The Garden Path Read online

  “Let’s run away together,” Barney said. It was something he often proposed, enjoying the absurdity of the suggestion, the idea that two middle-aged single people without ties should flee like star-crossed lovers. One of Barney’s gifts to her had been a large map of North America, mounted and framed. It hung in the nook off the kitchen where they always ate dinner, and they looked at it that night as they sat eating their stew and drinking cheap Bardolino.

  “We could go to Montana,” Barney said. “Or we could go out to Vancouver.” Barney was a Far West buff who had never been west of Ohio, and Rosie was a travel buff who had hardly ever traveled. He was afraid to fly, and she was reluctant to leave her garden in the summer. But they were always planning theoretical trips that would accommodate both their hang-ups—winter trips by train, chiefly. They had a lovely one picked out, to Santa Fe via Amtrak. Or they considered sailing to England, at off-season bargain rates, on the QEII, paying a quick trip to Silvergate (admission £2), and then taking the train to the Riviera. Or a January cruise through the blue Aegean, stopping at Delos, Mykonos, Thíra.…

  They looked at the map together. All Rosie could see was the imaginary line, like some monstrous leftover umbilical cord, connecting her to Susannah. There was nothing between them but Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

  “Look,” said Barney. “We could take the train to Grand Central, and from there we can get the Lakeshore Limited to Chicago, then in Chicago we change to the Empire Builder, and in three days we’re in Vancouver.”

  “I don’t really want to go to Vancouver, Barney.”

  “How about Montana? We could get off in Butte.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to stay here in peace and Susannah to stay in California where she belongs.”

  She said this with a vehemence that, even to her, sounded excessive. Barney put his hand over hers. “Don’t get hung up on it, Rosie. Don’t let it throw you.”

  She looked at the map with tears in her eyes, and all the pink and blue and green states blurred together. “I don’t like her, Barney. Isn’t that terrible? She’s my own daughter, and I just can’t stand her.”

  Rosie got less hung up, less thrown, as January went on. But every now and then she would recall, involuntarily, the last time she had seen Susannah, and her fevered dislike, with its attendant pangs of guilt, would return. The occasion had been her mother’s funeral.

  Why Susannah showed up at all, Rosie didn’t really know. She did know Peter called Susannah in California and told her her grandmother was dead. But what prompted the child, on hearing this news of a relative she hadn’t seen in fourteen years, to hop with her husband on a plane and to attend the funeral? Expectations from the will, Rosie always assumed—and, indeed, Susannah had been left a little money from her grandmother’s dwindled estate. Enough, maybe, to pay off some of their bills, including the airfare, which—Peter informed Rosie—they had Master Charged. She pictured them hugging each other in glee all the way back to Los Angeles, Susannah triumphant—she had managed, by dint of occasional Christmas cards and school photos, to worm her way into the old lady’s will. Furthermore, she had faced down her hostile family, and she had even succeeded in reducing her mother to a screaming shrew who lost control of herself in public. Oh yes, their monstrous euphoria would have filled the plane. She imagined them plotting the spree they’d have on their expected wealth, just like rotten-to-the-core heirs in Victorian novels.

  Rosie loved her mother. Both her parents, in fact, kept their light, tight parental hold on her until they died. She may have had her failings as a parent, but she was a model daughter. She adored them both as unreservedly at forty as she did at four.

  Her mother was English, born May Dennison in the town of Shepton Mallet on the second of May, 1906. (Rosie was born twenty-five years later, on her birthday.) May was the daughter of a naturalist, John Dennison, who made a small name for himself with a book called Somerset Nature Rambles illustrated with watercolors by Nora, his wife. Both of them died when May was in her early teens; all Rosie knew of those two grandparents was their book, the two headstones in a Somerset churchyard, and her mother’s stories about them, which always ended in tears. May was taken in by her father’s sister, Aunt Charlotte Dennison, a grim spinster in a little cap, who made her niece memorize a poem every Sunday. To her death, May remembered bits of poetry and came out with them at appropriate moments. “‘The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,’” she would call out cheerfully on a March morning to get Rosie out of bed. “‘Hail, blithe spirit—bird thou never wert,’” she would say to her husband when he came in for dinner. He used to laugh, flap his arms and squawk, and then kiss her. Rosie always envied them, their marriage. They were both blithe spirits.

  May used to make “clouted cream” as her mother had taught her to (with mace soaking in it, strung on a thread), and she kept a bird life-list as her father had. She held on to her English accent until the end—it even intensified in her later years, as her mother-in-law’s Italian one did—and Rosie had inherited a thread of it. Barney pointed out to her once that she pronounced the “t” in “Mortimer” as a “t” instead of a slurred “d.” Watching one of her old television shows one night, he said, “There’s the secret of your charm,” pointing to her bedraggled TV self holding some iris she had just uprooted. “You look so earthy and Italian, and you sound like an English schoolmarm.” Rosie took this for a compliment from Barney, especially as spoken in his own sexy Georgia accent, with his wandering arm around her.

  After Rosie’s father died, her mother declined. When she set her apron on fire, severely burning her left arm and shoulder—the skin delicately pink and translucent when it healed, like puckered mother-of-pearl—Rosie brought her from the old stone house in Westerly to a nursing home just outside Hartford. She visited her almost daily, doing Edwin’s old commute, for the three and a half years it took May to fade out of life. She died, finally, of nothing her doctor could pinpoint. Old age, he said, though she was barely seventy-two. She just pined away. “I miss him so,” was one of the last coherent things she said. Rosie brought her a cake on her last birthday, but she had no appetite for it. She smiled her sweet smile, holding her daughter’s hand, and said “I miss him so” with tears in her eyes. A couple of weeks later she stopped making sense. She looked out the window once and said to Rosie, “Look at the frost on the lawn, Sandra.” It was July, and Rosie wasn’t Sandra—she had no idea who was. The last thing May said to Rosie, with a giggle, was “Goblins.” She died that night in her sleep.

  And then the funeral, three days later. Rosie had finished her crying by then, and was talking to her Uncle Jim, her father’s remaining brother, in the vestibule of St. Terence’s Episcopal Church in Hartford, when Susannah walked in. Rosie could remember it all with perfect clarity.

  “I believe she had a happy death,” she had been saying, and her old uncle nodded and nodded, his brown eyes mournful. His hair was thick and white, and his big white mustache was yellowed at the corners. He put his hand on her arm. “Rosie,” he began, and was about to say something. She took her arm away with what must have seemed rudeness. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked over to Susannah.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. Susannah stood there looking at her mother. Rosie hadn’t seen her since she was ten, but she would have known the girl anywhere. She looked exactly like Edwin, though her coarse blonde hair had darkened slightly and she’d lost her baby fat. She had Edwin’s big white teeth and his long thin nose and his air of fatuous assurance.

  “I wanted to come and pay my respects to Grandma.” She looked around at the family—Peter, Uncle Jim, his wife Thelma, the cousins and their families—and she gave the smirky smile Rosie recalled so well from her daughter’s childhood, the smile designed solely to ingratiate, and said, “I wanted to see the family, too, of course. It’s been so long,” and pulled forward the hairy man who sto
od behind her like a footman. “This is my husband, everyone. Ivan Cord.” She waved her skinny hands around like a parody of someone with social graces. “Ivan, this is my Uncle Frank, I think … Uncle Jim? My brother Peter. This must be Aunt Thelma—”

  Rosie grabbed Susannah’s arm and turned her around. Though Rosie looked murderous, Susannah kept her smile, as if she was just about to introduce her mother, unctuously, to her husband, maybe even attempt a daughterly embrace. She was all bland affability, and she reminded Rosie at that moment of Edwin’s mother, old Mrs. Mortimer, whose self-satisfaction thinly disguised as goodwill hung around her like smog. Rosie said, “You don’t belong here. This isn’t your family any more. And don’t call her Grandma, you little bitch,” words that entered the family annals for keeps.

  In some part of her, Rosie was horrified to hear herself speak these words. Some tender little fold in her mind wanted her to hug Susannah, to forget everything and resolve to love her. She had just lost her own mother, and here she was driving her daughter away. And part of her also was appalled at the listening silence. She saw her cousin Deborah, with whom she had never gotten along, nudge her paunchy husband and roll her blue-shadowed eyes. Peter touched her shoulder—just a touch, as if to remind his mother. But she went on, and it was unfortunately true that while parts of her were dismayed, most of her thoroughly enjoyed the scene. She said things she hadn’t been able to say when Susannah was a child of ten.

  “You have no right to be here. She wasn’t your grandmother. I’m not your mother. I want nothing to do with you. This isn’t your family any more than it’s his.” Rosie gestured toward Susannah’s silent, glowering mate, the ex-priest. “You get out of here, damn you, both of you. I won’t have you contaminating my last memories of my mother.”

  Susannah’s face was red, her smile had slipped away, but she stood there and defied Rosie, just as she used to at seven, eight, ten. “I loved her too, you know,” she said softly. “She was my Grandma, and I loved her.”

  That was when Rosie slapped her. “Get out of here before I strangle you with my bare hands,” she said. Her voice rose, then lowered to a snarl. “Get out, get out, get out.” Rosie could hear it still, could see it as if it were all on film: her hand raised, the palm hitting Susannah’s cheek, the girl’s head spinning to the side, and her twisted mouth, the low chant of “Get out, get out …” Susannah looked at Rosie in an odd way. She was angry, of course, and indignant, and stunned, but she also looked, in an instant, teary and woebegone—a poor-little-match-girl look that might have gone to her mother’s heart if she hadn’t hardened it so thoroughly for so long.

  Then Susannah’s husband took her by the arm, supporting her with his other hand around her waist, and led her out, both of them strangely silent, unresisting, looking at no one. They went out the open door and down the steps, heads bowed, his arm supporting her. Rosie noticed what thin legs she had and how inappropriately she had dressed, in a garish nylon print wrap-dress with long, hot sleeves. Then they disappeared around the corner to the parking lot.

  There was silence for a moment in the church, and no one moved. Then Rosie’s Aunt Thelma said, “Well,” and a buzz of conversation started. Peter put his hand back on her shoulder and said, “Ma,” but whether in compassion or in reproach Rosie couldn’t tell. Then the rector came in, and Barney, who was late, and the service began, during which she wept and wept, with Barney on one side of her and Peter on the other. She knew perfectly well she was weeping for her daughter as well as for her mother.

  Rosie hoped, desperately, that that was the last of Susannah, but she and Ivan apparently went straight from the church to Uncle Jim’s house, where they waited for him and Aunt Thelma to return from the funeral. They waited a good long time, too, because everyone went out for lunch afterward, and Uncle Jim had too many gin and tonics. It was late afternoon when they arrived home, but Susannah got out of him the name of her grandmother’s lawyer, and went to the reading of the will a few days later—she and Ivan staying in the meantime with some hippie friend of theirs in New Haven. Rosie could just picture the place: incense, waterbed, astrological charts, marijuana, roaches. She didn’t attend the will-reading, but Peter did, and he told her they left for California right after. “Tell Mom I said good-bye,” Susannah said to Peter, with stupefying chutzpah. Peter and Ivan had a talk about the Red Sox. Susannah spoke to Russ O’Dell, the lawyer, about how long they’d have to wait for the money. Not that they got much. The bulk of it went to Rosie, of course, with Peter’s small legacy and Susannah’s tiny one and a few to old friends and contributions to the National Trust and the New England Federation of Garden Clubs. But to a pair of California ne’er-do-wells it must have seemed like a fortune. Neither of them, they told Peter, was employed “at the moment.” The moment, Rosie suspected, was a long, persistent, improvident one, cushioned with food stamps, sweetened now with Grandma’s legacy. Rosie never reproached her mother for anything in her life, but after her death she clenched her fists and asked her mother’s memory: “Why? Why leave her anything? How could you?” And her mother’s sweet fairness, her blithe spirit, reached back from the grave in reproach.

  Peter came to Rosie’s for dinner on a snowy Tuesday evening. Rosie hadn’t seen him for a week or two, and her first impression of him when he came in and shook the snow off his camel-hair coat was something is different. He looked, somehow, not himself. Was he thinner? tired? What it was didn’t come to her until he was sitting in his favorite chair with a drink in his hand and the light from the fire illuminating one side of his face.

  “So how’s it going, Ma?” he asked her, and she saw then that he was unhappy, the idle, affectionate question forced, his natural ebullience gone flat. And the ends of his mustache, unwaxed, drooped.

  “Peter dear, what is it?”

  He looked at her, startled, smiling, but Rosie knew she wasn’t mistaken; the smile was dredged up from murky depths. “What’s what?”

  She backtracked. It didn’t seem that many years ago that he and she had passed through his touchy, protracted adolescence. The wounds were barely healed. And yet, she remembered, even in the throes of teenage anguish—anguish that, in her son’s case, was made even more poignant by his then-unresolved sexual crisis—even in the midst of the sulks and late hours and slammed doors and mumbled apologies that characterized those difficult years, there had been a fizziness about Peter, an ability to enjoy life even when it went bad, that was now, Rosie realized with a shock, missing.

  “You must be tired,” she said, giving him that for an out—the legendary fatigue of the graduate student working against time.

  To his credit, he didn’t take the out. He looked at her steadily, the strained smile gradually slipping away, and she felt a surge of joy. I’ve brought him up well, was how she would have articulated that surge if she hadn’t been so involved in the moment. He refused to pretend, he insisted on truth, he would tell her his trouble. How she hated it when people pretended there was nothing the matter, as Edwin had insisted on doing for so many years. The stiff upper lip had never appealed to her: in this she was more Italian than English—though her English mother was, to the end, as honest and open in her quiet way as her flamboyant father, who wept without shame, even as an old man, when something moved him. And Peter, the dear boy, sat before her in the rose-patterned wing chair, with wet eyes.

  “I am tired,” he said after a sip of sherry. “I’m not sleeping very well.” She didn’t ask why not; she waited, sipping her own drink but keeping her gaze on him. “Hollis left me,” he said finally.

  “Oh, my dear.” Rosie moved forward to touch his knee, then stopped. It wasn’t a mother’s touch he wanted. “When was this, Peter? And why?”

  He and his friend Hollis had seemed settled for keeps. In fact, it was the permanence of his relationship with Hollis that had made Peter decide to confess to his mother, formally, a year ago December, his preference for his own sex—the only secret he had ever kept from her for lon
g. “Is it like a marriage, then?” she had asked him, saying any old thing to disguise the initial shock that wasn’t really a shock but the jolt that comes with confirmed suspicions, and with a sort of relief that it was all out in the open, and that it could have been so much worse. A long-term relationship instead of barhopping and diseases and absence of love.

  “It’s better than any marriage I’ve ever seen,” he had told her, his face shining with such delight that she couldn’t take his words as a reproach. And how, when a sexual preference she considered incomprehensible provided her son with such joy and contentment, could she disapprove?

  And when Rosie met Hollis, she loved him too. They were like twins, those boys—both of them dark and handsome and clever. Hollis, an architect, was also a gifted painter and cartoonist; Peter was a superannuated graduate student in Italian literature. What they had in common was no less than everything—Dante and Robert Venturi and Shaker furniture and traveling and scuba diving and English murder mysteries. They were perfectly matched, even wore the same shoe size, had identical soft brown mustaches, hated beets. They never touched each other in her presence. Their tact was immense. They could have been two brothers who’d grown up close, sharing the same jokes, the same tastes. In fact, when the three of them were together, they concentrated their attention on Rosie, teasing and flattering her as if they were her young lovers instead of each other’s. But the affection between them was obvious. It had warmed her, and she would miss it. She would miss the teasing, and the flattery too, and the absurd cartoons Hollis used to send her in the mail, and all the fun the three of them had had for so long.

  “When?” Peter repeated after her. “Last Saturday night at ten-thirty precisely. He took all his stuff. I helped him pack.”

  “Oh, my dear.” She could see the tears run down his cheeks, and she could see, too, what she’d never really noticed before: the lines in his face, the wrinkles around his eyes. Peter was twenty-nine years old. Rosie thought fleetingly that his thirtieth birthday, coming up in eight months, would be as big an event for him as her fiftieth would be for her. “Peter, honey,” she said.