The Garden Path Read online

  “Mr. Chips coming for the weekend?” Unlike Peter’s sex life, hers had been common ground between them for years. “You two going to sit around the fire in your shawls talking about the good old days before there were Cuisinarts and indoor plumbing?”

  “Something like that,” she said, regarding him fondly as he put on his camel-hair coat, his plaid muffler, his red earmuffs. There was always a campy touch, like the earmuffs, or a satin tie with palm trees on it, or a Dumbo watch.

  “Really, Ma—can an old guy like Barney still cut the mustard?”

  “Old guy indeed! You should be in such good shape when you’re fifty-five. And it’s none of your damned business.” She kissed him and patted the knot of his muffler. “Have fun with your little machines, dearie.”

  He picked his way down the slushy front walk, and Rosie watched him from the door until he got into his Volkswagen and drove off, honking. The sun was gone, the sky flat gray, and it looked like snow again; it was as if the dark shadow of Susannah was already blighting the weather, putting any sunny predictions out of whack. Rosie slammed the door and returned, shivering, to the fire to think about her daughter.

  It’s not that she hadn’t been a good mother. She was dedicated to Peter from the start, from the minute he was handed to her by a perky nurse, his eight pounds swaddled in blue flannel, his eyes shut and his mouth open, and his red fingers, with their tiny ragged nails, opening and closing in a way that seemed to Rosie heartbreaking. She fastened him to her breast as if he were a little lost thing in a storm and she the Saint Bernard with the cask of brandy, and felt a pang of unprecedented joy—symbolized, she always felt, by the pinching pains that tugged at her uterus whenever the baby nursed. The organs tightening up again, the doctor told her, getting ready for the next one, heh heh heh. But Rosie knew better—they were the bittersweet pains of motherhood, and she welcomed them.

  She tended him gladly, restless while he slept, running to the crib at his first waking cry to change him, nurse him, cuddle him, exchange baby talk—anything. She was a mother before all else; when her baby was asleep it was as if she ceased to exist. She bragged, like any mother, about what a good baby Peter was—meaning he slept a lot, slept through the night after a couple of weeks, took long naps—but she would have actually preferred him colicky or high-strung or just plain active, so long as he was awake.

  “I don’t know anyone who’s such good company,” she used to say to people, especially the other mothers she met on the Common. While they complained about night feedings and diaper rash, Rosie confounded them with her unbroken serenity, and she must have disgusted them with her smugness. She was unpopular, but she didn’t care. She had Peter, after all—her snugglewumps, her baby bunny, her muffin, her piggywig.

  She was twenty years old when Peter was born. She had been married to Edwin for a year and already things were going badly. Peter was her refuge, and though she had a glimpse now of how unhealthy that was, then it saved her from certain despair. She left Edwin out completely, deliberately, laughing at his disgust when he came upon her cooing and making silly noises at the baby. “Oh, Edwin, you old prune,” she used to say, smiling a little as if she were joking.

  “You’re spoiling him with all that attention,” Edwin would say, and Rosie would turn to Peter. “Was oo a spoiled muffin? Was oo?” watching Edwin’s disapproval from the corner of her eye.

  He was five years older than she, just out of law school, working in the legal department of a big Boston insurance company. They lived in a dark, grubby building on Marlborough Street, in a third floor apartment at the back. Rosie had been plucked from her parents’ vast green acres—Liliano’s Garden Center, on Route 1 near Westerly, R.I.—and transplanted to the barren wastes of the city, where the only garden she had was a row of houseplants that grew in the one window of the apartment that didn’t face north. During that first year, before Peter was born, she used to walk not only in the Common and in the Public Garden with its bright formal beds of annuals, but out as far as the Fenway where there were wildflowers, and vegetable plots grown by city dwellers, and one gorgeous rose garden tended by an old Scotsman in knickers and a cap. She had wondered how one went about getting a plot there, and always meant to ask Mr. McPherson, but she never did because then Peter was born and she no longer needed a garden. Peter was her plot, her lovely, lush flowerbed, and she was his Mr. McPherson; she was little Mary Lennox, and he was her secret garden.

  Rosie was a gardener, of course, the daughter and granddaughter of gardeners. It was in her blood—green veins run in the family, her father used to say. Rosie’s father was Peter Liliano—named for the owner of the estate in southern England where her grandfather, Massimo Liliano, had worked as a gardener. He had been imported from Italy for the purpose in 1896 when Peter Elliot-Casson, a wealthy young fellow on the Grand Tour, admired the work he was doing at a villa near Naples and decided the gardens at Silvergate needed restoring. He had a vision, he said, at the Villa Bianca, on the steps that swept down to the goldfish pond bordered with box and camellias, of the way life should be—green and verdant and full of flowers. He offered Rosie’s grandfather a job on the spot, and Massimo and his wife, Anna, arrived in England less than a month later, in August. Silvergate was a wreck. The following summer it had become a promising wreck, a year later a charming wreck, and by the time the century turned it was on its way to being a showplace.

  The Lilianos emigrated enthusiastically to England, and like typical converts they became more English than most Englishmen. Times had been hard in Italy; their padrone was mean and stingy—so tight he squeaked, as Massimo learned to say when he got to England. A real skinflint, Anna would add, but you had to know her well to catch the words through the maze of Italian inflections they were lost in. They both learned English quickly, but they never lost their accents—Rosie’s grandmother especially, who always called her Rose in three elongated syllables. No one else, Rosie was sure, had ever spoken her name so beautifully.

  Rosie was born at Silvergate in 1931, and she always thought her grandparents’ story was better than a story in a book: the two simple young Italians brought by a great lord to the ruined estate, to turn its brambly wastes into a place of beauty, and succeeding beyond anyone’s dreams, and founding their modest dynasty there. Anna and Massimo had three boys, all given English names—Frank and James and finally Peter, named after their new padrone. All of them became gardeners at Silvergate, all three married English girls, and all three—in the late thirties, when old Sir Peter was dead, Massimo was dead, Anna was an old woman gone blind, Silvergate belonged to the National Trust, and war was on the way even to the gardens of Kent—all three emigrated to America. Peter was the last. He had hoped to stay at Silvergate forever, but he didn’t get on with the caretaker the National Trust had installed to oversee the place, Mr. Horace Hogg, who called Italians “Eye-ties” and wrote a monograph for tourists stating that Sir Peter Elliott-Casson had designed the gardens himself and carried out his plans “with the help of imported peasant labor.” No mention of Massimo Liliano, whose genius had cleared away the decades of brambles and brush and neglect and put in their place the roses, the delphinium borders, the lily pond, the clipped box hedge that people traveled to Kent especially to see. Peter Liliano took his mother and wife and daughter, his copy of Gertrude Jekyll’s Wood and Garden and his back issues of The Countryman, and sailed to New England to work in the garden center where his brother Frank was manager. In three years he had his own place—Liliano’s Garden Center, as famous in its way as Silvergate had been. Where else could you buy Bramshill lilies and the double bloodroot?

  Rosie was six years old when she arrived in Rhode Island with her Italian father and her English mother, and she already knew about rose blight, and bone meal for bulbs, and the proper pruning time for japonica. Her knees were usually dirty or greenish, crisscrossed with the print of grass blades or stuck with tiny stones, and her hair was so often matted with dirt and leaves that her m
other cut it short. None of them cared about such things. What the Lilianos liked was getting out in the garden and digging in it. Rosie was given The Secret Garden one Christmas. She was sure it was her book, written for her pleasure, and she knew much of it by heart, including the parts in Yorkshire dialect. She used to amuse her parents by asking, plaintively, “Might I have a bit of earth?” in an accent so thick as to be, like her Nonna Anna’s Italian one, nearly incomprehensible. She always had a bit of earth, too—even at age five she had a six-by-six patch behind the gardener’s cottage, between her mother’s grape arbor and her father’s rose bed, where she grew, in neat rows, daffodils, cosmos, coral bells, sweet peas, and strawberries—so that at nearly fifty she could say, “I’ve grown strawberries since I was five years old,” leaving out the seven years on Marlborough Street where nothing grew but geraniums and spider plants in the one sunny window. And babies.

  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, tw
o 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.”