The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “I just wanted to meet my mother-in-law, darn it,” he said—and, somehow, she’d untied her gardening apron and left it and her gloves by the peonies, and they were walking together toward the house. “I’m not much of a feuder. I hate arguments, and I like family, and Susannah and I don’t have so much of it that we can afford to let any of it get away. At least, that’s my feeling.” He held the screen door for Rosie and followed her into the kitchen. “I don’t mind telling you that Susannah has been just a little reluctant to come over and see you. It’s certainly not my place to make any judgments or say who’s in the wrong, and I’m not going to do it. But I decided I’m not going to just sit back and let this thing accumulate any further, not if I can help it. So I said to myself, I’m going over there and see that mother-in-law of mine. I’m going to get some friendliness into this family if my wife murders me for it. Oh—thanks,” he said, accepting the can of beer she held out to him.

  They sat down at the table, and his presence seemed to fill her kitchen. He was an amazing creature—older, she saw, than Susannah, but full of all the vitality her daughter, as Rosie recalled her, had so comprehensively lacked. She could barely take it in, that this was her husband, and she wondered what on earth had drawn them together—or, more accurately, what had drawn him to her. She had no trouble imagining Susannah wanting to latch on to Ivan—any woman would. Rosie found herself warming to him, amazed at the transformation he had undergone since his brief appearance at her mother’s funeral. Was it simply a matter of a haircut, a trimmed beard, a puppydog smile?

  It wasn’t, she found out soon enough. “I feel I ought to apologize, just about, for that other time I met you,” he said. His grin disappeared, and he ran his fingers through his beard, looking pensive. “It was a pretty bad time in my life. Susannah and I were at our wit’s end. We were jobless, moneyless. We were hopeless. Literally. We didn’t have a hope in the world.” He drank a huge swallow of beer, keeping his eyes on Rosie; they were, unexpectedly, blue eyes, almond-shaped above high, ruddy cheekbones. “We were taking pills. Amphetamines. I still can’t believe how low we’d sunk, what depths we—” He leaned forward across the table to look at her close up. “I was a different person, Rosie,” he said. “And I know I didn’t ask you if I could call you Rosie, but I’m asking you now, and I hope you won’t mind.”

  “No,” she said. “Of course I don’t. Ivan,” she added.

  “Rosie,” he said, smiling again and then going somber as he resumed his story. “Anyway, we were taking these damn things, and then we decided to come east for Susannah’s grandmother’s funeral. That was my idea, mostly, I suppose. God, I hated California—still do, always did. I’m a New Englander myself—from Maine, way up at the cold end of it, and I jumped at the chance to get back east for a couple of days. I’m probably the only person on earth who hates the West Coast. Hates it! So we got on the plane, and Susannah forgot to pack the damn pills. We realized it just before Chicago. There we were, a thousand miles from home, and we clutched each other, and we wept. Rosie, I’m telling you the truth. We cried our eyes out. That’s the condition we were in.”

  He paused, and Rosie got a beer for herself. She could feel him watch her as she went to the refrigerator and returned. He had a steady gaze that never seemed to blink. She wondered, suddenly, if he was Susannah’s emissary, sent to break the ice.

  “I was a priest for eight years,” Ivan said. “Can you believe that? I was at a parish in Buffalo for the last five of them. And I was miserable there. Miserable. But while I was sitting in that jet at O’Hare airport waiting to take off again, I was twice as miserable, ten times, a hundred times as miserable as I’d ever been up in Buffalo. I knew I’d hit bottom, and I was sick with the knowledge of it. I spent a good portion of that trip in the john, just throwing up and crying. I can’t forget it, either. A grown man, thirty-three years old I was then, puking in the bathroom of a jet plane because my wife had forgotten to pack a little bottle of brown pills. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  Rosie hadn’t, so far, spoken, and she continued not to speak. She was speechless with—she didn’t know what. Shock, but more than shock. Some kind of release, relief, the consciousness of her life flowing through her body.

  “So,” said Ivan, and took a swallow of beer, “so by the time we saw you at the church we were in bad, bad shape, and Susannah—my wife—” He paused, shook his head, fingered his beard. “She didn’t handle it right. I can’t blame you for getting mad. We just barged in. Oh God, it was awful. Wasn’t it? Awful?”

  His narrow eyes widened, deepened. They looked wet, the thick black lashes around them stuck together in points. “Yes,” Rosie said. “It was. Awful.”

  He let out a sigh as if he’d been holding his breath. “And then we got the money, and it changed our lives. God bless your mother, Rosie. I just wish I’d known her. God rest her soul.”

  Yes, she could imagine him a priest, those long, hairy-knuckled fingers holding up bread and wine, that urgent voice raised in prayer, those arms stretched out in blessing. She could imagine him a priest with far more ease than she could imagine him mated with Susannah.

  “What did you do with it? How did it, the money—” She stopped, because he had leaned toward her again, and this time he took her hand.

  “Do you really want to hear this, Rosie? I hope you do, because it gives me a lot of satisfaction to tell it.” His eyes were blue, but not cold. Blue eyes normally made her uneasy—the flat, insipid light blue of Susannah’s and Edwin’s eyes, like those that look so eerie on Siberian huskies. Ivan’s eyes were different, warmer, a darker blue, with depths. They were like the ocean, like certain flowers, they were—he was—she hadn’t even realized it until then, she’d merely thought there was something unusual about him, she couldn’t think what it was, but when he took her hand she recognized that the oddity about him was that he was the most attractive man she’d ever been close to.

  “Yes,” she said, and removed her hand from his. “I do want to hear it. Ivan.”

  He smiled at her. His hand had been warm and rough. She looked at it, curled around his beer can, the long fingers splayed out. There was a bowl of purple and white lilacs on the table between them, and as she watched he touched a blossom with his fingers, caressed the tiny petals, and then picked a floweret and rolled it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger. “It wasn’t just the money that changed things,” he said. “It was the visit, the trip east, the whole thing. First of all, I said to Susannah that first night—we were staying with Duke. He’s our chef. He was working in New Haven then, and he and his wife had a big apartment where they kindly let us stay. Duke’s an old college buddy of mine, and his wife is dead now, poor bastard. But that’s another story. So I said to Susannah, now’s our chance to kick the habit, those goddam California pills. It was providence, I said, that made you forget them. It gives us a chance. At first she was going to get Duke, or Margie, Duke’s wife—she was a nurse—to get some for us, but I talked her out of it. Sick as we were, we sat on our bed that night after we saw Susannah’s Uncle Jim, and we talked it out, and we made the decision: no more. And we decided something else. We’d go back to California, and we’d wait, and plan, and save, and when we could manage it we’d come back east, for good. And here we are,” he added triumphantly. He tipped up his beer can and drank, and she watched him. She looked at his short, soft beard, and at the black, curlier hair brushed back from his forehead, and at his arms tanned golden beneath their tangle of hair, and she became conscious of a desire to touch him.

  He went on, cheerfully. “So we invested the money we inherited. It took months to come. Hell, I don’t think we got it until around Christmas, and when we got the check we took it to a broker. I’m serious, now, we went to a regular stockbroker on Wilshire Boulevard. Can you imagine this? Believe me, we’re not the type, but there we were. Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Mr. and Mrs. Filthy Capitalist System, handing our cash over to the money boys. We invested in on
e of those budget motel chains, a little one called Happy Nights. I don’t think they’ve come east yet, but they will. They’re a hell of an outfit, and we tripled our money in two years. Can you believe it? We just sat back and watched that stock shoot up like wildflowers. And then, the summer before we left, just before we were going to sell it—when we got the chance to go in with Duke on a restaurant—the goddamn stock split. This is the truth, Rosie. It split, and we sat on it, and we cleaned up, and we headed for Connecticut with our pockets lined with gold.” He sat back, chuckling. She laughed with him, and then they sat, smiling comfortably at each other.

  “I talk a lot,” he said. “But I have a lot to tell you. It’s not every day you meet a long-lost mother-in-law. I don’t mind telling you I’ve admired you for years. I used to love that TV show. I’d sit there and think, this terrific-looking lady is family.”

  It was late afternoon, a glorious May day, and sun was streaming in the kitchen window. The room was filled with a golden glow, with heat, with the scent of the lilacs. Rosie wiped a rim of sweat from her upper lip and pushed her hair off her face. She was wishing she could go upstairs and wash—she’d been in the garden since lunch—and put on some makeup and brush her hair, but she was afraid if she excused herself he’d be gone when she returned. He was a large, sturdy, staggeringly tangible person, but she thought of him as fragile—he’d come into her life so unexpectedly, so whimsically, she feared he’d disappear from it the same way if she didn’t keep an eye on him.

  She offered him another beer. He crushed his empty can in one hand, considering the idea, and said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a lot more to say, Rosie, and if you’re not scheduled for something more interesting tonight I’d like to cook dinner for you. Here in your kitchen, if you don’t mind. Susannah and Duke and the kids went to Mystic for the day. They’re going to the Aquarium, and then Duke knows someone over there who wants to sell one of those antique cash registers, cheap. We open in a week, you know—or maybe you don’t. We’ve had to push back that date about ten times. You’d think it’d be a simple operation, getting the place ready—I mean, it’s not as if we’re doing anything fancy, it’s not exactly the Four Seasons! But the details, the waiting, the red tape!” He stood up. “So let’s do this. You go on up and shower or whatever; I know how you feel after working in the garden on a hot day, I’ve done enough of it—and do you know there’s dirt on your face? There.” He pointed to her left cheek. She thought for a second he was going to touch it, and she drew back and rubbed at it. “Nope,” he said, laughing. “You’re going to have to wash it. So while you’re doing that I’ll go to that posh little market in town and get the ingredients for the best dinner you’ve ever had. How does that sound?”

  He stood over her. The sun poured in the window behind him, and looking up at him, she thought, Here’s the sign I was waiting for—Ivan. But what he signified, she had no idea.

  “What kids?” she asked. She took in the word belatedly, and her heart jumped.

  “Kids? Oh—kids. Duke’s two girls—twins. Mary Claire and Mary Grace. Duke let them stay out of school today so they could see the Aquarium. Cute kids, but holy terrors. See?” He grinned at her. “I told you I had a lot to tell you. I’ve got a thousand things you’ve got to know. What do you say? Can I make you dinner?”

  “Well … yes, of course,” she said, standing up. “But you don’t have to go to the store, we could—” She gestured around the kitchen, trying to recall what food was on hand.

  “Nope—I insist. This has got to be my dinner, and I only know two recipes. No substitutions.” He took car keys from his pocket—he wore jeans, a red polo shirt, and sneakers—and jingled them. “I’ll be back before you’re out of the shower. Leave the door open.”

  He was gone—out the back door, down the steps, around the side to the front. She could hear his footsteps, hear him whistle—what was it? an old Beatles song she couldn’t place—hear him slam a car door, start the motor, drive off. She sat at the table and finished her beer. Her heart pounded. No, Susannah hadn’t sent him, she was sure of it. He had come to see her out of curiosity and simple friendliness. Ivan.

  The silence and the beer and the sun lulled her, nearly put her to sleep. All she could think were two things: would he come back? and what was she getting into?

  She roused herself and went upstairs to shower. She threw her sweaty gardening clothes in a heap and stood naked, wondering what to wear. What did you wear to entertain the husband of your estranged daughter? She shivered in spite of the heat. She remembered, suddenly, Barney and herself in the shower, on the bath mat, and she was shocked at the longing, the loss she felt.

  When she looked in the mirror after her shower, her face was pink and glowing, she thought, even without makeup. She looked unexpectedly girlish, and she smiled, for once, at her reflection. Ridiculous, she thought, smiling. But Barney had said she was beautiful. Barney’s a fifty-five-year-old man, some baleful echo answered. She ignored it. She shook her hair forward, bent from the waist, and blew it dry—or nearly dry. It was thick and heavy, and held water like wool, and she was in a hurry: what if he came back, found her not ready, and left? She turned off the dryer, listening for a car, a whistle, footsteps. What she wanted was to be dressed, downstairs, at ease in the cool living room with a drink when he returned. He had come to see her, because he had always admired her. He’d just wanted to meet his mother-in-law, darn it. Rosie smiled, and her heart pounded hard in her chest. This visit, this dinner, the bearded god who’d invaded her garden had nothing to do with Susannah. Ivan would be her friend.

  Briefly, for a space of seconds, she was conscious of disappointment, that it was Ivan, and not Susannah, who was offering a hand to her. But she didn’t let it last. Of course it was a bizarre situation. Kiki Sheffield would be horrified. Her cousin Debbie would swoon with disapproval. But when had she ever done the conventional thing? And why should she be a conventional mother-in-law?

  She put on some makeup and dressed, quickly, in clean jeans and a T-shirt, and looked in the mirror—too gardeny, too tailored, too masculine, for God’s sake: he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She changed into a dress, a black flowered cotton with a flounce around the hem, and looked into the mirror again: too la di da? too self-consciously feminine? too contrived? or—God forbid—too juvenile? too much the last gasp? the aging sexpot? But she left it on because it had a low neck and showed off her smallish waist (her hips she ignored) and there wasn’t time to change again. She began to feel frantic; he’d be back any minute—but would he come back? would he? She brushed her damp hair, leaving it to hang around her face in waves, then—no, pulling it loosely back with a barrette, then braiding it and twisting it into a loose knot. Too messy, too wet. She ran back to the bathroom, dried it some more, listening—a whistle? a step?—and pulled it off her neck, finally, into a neater knot, leaving it loose in front, unstudied. Messy? Mirror—it would have to do. Did she still look girlish, still pink and pretty? A little more blusher—not much (thinking of old women with a spot of rouge on each cheek)—and earrings. Gold hoops? Too ethnic? No. Fine. Hoops.

  And ran downstairs, hearing a car door slam. But it was the Sheffields, unloading bags of peat moss and a new garden hose. Rosie looked at the clock; she had been upstairs exactly fifteen minutes.

  Well. She pressed both hands to her chest, breathing deeply: calm down, old girl. Her heart still pounded, and the question pounded in her head: will he come back? She poured herself a little sherry—not beer, or she’d be running to the bathroom every half-hour—and stood by the window, in the sun, watching Jim and Kiki. She considered going out to talk to them, so he’d find her, if he did come back, chatting casually with the neighbors, absorbed, indifferent—“Oh, there you are! Back already? Jim, Kiki, meet my son-in-law, Ivan Cord.” But no—she could imagine friendly Ivan inviting the Sheffields over to dinner, and the evening turning into a Scrabble tournament, with the Sheffields telling him how Rosie really shou
ld get down to Florida in the winter, and Jim talking about his arthritis and how Frank Sinatra might look like an overweight businessman but he still had his voice, God bless him.

  The Sheffields went inside. She continued to stand by the window—barefoot, she realized, and went to find sandals, and returned to her post. She was watching, she thought to herself with disgust, with delight, like a teenager waiting for her date—watching for a car she wouldn’t recognize, one with California plates, most likely, to pull up in front, and Ivan to jump out, whistling. She looked at the clock. He’d been gone twenty minutes. Five minutes into town, ten in the store, five back, he could be here by now if Clyde’s wasn’t crowded. Ten minutes more at the most. If he wasn’t back in ten minutes he wasn’t coming, and she’d go next door and invite Jim and Kiki for drinks.

  She poured herself another sherry—will he come back? and what am I getting myself into?—and, to demonstrate to herself how truly nonchalant she could be, she began to straighten up the living room, brushing crumbs off a table, stacking up books, fluffing pillows, and she began to hum the song Ivan had been whistling. What was it? Surely an old Beatles tune. Dee dee dee da da, dee dee dee da—it came to her, with a jolt. “When I’m Sixty-Four.” That’s what it was. And he won’t come back, he won’t. You’re ridiculous, ridiculous, in your little dress, your earrings—

  And a door slammed. She ran to the window. A large blue van had pulled up, and there was Ivan hopping out of it, with a bag of groceries, whistling “Tea for Two.”