The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  That evening she telephoned Edwin, intending to tell him about the breakup, but he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sedated, he was having a bad night.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Mrs. Panza said. “Just pain.”

  Just pain. Susannah hung up, knowing she couldn’t have told him and added to it. She remembered the tears in his eyes when she had promised to give him a grandchild, the slackness of his cheek when she wiped the tears with her finger. She was tempted, for one weak, perverse moment, to fly out to California, kneel by Edwin’s bed, and cry—just cry into his shoulder, blubbering “Daddy,” for the comfort of his trembly hand patting her back, his reedy voice breaking into some corny old song to cheer her up.

  Duke hired a new waitress, a friend of Ginger’s called Lois. “She’s forty-one, and she’s got three kids,” Duke said.

  “You’re not going to run off to California with her?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, not smiling. She laughed, inappropriately, in confusion, and changed the subject. It was easy, now that they lived alone together, to stumble close to what wasn’t going to be said.

  The summer days went by, long, slow, hot, silent days that seemed to Susannah unreal, days that hovered like bees, tentative and waiting. The longer hours kept Duke later at the Café—that, or Susannah’s desperately faked good humor—and when he did come home, at night, the house felt huge around them. Ginger kept inviting the two of them down to dinner at her place that first week, and they accepted each time, as if their crisis was so immense it precluded normal life. It was the house’s silence they were fleeing from, and the awkward intimacies it pressed on them.

  “You should marry Duke,” Ginger said bluntly to Susannah after dinner one night. Duke was watching the Yankees on Ginger’s color TV, and she and Susannah sat in the kitchen over second cups of tea. The joint grumblings of the dishwasher and the air conditioner enclosed their words.

  Susannah flushed, and decided to be honest. “I think about it sometimes, Ginger,” she said, and wished immediately that she hadn’t. No: this was nobody’s business; she briefly disliked Ginger’s warm niceness that had dragged even that much out of her. “But it’s absurd,” she amended. “Duke and I are friends. I think about it only because I feel so lost. It’s hard to be married so long and then all of a sudden be alone.”

  “Don’t I know,” Ginger said with feeling.

  “But I’ll get used to it.”

  “I’m sure you will. I did, in about three days. Got to like it a lot.” Ginger grinned, leaned forward and said softly, “But I still think it’s a good idea.” She jerked her head toward the other room where Duke sat in front of the television.

  She and Ginger went in to join him. The Red Sox beat the Yankees 4–2.

  “Damn,” said Duke, then got up to snap off the television. “But I can’t complain. At least the strike is over.”

  He was getting paunchy, Susannah saw. She thought of Ivan’s perfect movie-star body and couldn’t tell whether the emotion she felt was revulsion or longing. The paunch made Duke seem genuine—not someone she’d made up. Her fantasies about Duke were all of comfort, ease, simple pleasure. She must have been crazy to love Ivan; how sane it would be to love Duke. And how right, of course, Ginger was. And yet there was Duke, as brotherly as Peter, patting her shoulder and making her tea, and going off to bed each night early, with a smile at her that was almost apologetic, faintly embarrassed, fond maybe, but certainly not inviting. The idea stuck in her mind, though, tempting her, affording a kind of comfort—assuring her, if nothing else, that she was sane, and capable of judgment. Sometimes she summoned up the fantasies herself; sometimes when they filled her head she tried to force them out, but they persisted no matter what she did, inventing themselves right along with scenes for her story.

  Her story: it was another new one, about a science-fiction writer whose tales came true. It was called “Ashes and Sparks,” a phrase from a poem she had read long ago. After the first few rough days, she was, incredibly, working well again, and the story filled her time, progressing with a logic of its own, originating from a part of her that was unaffected by events, a part that had its own life and its own emotion. She worked every day, with great concentration and very slowly, for hours. Then she went outside to sit, reading, on the ragged, shady grass by the pond or, sometimes, to work in the garden in the sun. She had to force herself, at first, into the garden. It was Ivan’s job; she had driven him away, therefore it became her responsibility. But she was beginning to like it, at least in short stretches. She was getting a pinkish tan; she had never had a tan in California, and she looked in amazement at the distinct white line on her wrist where her watchband went. She mulched the lettuce with straw to keep the moisture in; it seemed to flourish, and she was pleased when Duke said he’d never been able to keep it from bolting in August. She read somewhere that once a string bean is left to rot on the stem the whole plant withers and dies, and she inspected the beans daily, picking them before they got big and mealy.

  The cats stayed near her, stretching themselves out between the rows and going to sleep on the warm straw. What a solace animals were, with their affections based on food and warmth, such simple, sensible creatures. She wondered whether Ivan missed them, driving across the country—into the sunset this time, how unpleasant it must be driving with the sun in your eyes—without the cats, without her, with only Garnet, a stranger; whether he thought of her weeding his garden back east, and of the cats looking up at her with their trusting yellow eyes. She patted them, murmuring their names, saying, “Hmm? Hmm, kitty-cats?” as if they might supply some sort of answer, but they only blinked at her, and when she squatted down to pull weeds they tried to climb into her lap.

  She kept Ivan in her mind as she pulled weeds, dutifully, almost as though she was cramming for a test. It was vital, she thought, to comprehend Ivan, and what had happened. She wondered what he used to think about when he took himself out there to work in the garden. His deceptions, most likely; how to keep his stories straight and his women happy—all of the teenage tramps, the secretaries and hairdressers he picked up in bars, the idle housewives he amused after work or before dinner or whenever he could catch a free moment. She imagined him, during his five months in Connecticut, in a frenzy of lust, speeding from one assignation to another and then coming home to bury himself in his acquiescent wife. How she had loved him, that poor wife—years of stupid love. And then how quick the end had been—Garnet and her untouched tea, and herself crying in Duke’s arms. She closed her eyes in the sun, and Ivan smiled at her, the tiny wrinkles fanning out from his blue, blue eyes. She remembered what a pleasure it was simply looking at him; he was like a god in the garden with his lean back bent in the sun. And probably, she told herself, he hadn’t been thinking about any of them; the ultimate insult, that none of them—us, Susannah thought, none of us—mattered to him at all. Maybe he thought about baseball, or the California coast, or his childhood, or the day’s take at the Café. He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t love any of us, Garnet had said. It’s you he loves. Had she said that? If so, she had been wrong. Poor stupid Garnet. What would become of that poor cow? She hoped they drove each other crazy. Your husband is sleeping with your mother, she had said. A bombshell. Susannah told herself, from time to time, that she should talk about it with someone. Was it healthy to keep such a loaded fact to herself? Shouldn’t she defuse it by spreading it thinner, collecting reactions and opinions and advice? Should she at least give Ginger a crack at it? But she kept thinking: not yet. She had never, she felt, needed so badly to spend time alone. She had never had so much thinking to do, so many threads to sort, and the most extravagantly tangled thread, the one that kept knotting itself in her mind, was the one Garnet had presented her with—the unthinkable fact of Ivan’s affair with Rosie.

  She thinned the lettuce and weeded the beans, and let that fact run through her consciousness until a coherent idea emerged: the reason she could tell
no one about Garnet’s revelation was that it had become a private matter—not between her and Garnet, or her and Ivan, but between her and Rosie. It was nobody’s business but theirs, and—like it or not—it made a bond between them. Susannah looked up from the vegetables when this idea came to her, and squinted into the sun. For the third time in her life she felt an alien idea, even a monstrous one, take over her life and illuminate it: something will happen. She had, years ago, decided to leave her mother’s house and follow Edwin, and she had thrown Ivan out, and now it was clear to her, there in the garden, that some sort of circle was on the verge of completion. Edwin would die, Ivan was gone, and Rosie and she were tangled tight together. Like it or not.

  She recognized that an immense curiosity about her mother had been collecting in her for years, incorporating the remembered mother, the unreal television mother, the unknown woman in East Chiswick, the fun mom Peter described. What on earth kind of woman was she, who would seduce her daughter’s husband? Or who could seduce a man fifteen, sixteen years younger? Not that Ivan was hard to seduce—and, in fact, Susannah wondered who had seduced whom. She could think about this more easily after her revelation in the garden, could speculate on the details of their affair without disgust. She remembered that Ivan had always liked Rosie. They had watched her television show together and seen that opinionated, funny, gypsy woman on their old black and white TV set, Ivan sitting beside her on the floor telling her what an incredible woman her mother was, how they should look the old girl up and surprise her. Recalling this, Susannah recognized that one part of her feeling about the whole mess was a sort of childish resentment at being left out. There they’d been, her husband and her mother, bound in whatever curious kinship they’d forged, and there had been no place for her. Had they discussed her? Had Rosie, triumphing over her daughter, made fun of her? She imagined Ivan detailing her sloppiness and dreaminess and incompetence, and Rosie coming up with all the old complaints. And she’d never had a chance either to defend herself or to join in their camaraderie—for they must have been comrades before they became lovers. She felt lonely, thinking of what she had missed. She was tempted to go and see her mother and tell her how she felt, but was half afraid that, face to face, the complicated emotions of curiosity and loneliness would be canceled out by pure jealous rage at the woman whose unnatural lusts had destroyed her marriage. Better to leave the bond unspoken, untested, though this didn’t satisfy her either. The idea of Rosie replaced Ivan in her head, and with it came a great longing to see her mother, to have a look at the woman Ivan had risked their marriage for—because he must have known that would be the end. Who was Rosie, Susannah wondered—and what could she tell her? And what would it be like to clasp the hand of a woman like her? And what could they say to each other?

  Then she did run into Rosie. There she was, a coincidence out of Thomas Hardy, walking out the door of the Café, looking old and confused and haggard, and Susannah was shocked to find that it wasn’t contempt or anger or disgust or curiosity that filled her but plain pity. Surely this woman—it was Rosie, her mother, wasn’t it? this tanned aging lady in a girlish sundress and too much rouge?—surely she had no power to hurt. She looked as if life had battered her so badly she had no powers left at all. Susannah held the door for her in silence and watched her walk past Wendell’s and across the concrete to her little tan car, tottering slightly on her high heels, looking frail and run-down, like a person who has lost too much weight too quickly. If it had been anyone but Rosie, Susannah would have been tempted—only shyness would have prevented her—to go after her, touch her arm, and say, “What’s the matter? Can I help?” and take her home and give her a shot of brandy and a shoulder to weep on. As it was, she only stood and watched, while this unexpected and futile pity invaded her, muddling everything worse than it was already muddled.

  So she told everything to Duke that night. It was their first real dinner alone together—pasta with the fresh tomato sauce Susannah had made that afternoon when she returned from the encounter with Rosie too agitated and unhappy to read or to write—and afterwards they sat on the porch drinking beer.

  “No, I didn’t know,” Duke said. “He didn’t ever tell me much, Susannah. God. Your mother.”

  They sat side by side, in ancient, broad-armed wicker chairs that creaked, and looked at one another. There was a full moon, low in the sky, straight ahead of them like a piece of fruit. In its light Duke’s glasses hid the expression in his eyes. “I don’t even know what to think about that, much less what to say.”

  “Did you happen to see a woman in the Café this afternoon? Just before I came in?” She had gone over there for lunch—had looked up from her notebook and craved company all of a sudden, and food; she liked to get there late, and nibble on scraps. “A short woman, very tanned, middle-aged? in a sort of bare dress? curly black hair?”

  “Long hair?” He gestured vaguely around his own neck.

  “No. Short.”

  Duke shook his head. “I guess I didn’t. Why? You don’t mean that was her?”

  “It was. She must have had lunch there.”

  “Pretty gutsy, considering.”

  “She was looking for him, maybe. She may not even know he’s gone.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Duke said. “Ivan wouldn’t waste much time on good-byes, I don’t think.” They each drank a gulp of beer, looking at the moon. “So what did you say to her, Susannah?”

  “Nothing. I couldn’t say a word. Neither could she. She was mortified or horrified, I don’t know what. Overcome. She was suffering, Duke. I’ve never seen such blatant suffering.”

  “Guilt. When she saw you. After all—” He held out one white hand and waggled it; it encompassed everything. “She’s your mother,” he said.

  “Yes, but she’s not only my mother, Duke. She hasn’t even been my mother, not for years. And she’s getting old. She’s fifty, I think. Fifty.”

  “You mean Ivan was her last grab at it. Before she gives in.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you’re worried about what Ivan’s done to her.”

  She looked out at the dark trees, darkening sky, bright moon, but what she saw was Edwin, a few years ago, before his illness halted him, at a swimming pool with one of his young women—his hair thinned, his face lined and jowly, his waist thickened, his legs spindly. He would be in swim trunks—it would be Mexico, this memory—and the girlfriend would be—who? It didn’t matter. And why hadn’t he been pathetic? While Rosie and Ivan …

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess that’s it. That’s exactly it. I’m afraid for her. She didn’t look good, Duke.”

  “Call Peter.”

  “Peter’s in Vermont.”

  “Maybe he got back. Call him.”

  “I will.” Yes: Peter. It was the favorite son who was needed, not the errant daughter. Peter, she assumed, could handle Rosie—and she imagined Rosie in hysterics, Peter calming her, giving her brandy, saying, “Now, Ma, don’t take it so hard,” patting her shoulder; and Rosie gulping brandy, getting older and older, turning into a crone, a strega, an old lady bundled in shawls with a long sharp nose and bright eyes.

  “My mother’s almost seventy,” Duke was saying. “I remember when I first noticed she was getting old. She didn’t look any different, I didn’t think, but she started calling everyone dear. Waitresses, clerks in stores—strangers. ‘No, dear, that’ll be all, we’ll have the check, please.’ That sort of thing. You have an awfully young mother, actually.”

  “She was a child bride.”

  They were silent again, but the quiet night seemed full of words, and what they said, the careless intimacy of it, seemed like the breaking of a long silence—even though in their week together there had been chatter enough whenever they met, Susannah’s full of forced good humor, Duke’s all encouraging facetiousness.

  “I want you to tell me about yourself sometime, Susannah,” Duke said in the darkness.

  “Tell you what?” she
asked, surprised.

  “Anything. I want to know who writes those stories. I don’t know how to say this, but I’m so grateful to you for letting me read them.” He had read “The Cage With Glass Walls” just before the crisis and pronounced it great. “Our Dukey dear is a man of few words,” Ivan had said. Magnificently creepy, Leslie Merwin had said of the story, and urged her again to come to New York and have lunch.

  “I’m the one who’s grateful,” Susannah said. “Ivan would never read my stuff. My stories bored him silly.”

  “I really love them, Susannah,” Duke said.

  If only the pronoun was different, she thought, wondering if she could say this aloud—why she couldn’t, why they got this far and no farther, this close.

  “Let’s go someplace tomorrow,” Duke said. “You and me.”

  “What about the Café?”

  “Monday tomorrow. We’re closed.”

  “Monday. I forgot. Of course, today’s Sunday.” Early on Sunday mornings, if the wind was right, she could hear church bells as she lay in bed; she had heard them that morning, sleepily, and thought: the holiness of the heart’s affections, and had worked on her story, and then had run into Rosie at the Café. All on a Sunday. Ivan used to hate Sundays; he was unsettled all day. “You’re a shepherd without his flock,” she had teased him, once, gently, years ago, and he had told her to leave him alone. Even lately, he was uneasy on Sunday mornings. At the sound of the distant bells he had pulled the pillow over his head, swearing. They had made love, once, awakened by the bells, and Ivan had taken a grim pleasure in the rhythm of their tolling. “Yes—let’s,” Susannah said. “Let’s go somewhere—get away again for the day.”

  Get away again: the word stood out in the dark, recalling the conversation in Stonington, Ivan’s hostility, Duke’s fear, Susannah’s sorrow, and the fun they had had in spite of everything. A wisp of cloud, like a dust-kitten, crossed the moon and was lost in the thick gray sky. Susannah waited for Duke to speak, and when he didn’t she said, “You know, I used to think of Ivan as my savior. Maybe because he had just left the priesthood—I don’t know. He seemed to take on that role—always trying to improve things.” She could see Duke nod; his glasses glinted briefly in the moonlight, then went dark again. “And he did save me, Duke,” she went on. “He really did. I can’t tell you what a messed-up kid I was when I met him. And for a while we were both messed up. We just kept drifting along. But he finally got things together, and he did sort of save me, and I’ll always owe him that. And now I’ve sent him away. There’s something wrong with that—don’t you think?”