The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  But Rosie was shaking her head—the first time she had felt vehement about something since she decided to put the gun to her heart. “No,” she said. “It’s all wrong. I’ve had enough.” The tears started again. Her only consolation was Susannah; Susannah’s thin competent ivory hands on the wheel, Susannah not insisting, heading the car down the drive, agreeable, content, her daughter.

  And Peter, of course. In the pub she took out a postcard to write to him. “I don’t know what to say. ‘Silvergate was a flop. We miss you. Love from secondhand Rose.’” She sighed and put the postcard down: a view of a country lane. Sipping her ale, she did miss Peter. He had spent a lot of time with her and Susannah during her recuperation, making their odd reunion easier—sitting with them on the screened porch telling them funny stories, talking frankly about himself and Hollis, reminiscing about the good parts of his and Susannah’s childhood. Rosie was grateful to him for reminding her that there had been good parts—not many, Lord knew, and quickly exhausted, but enough to cheer her up a little. She had cried, with Peter, and had tried to talk about what she had done—bought a gun and tried to shoot herself through the heart, for God’s sake! Had she done that? When she came to in the hospital after the surgery her first thought had been that she was going to die—the pain was so great—and that she must be forgiven, must look into Susannah’s face and find comfort. And when it became clear that she wouldn’t, after all, die quite yet, her chief emotion had been relief. She didn’t think of Ivan, and when Peter asked her, there on the porch, weeks later, on a hot September evening, over gin and tonics, “Why did you do it, Ma?”, she was stumped for a moment, as empty of ideas (though not as hostile) as she had been with the psychiatrist; and then she remembered Ivan, and how she had listened and listened for the sound of his van coming up the street and stopping out front. That grinding noise when he pulled on the brake, that metallic thud of the door shutting, his quick footsteps on the brick path.

  “It seems a million years ago,” she said.

  “But why, Ma?” he asked her again, gently, mercilessly. Susannah was inside, making spaghetti for dinner. If you looked toward the garage, you had to shade your eyes, the ball of the setting sun was so bright.

  “I had nothing, Peter,” she said. “And I was getting old. But not old enough. I saw my life stretching out for years and years and years. Empty. With nothing but gardens in it. Nothing but plants.” She gave a bitter laugh, to hide the fact that all this was only half the truth, the Ivanless half. The lie was necessary; only to Susannah could she tell the whole truth—and not even yet to Susannah, who knew it anyway. To Peter she had to lie, for once—as he for years had kept from her that one vital thing.

  But he was hurt, as she had known he would be, and she put out her right hand and touched his cheek with the back of her fingers; the effort pulled at the ripped muscle of her damaged left shoulder, and she winced with pain. But she stroked his cheek. “What about me?” he asked, as she had expected. “You say you had nothing. You had me, dammit.”

  “I know that, Peter. I couldn’t have a better son.” She paused, searching for words that would be both true and consoling. “It was something in me that was missing. The nothing I’m talking about. Things piled up on me and I sank. I dissolved. Like the Wicked Witch of the West.” She frowned. The Wizard of Oz: it rang a bell somewhere.

  “How could I have saved you?”

  She looked up in surprise at his words. “Saved me?” The idea was absurd, and she shook her head. “I was unsalvageable, Peter.” She remembered again the psychiatrist she had talked to in the hospital: I think what you did was a cry for help, she had said. A stupid woman. “What saved me,” Rosie told Peter, “was—you know—what I did.”

  “And Susannah,” he said.

  She inspected his face, the strong eyebrows lowered, the eyes hidden in shadows. Was he jealous, then? Was that what made him keep probing? She shook her head. “I insist on taking all the credit. I saved myself. Like those villages in Vietnam—remember? That they had to destroy in order to save? Lord.” The madness of the world, she thought. The world thick with death. “But Susannah came after,” she said to Peter. “An old wound healed. And the new wound—” She touched her shoulder with a grimace. “That’s healing, too.”

  “And now you’re going to say that in ten years we’ll all look back on this and laugh.”

  “No.” She looked out to the garden, half brilliant color, half shadow, and then turned suddenly to smile at Peter. “I think we can laugh now. I’m very glad to be alive, Peter. I’m totally happy.”

  “Totally? That’s pretty happy, Ma. That’s unnatural.” His brown eyes—affectionate, relieved—were laughing at her.

  “Well, that’s what I am,” she insisted. It was true, she supposed, and she had finally convinced the psychiatrist of its truth, though it seemed strangely beside the point. The point was being alive—but how silly it seemed, merely to draw breath after breath, and have your blood race through your veins, happy or unhappy not mattering. And then there was the thing she perceived, now, every time she looked into the garden: that, having done it once, she could do it again, someday, when she was old, really old, or sick, or bereft, when the breathing and the racing blood became a bleak joke. She hoped it would never happen, but the knowledge made her feel calm and potent, made the late-summer garden more beautiful than ever and her children inexpressibly dear to her.

  “I don’t think English food is so awful,” Susannah said. Rosie was having bread and cheese—ploughman’s lunch—but Susannah was digging into the “combination special”: a thick wedge of cheese and onion pie, two slices of fatty ham, and a salad, with pickled onions and plenty of wholemeal bread and butter on the side.

  “I never much liked to eat,” said Susannah, “until I became the owner of a restaurant. And now that I’m pregnant I can’t seem to stop.”

  “I don’t know where you put it,” said Rosie.

  “Into little Rosetta,” Susannah said, patting her abdomen. There was the faintest of convexities. “Little Rosetta thinks gammon and pickled onions are the cat’s meow.” For the baby’s sake, Susannah had abandoned her vegetarianism.

  “I won’t believe in her until I can see her,” said Rosie. “You’re as thin as a stick, Susannah. When I think how I’d begun to show at three months!”

  “She’s roughly the size of my thumb,” Susannah said complacently. “And her heart is nearly completely formed, and it beats. And she’s got little tiny fingers. She’s just the cutest thing.” She looked down fondly at her flat stomach. “The book says she’s got eyelids, even.”

  “If it weren’t for me she’d have a father, too,” Rosie said. She hadn’t meant to say it—not here, certainly, in a pub full of the noisy lunchtime crowd, with Susannah about to fork in a hunk of ham, with the pub cat on the windowsill looking out at the rain, the coils of an electric heater glowing in the fireplace, her shoulder throbbing. She hadn’t meant to make this grotesque joke at all. She wished it unsaid.

  Susannah was looking at her intently, with the dour frown that Rosie had come to realize meant merely that she was thinking hard. She set the forkful of ham down on her plate. The noise of the pub rose and fell around them, English-accented. “No,” Susannah said finally, and her frown smoothed out. “My breaking up with Ivan was sort of a variation on what Peter told me you said about your shoulder. About trying to kill yourself,” she said softly. “Destroying something in order to save something else. I couldn’t have stuck with him much longer. I’m sure you know you were only the last of a long string. And not even the last.” She didn’t elaborate, and Rosie didn’t ask. It was a million years ago, it was dead and gone, details didn’t matter. “I’m not very good at open marriage,” Susannah said. “It’s much, much better that it happened. Not that I didn’t love him, Rosie. I did. I adored that man.”

  “Yes,” said Rosie in a choked voice.

  “But I made a mistake. It’s better this way.”

&nbs
p; Rosie looked at her. She seemed sincere, all the benevolence in her face for her mother, and the benevolence marked only with regret. Rosie could detect no bitterness. How could that be? But she put it from her mind. She wasn’t ready for it. She nodded, and smiled a little. “All right. If you’re sure.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure,” said Susannah. They looked at each other and simultaneously shrugged, which made them laugh.

  “Now,” said Susannah. “‘Dear Peter. We’re sitting in a pub in Kent. It’s been raining steadily for three days, and we’re having the time of our lives.’”

  The rain let up the next day, and the soft English landscape, cool in its autumn colors, was soothing to Rosie. She began to catch some of Susannah’s knack of utter enjoyment—of throwing herself into the pleasures of the moment unencumbered by the past, by the future, by thoughts of home. Even the shadows cast by Silvergate were lightened, half-forgotten. Her shoulder stopped hurting for long stretches, and the tight feeling in her chest—tension, her doctor had said—let up altogether.

  They traveled, slowly, across the south of England in an oval path: from Silvergate to the great houses of Knole and Penshurst and the gardens (open) at Sissinghurst, and then to Canterbury (where they came upon a church fête on the cathedral green) and south to Rye, to see Henry James’s house. Then they drove on to Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, and Wells, finding they liked cathedral towns, and they climbed to the ruined chapel on Glastonbury Tor, where Rosie felt a hint of her old strength returning. And then they headed north, in one grand, beautiful afternoon’s drive, to Bath.

  Susannah was reading Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy and a book of Keats’s letters along with her pregnancy book. She was keeping a journal, and she continued to write long, private letters to Duke—letters that must have amused her, because she sometimes broke into a chuckle as she wrote. Rosie devoured the local papers, especially the classified ads, finding in them what she found, at home, reading the old copies of The Countryman: human interest, humor, something to speculate about. She envied Susannah the need to write that seemed to be always with her; even reading, she held a pencil, underlined, made notes. On one afternoon, as they sat under the shedding plane tree on Abbey Green in Bath, eating rock cakes, Susannah suggested to Rosie that she help her write her gardening book—a suggestion that, once made, seemed so natural and inevitable that Rosie wondered why no one had thought of it before—then remembered that Peter had.

  “I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time, actually,” Susannah said. “But I wasn’t sure if you were the kind of person one could make such an offer to. I didn’t know if it might offend you.” She paused and took a bite of her cake; there were crumbs all over the lap of her denim skirt. “I thought it was sort of presumptuous, offering to ghostwrite something you could probably jolly well do for yourself.”

  “Well, I can’t seem to do it for myself,” Rosie said. “I’m not a writer. I can’t even do postcards. You write such witty messages, and all I can come up with is ‘Having a great time, the weather is gorgeous.’ Susannah, if you would help me write my book I’d pay you decently for the work. They’ve given me a huge sum already—for nothing. It still embarrasses me. How much do you think—?”

  “I have no idea,” said Susannah. “Make me an offer.”

  She waited, agreeable, eating, while Rosie considered. Rosie had no idea, either. She remembered her fears that Susannah was coming east to get money out of her, and thought of Peter’s jokes about her stinginess: Rosie Marner, he called her. She didn’t feel stingy, though. Her daughter’s suggestion filled her with such glad relief she was ready to make over to Susannah her entire advance on the book. But she tried to think of a sensible figure.

  “Suppose I pay you as much as your publisher is giving you for Cloud House. Then later we can make some arrangement about royalties. Would that be fair, do you think?”

  “No,” said Susannah. “It would be munificent.”

  “It’s worth it to me,” said Rosie. “I’m desperate.”

  Susannah sighed. “I must admit it would take a load off my mind, Rosie. I do need to support myself and little Rosetta, and I may never make another nickel from Cloud House. And the Café is an unknown quantity. That money would get me through the next year, and after that I could get a regular job.”

  The thought of Susannah working at a “regular job”—behind a desk in an office, selling things in a shop, teaching people to write—failed to take hold. Even in her efficient English reincarnation, there was something wispy about Susannah—something ungrounded, thought Rosie. The idea of Susannah as a single mother supporting her child—as she herself had done—was absurd. She wondered fleetingly about Edwin and his money, but didn’t like to bring him up—another name they didn’t mention. “You’ll stay with me, of course,” said Rosie. “Until you get on your feet. Until after the baby.”

  “I’ll rent a room from you,” Susannah said firmly.

  “Nonsense,” said Rosie, with equal firmness. “Your old bedroom is part of the deal.”

  Susannah shook her head. “I’ll pay room and board, and if Cloud House gets a paperback sale or anything like that I’ll get myself an apartment.” She turned her stern profile away, intent on examining the little shops that ringed the green. “I’m not a sponger.”

  Rosie dropped it; she wasn’t sure of her own motives, for one thing. Was she trying to buy Susannah’s absolution—to make up for her betrayal, and Ivan’s betrayal, and all those long-ago begging letters she had unmaternally ripped to bits without answering, and her years of anger at her lost daughter, with cold cash, with regular meals, with a stable home for her grandchild? With, in fact, this expensive English jaunt?

  She shifted on the park bench. It had been a cold morning, but the afternoon was warm, and she was hot in her sweater. The rock cake sat heavily in her stomach. She had wanted to stop at a tea shop, but Susannah had been so hungry they had to go into a bakery and get a snack to eat outside on a bench. She had insisted on buying Rosie a rock cake, too—one of her little gestures toward independence. Rosie had finally figured out that Susannah felt just as dependent as she did, that while Rosie might be worn out and depressed and in pain, unable to drive or to cut up her own meat, she was paying for the trip. Money—Susannah’s consciousness of her own financial limits compared to Rosie’s largesse—was always coming into their relationship. It was an aspect of her reunion with her daughter that Rosie hadn’t anticipated: she hadn’t wanted to remember those letters; she preferred this new, serene, ungrasping Susannah. She wondered what Susannah retained from those days, whether she was embarrassed at the thought of her sly hints for cash, or grieved by her mother’s lack of response.

  What a pathetic pair we are, Rosie thought, looking at Susannah’s set face. Even after weeks of togetherness they were still circling warily, glancing off each other, meeting now and then on common ground to share a laugh, some gossip, bits of their life stories, their pleasure in England, and then awkwardly stepping back behind their boundaries. Sometimes when their eyes met they looked away, then sometimes back, with rueful smiles. And yet I like her, Rosie thought. She was a good companion, she was sweet, she was putting up with a lot. Rosie wondered what she wrote in her journal, and what was in her letters to Duke.

  She had to speak, and change the subject. “It’s a funny tree, isn’t it?” she said lamely, but Susannah looked with interest at the plane tree with its loose, shaggy bark and the globes of fruit, some dropped rotting on the ground.

  “I’ve never seen one at home,” said Susannah.

  “They’re all over New Haven,” said Rosie, amused. “I’ll have to take you on an expedition to the big city when we get back.”

  Susannah surveyed the tree, the green, the shops, the clear blue sky above the ancient rooftops, with her usual good humor. “I like it here in England so much, Rosie. I’ve always loved traveling, but I’ve never liked a place so well—except that little corner of Connecticut. Your corne
r.” She laughed softly, and Rosie realized that Susannah’s laugh, vaguely familiar all these weeks, was Edwin’s. “Coming there from California woke me up,” Susannah said. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  Rosie had one of her brief, unbidden Ivan-memories: Ivan when she first met him telling her with such vehemence how he hated California, and two months later sitting half-naked in her kitchen homesick for it, for the blue wild ocean and the spaciousness. “I’ve always heard California is so beautiful,” Rosie said. The remembered Ivan was so vivid before her she could have reached out and touched his warm, tanned chest.

  “Beautiful,” Susannah said thoughtfully. “Well, of course, it is, a lot of it. But it’s inhuman. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. This—” She gestured around the busy Bath street, at old stone and flower boxes. “This is human beauty—for people. And the countryside, Rosie—the hedges and the sheep and the hills.” She turned to Rosie with Edwin’s smile, wiping the last crumbs from her mouth, daintily, with a paper napkin. “Do you know the Los Angeles metropolitan area is as big as all of Connecticut?” She crumpled the napkin and stuffed it in her skirt pocket, took off her glasses—she wore them for eating as well as reading—and stowed them away, too. “He’s gone back there, to California. I don’t know if you were aware of that.”

  “Yes, I was,” Rosie said. Susannah looked at her in surprise, as if Rosie’s words had revealed something important. “I got a postcard,” Rosie added, half-whispering.

  Susannah took her hand, impulsively. You wouldn’t expect Susannah to be a hand-taker, a toucher, but she always made contact. “Did you love him, Rosie? Tell me that.”

  Tears came to her eyes, blurring the little shops across the way. He was so beautiful, she thought. Without looking at Susannah she said, “Yes, I guess I did love him.” The simple statement sounded false to her, though the words were true.

  “But that was in another country,” Susannah said softly, not letting go her hand, so that Rosie couldn’t wipe her eyes, or cover her face when it contorted. Rosie thought: I never would have done it if I’d known you first, Susannah, but it wasn’t something she could say aloud.