The Body in the Ivy (24 page)

There was only one thing to do. She went downstairs and sounded the gong, not pausing until all six women had arrived.

SENIOR YEAR

At first death meant a visceral, physical longing—wanting one last embrace, kiss, or simply to be in the same room, breathing the same air. As time went by, Chris realized that this kind of missing wasn't the worst part, the worst part was not being able to tell her grandmother things, talk to her. Her grief became distilled into three words, “She'll never know.”

They had all come to the farm during the summer, aunts, uncles, cousins, her siblings, her parents. It was like the old days, except for the reason. The reason was in bed, the big four-poster she had been born in and would now die in. They had promised her that. No extraordinary measures. And they weren't needed. She didn't seem to be in any pain, although a private nurse
came each day, and Chris presumed the clear liquid she saw her mother or one of her aunts add to Granny's juice on occasion must be morphine.

She stayed outside in the garden when she wasn't sitting by her grandmother's bed, holding her hand, talking about everything she could possibly think of, grasping desperately at this last chance to get questions answered, reminiscences straight—“Tell me again how you and Grandpa met”—but never too much at one time. Never tiring her grandmother out, although it was clear that she
was
tired and that this was what was killing her. Chris devoted her energies to the soil as never before, bringing fragrant bouquets to the sickroom and all the rest of the house, fresh fruits and vegetables to the table, consumed as a kind of communion by those who had come to say good-bye. It was never mentioned, but few would see the farm again. They ate Chris's string beans, tomatoes, and corn, the fruits of this small plot of earth made flesh in them. When the raspberries arrived, there were so many that the group visiting at the time made jam and carried those jars away as a mnemonic; some were never opened. Raspberries were her grandmother's favorite fruit and Chris mashed and strained some, still warm from the sun, which her grandmother ate, smiling, and eagerly opening her mouth for the next spoonful like the baby swallows that nested in the barn. It was the last food she would eat. For the next day and a half she lay with her eyes closed until she turned her head on the pillow, grasped her daughter's hand, and stopped breathing. It was so uneventful—no death rattle, nothing they had prepared themselves for—that Chris's aunt wasn't sure her mother was dead at first. Chris had gone in and
stroked that soft cheek. She knew there were others in the room, but afterward could not remember who they were. She knelt by the bed and said a prayer, thanking God and asking him to take care of Granny, although it would probably be the other way around, she thought irreverently, picturing the God in her Sunday school texts being urged to try some homemade rose hip jelly—“So good for warding off colds.” She got up, stumbled across the room and out into the garden, where she flung herself facedown, letting her tears soak into the ground beneath her.

Yes, she missed hugging her grandmother, holding her arm as they walked in the fields, missed her smell—a soapy, fresh smell and the smell of Pond's, which she swore by and urged on her female relatives instead of all those “fancy, department store lotions” they used. But most of all Chris wanted her grandmother back so she could keep on talking to her. She was the one who grounded her, helped her make sense of her life. After the funeral, it soon became apparent that this was the role she had played for her husband also. Grandpa's detachment, his withdrawal during the summer, even his absentmindedness—potholders in the refrigerator, pajamas still on under his overalls—were ascribed to the grief he must be feeling, the incipient sense of loss. But it was more than that, and less. Taking him to the doctor for the summer cold he'd picked up after the funeral that threatened to become bronchitis, Chris's mother returned to the farm in tears. Her father had Alzheimer's and they would have to find a place for him. He couldn't stay on the farm, not even with help. “How could we know?” she'd cried to Chris, the only one there at the time. “We
don't ask him things like who's the president of the United States and what year it is.” Grandpa had been pleasant, polite, and answered each question wrong.

Everything had gone so quickly—her grandparents, the farm sold to a neighbor's son and his young family. It terrified Chris. That life could do this, change overnight. She came back to Pelham feeling as if she had lost her bearings. The farm had always been more home than home had been. Then life had changed again and this was what she wanted to share with Granny, the only person who could possibly understand the wonder of it all. Chris was in love and the most amazing part was that she was loved in return. She'd never said those words to a man, never heard them. “I love you.” She was so happy that she found herself running not walking, smiling at nothing, and loath to go to sleep, except perchance to dream. Yes, she'd dated, but never seriously. At best they had been funny, at worst boring and sometimes nasty: “What did you expect? I took you to dinner and a movie, didn't I?” She knew what she wanted, someone tender, someone who would take his time and watch the fragile shoot she knew herself to be open up and bloom. And she had found him here, at Pelham of all places. The old Chinese proverb that her grandmother had written out and framed for her so long ago—“A garden cannot be made in a day, or a week…It must be planned for, waited for, and loved into being”—had come to life.

She'd put off the math requirement until senior year, hoping that it might be abolished as students at Pelham finally began to imitate their more radical sisters and brothers across the nation's campuses and argue for more say in their curricular choices, urging a total re
vamping of Pelham's courses. The administration was not budging, however, and stuck to the old “We know what's best for you” line. The line didn't hold for long—the year after Chris graduated, a new president came in, a new broom, but it would be too late for Chris. She went to her first class seething with anger at having to take it and more than a little afraid she would fail the course. Math had always been her worst subject and it was only because her verbal SAT had been in the high 700s that she'd been accepted at Pelham, she was sure. Her mother had gotten her through high school math courses: “It's so logical, dear. You're making it all much too hard.” For whatever reason, when Chris saw equations or word problems, they might as well have been in cuneiform.

The class seemed to be all freshmen, methodical girls wisely crossing their required courses off their lists. Chris had taken what she was interested in, assuming that this was why she was in college, and not worrying about the future. It had been a good strategy in a way. She loved her courses and did well, while watching her fellow classmates struggle. She understood why people talked about how much they enjoyed their college years—there was so much to learn. It was fun to be a sponge. But not to wipe out unappetizing sinks, and here she was in the most loathsome one of all. The professor smiled at her and asked her to move forward—“My voice isn't that loud,” he apologized. She had taken a seat at the rear of the class by herself, not knowing anyone. “I'm sorry,” she said, moving forward. His voice
wasn't
loud. It was low and there was the slightest trace of an accent, Southern, she thought. Wherever he'd gone to college, they must not have had speech tests, she thought,
and was grateful. She liked the sound of his voice. If only it had been a different subject. But soon she was grateful for that, too. Her inability to grasp even the simplest concept became apparent that first class and he'd asked her to come see him during his office hours so he could try to clear some things up for her. Instead of being mortified, she felt special, singled out. He
cared
. He wouldn't let her fail. He'd tend to her.

Robert Alexander LaFleur was indeed from the South, if New Orleans, a place that is unique unto itself, can be considered part of the South. He had been an assistant professor at Pelham for three years—“Oh, why did I wait so long to take math?” Chris had cried out to herself when she heard. They'd been on the same campus, passing each other in the library, no doubt, and she hadn't known it. He was thirty years old, a Harvard graduate—“Daddy married a Yankee and we could come back to live in New Orleans so long as we went to college in the North to give it a try.” The try had apparently lengthened into an accomplished fact for Sandy, as he was known to his friends and family.

Her first appointment with Professor LaFleur—thinking about his name, she knew they were meant to be—developed into regular tutoring sessions. Chris had never had trouble in any other course, so it wouldn't have occurred to her to wonder why the professor was serving as tutor rather than arranging for one of his advanced students to help her. Chris was taking the supposed gut, the most basic math course offered by the college, the one where students cut out paper and made Möbius strips, the one where the professor brought in doughnuts to explain what a torus was. She soon found
that the sessions in his office were the high points of her week. After the fourth one, they took a walk around the lake. It had seemed natural. They were both leaving at the same time, and emerging into the early autumn sunshine had simultaneously exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!” “Hook pinkies and make a wish. I'm very superstitious,” he'd said and she'd replied, “A superstitious mathematician—sounds like the answer to a riddle. You know, something like ‘who only counts to twelve?'” It was pretty stupid, but Chris didn't mind being pretty stupid in front of Professor LaFleur. He was actually making the murky realms of math make sense. They reached the point at which he would need to head for the parking lot and she would turn off toward the dorm, but without saying anything they kept walking down toward the lake and the path that went all the way around it—through wooded patches and past the manicured lawns of several large estates that faced the college from the opposite shore.

It had also seemed natural that they would drop their books, his in one of those green canvas book bags, hers clutched to her breast, and sit beside the water in a grove of birches. And finally, it had seemed
very
natural that he would kiss her, softly at first, then with a growing intensity to match her own. “You're so beautiful,” he murmured, pressing her down upon the soft yellow carpet the fallen birch leaves made. “You're just the most beautiful little thing, cher.”

Soon Chris was meeting him at his Cambridge apartment for her “tutoring.” Sometimes they'd go out, to the Brattle Theater for the Bogart festival, stopping off at the Bick, the Hayes Bickford, for a bite to eat afterward.
But mostly they stayed in his small apartment cooking for themselves—Sandy couldn't believe Chris had never had gumbo—and spending hours in bed. She loved to hear stories about his family, the generations on his father's side who had always lived in New Orleans, his Boston Brahmin mother who had flouted convention by marrying a Southerner, moving to what her relatives considered a place more foreign than any country in Europe. When he talked about the Garden District houses, elegant meals at Antoine's, beignets and chicory coffee at Cafe du Monde, lazy days on the river, Chris felt as if she was actually there by his side. And someday she would be.

His endearments were soft—“cher” and “shug”—his accent became more pronounced during their lovemaking, and she was seduced by his words, along with his touch, his obvious pleasure—her own, a revelation.

In turn Chris told him all about the farm and her love of growing things—and how devastated she continued to be by her grandmother's death. Sandy wanted to bring her to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, that joyful city ritual, a gorgeous chaos, which would coincide with Pelham's spring break. She secretly got in touch with the new owners of the farm—fantasizing about a long weekend—and was assured that she was welcome to visit any time she wanted and could bring any guests she liked. Aside from that, she didn't talk to anyone about Sandy. Not her parents, who had never been what Granny had been to her. Not even Rachel. She wanted to keep Robert Alexander La-Fleur all for herself, she acknowledged. This wasn't like the kinds of relationships her classmates had with their beaux, getting
pinned, even getting engaged. This was much more real, far removed from their trite conventions. This was love unto death.

 

“I've decided I want to graduate cum laude, maybe even summa,” Prin announced as she walked into Phoebe's room without knocking. It had only recently annoyed Phoebe. Last year she'd been pleased that Prin felt so close to her that she didn't bother.

“That's wonderful. But you need to get your thesis proposal in right away. I think the deadline is Friday.”

“It is and that's what reminded me. A bunch of Latin words won't matter years from now, but they might make the difference in getting a job in a gallery.” Prin had set her sights on working in a trendy gallery in London, Paris, or New York. “They'll think I'm beautiful
and
brainy.”

“Well, you are,” Phoebe said loyally. “Any place would be lucky to have you.”

“I was thinking something like twentieth-century design. That way you wouldn't have to research a whole different subject.”

“What!” Phoebe had been going over her notes for a psych quiz the next day and now she turned all the way around to face Prin. “Oh no, not this time, Prin. If you want to do a thesis, you are going to have to do it yourself. Aside from the ethics involved, I simply don't have the time. I started my thesis last spring. Most people do. It's a huge amount of work.”

Prin didn't say anything, but sat down on Phoebe's bed and leaned back against the armed cushion Phoebe used when she read late at night.

“I mean it,” Phoebe said. “This isn't like a paper. This is big. We'd both get kicked out if we got caught.”