The Secret Keeper (2 page)

He was, in fact, talking of going back to school for a degree in landscape architecture. By their nature, most of his jobs were short-term and, like the detective business, often sporadic, fluctuating between feast and famine. However, he did have one long-term customer whom he’d come across serendipitously.

One of his first jobs had been planting a decorative hedge around the property of a large house in Briarwood, which took nearly a week to complete. He’d work mornings at Evergreen then spend the afternoons on the hedge.

Reporting on his first day on the job, he mentioned the house next to his clients’, which was distinguished not only by its quiet opulence but by the fact it had a huge vegetable garden and greenhouse, which brought out the farmboy in him.

“You’d think they could afford all the vegetables they wanted from the store,” he said. “The place looks nice from the front—there was a lawn service there today, as a matter of fact—but whoever is taking care of the garden is doing a rotten job. I don’t know why they even bothered putting it in if they’re just going to let it go.”

A few nights later, as we were having dinner, he amended his earlier assessment.

“I shouldn’t be so quick to judge other people.”  

“I didn’t know you did,” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I told you about the house next door to the Gundersons’, the one with the big garden? Just about every day I’ve been working there, I’ve seen an old man in a wheelchair sitting on the patio reading a book, and every now and then I know he’s watching me.

“Well, today he came out of the house and wheeled himself down the sidewalk that leads out to the greenhouse at the back of the yard. He came out a minute later with a hoe on his lap and wheeled across the grass to the garden. How he was able to maneuver the wheelchair through the grass without help and balance a hoe at the same time, I don’t know.

“Anyway, I watched him go to the garden and start trying to use the hoe to take out some weeds along the edge. He couldn’t reach in very far, and it was almost impossible for him to handle the hoe properly, but he tried. A few minutes later, he accidentally dropped the hoe, and he started to get up out of his chair so he could bend down to get it, but I was afraid he might fall if he did that, so I went over to pick it up for him.

“He thanked me, and we got to talking. I couldn’t talk too long because I was still working, but he asked me to stop back after I’d finished, and I said I would. I kept an eye on him while I finished, afraid he might drop the hoe again, but I guess he gave up, because he took a book out of a sort of pouch hanging on one arm of the wheelchair and sat there reading.

“So, when I had the last shrub in, I went back over to talk to him. He’s really a nice man. He must be about a hundred years old, and I don’t know where he got his money, but he has to have a lot of it to live in a house like that, and he lives alone with just a housekeeper. Well, I think she’s a live-in, but I’m not positive.

“Anyway, he said he’d had the garden ever since he had the house built, and he’d planted it all by himself. He said he loved plants and trees and flowers all his life but was too busy making money to do much about it until he retired. But this year, right after he planted the garden, he fell down in his driveway and broke his hip. He can still stand up and take a few steps, but he has to have something to hold on to when he tries. He has that yard service mow his lawn, but he doesn’t want them near the garden.

“I told him I was raised on a farm, and that I really missed my mom’s garden—I helped her with it every year from the time I was old enough to hold a trowel. She used to call it ‘our’ garden, hers and mine.”

I could almost feel the soft breeze of memory and sadness sweep across him. His voice caught on his last words, and I remembered his brother Samuel, Joshua’s dad, telling me how totally devastated Jonathan had been when their mother died.

His narrative was briefly interrupted for a trip to the refrigerator to get Joshua another glass of milk. Returning to the table, he picked up where he’d left off, but since Jonathan’s stories tend to get a little heavy on the details, I’ll just cut to the chase.

He finished his story with “And guess what?”

I didn’t have to guess, but I dutifully responded with, “What?”

“He wants to hire me to help him with his garden. He says the people who take care of his lawn don’t know anything at all about gardens, and he wants me to come over three days a week for a couple hours each time. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do it on a regular basis, but he said we should try it out, and then he offered to pay me twenty dollars an hour! Twenty dollars! How could I say no?”

He had a point.

*

And
so it came to pass—yea, verily—that Jonathan spent an hour or two, three days a week, weather permitting, helping an old man with his vegetable garden, and bringing home bags of tomatoes and onions and peas and squash and zucchini his employer insisted he take.

*

The man’s name, Jonathan said, was Clarence Bement, a name I vaguely recognized, and, as it turned out, he missed Jonathan’s estimate of being “a hundred” by only ten years.

The next time I had a quick assignment from one of my lawyer clients to do some research at the library, my curiosity led me to also do some checking on Clarence Bement. I was right to have recognized the name.

Bement was once a major powerhouse on Wall Street. I remembered, too, having read once that he had two children and, about forty years before, had been involved in a messy divorce scandal, the details of which had made front page news at the time—1946, I think it was. It wouldn’t rate two paragraphs at the bottom of page 12 today.

Custody of his children and more than half his fortune went to his ex-wife, but he had persevered and, by shrewd business moves, not only made back every penny he’d lost in the divorce but doubled it. Probably having learned from his mistakes, he never remarried.

One of the infinite number of things I love about Jonathan is that, while he is often initially intimidated to the point of being starstruck at the prospect of meeting someone he considers rich or famous, the intimidation vanished if he got to see them as people. He almost immediately felt at ease with Clarence Bement. Not really realizing who Bement was or just how wealthy he was might have been a factor, but Jonathan considered him just a nice, interesting old man who loved the same things he loved.

Every night after spending time working on Bement’s garden, he would bring home stories—never of Bement’s wealth, but of his life outside the business world.

“I feel kind of sorry for him,” he observed. “I think he’s really lonely, and I guess he isn’t all that close to his family, although I think most of them live here or close by. He never talks about them, except for a couple of his grandkids, especially one grandson. I don’t know if he has any friends left, as old as he is. That must really be hard. I know how hard it is to lose even one friend. But to lose them all, one by one…” He shook his head. “Wow.” 

“That’s a long way down the road, Babe,” I said. “Don’t worry about it now.”

He nodded but did not seem convinced. I thought that a change of subject might be in order.

“So, what does he do with all the stuff from his garden, other than give it to you? Surely he can’t eat it all himself, and from what you say it’s a pretty big garden.”

“He has some people come over from a food bank every couple of days. I pick whatever’s ripe and put it on his patio near the back door. His housekeeper takes it in and keeps it until they come. I don’t think she likes me very much—I’ve never seen her smile, and she never says a word to me.

“He always comes out to the edge of the garden while I’m working, and sometimes he’ll talk and other times he just reads. It’s always the same book: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. It’s not a very big book, but he asked if I’d read it, and I told him no.

“Sometimes when we’re having coffee—he always insists I take time off from work to have coffee with him, and I feel kind of strange about that, because I get paid to work, not to drink coffee. But he insists, and he pays me for every minute I’m there, so I sit on the grass and listen to him talk.

“Anyway, sometimes he’ll talk about Mrs. Browning—I didn’t remember she was the one who wrote ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…’ I remember that one from school. I never would have thought such an important businessman like him would have time for poetry, but I guess you never know.

“It’s interesting, though, that it seems like the housekeeper is always looking through the window, watching us. Actually, I think she’s watching
me
. Mr. Bement jokes about her always spying on him, but I’m not sure he’s really joking, because whenever he sees her coming out of the house he changes the subject to gardening until she goes away.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” I said. “Some people are just strange. Probably she’s just watching out for him.”

He shrugged, but said nothing.

“So, when do think your assignment will be over?” I asked. “Fall’s coming, and the growing season is just about over for the year.”

“True. But he wants me to turn the garden over to get it ready for next year. He has a great rototiller.”

“Surely he’s not going to try to do a garden again next year?”

He gave me a surprised look. “Of course he is! I don’t know what he’d do without his garden. I told him I’d help him. And I promised him I’d make a couple of paths across it so he can get close enough to the plants to do some hoeing himself without having to lean way over to do it.

“And then there’s the greenhouse, and we’ll be able to start seedlings in there early in spring, then transfer them to the garden when it’s warm enough.”

*

So, aside from Jonathan dropping frequent hints about our buying a house in the suburbs with a garden of our own—though I shuddered at the thought of us turning into the Cleavers—God seemed to be in His heaven, and all was right with the world.

*

Shortly after the chorus’ last concert, their sign language interpreter had left the group, and Jonathan was very enthusiastic about his replacement, Cory Costas.

“You should see Cory sign!” he said after Cory’s first session with the chorus. “He’s fantastic! He doesn’t just sign with his hands, but with his face and his entire body. He loves sign, and it shows. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

“His partner, Nick, is deaf, and they just moved into town a month or so ago. They go to the Metropolitan Community Church, and that’s how Mr. Rothenberger met them. Quite a few deaf people go there, and Lisa, who interprets for the church, introduced Cory to Mr. Rothenberger when she heard Jerry was leaving the chorus. We were really lucky to have found him.”

So when, after a few weeks, Jonathan suggested we have Nick and Cory over for dinner, I wasn’t surprised, and readily agreed. I’d had some deaf friends in college and learned a little ASL—American Sign Language—and though I’d forgotten most of it through lack of practice, I could still finger-spell.

One thing I’d learned about the deaf is that they are infinitely patient with those who take the time and make the effort to learn to sign. It would be nice to have some new deaf friends, and it would be a good learning experience for Joshua.

Though he went to the MCC with Jonathan every week, Joshua attended Sunday school downstairs while Jonathan was upstairs for the regular service. There were no deaf children in the Sunday school, and none at his day care, so he’d never been exposed to signing.

Once, at the mall, he had seen a group of deaf teens in animated conversation, and he was utterly fascinated to the point we had to remind him gently it wasn’t polite to stare. We explained to him what being deaf was, and how the deaf use their hands to talk instead of their voices. 

“But they were making noises,” he said, “and faces. They look funny. Why do they do that?”

“You know how when you’re telling us something really interesting your voice goes up and down to show how you feel?” Jonathan asked. “Like when you said last night that you really
liked
that story we were reading? Well, the deaf can’t always show how they feel with just their hands, so they use facial expressions, too. It’s perfectly normal.”

At the next Tuesday night chorus practice, Jonathan extended the dinner invitation for the following Saturday, and gave Cory our phone number so he could get back to us after he’d checked with Nick. Cory called back that same night, just as we were getting ready for bed, to accept.

*

I’d noticed that lately, on the days Jonathan spent at Clarence Bement’s, he would more and more frequently call me at the last minute to ask me to pick up Joshua from day care. Usually, it was no problem, but every now and then I had to do some quick reshuffling of what I was doing in order to make it to Happy Day on time. And after four or five such incidents, it began to niggle at me. 

I really didn’t want to make an issue of it. Lord knows, Jonathan had put up with enough inconveniences from me in the course of my job. When he’d first started working for Bement he would give a lengthy and detailed rundown of everything he’d done and everything they had talked about that day. Bement always sat in his wheelchair beside the garden the whole time Jonathan was there, reading or talking or sometimes trying to do something with the hoe to maintain the illusion he was still actually able to do something.