The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

Family Matters

Chez Cordelia

The Garden Path

The Garden Path

A Novel

Kitty Burns Florey

For Dan Wickenden

Chapter One

A Wind from the West

Rosie Mortimer's Garden, the one that has been seen and admired on television by millions, was as bleak as anyone else's in the middle of January. Rosie looked out the window at it that cold morning, as she did every morning before doing anything else. In spite of the weather-stripping Barney had installed on all the windows, a thin gust of the cold got to her, and she pulled her old wool bathrobe tighter as she stood there. She didn't enjoy getting out of bed at seven in the morning in the dead of winter. Who does? thought Rosie, trying for some kind of kinship with those who had no choice. She had set her alarm so she could get to work on the book she was supposed to be writing:
Rosie Mortimer's Garden Book
. She hadn't had much luck in the afternoons or evenings, so she thought she must be an early-morning writer. She was beginning to be afraid she wasn't any kind of a writer at all, and her morale was low as she stood there and shivered.

The sight of her backyard, dearly though she loved it, didn't help. It was an untidy pattern of browns: brown earth, dead-brown trees, shrubs and bushes in dull khakis and tans, brown leaves in loose piles thrown by the wind against the compost fence. Six stubborn hydrangea snowballs, bleached beige, still clung to their branches. The few bits of color—purply red holly-grape leaves, periwinkle still green under the burlapped rose bushes, scarlet berries on the euonymus—were overwhelmed by the drabness, and so, nearly, was Rosie. It took a gardener's imagination to see the garden as alive and potent, full of change and slow growth, with juices running in its chilled veins. And that was the way she did see it; part of her did, anyway, the most ancient and basic part, and the professional side as well. She made her living by such observations. “Rosie Mortimer's Garden”—check your local listing for time and channel.

One of her most well-received programs was the tour of her January garden—not this one, but two Januarys ago, when she had demonstrated to her faithful viewers evidence of life and renewal designed to chase away the winter doldrums: forsythia buds, snowdrop tips, leaflets on the azaleas, and scaly tufts on the pussywillow. “In the Midst of Death” was the gloomy title Janice, her producer, had given that show. “Nature doesn't hibernate in winter along with the bears,” Rosie informed her audience—tartly, as usual. Tartness was her trademark—not tartiness, which her producer firmly suppressed. All attempts at ribald humor were considered out of place in the bosom of Mother Nature, who was seen by the folks at WEZL–TV as a bit of a prude. All off-color remarks were deleted, and if on a summer day Rosie should wear a shirt that exposed even one millimeter of cleavage, on went the old canvas gardening apron along with the makeup and the hidden mike. So she came across all brisk and hearty, and she said things like, “Nature doesn't hibernate in winter along with the bears. It's only the gardener who does that, for want of a better occupation. Hibernates with the seed catalogs, that is,” and she twinkled her eyes at the cameras and they followed her indoors to her fireside, the pot of tea, the plate of scones and jam, the pile of seed catalogs on the old trestle table. Her producer had provided the nice new pot—one of those fat brown ones that scream England—and the scones and the jam. Jampot, too. The seed catalogs were Rosie's, though, and she had made the fire because no one else understood her fireplace.

But in spite of all the cheery, upbeat gardening talk for the cameras, January always depressed her, and she thought, as she stood there looking at the scene and shivering, that it was nice, it was reassuring, it was even quite beautiful, really, that Nature was so busy with her fecund underground life; but what showed when you looked out the window was simply winter, the weary brown look of it. The garden was like an empty house before the movers come with the furniture and pictures—better yet, like an unattractive pregnant woman. She was pleased with that last image. She looked around for a pen and paper to write it down for her book, found nothing, closed her eyes and said it over three times to imprint it on her brain. By the third time it sounded far less clever. When she opened her eyes it was snowing, and she stood and watched as the snow slowly, silently covered the dull garden browns with nets of snowflakes, softening and cleansing, getting heavier and quicker and more substantial, until the primroses were covered, the brick borders, the hay mulch on the strawberry bed. Even the lower shrubs threatened to be lost as snow gathered on their bare branches and piled up on the cold earth around them.

But enough. Rosie dressed quickly, in old jeans and a red sweater, and went downstairs to get herself some hot breakfast: instant oatmeal, one of the great advances of our time, and only a hundred calories if you don't count the butter and the brown sugar.

She was outside knocking the snow off the conifers with the broom when her son Peter telephoned, and he drove over to see why she hadn't answered the phone.

“You were worried about me,” Rosie accused, after she hugged him and kissed him. She was aware that she had been, perhaps, an excessively fond mother to her son, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

“I wasn't.” He sat there in his favorite chair, handsome and blandly smiling. Rosie's son looked like her father—not like his own father, her ex-husband. This made her happy every time she looked at him, even at that particular moment, when he was irritating her.

“You were. You'd think I was
elderly
. You'd think I was helpless and decrepit. I am not quite fifty years old, Peter. I'll be forty-nine until May. I had a complete physical last month. I am in perfect health. Just because I don't answer my phone is no reason you have to drive twenty-five miles to check up on me.” Her voice, meant to be humorously reprimanding, came out fretful and fussy—overemphatic.

“Oh, Ma,” he said, responding to her tone, waving one hand around aimlessly and slouching down in his chair. For years those words and that gesture had meant
let's drop it
.

Rosie was willing. She looked out the window. The snow had stopped; there were a few wan rays of sunshine. The backyard was blue-white. The shrubs she had cleaned off were blackish against the snow. “This will thaw before evening,” she predicted. “Won't amount to a row of pins, as Grandma used to say.”

“I had a letter from Susannah.”

Rosie looked from the backyard to Peter. “I beg your pardon. You had what?”

“A letter from my sweet sister Sue. After all these long, peaceful years. That's why I called you.”

He was slouched so low in the rose-patterned wing chair that he was almost flat, his head propped at an angle that gave him a double chin. She wanted to tell him to sit up, then realized that wasn't the proper response to what he had said. She stayed silent.

“She and her hubby are moving back East.”

Rosie knew he was watching her, and she made herself look out the window again, gazing hard at the snow, the side of the garage, a chickadee in the feeder. “Where East?” she asked.

“Chiswick. Practically the old home turf.”

She clenched her fist and banged it down on her knee. “Damnation,” she said, glaring at him. “And will you please sit up straight? You look deformed.”

He sat up. “Don't get mad at me. I didn't invite them here. She and Vladimir or Nikolai or whatever his name is are going into business.”

“Ivan. What kind of business, may I ask?” Rosie tried to imagine—her coldhearted, hippie daughter and her son-in-law the expriest. What business? Penny arcade. Massage parlor. Crackpot church. Hypnosis/acupuncture/meditation center.

“Are you ready for this one?”

Rosie wasn't. She wasn't ready for the fact of their arrival, much less for the harebrained project that was bringing them. “Tell me,” she said, wearily but not without interest.

“Health food restaurant. They've rented a place on the Post Road, right near Dunkin' Donuts, with some friend of theirs who lives near here. Remember that bookstore that closed up a couple of months ago? In there.”

“Damnation,” Rosie said again, but absently, thinking hard. She was trying to imagine her daughter, who used to scatter candy wrappers behind her like falling leaves and who couldn't, Rosie believed, have much more business sense than a cat, running a health food restaurant in a location partnered by fast-food chains, auto body shops, a roller dome. Another thought struck her. “Why here, Peter? Why so close to me and to you? Did she tell you that?”

“No, she didn't, but it ain't nostalgia. I'll give you one guess.”

Rosie stood up and went around the corner into the kitchen to hide her agitation. “Well, they certainly won't get one cent out of me.” She filled the kettle and put it on to boil, and stayed in the kitchen to wait for it. She needed to be alone to compose herself; the anger that gripped her at Peter's announcement was a complete surprise. She had thought her daughter's life had long ceased to affect or involve her, and here was her heart thumping loudly and her pulse beating audibly in her left ear and her breath coming short. What if I die? she thought. What if the news kills me? She imagined Peter hearing her fall, finding her in a heap on the kitchen floor, stretching her out, trying the CPR techniques he had learned in a class at the Y, in vain, and then blaming Susannah for it, and Susannah … Rosie saw her daughter's triumphant smile and pressed her hands to her heart, forced herself to breathe deeply, to relax. She looked out the kitchen window. There—the sun was out properly, shining yellow on the snow. Brown patches showed already on top of the stone wall. The triumph of the sun, she thought. The idea rubbed away the image of Susannah's smile and cheered her. The phrase might do for her book. A chapter title? For a chapter about what? She must at least do an outline today—this afternoon, before Barney came.

“You making tea?”

“Yes.”

“Ah—good old Mum.”

Dear Peter. The thought of Susannah prompted the sentiment, though it was never far from her mind. The dear boy. Except for the fact that his sexual preferences precluded grandchildren, he was a perfect son—a daughterly son who dropped in for tea and gossip. And as for her daughter, who at the age of ten had rejected her mother and chosen to live with her deplorable father, Rosie hadn't seen her in seventeen years, except for one disastrous incident. But there were her letters. The first one had arrived when Susannah was in college, an attempt at mollification with a plea for money at the end of it. Rosie burned the letter, then regretted it. It was an unbeatable specimen of sheer gall, and she wished she had it to read over periodically as a reminder of the depths to which human nature could sink. And though she didn't answer it, more letters came, erratically, maybe two a year on the average. They got subtler as Susannah got older. One or two didn't mention money at all, or did so only obliquely, with statements like, “It's dreadfully expensive living in San Francisco, and Dad is so busy sometimes he seems to forget I exist.” This sort of thing failed to touch Rosie's heart; her heart, alas, had become untouchable from that particular quarter. She did pay off Susannah's last college loan, though, not because of Susannah's plea but because of Peter's, after he saw his sister on a trip out there and said she was unemployed, undernourished and unhappy. But Rosie gave the money to Peter and made him pay it off in his own name, and directly to the Financial Aid Office, not to Susannah. Lord knows what she would have done with it—or what heights her begging letters would have reached if she'd known who was her fairy godmother. Shortly after the loan was paid, Rosie got a letter from her, reproachful in tone, in praise of Peter's generosity and, by implication, lamenting her mother's lack of same.

During the first few years after Edwin and Rosie split up, when he and Susannah were living in New Mexico and then California and she heard from them only via child support payments and their occasional letters and cards to Peter, Rosie's feelings toward her daughter had been composed, she admitted readily, as much of hurt pride as of dislike. If Susannah had chosen to stay with her and Peter, Rosie could still have viewed her as a troublesome but salvageable brat. At least Edwin would have been out of the way, unable to spoil the child and make excuses for her behavior. But with the coming of the letters, active animosity entered Rosie's heart and expanded there until the day she had come face to face with Susannah, three summers ago, and made the scene that became family history. After it, the letters ceased. And now the wretched child was on her way to Connecticut, to settle with her hippie husband and her insane business in the next town.