The Garden Path (12 page)

“School?”

“Kindergarten. Palmer Elementary School, on the other side of Chiswick. They take the school bus.” He relished imparting this information. Susannah could see that his daughters enchanted him—just the fact of their existence, their presence in his life, their trap-door sleepers, the name of their school. “Is that where you went, Susannah? Palmer School?”

“No—mine was just called Chiswick Elementary School. Though I suppose it could be the same building. I don't know where it'd be from here. I've lost my bearings.”

But she remembered Mrs. Garmer, and rows of inky desks, and dusty hardwood floors, and her friend Ellen Moffat, who also had a terrible mother. Ellen's threw tantrums and had weeping fits; thinking back, Susannah realized Mrs. Moffat must have been alcoholic, like her own father; she dimly recalled the smell of booze, a blurred look in her eyes. Mrs. Garmer was the fifth-grade teacher, she had pimples and a crown of braids. Susannah was always in trouble, the principal (Miss Clelland?) calling her mother, and Rosie giving Susannah the silent treatment.

“And who looks after them, Duke? I mean, when they get home from school?”

“I do,” he said, surprised. He was stocky and handsome, a little shorter than Susannah, with a neat pointed nose, mild no-color eyes, a cherubic face with long, turned-down lips, and thinning hair hanging to the middle of his ears. He had neat, aristocratic wrists and ankles, and quick, square hands. His wife, Margie, had been a tiny woman, curly-haired, competent, with gold stars in her pierced ears. She wore a light blue nurse's uniform, and that summer when the Cords came to Connecticut for the funeral and stayed with Duke and Margie, when Susannah had been so sick and desperate, she used to look at Margie—a nurse with gold stars twinkling at her ears—and think
Help me, save me
. And she and Ivan were, of course, helped and saved, by luck and money, and it was Margie who was lost—killed not long after in a car crash on Route 95.

“The bus doesn't get them home until four o'clock, and I'm here by then,” Duke said. “If I'm not, Ginger looks after them—that's my neighbor, in the white house across the road and down. They love Ginger.”

Susannah wondered:
will they love me
? “I'm afraid of children,” she said to Duke, and Ivan stopped eating and said, “For Christ's sake, Susannah, that's what I
mean
,” as if he were continuing an old conversation. As indeed he was. “Pull yourself together, for Christ's sake.”

When Duke said, “You'll love the twins, Susannah, and I know they'll love you. I don't want you to worry while you're here, I want you to throw yourself heart and soul into your new life and get a little
happy
,” and whacked his warm hand down on hers, she knew what Ivan had been gesturing about out there in the dark.

Duke and Ivan talked about the restaurant: about money, about the lease, about ordering equipment, about quantity cooking. Most of what Ivan had speculated about on the road was proving to be wrong-headed; Duke knew all about it, it would be all his doing, all his ideas. They had the money—her grandmother's legacy, expanded through some lucky investing—but Duke had the experience, and the head for practicalities. He had managed a health food store for five years, he'd cooked for two years in a vegetarian restaurant and another two years in an Italian restaurant in New Haven, and if his soup was any indication, he was a good cook, sure enough.

Susannah felt as they sat there that they were in the hands of a wise doctor, or guru, or shrink—that as things stood Duke would be a father figure not only to her but to Ivan, and she wondered how and where Ivan would gain the upper hand, for she knew he'd have to have it in some aspect of their new communal life. Maybe by becoming a father? Surely a proud new daddy doesn't need a father figure?

She didn't know Duke very well. He was an old college buddy and fellow seminarian of Ivan's. Duke, though, had left the seminary after a year, while Ivan went on to be ordained, to batter at the walls of the priesthood in a slum parish in Buffalo, New York, and finally to leave not only the priesthood but the church, split for California, and hook up with—among others—Susannah. He and Duke had kept in touch via occasional and expensive phone calls, one visit from Duke to California, their trip east three years back, and an annual Christmas card from them to Duke. From what Susannah had observed of Ivan's friendship with Duke, it seemed to be composed of equal parts rivalry, affection, and a set of vague shared aspirations—toward
what
it would be hard to say precisely, but what it came down to was an aspiration toward whatever they didn't have at the moment: first holiness, then freedom, then mainstream respectability, now Yankee self-sufficiency. And there they all were, breaking wholesome bread around their woodstove, with the aspirations of Duke and Ivan rising in the air around them.

Susannah decided to share them, however vague. She believed in Ivan (she must believe in Ivan; what other choice had she?). She would believe in Duke, too. And most of all she believed in the holiness of the heart's affections. Where had that phrase come from? what poem? She couldn't recall, but she said it to herself as she sat in the stove's heat, listening to Ivan's travel stories, listening to Duke's plans for the restaurant. “You name it, Susannah. You're the writer,” Duke said. “Come up with something poetic.” It would be real, then; it would have a name; it would materialize in a happy confusion of pots and pans, and tables and chairs, and the smell of cooking. She had been unaware, until that stove-lit moment of certainty, that she had ever been dubious about the project.

She settled down easily at the house on Perkins Road. After the first shock of its dark draftiness, she began to like it. The hugeness of the place pleased her—the high ceilings, the maze of unheated rooms, the vast empty attic, the clutter of outbuildings, the calendar-scene view behind the house, to the west, of a red barn on a hill, a white farmhouse, cows. Even the red-flagged mailbox, shiny black against the white snow, filled her with delight when she trekked out in her boots for the mail. And from the front porch, Duke said, the factory would be nearly invisible in summer when the trees leafed out. From her bedroom window she could see Duke's six apple trees, gnarled as witches, and the frozen pond surrounded by stiff brown weeds.

They did little for the first few days but talk, eat, and drink beer, sitting around the kitchen stove in heavy sweaters and wool socks. Susannah listened, chewing her cuticles, while Duke and Ivan reminisced about their college days and the seminary. All their stories were absurd, designed to make themselves look as silly as possible; they liked looking back from their thirties at their frivolous and misguided youth, and there was an unspoken satisfaction between them with how well, after all, they'd turned out.

Susannah and Ivan told Duke about California, where he'd been just that once and was reluctant to travel to again. He was scared of earthquakes—afraid, since Margie's death, of disasters in general, cautious about cars, protective of his daughters. Susannah told him about the time she and Carla had taken Carla's little boy skiing at Big Bear, outside Los Angeles.

“We had to rent him a snowsuit—can you imagine? Southern California kids don't own them.”

They all looked at the hooks by the kitchen door crowded with the twins' well-worn and grubby collection of snowpants and down jackets, the pile of mittens and wool hats in a basket on the floor, the tangle of boots left on newspapers to drip, and Duke laughed. “Sounds like paradise, right about now. Sometimes I think if I have to zip another boot or hunt up one more lost mitten I'll just flip out, and the little men will have to cart me off to L.A.” He looked at Susannah in belated surprise. “You
ski
?”

“Oh no,” she said. “I sat in the clubhouse and watched.”

“Just watched? All afternoon?” Duke look amused.

“I read old magazines.
People
magazine, and
Time
. I learned a lot.”

“Normally, Susannah is sort of out of touch,” Ivan said, waggling his eyebrows as if to say: understatement of the year.

“I thought writers had to have their fingers on the pulse of the world.”

“My writing is strictly other-worldly,” said Susannah, smiling at them both, wondering how soon she could stop being sociable—a
guest
—and get to work. Her half-formed story pulled at her; even as she sat talking, bits of it wandered into her head, fanciful fragments mixed up with Duke's striped socks, cold beer, Ivan's laugh. In the evenings, the twins played in the front room and the three adults, sitting in the kitchen, could hear tags of their conversation. Everything they said made Duke chuckle, or smile secretly to himself with pride. His mouth turned down at the corners when he smiled, giving him a rueful look. Susannah wondered whether it tormented him that his little girls, with their tiny hands and feet, and their light, curly hair, looked so much like his dead wife, or whether it consoled him. She tried to imagine herself, Ivan dead and gone, with her baby grown to a miniature version of its father, but she didn't linger on the thought; it horrified her, and she looked with great respect at Duke, who was able to enjoy his children, and to enjoy life in spite of what it had inflicted on him.

She wished she could make friends with the twins. She suspected she would, in time, but for the moment she couldn't think of anything to say to them, couldn't talk to them and tease them as Ivan did. She merely observed them, with wary interest, as if they were extraterrestrial beings, or some new and intelligent breed of cat—alien creatures. Their conversation fascinated her; they could, often, be one person talking, so closely did their twin thoughts connect. Once Susannah heard them jointly telling a story to the cats:

“So they went down the dark, dark path.”

“And it got darker and darker, like a tunnel.”

“All the bushes and plants closed in.”

“And the flowers.”

“And they walked and walked until they came to a cave. And what do you think was in it?”

“It was a beautiful princess with long silver hair.”

“And she said, ‘Won't you come in and play with my cats?'”

“They seem very precocious,” she said to Duke, and he smiled his turned-down smile and blushed.

Sometimes it snowed, lightly, never lasting. Large wet flakes drifted dreamily down, letting the wind bat them around before they settled and melted. Once there was a snow day, and the twins were home from school, exuberant at the holiday. Susannah, shyly, played a game called Sleepy Time with them. You had to match pairs of pajamaed animals and tuck them into little cardboard beds. She had a feeling they let her win. She made them cocoa, and they sang “Oh Susannah” to her. She liked the way they fussed over the cats, who bore all their attentions, except being dressed in doll clothes, with surprising aplomb.

“Why do they have those names?” Mary Claire asked her.

“They're named after poets,” Susannah said. “I took a course in college once, and read their poems, and liked them. They were all three friends,” she added, wondering if she was remembering right.

“I like Shelley best.”

“The
name
, you mean,” said Mary Grace.

“Oh, yes—the name—I like all the cats,” Mary Claire said, and the twins petted each cat in turn, scrupulously refusing to have favorites lest they hurt feelings.

She found she could relax with the twins by the process of recalling herself at that age—five going on six. She could remember the long blissful excursions with her father—bike rides or car trips, neither of them caring where they went as long as they could go far enough to wipe away for a while the hard silences of home. Susannah would tell Edwin about school, her teacher, her friend Ellen, her feuds with the other girls, her difficulties with numbers, her joy in learning to read. He always listened carefully, asking questions—not too many, and all the right ones, so that you knew he really cared about the answers. Their conversations were keepsakes to put away and treasure, and at night, in bed before sleep, she used to clutch her old plush tiger or her floppy-eared dog in her arms and go over and over them, committing them to memory just in case, just in case.… She always knew—so did Peter—that her parents would split up, and she had dreaded losing her father. She could still recall with precision the sensation of scared joy that filled her when they did separate and she was allowed, after all, to go west with Edwin.

She telephoned Peter one night after the twins were in bed and Duke and Ivan were drinking beer in the kitchen. She sat on the landing wrapped in a blanket and dialed Peter's number. She had talked to him twice from California, feeling he should know about Edwin's condition, and then about her migration back to Connecticut. They were, in a way, friends, and always had been, though they had often hated each other and had fought, bitterly, as children—little caricatures of their parents—and whenever Susannah heard Peter's voice, or had a letter from him, it was as if something that had been pinching her was eased and made comfortable, some weight removed, a missing piece clicked into place.
My brother
, she thought—and just as the words
my mother
seemed so strange and unwieldy that she sometimes stammered over them,
my brother
sounded right. She loved to say to people: my brother in Connecticut, my brother Peter who's in graduate school at Yale, my brother back east.…

“Peter? It's me—Susannah. We're here.”

The stair landing seemed to be at the center of all four winds. Susannah got colder and colder as they talked about the trip, the restaurant, movies, Peter's writer's block, Edwin, the weather. She loved talking to Peter, she could have sat there forever discussing the new Woody Allen film if she hadn't been freezing. She pulled the blanket tighter around her feet, tucking them in.