The Garden Path (2 page)

I'll go to Florida, she thought wildly, knowing she wouldn't. Her friends the Sheffields were there for the winter. A pelican had stolen Kiki Sheffield's handbag when she set it down to snap the bird's picture—just picked it up in his bill and dropped it out in the ocean somewhere, with her pills and two hundred dollars and three exposed rolls of film in it. The Sheffields sent postcards of garish tropical vegetation. “Azalea blossoms the size of grapefruits,” they wrote. “Grapefruits the size of basketballs. Avocados in our backyard. Roses in January. Wish you were here. Love, Jim and Kiki.”

No thanks
, Rosie always thought when the postcards came.
They can have it
. She knew she wouldn't change her mind, even with Susannah and her husband in the vicinity. Even if war was declared, she would stand her ground. Let them back off if anyone did. I was here first, she thought, knowing she was being childish and not caring a damn.

The kettle boiled, and Peter and Rosie sat by the fire with their mugs of tea. Rosie saw them there, in imagination, with the eyes of someone looking in through the dirty weather-stripped window: a woman in jeans, busty and big-bottomed, with her hair gone scraggly, needing a cut; and her fashionable—foppish?—son in a toast-colored sweater patterned across the chest with a row of red hens, his mustache waxed upward at the corners, and his brown eyes—like hers, like his grandfather's—soft with sympathy.

“I don't mean to jump to conclusions,” he said. “She may not have money on her mind at all. She says they're both sick to death of California. They're homesick for
weather
, she says.” The fire's fangs gnashed at the logs, and Rosie held her cold hands toward the blaze. Peter sipped his tea and smiled at her. “Poor Ma. What do you do if you meet her on the street?”

“Just what I always do! Go on about my business. And Dunkin' Donuts is not an establishment I frequent. Neither are health food restaurants.” This was said in her best tart TV manner, but the scene entered her imagination for a painful second: herself versus Susannah on the street, in a store, thrown into inescapable proximity on line, in a waiting room, at a restaurant. What then? Rosie's mind numbed and went blank, and she shivered. The fire failed to warm her.

“Knowing Susannah, she'll be going down to McDonald's for her lunch break,” Peter said. “I don't see her going the bean curd route. Though I suppose California could do it to anyone.”

“I'm sure I won't run into them.”

“They just might look you up.”

“She wouldn't have the nerve.”

“Don't underestimate her.”

Florida, Rosie thought desperately, hugging her tea mug with cold hands. Her pulse pounded in her ear like the surf. It was true—Susannah had the nerve of a pelican. Just because her mother had slapped her and insulted her and cursed her in public, it didn't mean she would stop trying. Edwin, never very generous anyway, was, last anyone had heard, in Mexico with his new popsie, who was younger than his daughter. And not too long ago,
People
magazine had spilled the beans about what kind of money Rosie was making from her television show. She should have expected to hear from Susannah.

“Well, they won't be here until spring,” Peter said. “And who knows if it'll come off, anyway? I don't get the impression she and Dmitri are the world's most stable individuals.”

“Ivan,” she said, trying to remember what her son-in-law, the expriest turned painter, looked like. Ivan Cord, his name was—short for something unpronounceably Slavic, probably. She had seen him just once, and she had a vague recollection of a large and hairy man with a pale, sullen face and thick lips. “He looks like something from a monster movie, if I recall,” she said to Peter. “
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
, or
White Pongo
. I'm sure he's some kind of an addict.”

“I don't think so,” said Peter. “He's not so bad, really. Probably better than Susannah deserves.” Peter's derogatory remarks about his sister were halfhearted, automatic, designed to please, and almost without any connection to the real Susannah, who had achieved, with the two of them, the hazy status of myth, she'd been gone so long. “He's not my type, of course,” Peter added, looking at Rosie for reaction. Such remarks were still fairly daring: he'd confessed his homosexuality to her only a little over a year ago—for Christmas. “Too macho.”

“Hmm,” was all Rosie said.

“Or yours, either,” said Peter. “Too counterculture.”

“Please, Peter.” Sometimes he went too far. “What amazes me,” she said, maliciously, “is that he and Susannah are still together. What is it—four years since the wedding we were so kindly not invited to? He must be a dreadful man.” In the midst of anger and dismay, Rosie felt curiosity creep up.

Peter refused lunch. It was a Friday, and he always spent Friday afternoons in the computer center at the university. Rosie wasn't sure why a dissertation on Dante required the assistance of a computer, but Friday had been Peter's computer day for so long she no longer questioned it, or even thought about it—just as she took it for granted that Barney Macrae got up from her warm bed to go to church on Sunday mornings.

“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 mother 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.