The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Duke’s been making those noises, too,” Peter said. “He’s got his eye on a seafood place in East Chiswick that’s just filed for bankruptcy.”

  “Seymour’s?” Rosie asked. “Oh, my, Barney and I used to eat there.”

  “Not often enough to keep them in business.”

  “It’s a nice little place—just right for the Café, Susannah.” Rosie pointed out her window. “Just down there, as a matter of fact, where Hollander Street crosses. Remember that corner?” She sighed. “Oh dear. We should have just looked in on Duke and everybody.”

  “But I’m so tired,” Susannah said quickly. “I don’t know what’s come over me.” She forced out a yawn, which became genuine.

  “Well, it can’t be jet lag. She just doesn’t get jet lag,” Rosie said to Peter. “I’ve never seen such stamina.” She turned to smile at Rosie. “It’s pregnancy, that’s what it is. At last you’re beginning to behave like a pregnant woman.” She reached back a hand, and Susannah grasped it. “We did have fun, didn’t we?”

  “I wish we were back there,” said Susannah.

  “We shall return,” Rosie said. “We’ll take Peter, and the baby.”

  “Duke says he’ll bring the cats over tomorrow morning before work, Suse,” Peter said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure. Great.”

  “And he says to give him a call tonight if you’re feeling up to it. He gets home around ten, he says.”

  “I know.” He gets home around ten, she thought, and he takes a shower and has a beer and something to eat, and he sits on his porch thinking how he has nothing to give, no love at all, and then he goes to bed, alone. Tears gathered in her eyes. “But don’t you wish we were back in Rye, Rosie? In the little garden at Lamb House? Remember how red the walls were? Remember the little gazebo?”

  “I’m glad to be home,” Rosie said firmly. They turned down her street, and she leaned forward to see her house. “I can’t wait to get at my garden. Lord, what a list of chores I’ve got ahead of me.”

  Susannah had chewed her cuticle until it bled. She wished she had inherited Rosie’s spunk and vigor. Here was Rosie, back from the dead and ready to smack the earth itself into shape—and here was Susannah, scared to death.

  But how easy it was, after all, to settle into her old room again, to lie in the old maple bed propped on pillows, to drink the tea Peter brought her and read her accumulated mail. There was a letter from Carla, saying Tyler was taking Suzuki violin lessons. There was a note from Leslie Merwin saying her book was in production, and she would still love to meet her in New York one of these days, say when. There was a report from Mrs. Panza saying Edwin had received her two letters and her postcard, had enjoyed them, sent his love, said be good and be happy, continued as before, thank God. Nothing from Ivan, also thank God. No letter begging her to take him back: what she had feared since, in England, she dreamed it.

  “It’s not so bad, being home, is it?” Peter asked her when he brought the tea. He set the cup down, carefully, on Carla’s letter. “Guess who’s already out in the garden, hashing over the chrysanthemums with Mrs. Sheffield.”

  “And guess who’s taken to her bed with the vapors.”

  “Enjoy it while you can. She’ll have you out shredding cornstalks or some damn thing before you know it.”

  How easy it was, after all. She looked around the old shabby room—different from the room of her girlhood, but recognizable. Rosie had redecorated, of course; who wouldn’t, on the departure of a wayward daughter? So it was yellow instead of blue, and there was wall-to-wall carpeting and wooden shutters at the windows and an oak dresser instead of the matching maple one that had been a present from her grandmother—Edwin’s mother. But the bed was the same, even the too-soft mattress, and the light came in the windows just the same way—now, at twilight, with a soft pink glow. And the little pin-up lamp on the wall, with its pierced metal shade: for some reason, that hadn’t been replaced, and the light shining through it, and the click it made when you turned it on, recalled her childhood as almost nothing else could—long hours reading on her bed in that circle of light—blissful, possessed escapes into books. She reached up and turned it on now, illuminating Peter, erasing the pale glow from the window.

  “It’s funny to be home,” she said, but it was getting less funny all the time. It was beginning to seem almost normal, this room, this teacup, this pile of letters. The stack of manuscripts on the desk, accumulated during her six weeks tending Rosie, and a pile of books. The place between the windows where now there was a mirror but where, once, a painted-by-number sylvan scene had hung, done while she had the measles. She had stopped thinking, as she had those first days with Rosie: This is the house where my husband screwed my mother.

  “We’ve missed you,” Peter said. “I’ve seen Duke a couple of times, and we talked about you.”

  She closed her eyes. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Only good things. He misses you, too. And Hollis wants to meet you.”

  She opened her eyes. “Hollis is here? With you?”

  Peter smiled, with a look on his face she had never seen there. “He has a job with a solar architecture firm in Hartford,” Peter said. “He commutes.”

  “And it’s working out, Peter? It’s for keeps?”

  “Shh,” he said, and put a finger to his lips. “I don’t think in those terms. Carpe diem, Sister Sue. And gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”

  “What about Dante?”

  “Dante.” Peter stroked his mustache, still smiling. “You may not believe this, my sweet, but Dante—” He paused, for effect, crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair and grinned broadly. “Is done,” he said. “La commedia è finita. Also typed, weighed and measured, and approved. I give my defense of the damn thing in January, and then I’m thrown to the wolves. A job.” He pretended an elaborate shudder. “I’m too young to go to work.”

  They talked about his job prospects, about Susannah’s book and Rosie’s, about the solar summer house he and Hollis wanted to build, about England and the last excursion to Silvergate.

  “And you think she’s okay?” Peter asked Susannah. “You think she’s the old Rosie?”

  “The old Rosie I remember?” Susannah chuckled. “Not likely. She’s a new improved Rosie.”

  “You’ve been good for her. And the trip, the book. The incipient heir.”

  As if to prove it, Rosie’s voice sang up from downstairs. “Anybody home up there? Isn’t anyone going to come down and appreciate my last mum before the frost gets it?”

  Susannah hauled herself up from the bed—was it, really, little Rosetta that made her feel so heavy and slow?—and she and Peter went downstairs. They wandered through the garden in the cold twilight, the three of them, Rosie and Susannah in the heavy sweaters they had bought in Somerset. “It’s coming,” Rosie said, snapping off a blighted flower head. “Winter.”

  “You sound pretty happy about it,” said Peter. “For a gardener.”

  “But winter’s a gardener’s best season,” she said. “It’s all anticipation. And dreams.” She took Susannah’s arm. “I must remember that for the book. It’s a good line. I don’t know how you cured your writer’s block, Peter,” she went on. “But I just turned mine over to Susannah, and she’s doing wonderful things with it. Making it into a silk purse.”

  They headed toward the house. “Oh, don’t let’s go in yet,” Susannah said. There were three hours until ten o’clock. How to fill them, except with dread? “It’s so nice out here in the dark. And you haven’t told us yet if Mrs. Sheffield had her grandchild.”

  “It’s cold, you silly girl. And you look like you’re ready to drop over right there in my rose-bed. Come on inside and I’ll tell you all about baby Jamie, six pounds five ounces. I’m so jealous.” She squeezed Susannah’s arm. “I can’t wait for little Rosetta.”

  Inside, Peter had built a fire, and they gathered around it. Rosie yawned. “In England it’s nearly midnight. Do yo
u realize, Susannah, we’d probably be all tucked up into our feather beds by now? And remember the inn that gave us those lovely hot-water bottles for our feet? Covered in flowered flannel, Peter—all pink and white, like plump little babies.”

  Susannah laughed and then, yawning after her, was inspired. “I can’t imagine why I thought I could stay up until ten,” she said. “I can’t possibly call Duke. Ten o’clock is going to be practically in the middle of the night.”

  She sounded to herself like a character in a play, but Peter looked at her with sympathy. “Why don’t I give him a ring when I get home? You go to bed, and I’ll tell him you’ll see him tomorrow when he brings the cats.”

  Put off ’til tomorrow what you’re too chicken to face today, she thought, and stood up, rubbing her eyes. “I think I will. Thanks, Peter.” She stretched elaborately, feeling false, and vaguely guilty. “I am tired,” she said with a touch of defiance.

  “You look it—you look terrible,” Rosie said helpfully. Susannah bent to kiss her cheek. “Sleep well,” Rosie told her. “And little Rosetta, too. Get that child up to bed.”

  Susannah climbed the stairs, the extreme of her exhaustion momentarily lighted by the reprieve, but when she got to her room she nearly fell on her bed, and in one confused instant was asleep.

  She awoke abruptly to pitch dark and the woolly smell of her Somerset sweater, disoriented for only a second before she recognized the particular silence of Rosie’s house. She snapped on the light—10:30—and swung out of bed. She found an old nightgown in a drawer, put the sweater back on over it, and tiptoed downstairs. From Rosie’s room came her dainty snore. In the cellar the furnace kicked on with a thump. There were still a few red coals in the fireplace, and the suitcases still stood in the hall. She missed the cats, good companions when she woke in the night, following softly downstairs at her heels, hoping for food, settling for her proximity.

  She went into the kitchen and got a glass of milk—Peter had stocked the refrigerator, and she found bread and cheese for a sandwich. Then she sat down and dialed Duke’s number; the longing to call him must have invaded her sleep and her dreams and, finally, awakened her. All dread was gone in this middle-of-the-night silence, 3:30 A.M. in England, the brown sheep probably beginning to stir in their pens—or out on the hillsides? Where did they go at night, those fat and ubiquitous sheep? When she returned, she would get up at 3:30 and drive out to see if they were there, like tiny hillocks in the moonlight.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Susannah.” She had forgotten how deep and clear his voice was, how pretty her name sounded when he said it. “Welcome back.”

  “I missed you.” For the moment, she could say nothing more.

  “I missed you, too. And I’m glad you called. I was just making some chicken salad for the twins to have for lunch tomorrow, and then I was going to have a beer and listen to the radio for a while and go to bed. Peter said you’d gone to bed yourself. Why are you up?”

  She swallowed. “I missed you, Duke,” she said again. “I was afraid to talk to you or see you when I got here, I don’t know why, just afraid of how I would feel or something, and then I woke up suddenly in the night, wide awake for no reason, and looked at the clock, and I wanted to call you all of a sudden. I couldn’t wait.”

  “Susannah.”

  “It seemed weird to me, it seemed utterly bizarre, that I could have been afraid of you just because—well—oh, you know—and I just wanted to hear your voice to reassure myself that we could still be friends, at least, that you were still the same.” She stopped. She hadn’t meant to say so much, or to say it in this way. Why hadn’t she rehearsed on the way to the phone instead of missing the cats, thinking of sheep on the hills, making a sandwich? But she hadn’t known, when she woke in the dark needing to call, for what she had wanted to say—had known only that she wished for his voice. “I would have rehearsed this but I had no script,” she said. “I probably sound crazy. Let’s just forget this phone call, you go have your beer and I’ll eat my sandwich and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You didn’t tell me you made a sandwich.”

  “What? Oh. Well, I did. Just cheese.”

  “I like to think of you sitting there with your cheese sandwich. And are you in your nightgown?”

  She sighed. “Yes. An old summer one, with my new sweater on over it, and a pair of black wool socks with a hole in one toe.”

  “What new sweater?”

  “I got it in Somerset. There’s a place that raises sheep and shears them and spins the wool and then the sweaters are hand-knit there by elves and fairies. Duke?”

  “What?”

  “Why are we having this conversation?”

  “Because I’m so happy you’re home, Susannah. I wish I could see you right now, in your English sweater, with the hole in your sock. Can’t I come over and get you and bring you home with me?”

  She thought for a minute, then said, “No. It’s late. I need to sleep a lot more. And the twins—you can’t leave them alone.”

  “Traveling has made you very practical, Susannah.”

  “Why do you keep laughing at me?” she asked, but happily—seeing his turned-down smile, his gray eyes: how different he looks without his glasses, she remembered. He had folded them up and put them on the table by the bed, with Walden.

  “Because I’m so happy you’re home.”

  “You said that already.”

  “But it’s true. I want you to know that. I liked your letters.”

  “I wanted them to make you miss me more.”

  He laughed. “I missed you so much, anyway, that I can’t tell whether or not they made it worse. Now that you’re home I’ll miss your letters.”

  “Should I go away again?”

  “No, don’t do that. Susannah? We need to talk—don’t you think? We need to get together and talk all this to death. There’s a lot I want to say. I’ve been thinking, the whole time you’ve been gone, and I want to tell you what I’ve thought about. So why don’t we do this—”

  “What?”

  “Well.” He paused while she wondered. She had her own ideas, and she clutched the phone tight. Was this really love: this pure, embarrassing need?

  “What?”

  “Suppose I pick you up tomorrow night after work and you come home with me and stay the night, and then Monday is my day off and we could spend it together and get everything straightened out.”

  She smiled, pressed her lips with her fingers; it was so seldom in life that you heard exactly what you wanted to hear.

  When they hung up, she ate her sandwich, breaking off small pieces and putting them into her mouth; it seemed too much effort to pick the whole thing up and bite into it. She was tired again, as if the talk with Duke had been equal to a six-hour plane ride, a trip through time zones. She got a glass of milk. There was beer in the refrigerator, the heavy Mexican kind Ivan always drank; but she didn’t think about that, and noted only a small grateful rejoicing, a musical note somewhere in the back of her mind, that he was gone, a phenomenon—that music—that always astonished her. How could she have kept herself from knowing, while they were still together, how much she hated what he did? But she thought of Duke drinking his beer in the kitchen of his old house. Would the stove be going? If not, the kitchen would be cold, Duke would have on his lumberjack shirt, there would be either chamber music or bluegrass on the radio, and Duke would drink his Heineken out of a glass mug like the ones in English pubs. She remembered again their night together, and the shock of the morning, and the days following when she had stayed at Duke’s because she had nowhere else to go, coming home from the hospital to flop, dead tired, on the bed in the room she and Ivan had shared. How she had kept her distance from Duke because he had said he had nothing to give; how she had thought to protect herself and had waked in the mornings, surrounded by the cats, certain that life held nothing for her except this, and maybe the baby, still unreal, that she car
ried in her womb. And then Rosie had asked her to come and care for her; and Duke had come to visit like a friend, or a shy formal suitor, or a caseworker checking up, had sat out on the porch with her and Rosie and Peter, sometimes, on the evenings of his days off, while they all talked baseball or vegetable gardening or English travel plans, never speaking a word to her in private or alluding to their night together or what was said afterward; until, the day before she and Rosie left for England, he had left the Café in Simon’s hands, shown up in the middle of dinnertime, and kissed her in Rosie’s living room, and asked her again, urgently, to come and live with him even though he didn’t know, couldn’t know what he could offer her in return except shelter, and friendship, and his desire for her; and she had said she didn’t know, had no answer, kept thinking life is too short—but whether she meant too short to go through it without Duke or to settle for so little, she didn’t know. And they had kissed and kissed, and she had promised to write and he had dashed back to the Café. Then, next day on the plane, while Rosie flirted with the man on the aisle, she had begun composing her first letter, and had resolved to fight.

  Susannah went upstairs and turned on the radio by her bed, softly, to the public station—Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, that’s what Duke would be listening to. She fell asleep during “Lonesome Road Blues,” during the accelerando banjo solo.

  She slept late, and then spent the day emptying suitcases: putting dirty clothes through the washer, reading over the journal she had kept, collecting into a manila envelope the pile of souvenirs Rosie had doggedly gathered—National Trust pamphlets, matchbooks, ticket stubs, postcards, a schedule of services from Winchester Cathedral—irrelevant now, absorbed into the past. Susannah worked inside while Rosie, out in the garden, spread compost and hay mulch. A huge box of bulbs had arrived, and Rosie talked of getting them all into the ground within the next few days.

  “There are hundreds of them,” Susannah protested on one of her trips to the backyard. She didn’t understand bulbs: you planted them in the fall, they flowered in the spring if the squirrels didn’t dig them up, then you pulled them out in the summer and put them back in again in the fall. Her mother’s energy for this sort of thing astonished her; it was a Rosie she hadn’t met before, except as a child. She dimly recalled a tight-lipped Rosie raging through her bedroom like a natural disaster in reverse, banging everything noisily into place.