The Garden Path (47 page)

Duke put a hand on Ginger's shoulder. She breathed deeply, calming herself. “Get some sleep, Ginger. Or do you want to come home with us? We'll put you up if you'd rather not stay alone.”

“I'm all right,” Ginger said. “I'm just
sad
, Duke.”

“I know,” he said. The three of them walked toward the car. “I'm sad, too.”

Duke got into the car, and Ginger turned to look at Susannah. “You're not saying much, Susannah.” She spoke with effort, as if the words caused her actual pain, in her throat or in her chest.

“Oh, Ginger—” Susannah put her arms around Ginger, breathed in the smells of hair spray and whiskey, said, “Ginger, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,” and they both began to cry, taking comfort from the sound of their joint weeping until they laughed self-consciously and separated.

“God,” Ginger said, and wiped her face again with Ivan's towels. “God, Susannah, what a life—isn't it?”

“It is,” Susannah said, and sighed, and got into the car. “You're sure you're going to be okay alone?”

“I'm alone every night. What the hell.” She went over to Duke's side and hung on to the half-open window. “Duke? You're going to reopen the place, aren't you? We can get it all cleaned up, we'll all pitch in.”

Duke laughed shortly. “I don't know, Ginger. Talk to me tomorrow. I'm having a little trouble thinking constructively at the moment.” He attempted a smile, unconvincingly. “Go to bed, Ginger.”

She wiped her eyes. “Stay in touch, at least.”

Duke's smile was genuine this time. “Ginger, we still live down the road from you. We're still
friends
. And when we reopen you'll be the first waitress we interview for a job.”

He put the car in gear, and they drove back to their own dark house. It was four
A
.
M
. Duke built a fire, and they pulled their rocking chairs close together, their knees touching. Susannah had a glass of milk, Duke a beer. The three cats rubbed against their chairs, purring, hoping for food, gazing up at them with their round, surprised eyes, but eventually they gave up and, one after the other, fell asleep by the woodstove.

Epilogue

Peter and Hollis are building themselves a house, a wood frame, solar-heated four-room cottage on a hillside west of Hartford, in the Connecticut Berkshires. They are on the roof, nailing on shingles. If they look up from their work, they can see gentle green slopes, hills higher than theirs rising dark with trees, and the low hills below them to the west spread out, from this angle, almost flat. But Peter doesn't look up, doesn't like to be reminded he's twenty feet off the ground. He keeps his eyes on the shingles, pretending he's nailing them to an oddly pitched floor. Hollis respects Peter's fear, and moves carefully, talking in a low voice—no shouting, no sudden moves, no acrophobia jokes.

“What about Nelson's party?” Peter says.

“Forget Nelson's party. We're building this place so we can get away from parties like Nelson's, I thought.”

“Just checking.”

“Nelson's party appeals to me about as much as roofing this in gold lamé.”

Peter gives a restrained chuckle, and moves in a crouch to a new spot. Hollis hands him a bag of nails. They have taken to dressing alike, when they're alone, and they both wear overalls, no shirts, white sweatbands, heavy work shoes. Taking the nails from Hollis, Peter feels as if he's taking them from his mirror image. If Hollis, who has to watch what he eats, ever put on weight, Peter thinks how he would gain it too, matching him pound for pound.

“So we'll just go to Susannah's thing and then drive back here? Or will Susannah and Duke put us up?”

“Let's drive back. I don't relish being awakened by the cries of my nephew at six
A
.
M
.”

“Maybe we could stay at your mother's.”

“We could do that. Emmet will probably be there. I think she's taking him to Susannah's.”

“Emmet is the English guy?”

“The one who looks like Leslie Howard. Not a bad chap. Hopelessly straight, in every sense of the word.”

“Wouldn't Rosie be embarrassed if we stayed with her? With Emmet there? If he's so straight.”

Peter laughs, not looking down. “It might embarrass Emmet, but it would take a lot more than that to embarrass my mother. Let's do that—then we won't have to worry about driving back here after the grand opening.”

“It sounds like it's going to be some party.”

“I just hope they do as well in this new place as they did at the old Café.”

“Speaking of restaurants, what do you say we knock off and have some lunch?”

Peter pulls his hammer through the loop on his overalls, and wipes his sweaty hands. “
Andiamo
,” he says gratefully, and heads with caution for the ladder. Hollis, as always, goes first, and holds the ladder while Peter descends. “Thanks, old buddy,” Peter says.

It's cooler on the ground, even breezy. They both pause to look at their view. Green surrounds them, every shade of it, and above the hills and the line of trees the sky is perfectly blue, cloudless, shimmering. There is a smell of lumber and blossoms. Peter and Hollis reach out, simultaneously, and for an instant link their hands together.

From his bed, when he's propped on pillows, Edwin can see out the window to the garden where, months ago now, almost longer than he can recall, they used to wheel him in a chair. He can see the long red band of geraniums that stretches out along the gravel drive, and clumps of yellow that must be—what? Daffodils? Or marigolds? Or chrysanthemums? He can't remember, now, what blooms when, and it does no good to ask; he has asked, and he just forgets. It doesn't matter, anyway. There are the red flowers, the yellow ones, the green grass, the sky that is nearly always blue.

Sometimes he doesn't look out the window. There's the television: he has become very fond of a nature series that shows scorpions mating, lions dozing in the African bush, whales making their calm way through green, green water. And there is the photograph on his table of William, his grandson, a pink baby with an amazing quantity of fluffy yellow hair. He looks often at the photograph, attempting to find his daughter's face in that of her son; the baby is dimpled and roly-poly as Susannah never was, but the hair and the blue eyes are the same.

“He looks like a real little doll,” Mrs. Panza says, when she comes with the pill. “A handsome boy, Mr. Mortimer. I'll bet he keeps his mother hopping.”

“Looks like his mother,” Edwin says with effort, and falls back panting on the pillows. When Susannah calls, later that evening, he is unable to talk.

“The new restaurant is doing just great,” Mrs. Panza tells him. “And the baby is already turning over, she says.”

“No,” Edwin manages to say. He can't recall much about babies, at what age they do what, but he knows William is a remarkable child, a prodigy, and he smiles at Mrs. Panza, hoping he looks properly impressed.

She sits down on the chair by his bed—a solid, stout woman, big-bosomed. Edwin likes her big breasts, and the warm valley between them he can just glimpse when she bends over. Mrs. Panza smells of talcum powder, an innocent flowery scent.

“Your daughter says she wants to come out, soon, and bring the baby.” She no longer calls Susannah “Mrs. Cord.” She seems unsure, in fact, what to call her, and Edwin is no help; he can't remember her new husband's name, and isn't sure he's even her husband, as yet. It seems just a few days ago she told him she was divorcing one man and marrying another, but it must have been months ago: winter? “Mr. Mortimer? What do you think? The baby is three months old, and she thinks he's ready to make the trip.”

Edwin looks at the photograph. The baby is three months old. He imagines a three-month-old baby here, in this room. How big would a baby that age be? Did she say three months or three years? Months, of course, but—was it only three months ago that the baby was born? He thinks back to the baby, golden-haired, how he had loved her, had thought:
my salvation
—but that was Susannah, years and years ago. This was William, his grandson William.

“Here?” he says.

“Here,” says Mrs. Panza, and she herself looks, he thinks, dubious. “Just a short visit. She'd like you to see the baby. But only if you're going to be up to it, Mr. Mortimer. I told her we'd talk it over, and discuss it with Dr. Strauss.”

Edwin looks at the photograph. A nice baby, favors his side of the family, that yellow hair must be like silk, like Susannah's. Outside his window the flowers have dimmed, the green lawn has darkened. It won't be long before everything is dark, blank, black, and sleep comes. Mrs. Panza leaves, returns, props Edwin up so he can drink, turns on the light and the television.

“No,” Edwin says, and feeling a little stronger he nods his head toward the photograph. “No, I don't think so,” he says.

Ivan is working in the garden, weeding between the rows of lettuce, making his way toward the tomato plants. The sun beats hard on his bent back, and sweat drips down to the waistband of his khakis. He will finish the weeding, and then pick beans, and then in the raspberry patch he will drop berries into a basket and Japanese beetles into a coffee can filled with water, where they will drown. Drowning the beetles is the only chore he dislikes, but any fool can see they'd wreck the berry crop, so in they go, buzzing between his fingers and then flailing in the water before they stop, and float.

When he is finished in the garden, he will go inside and shower and put on clean khakis and a clean shirt and go down to the kitchen to snap beans for Brother Michael. Then he'll fill the water pitchers and wipe down the long tables before dinner, and he'll just have time to stop in the chapel before the bell. He needs to pause in the chapel three or four times a day, and he's happy there—though not so happy as he is in the garden. But the chapel drew him in over the long northern winter when the garden was unavailable, and the habit has persisted into summer. He stops only a few minutes, long enough for the stillness to sink into him, and he doesn't pray—only kneels, with his head in his hands, smelling candle wax and the curious musky smell of incense, though incense hasn't been used there in years. He thinks, sometimes, of William, his son whom he will never see, or of his two sisters in Maine whom he has, after all these years and against all odds, became close to again, but mostly he tries to keep his mind blank for these minutes—to become nothing, no one, pure existence, bodiless, without will or memory.

And it does no harm, of course, for Father Llewellyn or Father Seward to come in and see him there, head bowed. He has petitioned Rome for reentry into the priesthood, and both his superiors, he knows, will be required to evaluate him. He hasn't much hope: ex-priests are gladly welcomed back into the flock, but not as shepherds.

“It's a long shot, Ivan,” Father Llewellyn has told him. “Don't be disappointed if it doesn't happen.”

“I don't expect anything,” Ivan always says.

“Good,” says the priest.

After dinner, he goes again to the garden, and plays chess with the reformed alcoholic priest who has become his friend, or he works seriously at his sketching, doing pastel drawings of the other men—the portrait of old Father Aubrey with his head bent over his breviary is his best so far—and of the growing things in the garden: the heavy-laden arm of a tomato plant, the beans all in blossom climbing their pole, the rows of green lettuces like huge flowers, full of folds and shadows his pastels will never get to the heart of, Ivan thinks, even if he draws them every day for the rest of his life.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1983 by Kitty Burns Florey

ISBN: 978-1-4976-9347-0

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