work out.”
“I don’t intend to worry. Now tell me when you’re coming to see us.”
They arranged that he would—hesitantly, it had been so long, and they didn’t make it soon, but Susannah looked forward to it happily, with a catch of excitement she knew Peter shared. After she hung up she sat on the landing a while longer in spite of the cold, rubbing her feet through the blanket, wondering what Peter’s problems were, wondering what ways her mother was set in. She tried to recall Rosie smiling—in person, not her black-and-white television smile (even that was rare enough)—but all she could remember was the disapproving frown she had seen so often, and always, dimly, that horrible memory of their last encounter, and the force of Rosie’s palm striking her cheek, and the hard strength that had seemed to flow out of her to Susannah, sweeping her away like a dead leaf.
Duke came out to see if she was off the phone; he had to make a call.
“I was talking to my brother,” she said, painfully getting up. “I invited him to come out and see us one of these days.”
“He’s in New Haven?”
She nodded. “He has writer’s block.”
“What’s he writing?”
“A dissertation on Dante.”
“You’re a family of other-worldly writers, I see,” Duke said with a laugh. “And you look like you’re freezing, Susannah. Get in there by the stove.”
She moved aside for him to pass her on the stairs, and he smiled his upside-down smile. “You’re sure you don’t mind that we’re here, Duke?” she asked him.
“Mind?” He stopped a step above her and looked down. Normally she was a fraction taller than he, and it seemed odd to look up at him. “Do I mind? Susannah, I love having you two here. Don’t you think I’ve been lonely?”
She reached up, squeezed his hand quickly, and released it. The backs of his fingers were rough, as if they’d been sandpapered. “It’s good of you all the same, Duke, to take us in.”
“It’s good of you to come all the way east to be taken in,” he said. They stood a moment smiling at each other before she made her way downstairs, wrapped in her blanket, to the stove.
Ivan sat making sketches at the kitchen table. The cats lay curled in a heap. “I just talked to Peter,” she said.
He looked up. “Oh. How’s old Peter?”
“Ivan, I don’t want you to get in touch with my mother. Please. Promise me you won’t.”
“Well, not right away, Susie. In time.”
“No.” She sat down in a rocking chair and let her blanket fall away. She wore a denim skirt and black woolen tights with a hole in the knee, and she pinched the sides of the hole together over her skin. “I don’t want to get friendly with her, Ivan. She doesn’t want me here—she doesn’t want to be friends. And I don’t either.”
“How do you know she doesn’t?”
“Peter.”
“Oh, Peter. Of course Peter’s trying to keep you two apart,” he said, as if this was an obvious, reasonable, and long-held conviction. “He doesn’t want to share his precious mama.”
“Why do you say that, Ivan?” He bent over the table again, laid ruler against paper, and carefully, in silence, drew a short black line. “What on earth makes you think that’s true?” she asked.
“Oh, come on, Susannah.” He looked up irritably. “Same reason you never tried to bring Edwin and Peter together. Remember when Peter came out to see you? Did you engineer a reunion?”
“Dad was in Mexico, Ivan. I never even thought of it, and neither did Peter.”
“You think he wouldn’t have skipped going to Mexico if you’d told him his son was in town and wanted to see him?”
“But Peter didn’t.”
“That’s what I’m saying, Susannah. It takes two to work things out, and they sometimes need a third party to arrange them. You know that perfectly well. And you never made an attempt. So don’t be surprised if your brother doesn’t, either.”
She didn’t reply. She pulled at her tights with the fingers of one hand while she bit the cuticles of the other. There was silence in the room except for a rasp when Ivan erased something. Duke was talking softly on the landing. She wondered whom he had called; there hadn’t, so far, been the hint of a girlfriend. Byron extricated himself from the other two cats, stretched and yawned, and leapt to Susannah’s lap. She sat scratching him behind the ears and resenting Ivan, with his glib analyses of other people’s business, and his know-it-all tone of voice, his instructor voice that must, she thought, have driven his Buffalo parishioners up the wall. “Father Cord,” she imagined them saying to each other with a grimace. “Yack yack yack, he’s got an answer for everything.” The idea amused her—Ivan in his cassock (had he worn a cassock?) hammering home tedious doctrine to a sea of irritated Sunday-morning faces. They kept looking at their watches and nudging each other, rolling their eyes. She wondered if he drove anyone out of the church with his smug lectures, and she cheered up, imagining a stream of people marching out of St. Lucy’s to a Lutheran or Baptist church down the street, mumbling, “I can’t take it any more, that Father Cord.…”
Duke returned to find her smiling. “What’s so funny?” he asked, and Ivan looked up from his work, curious.
But she said nothing, just shook her head and smiled on. As always, it was her own thoughts that consoled her—that delighted her, amused her, and reconciled her to the thorns of life, and the blood.
Ivan and Duke applied themselves to their project, the still unchristened restaurant. They began interviewing contractors and pricing supplies. Ivan, who enjoyed manual labor, kept saying, “I can hardly wait to get my hands on lumber.” They were planning to do much of the renovation work themselves, and the talk around the woodstove in the cold evenings was all of two-by-fours and floor tile. There was a great debate over ceramic tile versus vinyl—Ivan wanted earth-brown ceramic, Duke wanted black and white checkerboard vinyl. Duke called Ivan extravagant, Ivan called Duke middle class—-joking exchanges with grains of sincerity embedded in them. Susannah suggested bare wooden floors, plain plywood, simple and rustic.
“The Board of Health wouldn’t approve,” said Duke.
“Tacky, anyway,” said Ivan. “Too California.”
His calm good nature began to worry Susannah, not because it was uncharacteristic (Ivan was renowned for his amiability; only with his wife did it ever slip) but because in this case it seemed forced: his smiles were too quick, his silences loaded, his gaze wandering off into the distance while his fingers drummed on a tabletop. He might fool Duke, but he didn’t fool Susannah, who was used to scrutinizing Ivan’s words, Ivan’s moods, for concealed dangers. She had a feeling these conversations made him boiling mad, and not only at her for her ignorant suggestions—predictable spinoffs from her general uselessness in the real world—but at Duke for his infernal practical streak, which Ivan knew would prevail. The cheap black and white vinyl was as good as laid.
Still, he persisted, while Susannah watched and listened with apprehension. “Sure it’s cheaper, Duke, but you want durability you go with ceramic,” Ivan would say, making Susannah smile in spite of herself at the ease with which Ivan had picked up the vocabulary and the inflections of the workmen they talked to, the men at the wholesale lumber supply, the plumbers and carpenters. She wondered, too, if her apprehensions about the collaboration weren’t a trifle absurd, as so many of her worries proved to be. Ivan was always telling her she took life too seriously—on the days when he wasn’t telling her she didn’t take it seriously enough—and she knew that sometimes she did. Maybe Ivan’s anger didn’t go deep; maybe it was at least half show, maybe it was a private, affectionate signal between him and Duke—Ivan’s way of saying to his old friend: I’m so fond of you I can even put up with this damned bullying. Duke smiled at Susannah sometimes, over Ivan’s head, a friendly, even intimate smile that she felt vaguely disloyal returning. She wondered if Duke found Ivan funny, if he also had visions of Father Cord and his grumbling flock.
She hadn’t, after all, gotten pregnant in the van. “You’ll get pregnant here, then,” Ivan told her confidently when they’d been at Duke’s a week. “Back home in good old Connecticut where you were born. And we’ll call the kid Chiswick.”
“I was born in Boston, Ivan.”
“Well, raised,” he said, looking annoyed.
She laughed at him. “We could take a trip to Boston if you insist on seeing this so mystically. We could make love on Marlborough Street where I was conceived.”
She felt his smile against her cheek. They were lying in bed; his palm was spread out on her flat stomach. “I know people have babies every day,” he said. “But it seems so staggering to actually do it, ourselves. I can really understand all those primitive fertility rites. It’s so important.” He peered at her in the dark. “Do you feel comfortable here? In this house? Do you feel as if it could happen?”
“Oh, yes,” she said drowsily, and snuggled against him. If they were very still she could sometimes hear the old house creak. “I feel more home here than I did back in L.A.”
“You seem to like the kids.”
“I love the kids. I love the way they enjoy their lives. That’s something I can’t remember doing, not really—I was so ornery at that age.”
“Not scared of them any more?” he teased her. He must have been drowsy because he didn’t pursue the reference to her childhood. She wondered if he’d been in touch with Rosie. She was sure he hadn’t, but Ivan was an expert dissembler, and sure was the wrong word. She was never sure; for all she knew he already had a girl.
“I’m not scared of anything but Dad dying,” she said.
“Susannah.” He removed his hand from her stomach; he was wide awake. She sensed his exasperation in the dark, and she was sorry for having caused it. She knew why she had brought up her father just then—as a foil to Ivan, to her mother, to Ivan’s girls. As a specter of death to set against Ivan with all his life. She was ashamed of herself.
“Sh,” she said. “Never mind, I’m sorry, I know it’s best this way, Ivan, and I’m glad we’re here. I just miss him, I can’t help it. But I know we’ve done the right thing.” She could feel how tensely he was lying beside her. “Don’t be angry, Ivan.”
“You call him often enough.”
“I know,” she said, and lay quietly, wondering if it would be a relief to her, after all, when she called one day and Mrs. Panza or Dr. Strauss told her it was over. “Maybe it will be a sort of relief when he d
ies, Ivan,” she said after a while. “I won’t be so torn.”
“Mmm,” he said. He was asleep. She turned over, he snuggled against her back, and she thought to herself, it’s not true, I don’t want to be there watching him die, I want to be here. A scene came into her mind, an improbable one out of old movies—herself telling Ivan they were going to have a baby, and his tender, solicitous astonishment. She smiled. The way Ivan monitored her menstrual cycle and her fertile days and their lovemaking, he’d probably know before she did. How funny it must have been, back in the days—had there been such days? really?—when women’s bodies were mysterious temples to their husbands. Could men have been so ignorant? And was it now, this very minute, happening deep inside her, sperm and egg uniting in their vital embrace, and their baby, even now, beginning to grow? The thought rubbed away the guilt she inevitably felt whenever she admitted to herself that she preferred cold Connecticut, where life was, to her father’s slow dying in California.
She lay curled against Ivan, listening to the sound of the wind whipping past outside their window, and the cats purring themselves to sleep at her feet. She had never stopped being grateful for silence to sleep by—this kind of silence. For a long time after she and Edwin had moved out to New Mexico, Susannah had fallen asleep to the echoes, from the depths and crannies of her mind, of her parents arguing. They had begun to argue, with brutal suddenness, one summer evening, and hadn’t stopped until Edwin left the house for good in the autumn—a couple of hard months that had finally brought her together with Peter in fearful horror. Their parents had never argued, all those years—had long since, in fact, stopped speaking to each other. The children had become used to the cold silence in their house—had become part of it, so that when the noisy fights began, on hot summer nights after they had gone up to bed, they hadn’t known what to do. Susannah sometimes crept into Peter’s room, and they sat in the dim light staring at each other, wordless and frightened, listening to the long, noisy, heedless battles downstairs, the angry words bouncing off the walls. The words had struck Susannah and her brother with their violence, their ugliness, like actual blows, her mother’s shrill voice going on and on, her father’s hard and strained, as if saved up for the long, almost guttural speeches that hit and hit and hit until her mother’s protest came. And now and then a blow, or something thrown. And then a horrible silence out of which Susannah and Peter would try to salvage sleep.
The Garden Path Page 10