Where Lilacs Still Bloom

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Shelly’s wrapper needed washing, so she took it to the laundry room along with other personal items. It was Monday morning, the day for her to fill the tubs and build the fire to heat the water. She liked it that students were assigned the time by reverse alphabet, and this term there were no people whose surnames began with letters after the S in Snyder. Well, Mrs. Thorpe, of course, but she lived off campus, as did most of the lecturers. Only the instructors stayed with students on the dormitory floor. Shelly liked the hard stirring of her clothes that let her put strong feelings into effort. Her favorite class was Gardening Out of Doors with Miss Hetzer, for the same reason. She got to shovel and dig and put her back into a task, which transferred the ache in her heart to a muscle ache in her arms and her legs.

  Bill had not been happy when she’d returned from her tour of the Lowthorpe School and had advised him of her plans to enroll. His mother had feigned a terrible illness the next day, and Bill stayed home that week from his classes in Annapolis to look after her, which both angered Shelly and hurt her since he would never cancel classes for her. She was angry because in between her mother-in-law’s coughing—how had it come on so quickly?—the woman managed to put suggestions into her son’s head about the frivolity of his wife. “She goes bicycle riding, wearing those bifurcated skirts!” Cough, cough. “I’ve seen her jumping up and down in the back garden, rolling one way and then another, one hundred times. ‘Exercising’ she calls it. Looks to me like one of those strange religions one reads about in that National Geographic magazine.” Cough, cough. “And now she wants to go to school? At her age? For women? I suspect it’s a cauldron of suffragettes. Don’t you let her go, William. Don’t you let that woman run your life into ruin!” Cough, cough. Her mother-in-law would recover as soon as Bill returned to his classes, but not before Shelly and Bill had a week of arguing.

  “It’s beyond discussion,” Bill had told her, as he fixed mint tea for his mother. “No wife of mine is going to be gone to another state for months on end, to what, draw plants? There are plenty to draw right here in the garden, if that’s your interest, though I must say it’s a new interest. One of your fleeting interests, I suspect. Like the lyceum attendance.”

  “I attend horticulture meetings regularly.”

  “And see where that’s gotten you.”

  “The few friends I have here, that’s what it’s gotten me.” She’d stood tall and straight as he poured hot water through the tea caddy. It had been months since he’d made tea for her, even longer since they’d sat and just talked about what the future might hold for them. She changed the tone. “What’s happened to us, Bill? I keep looking for yes in your face, and all I see is no.”

  Startled, Bill spilled the tea. She reached for a towel and held it to his hand, her fingers closing over his wrist, his palm. Once that touch would have brought currents of emotion through her and Bill as well. She pressed against his hand, urging the feeling to reappear, to reach him. He looked at her, really looked at her, and she felt his own sadness in the gaze, a sadness she longed to alter.

  “Shelly, I—”

  His mother coughed from her bedroom.

  Bill pulled the towel from his hand, lifted the teapot, and carried it away from her. Carried everything away.

  She’d packed her bags and left the next morning before anyone else was up. She opened the front door and heard a sound and turned. There stood her mother-in-law, looking chipper and in the bloom of health. She smiled, then coughed, pressing her hanky to her smirking lips as she waved a tepid good-bye.

  That had been more than a year ago. At least Bill hadn’t refused to pay the statements the school sent, or she couldn’t have remained. Perhaps it was better this way. She could take every course in each of the four subject divisions, which would require another year or so. But then what? She stirred the tub of her clothes. Cauldron of suffragettes. Her mother-in-law’s charge still irritated. She’d found no suffragettes here, only natural beauty, living things needing nurture to survive. As the months passed, she found she liked the lack of stressful talk—there was no need to defend all the time.

  She loved having her hands in soil, earth like face powder come together, patting around the roots, careful not to cover the crown, being wary of overwatering. These were things discussed at the horticultural meetings, but here, at the school, they were like a religion, each plant looked after with reverence.

  With her sleeve, Shelly wiped her forehead of perspiration. She lifted the soaked wrapper and twisted it as free of moisture as she could before sinking it into the boiling rinse water. Her eye caught the dying rhododendron outside that had been discussed at length in the Gardening Out of Doors class. The rhododendron had been planted wrong, where it could not flourish. It had been exposed to the harsh cold, though of course rhodies thrived in mountain zones with heavy snow and intense cold. The consensus was, the plant was dying.

  Laura Hetzer had used the occasion to discuss what plants need—what all living things need, she admonished—and looked for ways they might work to restore it. “Though there are times when one must simply pull the plant up by the roots and toss it aside, as it is gone. Dead. Finished.”

  Is this my marriage? Shelly wondered.

  But she found herself focused on restoring the rhodie as a necessary task. Her desire to repair had not lessened since she’d been here. She still wasn’t sure she should go home in December, to see if she and Bill could replant the seeds of their relationship. Her mother-in-law’s words—or was it her cough—and Bill’s bowing to them made her think it wasn’t possible. She had no way of mulching a marriage back into health by herself. She still hoped Lowthorpe might give her those tools.

  In the classroom, Shelly took her seat, surprised when Mr. Dawson, the instructor, introduced Cornelia Givens “who will be interviewing some of you today, if you care to participate, as she is working on a story about our school and its students. She’s from California.”

  Murmuring followed. Mr. Dawson coughed loudly to gain order. “Ladies, if you please. Are there volunteers?” Every hand except Shelly’s went up.

  “Could I ask you to suggest a few students?” the reporter said. She was a petite woman who wore her hair in that new fashion with a french twist. Her smallish hat—with one short feather—cocked jauntily to the side.

  Mr. Dawson looked over his glasses. “Mrs. Snyder would be a fine interviewee. She’s one of our few married students. And she has a special interest in rhododendrons.” Mr. Dawson urged Shelly to raise her hand. For some reason, Shelly complied, her palm barely reaching her chin. “Now that you’ve properly met, perhaps you can find a time after the class to talk. Will that work?” Both women nodded, and Mr. Dawson assumed his instruction, while Miss Givens took notes.

  Shelly didn’t know how she felt about being singled out for an interview because she was married. She wasn’t at all certain how long that status would remain.

  Cornelia Givens sat across from Shelly at the end of a long table on the dining porch. Several other girls, including a few instructors, spoke quietly, eventually leaving just the two women alone. Clanks of dishes from the kitchen provided background, and when they couldn’t hear those noises, there were birds chirping in the trees beyond the screened porch.

  “This is such a lovely place,” Cornelia began. “How did you first hear of the school?”

  “I attended horticultural meetings in Baltimore where I live, and they planned a tour to visit the Hampton Gardens, a fabulous estate. While we were there, the head gardener spoke of Mr. Child as one of the primary landscape engineers in the country. It’s a very old estate. And he said that Mr. Child was a lecturer at the Lowthorpe School. I’d never heard of it before and thought it intriguing, all female students in an occupation usually reserved for men. Not unlike your own profession, Miss Givens.”

  “Please. Call me Cornelia.”

  “And I’m Shelly.”

  “It’s true I have an interest in rhodies, but my favorite plant
is a lilac,” Shelly said.

  “I like them too,” Cornelia told her and mentioned Hulda Klager.

  The two talked away the afternoon, walking through the grounds, then back to the screened porch for afternoon tea. When students entered the hall for the evening meal, Cornelia and Shelly looked up. “Is it that time already?” Shelly said.

  “I’ll be here for a year myself if I take this long with one interview.” Cornelia started to return her notepad to her bag, then hesitated. “Is there one lesson you’ll take away from this course, a lesson about life perhaps?”

  “Egad, I’m no philosopher—not that I wouldn’t like to study Plato and Aristotle.” Shelly sat, thoughtful. “This past year I’ve found there are lessons in these plants—many lessons—testaments to faith and an acceptance that it’s the root structure as much as anything that predicts the kind of plant you’ll have.”

  Now that she’d said it, Shelly wondered if that was what was missing in her marriage: a solid foundation where sturdy roots sank deep into family and faith and that could weather the trials of living and, best of all, permit deep feelings to bloom year after year.

  Cornelia finished the interviews and stayed an additional day just to wander around the campus, taking in scents and sights that spiced her writing. In the kitchen, she chatted with the cooks, inhaling the aroma of fresh spinach salad with a hot bacon dressing and asking (and receiving) the recipe for a fruit drink combining apples, grapes, lemon juice, and ginger ale. She visited greenhouses and tried her hand at designing a small garden plot, realizing as she did the enormous task involved in creating a garden that matched one’s vision.

  The school suggested that graduates would find work in designing and planting for small estates, village parks, and forwarding-thinking cities. “People will more likely move to a town with a welcoming flower garden beneath its city sign than a pile of weeds blown up against its center post,” the school’s founder told her. Flowers spoke as clearly as Cornelia’s words did, maybe even more.

  As a result of the interviews, Cornelia planned a side trip to Arnold Arboretum run by Harvard University, where it was said there was a special lilac garden. That might lead to a series of stories about great arboretums across the country. There did seem to be a growing interest in the natural world, what with President Roosevelt urging Congress to set aside protected areas of landscape for all to enjoy as parks. She’d made notes on the journey itself, hoping she might sell a few pieces to travel magazines. She’d learned so much in this brief trip, not the least of which was confidence. She was a good listener, and people liked being heard. That was worthy work, even if she never got a story published.

  But if she didn’t get the stories published, what would she live on? She couldn’t survive on the beauty she saw.

  “Cornelia, I’m so glad I caught you.” It was Shelly, breathing hard, running down the hill as Cornelia headed for the cab. “I wanted to give you this. It’s a lilac start, from a variety here. It does well in neutral soil and cold weather. I had permission to cut it and meant to give it to you when we said good-bye earlier.” She handed it to Cornelia. “Keep it moist, and you’ll be able to plant it when you get home to California. Or maybe give it to your lilac friend, Mrs. Klager.”

  “She’s not really a friend.”

  “Would you ask her if she’ll send me a cultivar of one of her new varieties?”

  “She did say she likes to give them away. I’ll write and ask her. Should she send it here?”

  “No.” Shelly handed Cornelia a piece of paper on which she’d written her address. “I’m going home at Christmas. And God willing, I’ll bring my husband back here next spring to see if the rhodie made it. But something back home needs tending more.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  ON THE ROAD OF HEALING

  Hulda, 1908

  The spring floods weren’t bad in 1908, which was good since we had a wedding to plan for, that of Delia and Edmond. On June 16 they spoke their vows at the Presbyterian church, but we had the reception at the house. Rain showers threatened any garden time, and when it began to sprinkle, we moved inside, and I served from the cupboard filled with pastries and pies.

  The couple would return to the farm where Edmond had added potatoes to cattle raising, so this marriage was bittersweet. But I set my sadness aside by naming another new cultivar after Irvina, a single purple flower the exact hue I wanted.

  Nearly two years old, Irvina already put sentences together and loved the sounds of words her aunt Martha would feed her. “Colossal petunia, Gamma,” she’d tell me as she waddled along as I weeded and hoed. “Substantial!” Irvina squealed as I moved the grass aside with my hoe.

  “Now don’t you be upset by a little snake. They eat mice and are good friends in the garden. But see these strings here? That’s where we have traps set. Danger. So you must, must stay on these paths, all right?” I could’ve kept those traps closeted while she was small, but teaching a child limits was a necessary part of them becoming aware and responsible adults. I might not think that way if she ever hurt herself the way Alice Chapman had, but I couldn’t protect everyone I loved from every harm. I had to accept that.

  Delia assured me that she’d come by often and that Irvina could even spend an occasional night with us.

  “I surely hope so.” We all sat at the dining room table having dinner after church. Edmond and Delia radiated that newlywed glow. “She’s the only grandchild we have. My girls just aren’t propagating as quickly as I’d like.”

  I hated myself as soon as I said it, for Lizzie’s face turned pale, and she excused herself from the table, rose, and ascended the stairs to her room without another word.

  “Mama,” Martha said.

  “I know, I know. At times my mouth goes visiting from my brain.”

  “I’ll go talk with her,” Delia said.

  “No, no, it’s me. I’m the one who said it.” I frumped my napkin next to my plate and stood. Frank winked his support, though I thought how quickly I’d turned a nice day into sour.

  “Lizzie? It’s your mother. May I come in?”

  I heard crying, then a tentative “Yes” allowing me to enter. One of my wedding-ring quilts lay folded at the end of her bed, and a summer sun shone through the window. A breeze sighed the white curtains back and forth against the handblown glass. The wedding photograph of her and Delia standing before their former husbands sat framed on the small table between her and Martha’s beds. I picked it up and stared at it.

  “He was a handsome man, your husband,” I said. “And a good man too.” She nodded, wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. “He’d give me a tongue lashing for saying what I did downstairs. It was the most insensitive thing I could have ever said. I am so sorry.”

  “And you’d deserve such a lashing,” Lizzie said, but she had an uplift to the corners of her mouth.

  I winced. “Ja, I didn’t think.” I sat down beside her on the bed, hands in my lap. “I was being selfish, thinking of my own heart full of love for Irvina and missing them leaving to go on their own. I have room for other children … but it was thick-skinned of me, words I should have told my mouth not to spew.”

  “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, Mama. I know.” She sighed. “I just miss him so. I’m happy for Delia and Edmond, I truly am. I adore Irvina. Yet each time I see her, I’m reminded of what I don’t have, what Fred and I wanted but will never be, and sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve that. Did I offend God? Is my punishment that Fred and I would have so little time together, and I’d have a life of teaching music with a broken heart?”

  This was that moment when a mother wants more than anything to be wise and give something to her child that will feed her soul and heal it, but we are so impaired, we humans. I sent a prayer that I might think before I spoke. “God doesn’t work that way.” I picked at a thread in my apron. “At least I’ve never known Him to be a vindictive God, but rather one who is tender and loving. He would no more punish you by ha
ving Fred die than He’s punishing Martha for not finding a hand to hold.” Was that the proper comparison to make? “God gives us hope.” I paused. “The way I have hope my lilacs will bloom and maybe even one day give me the cultivar I imagine with many petals on hardy stems. Remember where it says, ‘I, even I, am He who comforts you’? That’s what I think God’s about. Sometimes there are troubles. And God is there with us.”

  “Then why don’t I feel comforted? And when will this awful hurt ever end?”

  It had been three years since Fred’s death, and some had suggested to me, and to Lizzie too, that “it was time she moved on, got over it.” But there was no one time that spoke to every heart. I hugged her to me, letting her sob into my shoulder. I remembered when she was four and broke her wrist falling when she climbed over a fence to chase a rabbit. The pain was great, but I knew with the bone set and a little laudanum, she’d soon be out racing and running. Heart and soul pain took so much longer to heal, required so much more faith that things would one day be better. I so wanted to give her that faith, and to assure her the pain wasn’t a consequence of anything she’d done wrong—despite the words of Barney Reed. I just didn’t know the words to say.

  Martha opened the door, came to sit across from us on her bed. She stayed silent for a time, then said, “Shakespeare wrote that we should give sorrow words,” her voice as soft and illuminating as the afternoon light. “ ‘The grief that does not speak whispers to the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.’ I don’t want your heart to break any further, Lizzie.”

  “Me either,” Lizzie said.

  Martha reached across to hold her sister’s hands. “Maybe you can put how you feel into words, help another wife who grieves.”

  “You’re the wordsmith, Martha.” Lizzie blew her nose into her handkerchief.

  “Maybe you could compose a piece of music,” Delia said. She’d come up the stairs and stood in the open doorway. “Maybe that would be a way of honoring Fred.”