The Wonder Garden (16 page)

As they walk, Avis helps herself to candy from her pail, and by the time they return home, her face is bloodied with chocolate. She stands patiently as Camille unfastens the costume and lets the pink cloud deflate at her feet. Her little girl's body is thin and swaybacked, painfully fragile. Camille draws a wet washcloth over the smeared face and puts her to bed. Avis lies with wide-open eyes as Camille pulls the covers to her chin and kisses her good night, then shuts off the porch light and drops the deadbolt on the door.

T
HE
V
IRGINALS

T
HERE ARE
no boxwood wreaths on the Ezekiel Slater house, no pine garlands around the batten heart pine door. There is no amber candlelight behind the twelve-by-twelve, divided-light windows.

“They're not living there,” Cheryl Foster tells her husband. “They're not even trying to pretend.”

Everyone decorates for Christmas on Cannonfield Road. As early as the second week of November, dark workmen appear on ladders, affixing red ribbons to window sashes, installing real pineapples and holly berries into triangular cornices. Cheryl and Roger decorate, too, with the most understated of candle glow, if only to avoid derision. What they'd prefer to do is hang a banner informing the neighbors that all their ornamentations are historically incorrect. The original owners of these homes were strict Puritans, forbidden to acknowledge the popish holiday. The colonists, in their plain way, would have worked through Christmas as through any day of the year, not a pineapple in sight.

It would be a stretch of incredible naïveté, of course, to think that the new owners of the Slater house are adhering to historical authenticity. It's true that she knows nothing of these newcomers other than that they are young, childless, and in possession of a preposterous Aston Martin that appears in the driveway from time to time like a mute foreigner. Its owners have shown themselves in full form only once. Cheryl and Roger had watched from the kitchen window one summer morning as the young couple slowly circled the august white saltbox across the street, freshly theirs, with the assessment of predator birds. Finally they disappeared inside, and as evening fell, Cheryl and Roger had seen a cool unfamiliar light appear in the window of the second-floor bedroom. Harriet's bedroom. Harriet's window: one of the beautiful, spit-perfect windows that Lars had installed with his own hands when he and Harriet were newlyweds. Those windows, like all things with flawless beginnings, had slackened with age and begun to gap over the years. There were drafts, Cheryl knew, that kept Harriet beneath a stack of quilts on winter nights.

They haven't seen a light in that bedroom since. There has been no moving van, no contractor's truck, no roofing ladder, no silver car.

“It's the Spaulding house all over again,” Cheryl says to Roger. “I was afraid this might happen.”

She still has nightmares about the Spaulding house, the wrecking ball slamming into its cedar shingles again and again, the front elevation crumpling inward as from a punch in the gut. Just like that, in one spinning flash of stupidity, two hundred years of history obliterated.

“I'm going to say something,” Cheryl states, “at the next meeting.”

Roger nods. Now that winter has descended, he has brought his file and spokeshave into the kitchen and works continuously at shaping spindles. His decision to specialize in the art of steam bending has paid off splendidly. There may be more multitalented carpenters around, but now that the legendary Thomas Whitman has hung up his adz, there exists no better maker of eighteenth-century Windsor chairs on the planet. The jump in demand after the Colonial Faire suggests that Roger has been crowned the living history community's chair-maker of choice. And once these people have chosen, they are loyal for the duration.

Roger shakes his head. “It's a bloody shame, it is.”

It irks Cheryl when he slips like this, tainting the colonial manner of speaking with cockney syntax. She presses her lips together. At least he is trying. At home, she grooms her own speech but does not force it. Even with years of practice, she is drained by the effort of sustaining proper diction for any length of time, and reserves her
thees
and
thous
for sanctioned gatherings.

“You know Harriet would be turning in her grave,” she tells Roger. “And Lars, too. And Ezekiel Slater, for that matter, and Jeremiah and all the grandchildren. You can be sure that Benjamin and Comfort would have done something. It's the duty of friends, then as now.”

Roger does not reply at once, but holds a spindle aloft and examines it. Watching him, Cheryl feels a crawling vexation. He has slipped so comfortably into success. He has absorbed the admiration so easily, as if it were long due. He has cut his billable hours at work without a jag of self-doubt. His transformation from lawyer to chair-maker has been as fluid as tadpole to toad.

Her own enterprise is a slower slog. She has to remind herself that only the most refined slice of the community will ever appreciate her work. Most are content to settle for buttons made of horn, pewter, or even tin. Among those who understand the superiority of thread, there are even fewer who recognize the beauty and accuracy of the death's-head tradition. In her workshop at the faire, she'd been visited by a small handful of exultant admirers in flawless midcentury dress and had sold three sets of astral-style buttons. She has to remind herself that it is her own choice to reject dressmaking, that wide and easy highway—and in no way is it Roger's fault.

“You're a good friend,” he tells her at last, fitting the spindle into a chair seat.

Cheryl feels a sudden threat of tears. Harriet is there, all at once, in her vegetable garden, dwarfed by sunflowers and tomato plants, bending with a watering can of dented metal. To Cheryl's surprise, this old woman had twined her way into her heart. She had risen above the general populace of scuttling, self-involved citizens and demonstrated what a full human being should be. Faithful and industrious, there could be no better heir to Reverend Slater's homestead, no better steward of the virtues of loyalty, sacrifice, and humility.

This image of Harriet in her garden is what Cheryl holds in her mind, three weeks later, as she sits at the massive oak table with her fellow commission members.

“Before we begin our scheduled agenda,” she says, making eye contact with each of them in turn, “I'd like to bring an urgent matter to your attention.”

The other commission members are sloppily dressed, in today's way, and slump in their chairs. No particular light of attention springs to their eyes. Cheryl, however, has honed the forgotten art of rhetoric. She has learned to use her voice like an instrument, strong and clear. She likes to think that her immersion into the past has opened her to the voices of the ancestors, given her the ability to channel them for present-day purposes. There is no denying that exceptional fervor comes through her voice, like a clarion call, as she eloquently skewers applications for certificates of appropriateness. The renovation plans that homeowners submit would be laughable were they not so sickening, tantamount to decimating original structures and hiding vulgar McMansions behind their facades. The homeowners—usually young, urbane couples—stare at her as she lambasts their building plans. When the commission votes with her, the husbands protest like teenagers given a bad grade. The women clutch their designer purses with intertwined initials and push back their ironed hair. Sometimes they cry. They should have stayed in the city where they belong, Cheryl thinks, in their elevator buildings with awnings and entrance rugs and sycophantic doormen.

“As you may be aware,” she begins, “the Ezekiel Slater house at 430 Cannonfield Road, built in 1740 by the Reverend Ezekiel Slater, has recently passed into new ownership. As a neighbor of close proximity to the Slater homestead, it has come to my attention that the new proprietors have been absent from the premises for months. As a confidante of the former owner, Mrs. Harriet Hertz, I am privy to the fact that the house has long been in need of substantial repair. Mrs. Hertz, having become infirm and impecunious in her final years, was unable to finance said repairs, but took solace in the certainty that they would be conscientiously performed after her passing by the purchasers of the home.”

Cheryl pauses, glances at the faces around the table. Victor Conetta gazes up at her with the eyes of an elderly beagle.

“However”—she pauses as she imagines an ancestral orator would—“as further weeks pass without bodily sign of the purchasers, it has become apparent to me that the acquisition of this venerable home was in fact made with an eye to circumventing the regulations of this commission through gradual and insidious demolition by neglect.”

She lets these final, horrible words settle upon the table. A long moment passes.

“It is imperative that the commission take immediate action. We delay at our peril. The fate of one of this region's most historic structures is at stake.”

A chair creaks, and Edward Drayton clears his throat.

“Pardon me, Cheryl, but is there visible
evidence
of neglect?” he asks in his slow, weary voice, gesturing as if his hands were underwater. “Are there broken windows, missing shingles, water stains on the roof?”

Cheryl straightens her posture and meets his gaze. “No, of course not. Not as yet, anyway.”

Drayton turns his palms to the ceiling. “Without visible
evidence
, we can't accuse the owners of wrongdoing.” He smiles, as if speaking to a child. “You know that.”

“I am giving the commission concrete information about the interior condition of a significant structure located within this town's defined historic district. Are you saying that we passively watch the house deteriorate until the owners waltz in with a demolition application?”

“If the house is truly in bad shape, we'll see it on the outside eventually. Then we can contact the owners and
discuss
it.”

Cheryl sniffs. “Like we did with the Spaulding house? You may notice there is no more Spaulding house.”

“Again, Cheryl, I must remind you that it's not within our jurisdiction to intervene into the upkeep of privately owned properties without cause, even within the historic district. Unless there is unmistakable
evidence
of neglect.” Drayton joins his hands and fingers together like the laces of a woman's stays. “Thank you, regardless, for bringing this to the commission's attention. We'll keep an eye on it. Now, let's move on to the written agenda.”

Cheryl breathes in and holds the air for a moment, feeling the boning of the hidden jumps beneath her own clothing. Most women save their stays for formal events, but Cheryl has found that wearing at least an informal pair of jumps on a daily basis has improved her posture and general outlook. She has grown to dislike how she feels without them.

After the meeting, she sits for a while before bed with her thread and button forms. She replays the commission meeting in her mind until the repetitive focus of her work calms her. Threading buttons never fails to renew her sense of simple purpose. Upstairs, in her chemise and cap, she tells Roger about the outcome of her appeal at the meeting.

He leans against the headboard. “Well then, like Drayton said, it falls to us to keep an eye on it.”

Extinguishing the lantern, they draw the bed hangings around them. There is satisfaction in lying upon the four-post bedstead built by Roger, warming themselves with the coverlet embroidered by Cheryl, swaddling themselves in white linen sheets. Inside this soft fort, they can feel themselves recede from the arrhythmic thrum of the world outside, join the steady pulse of the past.

Winter is Cheryl's favorite season in the Cook house: the short, stark days and early nights beside the hearth. In the pink-and-blue twilight, when Roger is finishing his work in the barn, she sits at her virginals near the window and fills the house with its silvery music. These are her most treasured moments, when she draws closest to the spirits of the house and the heavens. As she plays, she sometimes senses a presence beside her on the bench, feels the breath of Comfort on her neck.

The instrument is an exquisite reproduction, with an inset keyboard true to seventeenth-century Flemish construction, the lid's interior hand-painted with a pastoral scene. She knows it's a stretch to think an instrument like this would have existed in Hiram Cook's house. There may have been spinets in some households, but few true, vintage virginals. Still, she likes to imagine that as well-heeled leaders of the community the Cooks might have been an exception, might have indulged themselves in this one small way.

The virginals was a gift from Roger upon their fifth anniversary of purchasing the Cook house, of truly beginning their lives here. Before that, they'd rented a ranch house in a neighborhood of matching houses. They had chosen Old Cranbury carefully. The schools were outstanding and crime nonexistent. But more crucially, they'd been drawn to the historic pedigree of the place. There would naturally be remnants of Puritan conservatism and modesty here. The people would show a corresponding moral fiber.

It did not take long to recognize their mistake. Their ranch-house neighbors did not acknowledge their arrival. The constant sound of weed whackers and lawn mowers disrupted their weekends. Barbecues, to which they were not invited, were visible on the back decks of adjacent homes. The children wore disposable clothing and used trashy language. If this was true here, then perhaps there was no untainted place left in the country.

But the history was everywhere. Together, Cheryl and Roger would drive in religious silence up and down Cannonfield Road, that alley of splendor, a mile-long corridor of heart-stopping antiques, untouched by the larger plague of neocolonials with fanlights and dormers. These houses were the uncontested patriarchs of the town, their faces proud and plain against the old wagon road, their date plaques like medals of honor. They researched the founders of the town, the original families, paged through archived letters and early land deeds at the library. During that first year, throughout the course of Cheryl's first pregnancy, their love affair with the town's brave settlers was ignited. It became evident that they had been summoned here, that they must act as torchbearers, defenders of the original residents and their ideals. In that first year, they had been delivered from the sidelines of town to the core, transformed from aliens to denizens.