The Garden Path (11 page)

But she wasn't bored, alone in the van with Ivan all those long, changeless days, and they never quarreled. Susannah wondered whether she would come to look on that trip as an idyllic time, when Ivan didn't nag at her or deceive her or tell her to grow up.

Once, when they were crossing the interminable space of Texas, Susannah looked out at the setting sun: pure brilliant orange fading to pink (
rose madder, mallow pink, ocher, helianthin
) with the distinct black of a row of trees outlined against it.

“Death,” she said to Ivan, speaking before she thought. It was not a word he liked, not a word it was easy to associate with him. He always seemed to her to represent life; even the way his dark hair sprang from his brow, the way his beard curled crisply around his chin, so eager and healthy, spoke of life. He looked, she had always thought, especially in the mornings when he liked to prowl around naked until it was time to get ready for work, like a god.

“What?” He took his eyes from the road to look at the sunset. “Did you say death? Why
death
?”

“I was thinking of my father, I suppose,” she said apologetically. “And I read somewhere, I can't remember where”—
you can never remember where
, he sometimes said, but this time he was silent—“that the souls of the dead are held captive in natural objects like trees until, I forget, there's some way we can release them—”

“Your father's got a long time yet, Susannah.”

She looked from the black trees to his profile. “No, he doesn't, Ivan. He could go any minute.”

“Well. At least he's getting the best possible care.”

“And then I read, I think some Indian tribe has this belief, that the dead live only as long as they're remembered. That as long as there's a living soul to remember them they never truly die.”

“He's lucky he can afford a place like St. Theodore's,” Ivan said. He always followed his own train of thought, and laid it out patiently until her mind veered to meet it. “Your Dad couldn't be in better hands.” He reached over and patted hers, clasped tight in her lap around Keats, who slept there in a neat furry ball. “Quit worrying about your Dad. Think about the coming generation.” They left the black trees behind; buildings and a low-lying hill blocked the sunset. “Concentrate on getting pregnant,” Ivan went on. “I'm convinced it helps.” He grinned. “The power of pregnant thinking.”

She was grateful to him for trying to cheer her up. He was always either cheering her up or getting impatient with her when it didn't work. He couldn't believe she was, in fact, contented enough most of the time without his efforts. It's because I don't make jokes, Susannah thought. She had never learned to be funny, though she could laugh at other people's jokes. She turned her hand to clasp his and looked at his forehead, nose, beard, the planes of his cheeks against the sunset colors. “Do you think that's why people have children, Ivan? Because of death?”

He merely frowned straight ahead at the highway. A little later he said, after a silence, “Don't be so morbid, Susannah,” and she was sorry she had brought up the subject. She felt she had ruined the sunset for Ivan. But when they stopped for the night and went out for a spaghetti dinner he was as jolly and talkative as ever, and teased her about getting tomato sauce all over her chin.

They were traveling the southern route because it was February, but they ran into snow in Arizona and a blizzard in New Mexico (where they were stranded for two days at a deserted campsite, dozing and listening to the radio in the van, with the heater on full blast and in the distance reddish mountains rising from black evergreens). There was sleet and freezing rain in San Antonio, the city immobilized while they, old New Englanders, scoffed at its inability to cope—no plows, no sanders, no snow tires—and holed up in the van another two days, until the temperature rose, miraculously, overnight, into the fifties, and foiled the ice, turning the roads black and wet, with streams of melt running urgently in the gutters. They also encountered a heat-wave in Baton Rouge, hurricane warnings in Mobile, and violent rains in Knoxville, where they had to pull over for three hours and wait it out, munching on granola and reading. “All we saw of the country was the weather,” Susannah said afterward to Duke.

And superhighways: Route 10 out of Los Angeles through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where they started climbing north, through Alabama, nicking the northwest corner of Georgia, and picked up Route 81 in Tennessee, following it through Virginia and Pennsylvania, and then east on Route 84 to Connecticut. Up north, it was a fairly snowless winter—Pennsylvania and New Jersey surprised them by having no snow cover at all—but it was cold. Toward the end of the trip, to prevent having to sleep in the van (where despite the cats and the heater and their strenuous sex life they woke with toes and noses totally numb, too cold to pee, too cold to talk), they drove longer and longer each day, not stopping until dinner time; and once, through Pennsylvania, driving in shifts all night, so that Connecticut loomed, after the leisurely southern leg of their journey, frighteningly close all of a sudden. They were in New York late one afternoon, they were crossing the Hudson, they were in Danbury by rush hour, and they pushed on and arrived in Chiswick for dinner—Connecticut, where, even longer ago than Susannah had taken her vow to remain childless, she had sworn never to return. Well, vows are meant to be broken, as Ivan always said (referring to his leaving the priesthood), sounding as he sometimes did like a popular song from the fifties. But it was probably true. If people change, and change, shedding skin after skin throughout their lives—and Susannah believed they did—it becomes necessary to review such matters as vows. Particularly those taken in early youth, like hers, which she made at ten, after she traveled in a taxicab at a terrifying speed down the Connecticut turnpike to the New Haven Airport where she got on an American Airlines plane, clasping the bag of stuffed animals she'd been collecting since she was a baby, her talismans against airplanes, homesickness, terror, whatever demons awaited, vowing never to come back,
never never never
. As the plane soared into the air, she turned to the nice stewardess, who had come to sit buckled in beside her because she was young and upset; Susannah's face was filled with such misery and anger that the stewardess recoiled in shock and then put her arms around her and let her cry on her trim bosom, and when that was done brought her a lemonade and a ham sandwich. By that time, Connecticut was lost beneath the clouds—forever, thought Susannah, not having yet learned about the fragility of vows.

But there they were, at Duke's place in Chiswick—a big shingled house, painted red, with a wide stone-pillared porch and a view of barns, hills, and not too far off in the distance a plant that manufactured creosoted railroad ties.

When they arrived, finally, after twelve days on the road, Susannah was travel-tired and downhearted, overwhelmed simply at being there, of being jerked back into the present tense in a cold Connecticut house on a dark rural road. Ivan was full of energy after all those days cooped up in the van. While he and Duke went out into the cold dark with a flashlight, for a look around the place (woodpile, orchard, frozen pond, all the paraphernalia of self-sufficiency that Susannah, eventually, would become so fond of), Susannah called her father—called, at any rate, the number of St. Theodore's, hoping they'd hook her up to her father out there and not to Dr. Strauss or Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. Panza, which would mean she was too late and he had died while she was reading a road map in Virginia or screwing Ivan in Mississippi.

But they put him on the phone. “Susannah?” he said, his voice so weak and distant it was as if he were talking from the fictional star settlement she'd been writing about all the way across the continent.

“Dad, Dad, we're here, we're in Connecticut. How
are
you?”

There was a pause, and it sounded as if someone was propping him up on the pillows; she heard him grunt, heard a voice—Mrs. Panza, it sounded like—and then he said, more strongly, “What say, honey?”

“How
are
you? How are you
doing
?”

“Where are you now, Susannah? Did you get there? Are you all right?”

“Yes, we're here, in Connecticut. But how are
you
?”

“You know how I am, Susannah.” Neither of them spoke; he was being hoisted up again, and drank a little water. She heard a glass tap against the mouthpiece. Duke's phone was on the stair landing, and she sat on the step and leaned her head against the grimy brown wallpaper; it was ice cold. “There,” he said, not to her. Then, “Susannah?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“You don't need to call me, you know. I meant what I said. I can do this alone.” These words came through clearly.

“I know, Dad, but I need to know. I'm sorry, I just can't let you
go
like that.”

“Susannah? I don't want you to cry.” If she'd heard those words once from him she'd heard them a thousand times.

“I won't,” she said, crying anyway. “But don't say I can't
call
, Dad.”

There was another pause. She could hear him breathe, in, out, in—was he asleep? Where was Mrs. Panza? She imagined his pale, lipless mouth open in sleep like a slot, his caved-in cheeks. Then he said, “No,” and she waited. “No,” he said again. “You call, honey. You call if you want to. I like to hear your voice.”

His voice at that point faded away, and Mrs. Panza came on. “Mrs. Cord? How are you? It's Mrs. Panza. Your father has had his medication and is just about to drop off for a little nap before suppertime.”

“How is he, Mrs. Panza?” A motherly woman, on whose shoulder Susannah had wept, out in the hall, more than once.

“Doing pretty well today,” she said. “He's holding his own.” There was a smile in her voice, and Susannah could imagine her looking fondly at Edwin as she spoke—her baby. There was a low mumble, and she added, “He says for you not to worry.” Another mumble, prolonged. “He says be good and be happy and not to worry.”

“I'll call tomorrow, Mrs. Panza. Is that okay? Does it do him any good?”

“It certainly does him no harm, Mrs. Cord,” she said carefully. “You call as often as you wish. Even if he can't take the call someone will give you an update.”

Susannah carried a suitcase up to the room she and Ivan would sleep in. The cats followed her, the three of them skulking low and wary up the stairs, practically on their bellies. “Think of this as your home,” she said to them; it was what Duke had said to her when he kissed her hello. “For however long,” he had said.

She thought of it as her dark, cold home. It would be dark, she could tell, even in daylight. The windows were small and sparse, with dark green shades pulled down over them. All the light bulbs seemed to be forty-watt energy-savers. There were two woodstoves going, one in the huge and drafty kitchen, one in the toy-littered front room, but the house was still cold. Tiny, invisible gusts of frigid air whisked from behind walls and moldings and window-frames and cut through her jeans, her thin sweater. She unpacked Ivan's flannel shirt and put it on, and a second pair of heavy socks. From the room next door she could hear voices: the two little girls, aged five, talking in bed, sleepy murmurs with long pauses in between. She lifted up a shade and looked out at the night. She couldn't see much, but as she stood looking Duke's flashlight came into view from behind a grove of trees, and she could make out, just, Duke and Ivan behind it, Ivan with his hands in his jacket pockets. They'd have to buy some heavy gloves; neither of them had any. While she watched, he removed one hand and gestured with it. What's he telling Duke, she wondered—about his women? about Edwin? about the baby they were trying to make? about her? Anything—it could be anything, from what they had for lunch to what they did in bed. Ivan had no secrets except from his wife.

She let the shade fall and surveyed the room. It was what one would expect: stained wallpaper, an old sewing stand, an oak bow-front dresser, a strip of dingy carpet, a sagging double bed covered in a chenille bedspread with a pile of blankets folded at the foot, and the three cats under it. She squatted down to talk to them; three pairs of eyes gleamed; the three cats sat in perfect stillness. She stood up. Creaking floorboards. One wobbly brass floor lamp beside the bed, with the usual dim bulb. Could she write there? Well, why not? The room wasn't much different, except in temperature, from the bedroom they had left behind on Dimmick Street. Cleaner, maybe. She would hang Ivan's painting there—the only one they had brought with them, “Cloud House.”

She heard Duke and Ivan come in, and went down to join them. They had supper in the kitchen, sitting on rocking chairs pulled up to the blazing stove. It was the kind with glass doors in front, and they could see the flames licking the crossed logs. There was hot vegetable soup with barley in it, hunks of bread, and cold beer. They held the bowls in their hands, and Duke ladled in the soup. Steam rose from it, along with the smell of tomato and some pungent herb. Duke's hands were scarred with burn marks—long purplish welts and, across the back of one, a delicate white streak, healed.

“What've you been doing to yourself?” Susannah asked him.

“Just handling the stoves,” he grinned. “I've never had a really bad burn.”

Ivan was silent, eating his soup with single-minded concentration. It was the most substantial, and surely the most delicious, meal they'd had in many days, but a few spoonfuls made Susannah warm and full, and she stopped eating to ask Duke questions.

“Aren't the twins cold up there? There's no heat upstairs.”

He grinned at her again, enjoying his role of hardy New Englander against hers of California naif. “They've got thermal trapdoor sleepers on over long johns, and a bed full of quilts, and furthermore they sleep together. I go in to get them up in the mornings for school and they're cuddled together like kittens.”