The Garden Path Read online

  “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Susannah yelled, and streaked off toward the playhouse, Peter following her and trying to look nonchalant.

  “I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?” Rosie said with a shrug and a facial expression she had mastered over the years—a magnanimous but pained smile, as if the goodness of her heart forced her to squeeze it out against terrible odds. “We might as well take it. I suppose we’re all sick of looking.” Her lukewarm approval, hiding the fact that she had fallen in love with the place as quickly as Susannah had, was meant to ruin any pleasure Edwin might find in the purchase. Oh yes, she was a terrible bitch, but she felt she had to pay him back for tricking her into marriage.

  Edwin had tricked her into marriage, when she was nineteen and he twenty-four, by pretending to be interesting. He kept it up for an entire year, from the day they met until the wedding. By the time they were married he was thin and tired and nervous and unable to go on with it—the pretense. It crumbled on their Caribbean honeymoon, when he spent long hours simply lying in the sun, and stopped talking to her in restaurants while they waited for their crayfish and their mango pie and their exotic rum drinks served in hollowed-out pineapples, and while the steel band played with a black intensity that made Rosie sad. She thought Edwin was tired of her already, that she had begun to bore him, and she cried into her pillow every night after they made love and he went to sleep. She thought he had decided she was good for only one thing. It took her months to discover that he was simply tired of being fascinating—of taking her to the theater and the opera, of telling her funny stories from his college days, of asking intelligent questions about gardening, of promising to take her to see the gardens of England and France and Italy, of devouring Newsweek and the Sunday Times so he could wow her with his knowledge of the world. He settled, as if with a grunt, into the cold dullness that was natural to him. The repetitive acts that she came to associate with him—the back and forth swimming, the long sessions pushing Susannah on the swing, the tolerance for those daily drives up and down Route 91, even his incredible but, in the end, tedious endurance in bed—were, she decided, his way of winding himself up for life. He was always in danger of running down. He was a taciturn, introverted, selfish, incurious man who wanted most of all to be left alone. If she had a meatball for every time he said that all he asked was a little peace and quiet she could open a restaurant.

  She must have been, at nineteen, just the kind of wife Edwin wanted—young, pathetically naive, and upwardly mobile. She loved her parents dearly, and she loved her old Nonna Anna, who was still living with them, blind and arthritic but funny and full of beans. She was fond of Liliano’s Garden Center, too, and she was perfectly content to work there on weekends all through high school and, when she graduated, to work full-time, either behind the cash register or outside taking care of the plants and shrubs. But she didn’t want to spend her life there. She had grand ideas, vaguely incorporating an estate not unlike Silvergate. She wanted to be the grande dame ordering the viburnum and the wisteria, not the person who delivered them and sent the bill. At this utterly inane period in her life, she met Edwin. Edwin was a clerk in a law firm in Providence that summer. He was in his last year of law school at Harvard. He used to drive his fat and patronizing mother to Liliano’s to pick out flats of boring annuals, or he used to stop by for bags of fertilizer and grass seed. Mrs. Mortimer fancied herself a gardener because every spring she had her favorite son, dear Edwin, plant the perimeter of her lawns with lavish borders of red and white petunias and impatiens and salvia, outlined in blue ageratum for a patriotic effect. By the end of the summer, these garishly florabundant plots, cultivated and fertilized and pinched back every weekend by dutiful Edwin—who gardened in bathing trunks so he would tan—were undeniably an impressive sight. So, incidentally, was Edwin.

  “You should see my mother’s garden,” he said to Rosie one day when she was selling him a length of garden hose. He was in his bathing trunks and a T-shirt. His legs were long and golden-haired.

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  “Hop in the car. I’ll take you over.”

  She admired the red, white and blue extravaganza, then—sensing she hadn’t gone far enough—gushed heartily. Mrs. Mortimer, after all, was a good customer. She beamed at Rosie when she finally hit the proper level of enthusiasm and offered her a lemonade. It was hot out on the lawn, and she accepted. Rosie discoursed on the benefits of planting perennials rather than annuals: the financial saving, the greater variety, the satisfaction of watching something grow from year to year. Edwin, pretending to be interested, asked intelligent questions. His mother nodded patiently for a while, then quit listening and smirked with satisfaction at her petunias. Rosie had a second glass of lemonade and a tuna sandwich. While Mrs. Mortimer was inside fetching the food, Edwin asked Rosie to go to the movies with him. She accepted. They went to see High Noon, and Edwin impressed her profoundly by comparing it to the Iliad. She assumed later that he lifted the comparison from a movie review he had read, but at the time she was limp with admiration—a 24-year-old Harvard law student with intellectual leanings and a passionate curiosity about perennials was a far cry from Roger Mitchell, the boy she’d been dating, a freshman at the University of Rhode Island whose favorite activities were bowling and drinking beer. Rosie would never forgive herself for being taken in by Edwin, and often thought she’d have done better to stick with Roger, a good-hearted boy without a phony bone in his body. But a year later, dazzled by his ersatz culture, Rosie married Edwin Mortimer, who carried within him the seed that sparked Susannah.

  Barney was due for dinner. Their weekends were unvarying—on Friday nights Rosie cooked for him, on Saturdays he took her out to eat. In between, they watched TV, played Scrabble, made love, and—weather permitting—worked in the yard. They were pleasant weekends. Neither of them wanted to elongate them into marriage.

  So after Peter left, and Rosie had brooded a while over another cup of tea and a peanut butter sandwich, she put together the makings of a beef stew and set it to simmer. And then, she decided, it was time to get to work on her book.

  She had signed the contract for Rosie Mortimer’s Garden Book in the fall, soon after they finished taping the shows for the new season. She was scheduled to take two years off from television in order to, as her producer Janice put it, “have a fling at the print media.” The deal was arranged between WEZL and Rosie’s publisher, which were owned by the same vast conglomerate. So far no one had said anything about a major motion picture, but there were pots of money involved. All she needed to do was write the book. So far, she had the title, a thick pile of pages from Janice containing the transcripts of the shows, and an uneasy feeling that writers are born, not made, and that the fairies had failed to sprinkle the proper dust over her wicker cradle in the gardener’s cottage at Silvergate.

  Barney kept saying that any intelligent person could write a book. He was writing one about his twenty years as an elementary school principal, to be called Giant Among Pygmies. It was pretty good, too—a nice mix of theory, advice, and anecdote, which was exactly what Rosie wanted to do in her garden book. But so far, every time she sat down to work on it, she turned in a performance something like Jane Fonda’s portrayal of Lillian Hellman in Julia: she had an overflowing wastebasket, the urge to throw the typewriter out the window and the need for a stiff drink.

  She was at that point when Barney arrived. He was early, and Rosie was glad. If the Muse wouldn’t visit her, at least she could count on Barney Macrae. School had let out early, he said, so the kids could be taken to a performance of The Pirates of Penzance given by the Drama Club of the local high school, a treat Barney had bowed out of. “I decided I’d rather pull your knickers down,” he said, drinking Scotch and warming his feet at Rosie’s fire. The snow had ceased, but so had the sunshine, and the weather appeared to be settling in for a freeze.

  Barney was lovable the way Bertie Wooster would be lovable if he had a sex drive. He h
ad a corny sense of humor, with a strong silly streak, and he had very strange tastes. He once gave Rosie a silver lamé hostess apron, and he steadily lavished on her a supply of filmy nightgowns so sexy they were comical. On the other hand, he always sent her a singing telegram on her birthday, and one February when she had the flu he brought over a huge bouquet of violets and a teddy bear. He had been born in Georgia and had a sweet Southern accent that was, probably, what had won Rosie when she first met him, four years before.

  She had needed some children for one of her programs, “A Child’s Garden,” and she made an appointment at the Helen Palmer Elementary School in Chiswick. When she arrived, Mr. Bernard Macrae, the principal, was playing chess in his office with a skinny black boy of about ten. He waited while the boy completed his move, looked at it a minute, and then introduced him to Rosie (as “Scott Garnett, the chess king of Palmer School”), sent him back to his classroom, and motioned her to a chair.

  “I’m glad you showed up,” he said. “That kid was killing me. This’ll give me until tomorrow to come up with a move.” He looked dubiously down at the pieces, and sighed. On his desk-top, besides the chess board, were a small, smooth white stone, a piece of a two-by-four, a photograph of what appeared to be a girls’ baseball team, and a miniature taxicab with one wheel gone. He toyed with one of the chess pieces, a knight—picked it up, put it down, tapped the board with it.

  “You play every day?” Rosie asked, to remind him she was there.

  “It depends.” He put down the knight and picked up the piece of wood. He balanced it between his palms, then twiddled it between his fingers. He always had to have something in his hands. If nothing else was around, he’d crack his knuckles. “The kid is flunking everything except gym,” he went on. “But you put him in front of a chessboard and he’s a genius. I’m trying to get him to transfer some of that concentration from chess to schoolwork.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I play him a game every time he passes a math test.”

  “Bribery!”

  “Sure—that’s what teaching kids is all about—didn’t you know?” He grinned, put down the piece of wood, and reached across the desk to shake her hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” he said. “I’m a real admirer of your show, but you look even better in person.”

  He was wearing rimless glasses and a denim shirt with a frayed collar. His frizzy brown hair was both graying and receding, and it stuck out in all directions as if he’d clutched at it in despair during the chess game. He was tall and relaxed, and as skinny as Scott Garnett, and quite obviously a true, unaware eccentric.

  For the show, Barney supplied Rosie with a boy named Jonathan, who brought a hockey stick to the taping and accidentally whacked Janice with it; another boy, named Arthur, who wore thick glasses, asked too many questions, and was generally a caricature of the Class Brain; and two giggly girls named Jennifer and Amanda, who squealed when they saw a worm and picked most of the early golden Dayspring lilies for their mothers. Nevertheless, the show was such a huge success it was repeated every year. After the first one, when they’d finished filming the kids pigging out on Rosie’s strawberries, and Janice and the film crew had gone back to New York, she and Barney sat in the garden drinking gin and tonics and telling each other the stories of their lives. The next night he came back with a bottle of champagne and a pepperoni pizza, and stayed until morning, when he kissed her good-bye and went off to Sunday mass. They had been—what could you call it? Lovers? They’d been lovers ever since, though lovers didn’t seem exactly the right word. Barney was too nutty, too easygoing and familiar and, Rosie supposed, too unexciting to qualify as a lover. He liked to call himself, facetiously, her fancy man, her ravisher; she tended to refer to him publicly as her boyfriend, a word which still carried for her an indelible image of herself and Roger Mitchell in the back seat of his 1949 Ford. But what Barney was, mainly, was a friend.

  After they had their Scotch, they went up to bed, another of their unvarying routines. Barney was always ready, always, it seemed, looking at her expectantly, poised to leap to her side at the tiniest hint of desire, to—as he put it—pull her knickers down. To tell the truth, she wasn’t as interested in it as he was. He knew that, and he had various ways of wearing down her resistance—pitiful complaints of his midlife crisis, pleas to her humanity, her nobility of soul, her heart of gold. Or he would smirk like a teenager and say, shuffling his feet, “I kinda thought you owed me sumpin after I spent all that money on our date.” Or he would read her passages from D. H. Lawrence: “‘She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the back, and a living fire ran through her,’” he would intone, breathing heavily. Or he would bring her yet another funny black nightgown.

  And, God knows, most of this succeeded. They spent plenty of time in bed. What Rosie objected to about it all was that the payoff didn’t justify the energy expenditure involved; she was sure there was some economic principle that covered the case—the Law of Diminishing Something-or-other. She used to lie there with Barney, black nylon up around her neck or tossed in a heap on the floor, her fists pressing against his lean backbone, and her cheek rasped by his five o’clock shadow, and gradually, while he was still enthusiastically making love to her, she would have the sensation of shrinking back and away and down, of getting smaller and colder and harder until she was a stone. Barney above her would seem both very large and very distant. She would look over his shoulder at the window shades, at the frosted-pink lighting fixture on the ceiling. She would stretch her arm above him and look at her knobby wrist and stubby fingers. She would make her hand into a claw. She would conduct imaginary music. She would think how she really should replace that ugly lighting fixture. She would wait for it to be over. And because she was so fond of him, she would—when he had collapsed on her and then rolled quickly off so as not to hurt her—stroke his neck and his whiskery chin and his wild hair and smile at him in the dim light. And he, unaware, would tweak her nose and say, “Nothing like copulation for working up an appetite. What’s for dinner?” And she would shower while he switched on the radio and listened to “All Things Considered” or “Kammermusik,” and then he would shower while she went down to get dinner going. It was the same every weekend, right down to his singing “Second Hand Rose” in the shower.

  It was the same that evening, except that when she began to detach herself from the action and shrink to a stone, there in her mind was Susannah; not so much her face or any specific memories of her but the dull knowledge that she was on her way from her cold, hard little planet to Rosie’s—Susannah Mortimer Cord, her daughter, her failure, her discontent, and her blue devil of guilt.

  Rosie’s mental disengagement was so extreme that Barney noticed. “Is anything wrong?” he asked when he was done. His face was buried in her armpit, and he spoke in a deliberately casual mumble, but she knew his worry was genuine. He was continually afraid that she would tire of him—and this not because of any disaffection he spotted in her but because of his fears for himself. His midlife crisis was no idle joke.

  “I’m getting a cold,” she said, trying to sound nasal.

  “Bullshit,” he replied.

  “I’ll tell you over dinner.”

  He raised his head in alarm. “You’re going to become a nun. I knew it would come to this.”

  He always joked when he was serious, and she laughed and kissed him. “It’s nothing to do with us—nothing to do with me. There’s a small family crisis.”

  “You’re not throwing me over for some duke?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ballplayer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Rock star?”

  “Nope.”

  “International terrorist? Dress designer? Avant-garde filmmaker?”

  Rosie kissed him again. “Come and take a shower with me,” she said to reassure him. Normally she was not the reassuring sort; she was bad at mollification, and she never had much tact. But she didn’t see why
Barney should suffer because she and Edwin Mortimer had once unhappily combined to produce the serpent’s tooth that was Susannah, so she invited him to share her shower. This was a logical sequence Rosie rather liked, but she didn’t much like the idea of showering with Barney. He always got amorous all over again, and he had tried and tried to find a way to do it standing up in the tub, but this had never been a success, and they always ended up on the bath mat on the hard tile floor. Well, no, she couldn’t say she didn’t like it; at the time she always, reluctantly, rather enjoyed it. It usually either went fast or involved interesting variations—soap was handy, and so was hand lotion. She didn’t usually shrink to a stone—there wasn’t time. But, when it was done, she still couldn’t help feeling it was an absurd series of actions, more trouble than it was worth, and time that could be better spent. And it worried her that she felt that way. The words “past your prime” darted around in her head. She would be fifty in May, and she knew she was scared to death of that birthday.

  “Well?” he asked as they sat down to their stew.

  It wasn’t Barney’s way to plunge directly in—he was more of a meanderer—so she knew he was still worried, in spite of what had just taken place on the bath mat. “Susannah is coming back,” she said without preliminaries.

  “Susannah your daughter?”

  “My ex-daughter, I prefer to say.”

  “Coming back from California? To bedevil you, or for some other purpose?”

  She told him what she knew. She had long ago told him, of course, the outlines of her life, and had filled in most of it since, as people do when they know each other well, but she had said little about Susannah. There wasn’t a lot to say beyond the fact of their estrangement. She had a daughter, never got along with her very well, and lost her at ten to her father—not a loss she ever allowed herself to spend much time mourning.