Ella in Bloom

by Shelby Hearon

“That okay?” Bailey asked, the handkerchief showing red.

  “Push it down a bit, son. A bit more. Act like you’re plugging it in the ground. There you go.”

  Bailey held it with one hand, and helped to make a moat of soil around it with the other. He wiped his forehead, streaking it with dirt.

  “Appreciate that,” Henry said, moving over crab fashion to a velvety red Tea, the Frances Dubriel, draining the water and shaping a new trough. “What about you, boy?” he asked. “What do you do with yourself?”

  Before Bailey could answer, while he stood there hurting from the puncture wound to his palm, Birdie said, “He’s dropping out for a while, my cousin is, Mr. Legrand.”

  “That right?” Henry asked, keeping his eyes on what his hands were about.

  Bailey looked as if he could fall right through the ground. He shot my daughter a glance that would have made birds plunge from the sky.

  “He’s investigating his options,” she explained.

  “That right?” With effort, Henry dug around and righted a rosebush I didn’t recognize, a creamy white. He told me it was a Bourbon that had China blood in it, mixed with a Damask. And I realized it was one I’d written about to my mother.

  With effort, he got back to his feet, bending over to rub one knee. “I met this boy’s dad, as I recall. That right, Ella?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What does he think about a big strong boy like you crapping out?” He took his straw hat off and smacked his leg with it.

  Bailey stepped back as if hit. “I guess, you know, my brother’s at Yale. I guess Dad doesn’t, doesn’t—” He looked as if he couldn’t find a well-mannered way to say “give a fuck,” or “give a shit.” “I guess he’s pretty busy,” he said. “My mom, my mom died in January.”

  “Sorry, son,” Henry said, reaching out and taking the hand wrapped in the handkerchief. “I was talking to myself, more than likely, thinking about my own self back there in the dark ages. Here—” He opened Bailey’s palm and pushed on the wound. “Suck on it,” he said. “Thorns are bad as snakebites. You got to treat them the same way.”

  I gave Henry a thank-you hug, promised to come back soon, and we left him, indeed looking like a farmer in the Rhône Valley, bent over his prize old roses.

  When we were back through the trellises, Bailey stopped. “I embarrassed you, didn’t I, Aunt Ella?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Henry thought I was a rich prick, didn’t he?”

  “He was coming from his experience—”

  “Everybody thinks that. I’m not good for squat. The gnome here with the flapping mouth, she’s got a big talent she can tell everybody about. And my bro can say, ‘I got in Yale.’ He doesn’t have to be planning to do jack shit with his life, all he has to say is, ‘I got in Yale.’ ‘Hi, I’m at Yale.’ ‘Hi, I play the doo-wah-doo cello.’ ”

  “That’s how I felt about your mom,” I told him.

  He looked off past the reflecting pool. “Even when she quit playing?”

  “You never get over being the younger kid,” I said.

  Birdie stood in front of him. “That’s at your old place in West Lake Hills you were Borden’s brother, Bailey, which you were always complaining about having to be. But in your new place, in Pflugerville, nobody knows who you are. So you can be whoever you want to be.”

  My nephew put his hand on her head and lightly hammered it with his other hand, as if driving a post into the ground. “Do not tell me one more piece of helpful crap about my life, Troll. Do not open your mouth in my direction one single more time.”

  Birdie giggled and took the door key she wore on a ribbon around her neck and poked it in her ear, pretending to turn herself off.

  Bailey laughed in spite of himself. “Lucky, I guess, you just had one, Ella.”

  And hearing him use just my name, like that, which seemed a sort of permission to take up with his dad, I broke my never-touch-teenagers rule and, at the gate, reached up and slicked down his cowlick.

  32

  The kids and I had early spaghetti and saved Red some. Hoping against hope that the phone wouldn’t ring with the news that he’d stopped somewhere to the east of us for the night.

  Birdie, the first to the back door when he knocked, threw herself at him, giving him, on tiptoe, a big choke around the neck. “Hi, Un—Hi, Rufus.” She blushed furiously at the intimacy of his bare name.

  “Hi, yourself,” he said, setting down his shoes, his feet wet, suitcase in hand.

  “You’re supposed to say ‘Guten Tag,’ that’s what Granddaddy does.”

  “How about ‘Buenas noches’?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hello, Red.” I kissed him right there. Youth could look the other way if they wanted to.

  “Hello, Ella.” He looked happy to see me. “It’s good to be home.”

  While I filled his plate and opened him a beer, Birdie pulled him into a kitchen chair, barely giving him time to sit before she began to talk. “Today we found our instruments. Felice’s mom took us to the city to the violin shop and the orchestra shop. This old man showed me everything about good cellos. I got to touch the wrapped metal strings and the gut strings—they call them catgut but they’re really sheep intestines—and sit and hold it between my knees, the way they did in the old days, and the way Yo-Yo Ma does when he is playing an old instrument. And I got to try a twenty-thousand-dollar cello and even pull the foot down so it fit me.”

  She scooted her chair till it touched his, transfixed with excitement. “I told him I had two thousand, and first he showed me one with an Italian name that was plywood with this veneer that made it look real antique. I said I wouldn’t buy something made out of plywood no matter how it looked, that I wanted the same thing you always got in good instruments of the violin family, and that’s spruce wood on the front and maple on the back and sides and neck. And he acted like he didn’t have one for me. They had one for three thousand, he said, that was German with a pretend Italian name. But I said that was too much. Then his old wife, she was shorter than me, came up to him and said”—Birdie got out of her chair and crouched down, craning up her neck as if talking to someone very tall, speaking in a heavy accent— “ ‘Zhow er zee one on conzignment.’ And he got out this other new cello that was Korean, and it had an Italian name, too, the way they all do, and it was a Strad copy the way they all are, but the back and sides and neck were maple, and the neck scroll was very beautiful, and the front was spruce. He said it was eighteen hundred dollars, and I told him I would like to have that one.”

  Red looked pleased.

  “And Felice, at the orchestra store, they offered her a copy of a four-piece Bressan flute made out of grenadilla wood, but it was a copy of a Baroque flute, and she wanted a modern one. Then the man showed her a Japanese open-hole flute with all-silver body and stops, that had the same construction as one for eight thousand, for two thousand. And Felice said, ‘I’ll take that.’ Because she was forgetting that we didn’t exactly have two thousand, and because she was a lot in love with it.”

  She stood close to Red and put her hand on his shoulder. “So, Un—So, Rufus, that means we are missing two hundred dollars from having enough for two instruments. And Felice’s mom wanted to pay, but we said, No, that wasn’t right. So you have to let Bailey come back for five days, and then that’ll be the rest of what we need.”

  “Trapped in Purgatory with the pubes,” Bailey groaned, throwing his arms around his own bony shoulders, but he didn’t really seem to mind.

  When Red agreed to all the details of the terms, and wrote Birdie a check for what they’d bargained, she looked as if she might die of rapture, and nearly strangled him saying thanks.

  After she’d gone off, dragging the miles of twisted phone cord behind her, to tell Felice the news, Bailey opened himself a beer (without asking me) and sat down across from his dad. “How’d it go with nano-brain?” he asked, in a super casual voice.

  “He sa
id, ‘Tell my bro to write when he learns how.’ ” Red gave his younger son a sort of shoulder punch of affection, in the oblique male manner. “I hated leaving him there, to tell the truth.”

  “How come?” Bailey affected disinterest.

  Red considered. He looked tired from the long trip, but more relaxed than he had in Texas. “I’m a country boy, I guess. They looked—tough—to me, the other freshmen I saw. I don’t mean like rough, just that prep-school, teamplayer demeanor, both the girls and the boys. The kind of look I take as: Who are you, hick? But that’s projecting. Your brother—”

  “Sure. He’s a jock. He’s cool.”

  “What’ve you been up to?” Red asked.

  “Uh, I had it in my head,” Bailey began to explain, “to build Ella a deck. To do something here, you know, to help out. In Texas, you put up a redwood deck or a cedar deck or any kind of deck, you end up with a deck. Here, you’ve got a pond in your yard with rotten wood floating in it. Eccchhh.” He tilted his chair back, taking a long pull on his beer. “So this afternoon, we went to this old mansion, I guess you’d call it? That’s been there for a hundred and fifty years and now you pay to see it? The first thing I noticed was: no standing water. Zip. I had to check how they did that. First of all, they’ve got this reflecting pool, and framing it all around, two foot wide, they’ve got gravel, boxed in and sloping a little so all the water runs down to this hedge. And under the hedge where you don’t notice, they have drains. Me and Ella talked to this guy, this gardener, Mr. Legrand—”

  “I met Henry,” Red said, reaching out a hand and finding mine. “He made quite an impression.”

  “That’s right, he said.” Bailey stopped a minute, blinked, reminded of the painful scene at Belle Vue. “Yeah, anyhow, he was keeping these roses from washing away by building them up into, like, anthills, and then making a trough around them with a canal on one side that let the water run off. And at the sides of every rose bed, he’d got long ditches, like irrigation ditches, that emptied into drains. The thing is, in Texas, you catch every drop of water you can; here, you got to have runoff.”

  “I see that,” Red said, sticking out his leg with its damp pants cuff.

  “So, uhh,” Bailey continued, looking somewhere over his dad’s shoulder, draining almost half of his bottle of beer, “I thought when I came back here over Christmas break, I could, you know, fix Ella up something so we don’t have to fucking wade everywhere.”

  What a roundabout way boys had of telling adults about major life matters. Here, woven into his talk of coastal saturation, the sixteen-year-old beanpole with the stand-up hair and the attitude had just announced the happy news that he wouldn’t be dropping out of school after all. Plus that he had plans to come see his young cousin and her mom in this scruffy, moated half-a-house again.

  To which wonderful revelations, Red responded in the unflapped way of the daddies of sons, “You’ll have to bring in some topsoil, I imagine.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Build it up.”

  Red rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, his left arm a dark tan from driving with the window down. I spotted it because my daddy used to do the same, to and from the university. Rolling down the sleeves of his blue shirts, knotting and cinching his yellow ties when it was time for the classroom. “Where are the oranges?” Red asked, looking around.

  The words brought a blush to my cheeks, as if this were our code for lovemaking, though I knew he meant the crate of assorted kinds he’d sent. “I ate them,” I said. “We did, ate them all.”

  He smiled at me. “They’re growing more all over the world,” he told me.

  Then at that moment, I heard the blat-blat horn of a familiar Honda. But what could Karl be thinking? To come pull in behind Red’s car and honk? I rose, half angry, half embarrassed, getting ready to charge out the back door. But Bailey jumped to his feet and, grabbing his tennis shoes, said, “Gee, Dad, we thought you weren’t coming back till tomorrow, and, uh, Birdie and I already had plans to see Godzilla with Karl.”

  He stuck his head in Birdie’s room and made wild gestures for her to come on, hurry up.

  Red looked at his son, disbelieving. “That the guy who used to take Ella out?”

  “Aw,” Bailey said, “he’s not, no, he’s nothing, I mean, all Karl wants is somebody to go with him to the flicks.” He yelled for Birdie.

  She rushed in, carrying the phone and the Chinese slippers that Felice had given her. “I and Bailey,” she explained to Red, “are going to see—”

  “I told them.”

  “When did you make these plans?” Red asked, looking at his son, trying to get what was going on.

  “Bailey called up—” Birdie started to say, quieted by the pressure of a hand on her head.

  “Karl called a couple days ago,” her cousin improvised smoothly, fixing Birdie with a glare that would dissolve ice cubes. “We’ll probably be back late,” he added, and then, at the door, in a sleight of hand that Red missed, he reached down and lifted the key from around Birdie’s neck and dropped it on the counter.

  “But how can we—?” She stopped. “Okay.”

  “See you later, Dad, Ella,” Bailey said. “We gotta go.”

  I could not believe that boy. Calling Karl and asking him to come by, more than likely offering to pay for the theater tickets and a triple bucket of popcorn and maybe even a tank of gas. I hadn’t thought Red and I would have a single moment alone.

  “Good kid you got,” I said, turning off the kitchen light.

  “Your good influence,” Red said, locking the back door.

  We didn’t need to get under the covers this time. We didn’t even make it into the bedroom before I had my tongue in his mouth and his jeans all the way off. Before he’d pulled down my best love-making shorts and got his hands under my bra. I set my timer for two hours, figuring that was more than safe. And then we turned back the spread and threw ourselves on my clean navy sheets and tried all those ways you do to get inside somebody you love and let him get inside you, because you’re one person and he’s another, and it’s always going to be that way, you being two people. Trying just for a little while to entangle, commingle, entwine enough to feel like one.

  33

  Later that week, I penned a letter to my mother. And whether I meant it that way, or it just happened, for the first time, every word I wrote was true.

  Dear Mother,

  Rufus and I took Birdie and Bailey to the old Episcopal church here, not far from our house. It was built stone by stone as an exact copy of St. Bartolph’s in Cambridge, complete with flying buttresses, Gothic-arched windows, a wild little hollyhock-lined garden with daisies and pinks and bachelor buttons. And weathered tombstones on the side which appear older than the state of Louisiana.

  I wore the button-front black linen dress you saw on a less happy occasion, and thought of how you and Terrell and I used to go on Sunday mornings together.

  Rufus tells me that the roses from my very favorite catalogue, The Antique Rose Emporium, are grown quite near to Austin, in the little town of Brenham, which is also the home of Blue Bell Supreme ice cream. And I plan to visit their wondrous gardens when next I come to see you.

  Daddy called to say that you had not changed your mind about attending the Agatha Adams Day celebration in Angelina County, and I am sorry for that. But Birdie and I, and our friends Felice and Mayfair Roberdeau, will be there in your name. In addition, a very dear friend of Terrell’s has donated a baby grand piano in her memory to be given to the school where your former student is the principal. Please think of the children playing it every day.

  I’m so glad you are still doing well and that Daddy has begun to walk in the house. Rufus has promised to check on you often for me.

  Love,

  Ella

  ONE VIOLET LANE

  OLD METAIRIE

  A Note About the Author

  Shelby Hearon was born in 1931 in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now
makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of fifteen novels, including Footprints, Life Estates, and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She has received an Ingram Merrill grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. Married to physiologist William Halpern, she is the mother of a grown daughter and son.