The Perfect Son (22 page)

Felix almost said,
Keep him.
“Since it’s a school night, nine thirty. We have a ten o’clock curfew.”

“We do?” Harry was gripping Sammie’s right hand with both of his hands.

“We do,” Felix said. There had to be consequences for calling your father a Nazi. “And if you break it, you’re grounded for the rest of your life.”

Harry blushed.

Felix turned to Sammie’s mother. “Would you mind if I talk to Harry in private?”

Sammie glanced at Harry, her bottom lip caught in her teeth.

“Of course,” Sammie’s mother said. “We’ll wait in the car.”

They disappeared into the night, but not before a blast of frigid air entered the house.

“You didn’t think I’d ground you?” Felix asked Harry. “I would like to remind you that you are still a child. For another year. And that I am the parent.”

“Dad—when have I ever disobeyed you? I may have focus issues, I may be untidy, but I’ve always followed your rules. If you say home by nine thirty, I’ll be home by nine thirty. You don’t have to threaten me.” Head down, Harry hoisted his bag over his shoulder. “Can I go now?”

“Yes.”

Had Ella ever grounded Harry? In fact, had Ella ever so much as raised her voice at him? The front door closed quietly, and Felix glanced at the space where the jug had been, the one that he’d swept up and dumped in the kitchen bin.

An empty house breathed differently. It wasn’t the silence; it was the nothingness. The heavy, painful solitude that hung in every corner. In the black forest beyond the sliding doors, eyes popped through the trees. The nighttime creatures were out.

An owl hooted, speaking the language of darkness, of despair. Of loneliness.

When they were first married, Ella had planned to get a dog and walk it in Duke Forest every day. But once Harry was born and brought chaos into the house, Felix said no, and the subject had never come up again. Should they get a dog? Not a puppy, but maybe a rescue dog. No, that would come with unknown problems. A dog with a pedigree, then, with kennel-club papers. A perfectly behaved, perfectly trained, perfectly housebroken dog. Would that make Ella happy? Would it make Harry happy? Would a dog give Felix the one thing that continued to elude him: a real family life?

Down the hall, Harry’s door was flung open. As always, the lights blazed. Once his son left home and had to pay his own electric bill, maybe he’d realize what it meant to be wasteful.

Felix stormed toward the teen cave. Harry’s laptop was open, and the clean laundry Felix had folded that morning—he’d done a full load at 6:00 a.m.—lay scattered over the floor. Drawing a deep breath, Felix entered the room and forced himself to ignore the empty lemonade bottle, the crushed soda can, and the half-eaten bar of chocolate. He stepped over the debris of shoes.

“What’s this unnatural obsession you have with putting away shoes?” Harry had said.

It’s called order, Harry. You’ll never understand.

He refolded the T-shirts, repiled them on the bed, and picked up the open laptop to shut it down. As he clicked on the track pad, the screen opened to Harry’s Facebook page with a message to Sammie:
see you in a few.
Followed by a crazy number of kisses.

His son needed a lesson on restraint.

Restraint had never been an issue for teenage Felix. Girls put out for him all the time, but he could never take it to the next level. Sex was not the problem. Love, however, confounded him. He couldn’t make girls happy; they couldn’t make him happy. He tried to be a good boyfriend, but after a while he couldn’t see past their flaws, and then his attention would turn to the next pretty girl. The theme continued into his twenties, but everything had changed the day Ella collapsed on the Tube.

Still holding the laptop, Felix sat down on the bed. Harry’s skull and crossbones alarm clock ticked its ridiculously loud tick and Felix scrolled through the messages. He would never understand why he had decided to pry. Maybe there was no decision. Maybe all he wanted was to understand Harry better, but once he’d read the phrase
attila the dad
, there was no turning back. He had to read all of them. Every last message between Harry and Sammie, between Harry and Max, between Harry and Ella. (As if Harry and his mother needed yet another line of communication.) He read the messages that called him a control freak, that linked the words hate and Dad, and—the worst ones of all—the messages without smiley faces, the ones that shouted loud and clear,
My dad terrifies me.
It was official: he had failed to be more than someone who instilled fear.

The phone rang, but Felix didn’t pick up. He didn’t even move. Down the hall, Eudora’s voice played to the empty living room.

“Felix, honey, I know you’re home. I can see your lights on, and I heard Harry leave. Pick up the phone.” A long pause. “Felix Fitzwilliam. You have two choices. You pick up the phone right now, or I’m coming over. And since I’m in my nightgown, I know you don’t want that vision of wrinkled beauty on your doorstep.” A longer pause. “Lord, son, are you going to make me count? One, two . . .”

Felix ran into his bedroom and snatched the phone off the cradle. “Harry hates me.”

“Why, of course he does. He’s a teenage boy, and you’re his daddy.”

“We had a fight, and he said—” What the hell was he doing sharing family secrets with a neighbor? “I’m not sure there’s a way forward for the two of us.”

“Now, that’s not true, son. It might take a bit o’ doing, is all.” Eudora paused. “Noon tomorrow, meet me at Duke Gardens for some of that . . . what’s it called? My mind just fizzled worse than a . . . Brainstorming! That’s the word I was searching for. Brainstorming.”

“Eudora, I’ll be in the office until school pickup. We have a deadline on this hundred-million-dollar deal, and I need to work every second Harry’s in school. I don’t have time to wander around Duke Gardens.”

“Have you ever visited?”

“No.” Felix tried to edit exasperation from his voice.

“Well then, it’s all settled.”

“Excuse me?”

“You and I need to talk, and tomorrow’s one of my volunteer mornings. Did I mention I’m an ambassador for the Blomquist Garden? Such a joy to work with native plants.”

“Yes, I believe you have mentioned this several times, Eudora. Unfortunately, I don’t—”

“Meet me under the pergola at noon.”

Would he have to be rude to a pensioner? “I can’t. I’m in danger of losing my job. The well-paid job that funds this family.”

“Honey, that job sure is pointless if you lose your family anyway.” She paused. “Bye-bye!”

TWENTY-THREE

Felix drove through the matching stone balustrades that marked the entrance to Duke Gardens and slammed on the brakes with no thought to other drivers. Straight ahead, beyond majestic evergreens and plants with elongated leaves related—surely—to palms, the gothic spire of Duke Chapel rose like a monument to his past, to the one place that had always represented home: Oxford. Many times he’d glimpsed Duke Chapel from the Durham Freeway, and yet he’d never seen it from this angle. What a glorious surprise.

Ducking down for a better view, Felix inched toward the car park. He was in the middle of Durham, North Carolina, but he could have been looking at Magdalen College.

Elation vanished the moment he stepped from the car and discovered the out-of-order notice taped over the parking meter.
Brilliant.
He had timed his arrival perfectly—
perfectly
. Now he would have to take a diversion inside the Doris Duke Center to purchase a parking receipt. He would not only be a hated father; he would be a late hated father.

Parking receipt purchased, despite the painful negotiation with an elderly volunteer who appeared incapable of understanding his English accent, Felix consulted his map and strode toward the Historic Gardens. The path was covered in sand. Sand would stick to his shoes, track into his car, and necessitate another cleaning. He hated sand.

With a quiet harrumph, he tugged up the collar of his cashmere coat—now in its thirtieth year—and adjusted his scarf. If only he had his cashmere-lined leather gloves, too. There was a definite nip in the air, a bite of winter. Maybe even snow in those heavy clouds, which would mean school delays and closings. One snowflake, and the entire Triangle shut down. Really, it was preposterous.

Workers in beanies milled round, quietly purposeful; a young man drove past in a golf cart loaded with gardening implements and hoses; two young women silently shoveled compost out of the back of a small truck. Several dog walkers passed him and smiled. No one seemed in a hurry.

According to the map, he had entered the Mary Duke Biddle Rose Garden. If he wasn’t pressed for time, he might pause to admire the calm order of the artfully placed decorative urns and the well-spaced, well-labeled plants. Felix inhaled deeply, and the irritation over the parking dissipated into the icy air. Plant labels, what a marvelous idea. He would ask Ella to start labeling their plants.

Felix turned left onto a straight path lined with flower borders and trees. Most of the plants were dormant, but some pushed up through the soil: spiky black grass no more than an inch high and a low-growing plant with vivid, scallop-edged leaves. How unexpected to find color on such a raw, sullen day. He peered down at the labels: “Black Mondo Grass” and “Heuchera.”

He pulled out his phone and typed a note:
Ask Ella about heucheras.

Through the trees to his left, an orange Bobcat whirred away as it dug up the ground, as it destroyed to rebuild. Intriguing that this garden, which had been established for decades, was still a work in progress.

Turning right, he spotted Eudora sitting on a metal bench under a huge pergola made of thin strips of iron and a gnarled old vine.

“My, my, don’t you look dashing, all dolled up for the world of high finance.” She pushed off from the bench seat, then wobbled and sank back down. Felix rushed to help.

“Are you unwell?” He had kept an older woman waiting in the cold. What inexcusable behavior.

Eudora waved him off. “At my age, things rust up if I’ve been on my rump for too long.”

Felix hung back, fighting the urge to tuck his arm under hers and haul her to her feet. “Apologies for being tardy. The parking meters were out.”

“
Pfff.
Late is a fact of life. I had hoped you were taking time to dawdle and enjoy this remarkable local treasure.”

“That too,” Felix said, surprised to admit to the dawdling. Dawdling didn’t fit his worldview. Of course, he no longer had a worldview, at least not one he understood. His job was in jeopardy, his wife was critically ill, his son hated him, and he was meeting a seventy-five-year-old spinster for parenting lessons under a pergola.

“I hadn’t appreciated before how much Duke Chapel looks like Maudlin College.”

“I’m not familiar with that—Maudlin, you said?”

“Spelled
M-a-g-d-a-l-e-n
.”

“Ah, Magdalen College pronounced the Oxford way.”

“Indeed.” Felix tipped back his head to glance up at the gray sky through the giant metal web covered in a latticework of sticks. Frozen precipitation was definitely heading their way. Should he check the school website and see if they were announcing an early dismissal?

“Asian wisteria,” Eudora said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re looking at Asian wisteria. Not up to much in the winter, but wait until the wedding season.” She gave a low whistle.

“They have weddings here?”

“Lord, yes.”

In front of them, terraced gardens flowed down to a large pond. “Is that a heron?” he said.

“Blue heron. It comes to dine on the koi. Magnificent fish.”

Felix nodded. He knew nothing about fish unless it was being served to him on a platter.

“The original garden was built in 1934 at the instigation of one Dr. Hanes, an iris buff. He persuaded Sarah P. Duke to invest in a garden, and they planted an array of iris bulbs. But the land was prone to flooding, and everything rotted. Sarah died, and he convinced her daughter, Mary Duke Biddle, to construct a new garden in honor of her mother, but on higher ground.” Eudora flashed her eyes at him. “I admire that kind of persistence, when combined with an ability to learn from one’s mistakes. Don’t you?”

Felix nodded. Was there some didactic meaning buried in her docent spiel?

“Mary hired Ellen Biddle Shipman, a pioneer in American landscape design, to create the Terrace Gardens in the Italianate style. The garden you see today was built by women.”

“Impressive,” Felix said.

“And this”—Eudora swept her arm to the right—“represents the globe with its lines of longitude and latitude. Quite fascinating when you consider the dedication of the garden was in 1939.”

“On the eve of World War Two,” Felix said. “And this year marks its seventy-fifth anniversary.”

“Precisely, hon. And the pergola is the original structure.”

The structure above them had endured over seven decades and any number of weddings. He’d never thought about history in terms of gardens before, despite listening to busloads of National Trust retirees twitter over Saint John’s garden, designed by the famous English landscape architect Capability Brown. Continuity, longevity, places that had established a timeline: these were important. Felix had little interest in the contemporary.

“But we’re starting in the wrong place,” Eudora said. “As everyone does. To experience the true joy of the Historic Gardens, we need to be on the other side of the pond, by the original entrance. Come.”

Eudora started walking, and Felix followed.

“We’re stepping on Tennessee stone, although”—she pointed to a low, circular wall surrounding a small pond and a statue of Cupid holding a large shell—“that’s Duke stone. Bless my soul, would you look at that?” Her voice turned girlish. “The tulips are coming up. I
love
tulips.”

“So did my brother, Tom.”

“He was a gardener?”

“A landscape architect. Much sought after by the rich and famous.” The pride in Tom’s success never abated.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

Felix stroked his designer cashmere scarf, his last present from Tom. Tom had been an extravagant gift giver.
I miss him every day, every week, every month, every year.
The void created by Tom’s death was a rip through the universe, an open wound that would never heal. “He died of AIDS. Hard to forget such a slow, painful death.”

“Ah,” Eudora said. “But even under the shadow of death, one can celebrate life. Each day with a loved one is a blessing.”

“I’m not sure that applies to AIDS.”

“Dahlia had a drawn-out death. Cancer. But we took joy where we could, right up until the end.”

They climbed the slope behind the pond, and Felix forgot to check his watch. Eudora paused by a cluster of ceramic pots in grays and browns that spewed over with plants in eclectic shades of green, gold, and bronze. He looked up—across the green water of the pond, streaked with orange fish, to the white steps and multihued walls, and, finally, to the pergola and the backdrop of forest. The gardens were surrounded by naked trees, and yet the plant beds were filled with layers of life.

“Splendid view, isn’t it?” Eudora said. He turned to find her watching him. “Do you have a favorite plant?”

“Everything I know about plants comes from Tom, from his tales of plant folklore. Ivy always appealed. In Celtic tree astrology, ivy is a tree—the strongest of them all. At Tom’s suggestion, Ella had ivy in her bridal bouquet to represent endurance and fidelity. Mother, who believes ivy belongs in churchyards, was quite horrified.”

“I often wondered why you folks chose not to rip up the ivy on your property. To most people, ivy is little more than a parasite.”

“Tom taught me that it symbolizes survival—the ability to overcome all odds.”

Eudora nodded. “Seems I learned something from you today, son. But oh, would you look at that!” A young man dashed past, carrying a backpack and wearing outrageously high stilettoes. “Only a man would wear heels to a garden.”

“It would seem so.” Felix laughed—a stolen moment of pleasure. This was another reason he loved the heart of Durham: the downtown pulsed with creativity, especially in historic Black Wall Street, where he worked, with its art deco buildings, funky cafés, and nonsensical one-way system that could appeal only to a Londoner.

He stopped by a spreading magnolia, its twisted branches whispering,
Come climb me
. Tom would have loved it, would have created a whole world of make-believe in its boughs.

Eudora kept walking. “And now I’m taking you to the best part,” she called over her shoulder. “The Blomquist Garden, started in 1968 by the first chair of the botany department at Duke.”

With the cold stinging his cheeks, Felix jogged to catch up. For an older woman, she walked at a fair lick. “And what makes it special?”

“Nine hundred species of native plants. I have a feeling you’re someone who will appreciate that we grow the real beauties here,” Eudora said. “Not the gaudy sun perennials that want to flash everything they’ve got like cheap hookers. You have to look hard to find the pockets of beauty in my garden.”

“Your garden?”

But Eudora was no longer listening. She strode ahead, slowing down when they entered an intimate fairy-tale forest. The path narrowed and switched to pale stone. Crazy paving, Tom would have called it—stone slabs haphazardly slotted together in a way that defied time, feet, and the extremes of weather. The formal, structured sweep of the Historic Gardens was replaced by a hint of controlled but wild beauty. Above the towering hemlocks, the clouds broke apart to reveal slashes of blue sky.

Eudora was right—so many pockets of beauty if you looked hard enough: trailing catkins and clusters of reddish pitcher plants that looked like rhubarb stalks with curling ends. (Such fascination he’d had for carnivorous plants after Tom had shown him a picture of a Venus flytrap in
Encyclopædia Britannica
.) A dead stick jutted up through the leaves; the sign next to it read “Northern Catalpa.” He would research that on the Web when he got to the office. See if he could find a picture of it in full leaf.

“Here, smell this.” Eudora had stopped by a small, unimpressive tree, but as Felix moved close, he spotted tiny pom-poms of reddish blooms. He had never seen anything quite so weird or wonderful. Ella should definitely plant one of those.

“Hmm.”

“Witch hazel.”

Birdsong surrounded them, and they ambled along a gravel path that meandered down a short flight of steps.

“This railing . . .” Felix reached for a red wooden handrail so shiny it glowed.

“Magnificent, isn’t it? Believe it or not, I helped with the sanding. Heavens to Betsy, that was some job. Several weeks of eight-hour-a-day shifts.”

Of course he believed it. Nothing about Eudora surprised him.

“Red cedar,” Felix said. “Long lasting and slow to rot.”

“And always the first tree to colonize when the land is no longer farmed. Very common in the North Carolina landscape.”

“What’s the finish?”

“Polyurethane. Come,” Eudora said. “There are more rails up ahead.”

The path snaked through the trees, and they followed in silence, passing through the endangered species garden and over a small bridge with more cedar railings. Such a simple, organic idea, yet so beautiful—not unlike the earrings Ella used to make. As he walked, his mind drafted design ideas for a new bridge to their house. He imagined the joy of working with his hands again. Of creating beauty.

The ground was hilly but the slopes gentle. Ahead, nestled in the leaves and sitting on the brow of a slope, there was a cedar shelter shaped like a giant bird feeder with benches. Presumably for bird watching.
How inventive.
More cedar rails led up toward it, the end post richer and darker than the others. Felix stepped forward. He couldn’t help himself; he had to stroke the wood. For a moment, he thought of Harry. Always touching, unable to stop.

“This piece appears to have been burned at one time.” It was as smooth as he’d imagined.

“Such stories in this one rail, and the flaws make it beautiful. All the timber came from Durham. From an old moonshine distillery, unless I’m mistaken.” She touched his upper arm briefly. “Look,” she whispered. “On the bird feeder.”

“A woodpecker?” Felix said.

“A downy woodpecker. What a handsome fella.”

They continued along the woodland path and down another flight of steps, and Felix paused to stare at a pavilion that overlooked a small pond. A flash of sunlight broke through the trees, turning the water luminous. To their left, a mossy nook closed around a circular stone dais with two wooden benches flanking a round stone table.