The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  They walked down to the formal rose beds—tidy and flowerless now, dotted with orange rose hips—and beyond them to the lily pond. The pond was perfectly clear, the colors of the trees reflected in it just as vivid in the water as on the shore, the surface ruffled by a light wind that gathered itself now and then into a gust. Rosie almost went up to the pond, knelt beside it and peered in to see her face, age fifty, where years ago her young eyes had looked back at her. But she refrained. It would be too much, somehow, of either ecstasy or pain, and the only logical culmination of such an act would be to throw herself into the water, and sink below the reflections of the trees.

  The garden was perfectly quiet, not a guide was visible, or a gardener, or another tourist. Rosie and Susannah inspected all the little gardens, walking the graveled paths and admiring their neat regularity, their patterns, their variety.

  “I remember them all,” Rosie said, but she didn’t say much more than that. Susannah was silent also, taking photographs and, eventually, wandering off by herself. Tactful child, thought Rosie to herself, turning down a path, and there before her was the battened green door in the yew hedge behind which, she knew—how could she have forgotten? it was as familiar, suddenly, as her own place back home—was the brick path that led to the gardener’s cottage.

  Rosie sat down on a stone bench and let the tears come to her eyes. Behind the door—and looking at the handle she recalled precisely the amount of pressure your thumb must exert, and the vigorous push it took to open it—behind the door the path curved to the right and then turned left, and there was the stone cottage with the tile roof, and the two squat chimneys, the heavy oak door, and the tiny-paned windows on either side. In this October sun the cottage would be tawny brown, and the Michaelmas daisies would still be in bloom by the door, and the Virginia creeper by the wall would be reddening. And her mother’s gardening basket used to stand there, with her dirty blue gloves and the battered straw hat her father said belonged on a horse.

  “Well? And how is it?” Susannah sat down beside her, camera around her neck; her blonde hair, unbraided, was tangled in her face, and she pushed it back and hung on to it.

  “It’s just fine,” Rosie said, and blew her nose. “It’s as it was. That’s all I wanted from it.”

  Susannah nodded, and pointed to the birch trees behind the pond. The wind, blowing through them, flung their leaves into the water. “‘Goldengrove unleaving,’” Susannah said.

  “My mother used to say that,” Rosie murmured, shyly but with delight. “Every fall.” She smiled suddenly. “And ‘worlds of wanwood leafmeal.’ That’s what she called her compost heap. I’d forgotten.”

  “They’re from a poem,” Susannah said.

  “Not Keats?”

  “Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ is Keats. And something something dum de dum ‘the vines that round the thatch-eves run.’ And then something about apples and bees.” Susannah let go her hair and rested her hands comfortably on her little stomach. “Why are you crying? Is it so sad?”

  “I was missing my parents,” said Rosie, her eyes wet again. Susannah’s hair blew against her face. “And then you sat down and said that, just like my mother.” Wanwood leafmeal: the crunch of leaves underfoot, and the bonfires of her youth, her mother with a square of red wool tied under her chin, her father heaping leaves with a rake, the woody smell of the smoke, the magical look of the smoke rising, thinning, disappearing. Her mother holding her hand.

  “My grandmother,” said Susannah. “I remember her so well. Her pretty English voice.”

  Rosie regretted, not for the first time, that because of her Susannah hadn’t known her grandparents for so long. But there had been, she thought, enough regrets and apologies. She didn’t speak of it, touched Susannah’s arm. “Behind that door is the cottage where we lived. Down a brick path lined with rhododendrons. A stone cottage with flowers out front, and a maple tree in back, and a wooden bench painted green, and my little strawberry patch.”

  “Let’s open it,” said Susannah, getting up. “Is it locked, do you think? Let’s take a look.”

  But Rosie pulled her back. “No—please,” she said. “I’d rather we didn’t. I have it all in my head, Susannah, and we’ll put it in the book. But I don’t want to open the door. Unless—”

  “I could look!” Susannah beamed at her, and stood up. “Great idea. You start back, up the path, and I’ll open the door a crack and have a look, and I won’t say a word. And if the National Trust swoops down on me with a paddy wagon you come and rescue me, and say it’s part of our research for an important book.” She paused, and looked closely into Rosie’s face. “Okay? Or would you rather I didn’t?”

  “No—have a look.” Rosie smiled, and put out a hand for Susannah to pull her up. “I’ll head back to the terrace and meet you there.”

  The chrysanthemums were over, she could see that, and frost would come soon and cut down the loosestrife, the daisies that were left, the verbena in the stone urns. She stood on the terrace, not looking back down the garden path, looking up at the house rising above her in all its magnificence, and blew her nose. For a dozen reasons, it was time to go home.

  Susannah came up behind her, light-footed, her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “It’s getting chilly,” she said.

  They walked across the terrace together, but just before they went back through the double doors—through them they could see a party of tourists entering—Rosie turned to her daughter. “Just tell me,” she said. “Is it the same, Susannah? Is it the way I remembered?”

  Susannah impulsively hugged her. “I knew you’d want to know,” she said with glee. “And yes,” she told Rosie. “I couldn’t see the back, so I don’t know about the strawberry bed and the little green bench, but it’s a stone cottage, with flowers out front—don’t ask me what kind—and a chimney with smoke coming out of it, and not a soul around. Down a brick path lined with rhododendrons.”

  Rosie smiled, dug out her handkerchief and blew her nose for the last time. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter Eight

  Halloween

  Dear Duke,

  By the time you get this I will be home—this is our last night in England—but I’ll write it anyway, for me as much as for you. I’ve often wished I had a double living in my brain, someone who could take part in all the thoughts that pass through it, some super-tolerant spirit with a high boredom threshold. For the moment you’re its substitute. Lord knows, I’ve bombarded you with letters. It’s only because, for all my pleasure in this beautiful country, I miss you.

  Dear Duke, I look forward to coming home. It seems that we’ve been here a long time, though I know after I’ve been home a while I’ll remember it as a painfully brief trip. I didn’t begin missing things until just a few days ago. You, yes, I’ve missed steadily, and Peter, too, and the cats. But things. That just started. I miss your big front porch and my mother’s little back screened one, and the Chiswick Public Library. I miss certain books, and everyday events like buying groceries, and I miss my old wool shirt that I considered too crummy to bring abroad. And I miss the look of it there. Rosie talks fervently about autumn in New England—the foliage, she calls it, and hopes we’ll be home in time for a “foliage trip.” Like the pilgrims going to Canterbury. Well, I want to see it, too. Maybe on one of your days off the three of us could drive to Massachusetts or Vermont or wherever one goes to worship foliage. We never took our trip, the one we would have taken had we not ended up at the hospital instead. Rosie and I didn’t manage to get as far west as Cornwall, and Land’s End, where I could have looked straight across the water at you, but the sea at Plymouth reminded me of our afternoon in Stonington. And that reminds me—please give my love to the twins and tell them I have various fripperies and doo-dads for them.

  I’ll return with a thicker waist than when I left. My favorite skirt is unbuttonable, and I bought a large safety pin in Rye to fas
ten it, a souvenir of Henry James’s town. I feel great. The baby and I thrive in this clear air. Rosie also thrives. If I had known her old self I’d have to say she’s her old self again. Her spirits have risen steadily. We did go back to Silvergate, to the gardens, on a sunny breezy perfect day, and she seemed overcome by her memories, which all returned to her, apparently, beside the lily pond, and in the rose garden, and at the sight of a little green door in the hedge (amazing hedges, thick and black and eight feet tall clipped into turrets and battlements) which she said led to the old cottage where she lived. And she wouldn’t go through it. She keeps certain strongholds intact, hasn’t mentioned my father, for example, not a word, and seems utterly without curiosity about Ivan. As if once people, or cottages, pass out of her life they lose existence, or hang on only in memory where they’re kept within narrow bounds. Or they surface, I suppose, in dreams. I don’t know how healthy it is, but I’m glad she didn’t choose to go through the green door because I persuaded her to let me peek through (while she scurried off toward the main house as if pursued by demons) and behind it was a smallish sort of modern building that evidently housed tools and garden equipment, including a tractor, and beyond that there was nothing. No brick path stone cottage flower beds, nothing. Just scruffy grass and what could have been a hayfield, all yellow, and the inevitable sheep in the distance. And I went back and told her, when she asked, and I knew she would ask, and was prepared, that it was just as she remembered, that her lovely magic childhood survived intact behind a little green door. And she shed another tear or two and that was that. Was this whopper justified? And did she make it all up, she and my grandparents, out of The Secret Garden and Agatha Christie and those back issues of The Countryman?

  Dear Duke, are you well? Does the Café flourish? I miss the smell of cooking, and the sight of you in your apron, and Ginger with her wild hair, and the twins. Scratch the cats behind the ears for me, except Byron who doesn’t like it. I still have no answer to your question. For now, I’ll go to Rosie’s and help her write her book. And will you, I wonder, continue to ask me when I return? Will you even remember me after three weeks and a day and a dozen rambling letters? In a way I’m a different person, a thicker around the middle one with a tendency to put on a motley English accent from time to time, a person with a mother for the first time, a person whose soul has been bathed in these tender landscapes, and soothed. Will you remember me? I remember you, dear Duke, and our night together before its terrible end. I remember being so fond of your back when I curled up against it, and how for one night everything seemed settled. I realize now I’ll never send this letter, and so I can say more: for instance that I do love you, Duke. I wish things were different, and that you didn’t have your own little green door in a battlemented hedge. But that would be wishing you were a different person, one whose soul has been bathed and soothed by something or other, and everyone knows it’s not real love if you don’t accept the beloved as is. It feels like real love, though I do wish you were different, in just that one way. In every other way you’re perfect, except that you won’t love me. Your fatal flaw.

  If I were still on the coast of England I would rip this letter to pieces and fling it into the Atlantic for you, and you would find it in the belly of a fish you buy at DeLuca’s, a piece of paper softened and faded by its ocean voyage, on which you can just make out the words “I do love you, Duke.” Or more cryptically, “tools and garden implements.” Or “fripperies and doo-dads,” or “the inevitable sheep.” As it is, I’m in a posh hotel not far from Heathrow Airport, and I shall rip it to pieces and flush it down the last in our series of memorable English toilets—veritable geysers, they are, white-water rapids, hissing Niagara Falls explosions of water that will reduce my letter to limp pulp.

  I’m homesick, that’s my excuse for this drivel, but I’m not sure what home I’m sick for—your place, or Rosie’s, or the Café, or someplace I’ve never been. Technically, I’m homeless, no less a wanderer than I’ve always been. I’ve tried to change your heart with these letters, because I can’t accept what you said, that you have nothing to give. I know that’s not true, but if you don’t know it then my certainty isn’t worth much.

  Dear Duke, here in England my life has stood still for me so I can look at it, my life that I’ve dreamed my way through, half the time, like a cat—and I’ve turned it over carefully in my mind, with all the metamorphoses that have made it up: unloved daughter, spoiled daughter, dropout, reclaimed dropout, wife, betrayed wife, ex-wife, reclaimed daughter. All a mix-up, and that’s not even the end of it, there’s a part in there that has visions and arranges them into patterns and writes stories about them, and one that makes vows and after due deliberation breaks them when necessary, and one who loves animals, baseball, books, you. I’ve been looking at it, Duke—my life, myself—all over England, in these sleepy old narrow towns, behind crumbling stone walls, in fabulous gardens, in half a dozen cathedrals—especially in the cathedrals, looking up, and up, just as one is supposed to do—the spaces in them, the stillness, the height, the light coming through the colored windows, the sense of an inspired hand in all of it—what am I saying? That in the cathedrals, especially, I examined my life and asked questions and kept getting the same answer, this one: I will make Duke love me, I will raise our children, I will write my books. Beyond that I can’t see, but I can see that far, and I write you this letter with those answers in my mind, and flush it down the toilet because none of my answers answer your question.

  But I’m coming home, dear Duke, to do battle.

  Coming up the Connecticut Turnpike in the back seat of Peter’s little car, Susannah already missed the bright blue skies, the plump clouds, the green hedges and old stone walls of England. Route 95 was a scene of desolation, margined with dumps, wrecked buildings, waste stretches choked with weeds and strewn with parts of cars, cans, oil drums, garbage. The sides of abandoned warehouses and factories, and the concrete bridge abutments, were layered with graffiti: KILL SLADE, NO NUKES, FUCK WAR, FUCK YOU.

  “We’re romanticizing England, of course,” Rosie said over her shoulder to Susannah. “We only saw the good parts. They have all this in England, too.”

  “I wonder where,” Susannah said. She chewed dolefully at her cuticles, and narrowed her eyes to blur the passing scene. It didn’t help.

  Susannah was depressed and exhausted. She hadn’t slept on the return flight—it had departed in the morning; and the red tape at Kennedy had taken, it seemed, hours; and a large man in a business suit had banged into her, nearly knocking her down, at the baggage claim, and he not only hadn’t apologized but had glared at her as if it was her fault; and she had suddenly, irrationally, become consumed with fears for little Rosetta: what if she had fallen, what if she had miscarried there by the revolving baggage claim at Kennedy Airport, how could she have chanced a plane flight during her pregnancy, she must have been crazy.

  While her mother and Peter claimed bags and chattered about the World Series and the beauties of England and the weather in Connecticut, Susannah’s mind halted at the thought of her own fatigue, and it expanded, her tiredness, until she was tired of everything, and frightened at being home: now what? She should have stayed in England, she thought. Become an expatriate writer. Brought up her poor baby in a country where people don’t knock you down and then look at you with hatred. She was amazed that they got out of the airport alive, and now here they were on this ugly stretch of road, and the ride was bumpy, making her vaguely carsick, and Rosie, of all people, was saying they romanticized England.

  Susannah closed her eyes, returned to Rye, and entered the little glass-fronted pavilion in the garden of Lamb House, and Henry James got up from his table, where he was painstakingly putting together a wooden toy—a duck, maybe, with a bright yellow bill—and put an arm around her shoulder and said, “This is the real thing, old girl.”

  When she awoke they were on Route One, outside Chiswick. “I fell asleep,” she said.

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nbsp; “And woke up just in time,” Peter said. “How does the place look?”

  They were passing the Café. An omen, Susannah thought, to wake up just then: an omen of what? The Café was lit up for dinner, cars massed in front. Peter slowed up.

  “Want to stop?”

  “No—we’d better not.” She prayed they wouldn’t overrule her. She needed time to prepare for meeting Duke; the idea filled her with dread. Here, home, what certainties she’d had were lost. “They must be horribly busy,” she said.

  “Still packing them in,” Peter said.

  It’s mine, she thought as they went by. Mine—in surprise, comprehending it for the first time. She thought of novels, movies, in which a woman, usually a farm wife, suddenly bereft of her man, has to take over his role. She imagined herself presiding over the Café, arranging flowers on the tables—if they could ever afford flowers on the tables.

  The image of the Café stayed in her mind—not Duke, not yet, just the Café. It was incongruous, she realized, with its crisp green and white checks and the classy sign and inside (she imagined it) the good smells and the beautiful food—and all of it sandwiched between Wendell’s with its purple light in the window, and the Liquor Boutique with its usual dated and ungrammatical specials: OUR OWN HOUSE BRAND VODKA GIN SUMMER BARGAIN’S GALORE.

  “I think we’re going to have to find a new location,” she said, liking the proprietary words. A little stone cottage—she imagined it—like an English tea shop.