The Garden Path (6 page)

“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 long. “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.

“And as for
why
,” he went on, his steady voice incongruous with his tears, “he left to get married. He's gone to Vermont. He's got a job there and everything.”

“You mean—
married
?”

“To a girl—excuse me, a
woman
he met at his sister's place last summer. He's been—”

There his voice choked and stopped, but Rosie had no trouble filling in: Hollis had been seeing her, corresponding with her, wooing her, bedding her, all this time. Rosie closed her eyes. It was unbelievable. “The little bastard,” she said. “Leading a stinking double life. Oh,
Peter.
” She opened her eyes. Incredibly, he was grinning at her through his tears with a touch of his old humor.

“Ma,” he said. “You're terrific. Pissed off at Hollis because he's straight.”

“I'd kill the little bastard if I could,” she said. “I'd tear his heart out with my bare hands.”

They laughed together, probably a touch too loud and long, and after dinner and a bottle of wine she did hug him while he wept, briefly. Then they sat by the fire and talked about Hollis, and Rosie was again proud of Peter; he didn't vilify Hollis, didn't bring up his tendency to drink too much and make an ass of himself, or his dreadful Italian accent. She would have cackled over these things, gladly—her hatred for Hollis was pure and bright and shining—but Peter wanted to talk about the good times. He'd passed through the bitchy stage on his own. He confessed that he'd gathered up all of Hollis's funny cartoons, ripped them to bits, and burned them. And that he'd stuffed Hollis's favorite sweater, left behind in a pile for the cleaners, into the trash. And that he spent two days drunk, tossing his glass after every couple of drinks into the fireplace so that he had a pile of shards to clean up when he recovered. But the anger seemed to have passed, leaving behind a resigned, sad tenderness that wrung Rosie's heart. He wished he had the cartoons back.

“Tell me the truth, Ma,” he said as he was leaving. “You wish it had been me, don't you, going off into the sunset with a woman to have babies?”

Rosie tucked his red scarf around his neck and shook her head firmly. “No, I don't,” she said. “I don't care who you love, Peter, as long as you're happy. I really mean that. No jokes. I want you to be happy.”

“Thanks,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

She shrugged. “I'm your mother.”

He hesitated, looking at her there in the front hall. “Then let me ask you this,” he said, paused again, then went on. “You're Susannah's mother, too.”

Rosie stiffened immediately, and dropped his hand that she'd been holding. “So?”

“Well, I think she's been unhappy, too. I think she'd like to have your—”

“Hmm?”

“Your support.”

“My support.”

“Just a word, to say you welcome her back East, that bygones will be bygones.”

“Bygones never will be bygones, Peter.” She felt her heart begin to thump again, her pulse pound. The anger she'd had to suppress all evening, against Hollis, for Peter's sake, brimmed over toward Susannah. “She left her mother of her own free will, and she was brought up by her father to be a despicable human being. I haven't got a reason in the world to give her my damned
support
.”

“You're her mother.”

“I'm
not
her mother! I've disowned her, and I want nothing to do with her, whether she's in California or on my doorstep. I don't even want to talk about her, much less give her my
support.
”

He looked at her unhappily. “She's been calling me.”

“She's been calling you.”

“She called me a couple of weeks ago.”

“Collect, I assume.”

“Well, yes, but then she called me again direct. She talked for a long time, about—well, the family, about you, about Dad.”

“She did.”

“She really seems to be sincere. I mean, about wanting to make it up with you. I feel bad that I was so snide about her. I don't think she's trying to get anything out of you, except—”

“Support,” Rosie said sarcastically. “In every sense of the word.”

“Ma …”

“Go along, now, Peter,” she said, opening the door. It was snowing, very gently. She had never kicked him out before, but she was sick of it—his pleas for Susannah, the way he'd let the girl get to him, her own pounding anger that was beginning to appear ridiculous but which she couldn't, wouldn't, couldn't shake. “And please drive carefully. And I'll call you tomorrow, maybe. Do you want to go to a movie one of these nights?”

He sighed. He drew on his gloves—red woolen ones, with leather palms—and kissed her again, lightly. “Sure,” he said. “Let's go to a movie. You pick.” And then, just before he left, he said, “You're going to have to face her, sooner or later.”

She didn't even answer. She just pushed him out the door, and then watched him go down the walk to his car, get the brush out of the trunk, clean off the windshield.
Do the back window, too
, she said silently to him, and was relieved when he walked around to do so. He got in the car and drove off—
drive carefully
, she said to his taillights—leaving her with her anger. It didn't go away but intensified as she sat by the fire having a last glass of sherry before bed, remembering for some reason how Susannah had abandoned her playhouse after that first summer, declared it was dirty and full of bugs and spiders, cried when Rosie told her she was spoiled, and gone to Edwin for the approval he was quick to give. “Kids outgrow things,” he had said to Rosie, who hadn't deigned to answer. She had turned the playhouse into a garden shed, and always felt warmly toward the spiders who built their webs in the corners and scurried over the pots.

When she finished the sherry, she threw the glass at the fireplace, where it shattered, and she felt better. She even chuckled a little, imagining Peter's pile of smashed glass. But when she went to bed, tired though she was from the late hour, the sherry, the angry bumping of her heart, she couldn't sleep for thinking of her children. And lest she dwell on Susannah—her tantrums, her school troubles, the fistful of squash she threw at the dining room curtains, the time she rode her bicycle into the box hedge; all this was waiting just outside Rosie's consciousness for her fury to pounce on—and lest she dwell on it, she thought of Peter, remembering.

When Edwin left, followed soon by stony-faced Susannah with her three suitcases and a huge plastic bag full of stuffed animals she should have outgrown, and Peter and Rosie were left alone in the house, she felt happiness settle into her and into all the rooms. It was the feeling she remembered from childhood at the start of summer vacation, of infinite possibility, of blessed release. The house, which had for so many years been blighted with the growing enmity between herself and Edwin, between herself and Susannah, between Peter and Edwin, and Peter and Susannah, was blown clean and healthy again by their exit.

With glee—yes, it was glee, there wasn't a shred of sadness in her (though for months she couldn't bring herself to enter Susannah's room)—with glee she tossed out the old mattress she and Edwin had avoided each other on for so long and bought a new one, hard the way she liked it. She also got rid of the scratchy white muslin sheets Edwin's mother had given them, which he had always, perversely, claimed to prefer, and bought herself sheets patterned with roses. Edwin had been scornful, after that brief courting period when he'd faked tolerant benevolence, of the roses she surrounded herself with, not only in the garden but in the house. It was something her parents started—roses for their Rose.

She remembered coming home from school one day when she was eight years old to find her bedroom transformed: rose-colored walls, roses on the curtains, a bedspread to match, roses glowing on the lampshade, the two framed Redouté prints moved from the living room to the wall over her desk, and on the desk a little box whose cover was a full-blown porcelain rose. She was overcome, not least that her parents—garden people, not house people—had done this for her. The rest of the house was a comfortable shambles; her room was a palace, though what her mother called it sometimes, shyly, fearing to be corny, was “Rose's Secret Garden.” Now, all these years later, if Rosie had burst into that long-gone rosy room, where even the sun coming in the windows had a pinkish tint, she might have found it garish and tacky—all but the Redouté prints, which she still had. But then it was a heavenly place that summed up all the bliss of her early years.

And when she and Edwin bought the house in East Chiswick she did it up in roses—not a bower, just here and there a touch, a nosegay. She slipcovered the old wing chair, she hung rose-patterned drapes in the dining room (it was these Susannah hurled the blob of acorn squash at, leaving a stain), she put down a rose-strewn runner in the upstairs hall, she hung the Redoutés and bought a large watercolor still life of roses lying, cut, on a table with secateurs and a pair of old gardening gloves. Something about the way the cut roses, fresh and hopeful but with sharp brown thorns, waited there for the vase and water that don't appear in the picture appealed to her. Would it be too much to say they reminded her of her waiting, thirsty self? Edwin never liked the picture, thought all her roses were a silly affectation, and even disliked the ones in the garden.

When he left she overdid it, rosifying the house (as Peter, a smart-aleck twelve, put it) to a perhaps absurd degree.

“It looks weird, Ma,” he said,
weird
being the word of the moment.

“I'm asserting my own personality, Peter,” Rosie told him with a touch of self-consciousness.

He understood what she was needing to do, of course. He treated the flowered sheets and rosy towels with affectionate amusement. She heard him, one day, apologize to his friend Ronnie, “See, my mother's name is Rose, so she gets everything with
roses
on it.”

“Neat,” Ronnie said, and Peter groaned.

But then, once, he told her, “It's not the kind of thing a
boy
wants to live with,” looking, himself, at thirteen or fourteen, not unlike a dark, graceful blossom of some exotic kind. And though then she scoffed, pointing out that he had his room—a sparsely dressed brown confusion—and the basement rec room with pool table and bare white walls in which to assert his personality, and that the house was hers, dammit, his words affected her, and gradually she “derosified” things a bit, sensing, perhaps, as she let the roses fade, that there were many reasons for Peter's discomfort with the aggressive femininity of a rose bower.

But roses aside, they were happy together in their newly roomy, purged house. Peter was a bright, eager, lighthearted boy, a good companion to her always during the lonely parts of those years. Not that he hadn't his difficult moments, but they were
moments
—he wasn't like Susannah, whose sourness was continual, who refused to settle with the world on any terms. Rose didn't hear from Edwin and Susannah, though her parents occasionally did. She knew they were in New Mexico, where Edwin managed to get himself a company transfer when the divorce became final. She knew when his mother's money came to him, and she assumed, from the swaggering reports of life deluxe that Susannah's scrawled communiqués contained, that he had used that money to make more money. But Rosie and her son seldom thought about either of them.