The Garden Path (3 page)

And her dislike of Edwin. During the first year of marriage, Rosie had declined from being madly in love with him to disliking him profoundly. It seems a short time for such an enormous change, but it happened, and it was, Rosie insisted, Edwin's fault, though she was sure he blamed her. But he was the coldest man she had ever met; any warmth in him was faked, and temporary. They never discussed their problems. Both of them sensed they were insoluble, not really problems at all but simply the results of a mating error—two different species coming together by hazard in a monstrous union that no amount of discussion could ever put right. They despised each other quietly for twelve and a half years, and then one day, after two wild, bitter, violent months of arguing, Rosie threw him out. At that point she stopped hating him and seldom, in fact, thought about Edwin any more at all, considering him, when she did allow him to enter her consciousness, faintly disgusting—an old guy pushing sixty living his warped conception of the good life, last heard of in Mexico with a twenty-year-old chippie who he really believed loved him for his fine mind and his gorgeous body and not for his bank account. Poor old Edwin.

Susannah was his idea. She was born when Peter was two years old. Rosie had suspected that Edwin wanted a second child, from his sudden unwelcome ardor after Peter's first birthday and his denunciation of rubbers as unnatural. She didn't mind having another baby. Edwin wanted it, she was sure, so he'd have a child on his side as she had Peter on hers, and she looked forward to the sheer fun of getting the second one in her camp too, imagining Edwin's dismay when he found himself on the short side of a 3–1 score.

But Rosie didn't take to Susannah as she had to Peter, especially after the child passed out of the purely helpless stage. She was a difficult child, unresponsive to cuddling, and nothing like the good sport Peter had been. And she resembled Edwin, especially when she was getting ready to cry and the closed-in, stubborn look turned her face an angry red.

Rosie was shocked at herself when she realized that she wasn't warming up to her troublesome new baby, but she blamed it all on Edwin. He'd forced this second child on her before she was ready, and she spent her days in a blur of exhaustion that he did hardly anything to ease. She felt they were in league against her, Edwin and Susannah, to wear her out, to turn her into a shrew; and the more Rosie looked at Susannah's petulant little face the more the child resembled not only Edwin but Edwin's mother.
She's not mine
, Rosie thought to herself almost from the beginning, both sickened and fascinated by the way the thought persisted. And it was as if Susannah shared her conviction. She would look up at Rosie with her hard blue eyes antagonistic and knowing, unimpressed by Rosie's attempts at mother-love, and the expression on her face said
I'm not yours
.

Rosie used to walk both children laboriously down to the Public Garden, Susannah in her carriage, Peter toddling haltingly along Commonwealth Avenue at her side. Now Rosie joined the other mothers in complaint, and understood the solace to be derived from communal bitching. The mothers in the park were mostly a new bunch. No one remembered Rosie's old boasts about Peter's charms, though she had no doubt they were appalled by her blatant favoring of Peter over his whiny sister, and gossiped about it, predicting woe for the gallant little lad. But Rosie always told herself, with conscious liberality and a touch of defiance, that if Peter's homosexuality flowered from her love for the boy, then homosexuality must not be such a bad thing.

Peter used to wobble over to his sister's crib and look at her in wonder as she lay there squalling. “Baby cry,” he would say, looking puzzled.

“I know,” Rosie would answer, weary from her efforts to comfort and placate. “Baby cry all the time.”

And Edwin would stalk over, put the baby up on his shoulder, and cuddle her magically into silence, glaring at wife and son over Susannah's red, bald head.

When, at the age of ten, Susannah said, “I don't want to live with you any more—I want to go to New Mexico with Dad,” that must have been the sort of thing she remembered: her father coming angrily to her defense, her brother looking on calmly, secure in his good behavior, her mother turning away with a sigh. Or so Rosie thought, helplessly, in later years, when all the harm had been irrevocably done.

They moved out of Boston, finally, when the children were still small. Edwin was transferred to the Hartford office of his company, and he commuted there from the town where they finally bought a house, after much looking, that suited their needs.

Rosie's needs were simple—she wanted a place where she could garden. And so were Edwin's—he wanted something more impressive than his brother Art's house on Long Island. They agreed, without discussing it, that a long commute wasn't a drawback. When they were looking in East Chiswick and the real estate agent, dubious, pointed out that it was a good hour away from Hartford, Edwin and Rosie looked at each other briefly, then away, and said, in unison, “That's no problem.”

They both knew that the less time they spent together the better they got along. In fact, as years went by and their marriage was increasingly revealed as a disastrous mistake, they admitted it—not openly, because, from the first, little with them was ever honest and open, but by a series of tacit machinations that struck Rosie later as absurd, even crazy. If she told Edwin, for instance, that she and Peter would be spending Saturday afternoon baking cookies for the first grade Halloween party, then he'd volunteer to take Susannah to the park. He was capable of pushing her on the swing there for an hour or more at a time, and she was capable of sitting there just as long, going down and up, down and up, her skinny little legs dangling, making no effort to push herself. Or they would go for long, pointless bike rides, racking up the miles on their odometers. Or they would drive to the other end of the state to see a dog show, or a planetarium show they had already seen three times. But Rosie was glad they had their diversions, just as they were no doubt glad she and Peter had theirs. She could think of only a few things the Mortimers did
en famille
—the circus, once, at which both children cried when the lion-tamer flicked his whip at the animals. Things like Thanksgiving dinners, of course, with one or the other set of grandparents and in-laws. Now and then the beach, which Rosie hated but the rest of them loved—and she wouldn't let Peter go with Edwin and Susannah alone for fear Edwin wouldn't watch him closely enough and he would drown. She used to picture the police coming to the door, her son's bloated, wet body dripping seaweed, and her hands around Edwin's throat, squeezing and squeezing, her nails digging in. So she would put on her bathing suit, pack a lunch, and sit grimly on the blanket in the sun getting a headache from trying to distinguish Peter's wet bobbing head from a hundred others while Edwin, a strong swimmer, swam back and forth along the ropes, steady and determined, his elbows going up like fins, his head swiveling from side to side—and anyone who failed to get out of his way was out of luck.

So they bought the house in East Chiswick, a tiny town attached to Chiswick like a nose to a face. The shopping centers were in Chiswick, and the auto body shops, the McDonald's, the Dunkin' Donuts; East Chiswick had an old wooden-floored Woolworth's, two antique shops, a florist, a greengrocer, a butcher, a French restaurant, and a store called Trade Winds that sold imported china. All this appealed to Edwin. It's a well-known fact that to be able to afford to live in a sleepy, simple little hamlet like East Chiswick you have to have plenty of money. It pleased Edwin to advertise the fact that he had moved up in the legal department of his company with a rapidity that startled even his mother, who thought he was a genius and who had told Rosie on her wedding day that her son was quite a catch and she hoped Rosie could live up to the responsibility of being married to him. And this is how naive Rosie had been—she said she would try; she even took Mrs. Mortimer's fat hand and squeezed it.

The house itself was too small for them. “Buy the community, not the house,” the real estate man told them. “Better a three-room shack in East Chiswick than a palace in someplace like Middletown or Danbury.” So they ended up with not quite a three-room shack but a small, tidy Cape Cod on a dead-end street with an acre of land. The acre was what sold Rosie. Edwin liked the land, too, because Art had only half an acre, but what finally sold Edwin was Susannah's discovery of a shed that had been converted to a playhouse, complete with window boxes and a doorknocker. “Buy this one, Daddy,” she pleaded in the imperious way that Edwin found so winning. “If you buy this house, you get two—one for me and one for you.” She gave Peter and her mother an excluding frown and pulled on Edwin's arm with both hands. “Please, Daddy, please, please.” He grinned down at her and ruffled her blonde hair. “Well,” he said, and then he looked at Rosie and pretended to become serious and businesslike. “It does have a nice kitchen, Rose. Two bathrooms. Good yard. Just about what we need.”

“Only three bedrooms,” she pointed out. “And don't forget it needs a new roof.”

“Still …” Susannah tugged at his arm. “I don't know. Let's make an offer on it. I don't think we can do better.”

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Susannah yelled, and streaked off toward the playhouse, Peter following her and trying to look nonchalant.

“I don't seem to have much choice, do I?” Rosie said with a shrug and a facial expression she had mastered over the years—a magnanimous but pained smile, as if the goodness of her heart forced her to squeeze it out against terrible odds. “We might as well take it. I suppose we're all sick of looking.” Her lukewarm approval, hiding the fact that she had fallen in love with the place as quickly as Susannah had, was meant to ruin any pleasure Edwin might find in the purchase. Oh yes, she was a terrible bitch, but she felt she had to pay him back for tricking her into marriage.

Edwin had tricked her into marriage, when she was nineteen and he twenty-four, by pretending to be interesting. He kept it up for an entire year, from the day they met until the wedding. By the time they were married he was thin and tired and nervous and unable to go on with it—the pretense. It crumbled on their Caribbean honeymoon, when he spent long hours simply lying in the sun, and stopped talking to her in restaurants while they waited for their crayfish and their mango pie and their exotic rum drinks served in hollowed-out pineapples, and while the steel band played with a black intensity that made Rosie sad. She thought Edwin was tired of her already, that she had begun to bore him, and she cried into her pillow every night after they made love and he went to sleep. She thought he had decided she was good for only one thing. It took her months to discover that he was simply tired of being fascinating—of taking her to the theater and the opera, of telling her funny stories from his college days, of asking intelligent questions about gardening, of promising to take her to see the gardens of England and France and Italy, of devouring
Newsweek
and the Sunday
Times
so he could wow her with his knowledge of the world. He settled, as if with a grunt, into the cold dullness that was natural to him. The repetitive acts that she came to associate with him—the back and forth swimming, the long sessions pushing Susannah on the swing, the tolerance for those daily drives up and down Route 91, even his incredible but, in the end, tedious endurance in bed—were, she decided, his way of winding himself up for life. He was always in danger of running down. He was a taciturn, introverted, selfish, incurious man who wanted most of all to be left alone. If she had a meatball for every time he said that all he asked was a little peace and quiet she could open a restaurant.

She must have been, at nineteen, just the kind of wife Edwin wanted—young, pathetically naive, and upwardly mobile. She loved her parents dearly, and she loved her old Nonna Anna, who was still living with them, blind and arthritic but funny and full of beans. She was fond of Liliano's Garden Center, too, and she was perfectly content to work there on weekends all through high school and, when she graduated, to work full-time, either behind the cash register or outside taking care of the plants and shrubs. But she didn't want to spend her life there. She had grand ideas, vaguely incorporating an estate not unlike Silvergate. She wanted to be the grande dame ordering the viburnum and the wisteria, not the person who delivered them and sent the bill. At this utterly inane period in her life, she met Edwin. Edwin was a clerk in a law firm in Providence that summer. He was in his last year of law school at Harvard. He used to drive his fat and patronizing mother to Liliano's to pick out flats of boring annuals, or he used to stop by for bags of fertilizer and grass seed. Mrs. Mortimer fancied herself a gardener because every spring she had her favorite son, dear Edwin, plant the perimeter of her lawns with lavish borders of red and white petunias and impatiens and salvia, outlined in blue ageratum for a patriotic effect. By the end of the summer, these garishly florabundant plots, cultivated and fertilized and pinched back every weekend by dutiful Edwin—who gardened in bathing trunks so he would tan—were undeniably an impressive sight. So, incidentally, was Edwin.

“You should see my mother's garden,” he said to Rosie one day when she was selling him a length of garden hose. He was in his bathing trunks and a T-shirt. His legs were long and golden-haired.

“I'd love to,” she said.

“Hop in the car. I'll take you over.”

She admired the red, white and blue extravaganza, then—sensing she hadn't gone far enough—gushed heartily. Mrs. Mortimer, after all, was a good customer. She beamed at Rosie when she finally hit the proper level of enthusiasm and offered her a lemonade. It was hot out on the lawn, and she accepted. Rosie discoursed on the benefits of planting perennials rather than annuals: the financial saving, the greater variety, the satisfaction of watching something grow from year to year. Edwin, pretending to be interested, asked intelligent questions. His mother nodded patiently for a while, then quit listening and smirked with satisfaction at her petunias. Rosie had a second glass of lemonade and a tuna sandwich. While Mrs. Mortimer was inside fetching the food, Edwin asked Rosie to go to the movies with him. She accepted. They went to see
High Noon
, and Edwin impressed her profoundly by comparing it to the
Iliad
. She assumed later that he lifted the comparison from a movie review he had read, but at the time she was limp with admiration—a 24-year-old Harvard law student with intellectual leanings and a passionate curiosity about perennials was a far cry from Roger Mitchell, the boy she'd been dating, a freshman at the University of Rhode Island whose favorite activities were bowling and drinking beer. Rosie would never forgive herself for being taken in by Edwin, and often thought she'd have done better to stick with Roger, a good-hearted boy without a phony bone in his body. But a year later, dazzled by his ersatz culture, Rosie married Edwin Mortimer, who carried within him the seed that sparked Susannah.