Where Lilacs Still Bloom (13 page)

“I want to know only you, Shelly.” Bill reached for her. “You are the love of my life.”

Shelly stepped back, arms across her chest. “Then why is it I rarely have any time with you? Why is it we do nothing on the weekends except ‘check in on the garden’ as though what I’ve dealt with all week is no concern of yours.”

“If there were problems, you’d tell me, or Mother would. So when I see you walk out to the carriage, I am the happiest man alive assured that all is well. Until we come inside and you … you …” He searched for words.

“I argue with you. I argue. It’s the only way I can get you to actually see me.”

“That’s not true, Shelly. It’s not. I thought you’d be happy here. Everything taken care of. No worries. You have an allowance. You can visit your aunt. Why don’t you do that more often?”

“I visit her every week. It’s the only time I leave here. I’m a captive.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Let me come with you to Annapolis. We could stay with my father during the week. It would save you the expense of a room. And we’d be together.”

He’d considered that; she knew he had. His hands had twisted back and forth as he did when he walked and was deep in thought about his posies. But then he’d shaken his head. “No. I spend my evenings preparing for classes, grading
papers, all things that would bore you, and you’d find me even less a social creature than what you long for. I … I thought you understood what my life was like.”

“I did.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “But I thought you’d allow a change in your life with me in it. It’s as though I’m another potted plant and that you just shifted a few others around so you could make a place for me in the hothouse. Just a pot in the hothouse.”

“Oh, Shelly.” He’d come to her then and held her, but it hadn’t been enough to silence her. She pushed back.

“If I can’t come with you to Annapolis … If I can’t go out—”

“Mother takes you to her club meetings.”

“I don’t need an escort,” Shelly snapped. “I need a husband. I need … a life.”

“I’ve given you the best one I have.” There was nothing negotiable in his voice, and she knew then that her thought of making him change, of getting him to be the man she dreamed he was, wasn’t going to happen.

“Then I will simply tell you now, before your mother tells you later, that I will be going out on my own, despite the ‘impropriety of my independence,’ as your mother calls my desire.”

So today she was doing just that. She took a cab, noting the lush estates along the cobbled streets. Shelly thought it odd that people of wealth built lavish homes with gracious
gardens, then hid them behind iron grates covered with clematis and ivies as though they didn’t want anyone to see what they’d built.

“Mrs. Shelly Snyder is pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said to herself inside the cab. “Mrs. Shelly Snyder is pleased to make your acquaintance,” she repeated, but emphasized the word
Mrs
. Yes, that’s how she’d say it at this first meeting of the horticultural society, without her mother-in-law to escort her. If she couldn’t change Bill, she would have to change herself. This was the best way she could think to do it: learn what she could about flowers and hope she could get her husband’s attention with more of her own attentiveness to what he truly loved.

I
walked to the tailor shop to buy new needles, past the mercantile, then the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge that housed the dentist and Dr. Chapman’s office. It was a balmy spring, nearly a year after the girls’ weddings. I’d filled the empty space of their leaving by cross-pollinating, growing seeds from plants. Martha was away at school, so I only had Fritz and Frank to spoil and Ruth when she worked in the garden. I bravely wrote to Luther Burbank, expressing admiration for his work, and he’d responded months later, though the letter was more a pat on my head than evidence he actually understood I shared his enthusiasm for hybridizing. But even his letter didn’t fill the hole I couldn’t name.

I loved watching my daughters turn into sensitive, joyful wives. Lizzie had a few complaints about being alone when Fred traveled, and I’d urged her to intensify interests that
didn’t require his presence. “You always liked azaleas,” I reminded her. “Why not think about hybridizing?”

“I don’t have the same passion for plants as you, Mother.”

“Well, let’s get that piano out of here and move it to your house,” I said. “I hoped one day you’d give me lessons, but that’ll have to happen when I’m old. I’ll come to you for them.”

“That would help,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t realize how much I’d miss teaching. Wish being married didn’t put a stopper at that door.”

Delia had no complaints at all. That surprised me, because she did have her share of issues growing up, whether a stitch was too wide and needed to be taken out or whether the way a cake rose—and fell—was the result of something she’d done in the mixing or just the nature of that cake. She was fussy like me that way. But with Nell Irving, she was happy as a clam, or so she told me. She worked side by side with him, with the cows and hogs and sheep on their acreage, and said she could see now why I liked to work beside her father so much. “We’re just good friends, Mama. Isn’t that nice?”

“It is.” I started to tell her how to keep it so by careful tending and by bending now and then to his wishes, but she just smiled.

“I have a good teacher, Mama. Not to worry. I was watching.”

Frank had tilled a section for the vegetable garden, and it
was planted so we’d have beans and beets and peas to eat and can. But now the lilacs were coming on to that perfect time for cross-pollinating, and I had needles to replace for my evening sewing, so I trekked to the tailor. There I saw his daughter, and the idea struck me, the hole I needed to fill.

“Do you ever let your daughter walk out on her own?” I asked Mr. Lawson. “My garden’s not that many blocks from here.”

“She’s a handful.”

The child appeared quiet, shy.

“I’ve raised three girls and a son, so I think I can handle a little thing like her. What’s your name, child?”

“Nelia,” her father answered for her. “I suppose I’ve not done proper by her since her nanny passed.” He faced his daughter. “You want to visit Mrs. Klager’s garden?” The girl nodded, and when she did, I saw something familiar in her profile. She’d snuck around the picket fence once or twice, flitting in beneath the shrubs. She did no harm, but I’d wondered who she was. Now I knew.

“Perhaps she could help me. I’d pay her, of course.”

He seemed relieved for the invitation, and the girl walked out with me, beginning a summer of her assistance. She’d come early as I’d requested, when the air was still and the bees and birds weren’t yet stirring. I confess, I loved an audience, having people ask about what I was doing and why. Maybe it was the teacher in me that hadn’t found students
until the garden. I liked seeing their eyes light up with understanding, especially if the concept was foreign to them as cross-pollinating usually was. Maybe Martha got her interest in teaching from her mother.

“Here are the parts of a flower,” I told Nelia. “These are sepals.” I pointed to the complete outer leaf of one of my lilacs.

“Are they always green?” Nelia asked.

“Most often a shade of green, yes. But that’s a good question. This inner leaf is called a petal. They usually aren’t green, and they’re flashy. They like to bring attention to themselves. It’s what we often notice first. Now see here.” I had her lean in close. “That area there is called the stamen. It holds a secret powder.”

“Fairy dust?” Nelia asked. The child had huge blue eyes, as blue as a summer sky, and they looked at me in awe with the possibility that I’d just shown her magic.

“Not fairy dust, no. But still magical. The tiny case is called the anther.” She repeated the word. “And inside of it is the dust. We call that pollen. Now this other part here”—I pointed to a feature next to the anther—“that’s the pistil. The stamen gives the pistil the pollen, and then the sepals and petals protect it so it can produce a seed. If no pollen makes its way to the pistil—”

“Is that like a gun, a pistol?”

“No, no. The word is
pistil
, p-i-s-t-i-l, and unless pollen
reaches it, there can be no seed. Usually birds and bees bring the pollen from a plant they’ve visited, and then they drop it onto the pistil of another plant, just when it’s ready. But I’m doing that with my turkey feather and magnifying glass so I can see it better. It’s so small. I used to cover them, but those I didn’t pollinated just as well, so I gave that up in … oh, nineteen aught three, I suppose. I’m trying to pollinate this one in such a way that one day it will produce a bloom that is creamy white.”

She nodded, but I suspect I’d already given her too much information. She watched, and with careful hands—her fingers were so small and delicate—she helped me place a metal tag at the base.

“Can’t you just plant a seed next to the plant you want it to be like?” Nelia asked. “I see yellow and white corn kernels covering the same cob.”

“You’re a good observer, Nelia. Something every horticulturist needs to be. And it’s true—nature will just pollinate and make its own individual plant that has a mix of this and that. But I want specific things to be different. Color. Whether the plant will be stronger and can resist diseases or will maybe even have a better smell. We have to … select for that.” I was going to say breed for it, but I wasn’t sure if her father would approve of my use of the word and her possibly repeating it. “That’s all we’re doing, really, selecting what nature has already put there for us, and seeing if we can enhance it.”

“Diseases are bad,” she said.

“Yes, yes they are.” I wondered what disease had affected her life. Bobby whimpered, lying on his side, his bushy collie tail lifting.

“Is he hurting?”

“No. Likely a rabbit dream.”

Nelia seemed satisfied, but I saw her compassion turning toward wounded things.

The morning had slipped away, and I looked up surprised to see the sun high overhead. “Goodness. Frank and Fritz will be in for dinner. Quick as a lamb’s tail, let’s see what we can rustle up for them and ourselves.”

I sliced ham and made sandwiches, put out pickled beets from last season, and filled big glasses with milk. The men ate heartily while Nelia picked at her sandwich. She eyed a platter of cookies on the counter.

“In this house we clean up our plates in order to get dessert,” I told her.

She lifted her eyes to me, to the cookies, and then formed new interest in her ham sandwich, which she consumed, though I did think I saw a sleight of hand at her side where Bobby assumed a position next to her chair.

“No feeding the dog. Or cat,” I said and made it stern. I’d done that with my own children early on and found I didn’t have to repeat it as they got older. “They get fed in the kitchen, next to the stove, after we’ve eaten.”

“Yes ma’am,” she said.

“When did you make these, Huldie?” Frank asked, eating his cookie and rescuing the child from my words, though he knew my routine of spoiling after a period of stern. Nelia had a cookie now too.

“Early this morning, while it was still cool.”

“They’re good,” Fritz offered.

“Didn’t think you’d have time what with your lessons going on out there,” Frank said. “Is she a good teacher, Nelia?”

The child nodded. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, and I gave her a napkin. “Jasmine liked lilacs,” Nelia said then. Her words were soft as the breeze breathing through the wind chimes hanging on the porch.

“Did she? Do you know what kind she liked?”

“Purple. We came by your garden and smelled them. Then she died.”

“Mrs. Klager has lots of purple,” Frank said.

“I’m sorry about Jasmine. She must have been special.”

“Maybe we can make one even purpler,” Nelia said. “With that pollen brush. My mama liked purple ones too.”

“We can try,” I said, pushing a wayward curl around her ear. “We can surely try.”

I stood up and went to the sun porch. Ludwig Späth, an excellent purple. “Let’s check Frank’s tags and see if we can find the most purple lilac in my garden, and we’ll pollinate dozens, see what we come up with next spring.”

“Or the spring after that,” Nelia said, bobbing her head, her cookie going up and down with her nodding. Bobby’s head followed her cookie’s every move. “Making flowers takes a long time.”

“Yes, it does,” I said to this plant of wisdom before me.

“So does forgetting,” she added, and I knew there was much healing left to do in the life of this precious bloom. I believed that lilacs were just the plants to do it.