Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  Wondering, Victorine looked down at La Fée Verte, who smiled at her, intimate and complicit. “You see? Help me up,” she murmured. As Victorine rose, lifting the thin woman with her, she jostled a woman in a scarf with a market basket on her arm. The woman moved aside, eyes still riveted on the procession beyond, and Victorine, raised above the crowd on the statue’s base, followed her gaze.

  There were soldiers, as La Fée Verte had said: lines of them in dark uniforms and high, glossy boots, marching stiff-legged through the square toward the rue de Rivoli. There seemed to be no end to them, each one the mirror of the next, scarlet armbands flashing as they swung their left arms. A vehicle like an open carriage came into view, horseless, propelled apparently by magic, with black-coated men seated in it, proud and hard-faced under peaked caps. Over their heads, banners bearing a contorted black cross against a white and scarlet ground rippled in the wind. And then from the sky came a buzzing like a thousand hives of bees, as loud as thunder but more continuous. Victorine looked up, and saw a thing she hardly knew how to apprehend. It was like a bird, but enormously bigger, with wings that blotted out the light, and a body shaped like a cigar.

  If this was vision, Victorine wanted none of it. She put her hands over her eyes, releasing La Fée Verte’s hand that she had not even been aware of holding. The buzzing roar ceased as if a door had been closed, and the tramp of marching feet. She heard shouting, and a man’s voice screaming with hysterical joy:

  “The Republic has fallen!” he shrieked. “Long live the Commune! To the Hôtel de Ville!”

  The fickle crowd took up the chant: “To the Hôtel de Ville! To the Hôtel de Ville!” And so chanting, they moved away from the statue, their voices gradually growing fainter and more confused with distance.

  When Victorine dared look again, the square was all but empty. The fat man was gone, and most of the crowd. A woman lingered, comfortingly attired in a long grey skirt, a tight brown jacket with a greasy shawl over it, and a battered black hat rammed over a straggling bun.

  “Better take her out of here, dear,” she said to Victorine. “I don’t care, but if any of those madmen come back this way, they’ll be wanting her blood.”

  That night, Victorine had her maid stand in line for a precious cup of milk, heated it up over her bedroom fire and poured it over some pieces of stale bread torn up into a Sèvres bowl.

  La Fée Verte, clean and wrapped in her old green kimono, accepted the dish with murmured thanks. She spooned up a bit, ate it, put the spoon back in the plate. “And your colonel?” she asked. “What will you tell him?”

  “You can be my sister,” Victorine said gaily. “He doesn’t know I don’t have one, and under the circumstances, he can hardly ask me to throw you out. You can sleep in the kitchen when he spends the night.”

  “Yes,” La Fée Verte said after a moment. “I will sleep in the kitchen. It will not be for long. We. . . .”

  “No,” said Victorine forcefully. “I don’t want to hear. I don’t care if we’re to be ruled by a republic or a commune or a king or an emperor, French or German. I don’t care if the streets run with blood. All I care is that we are here together now, just at this moment, and that we will stay here together, and be happy.”

  She was kneeling at La Fée Verte’s feet, not touching her for fear of upsetting the bread and milk, looking hopefully into the ravaged face. La Fée Verte touched her cheek very gently and smiled.

  “You are right,” she said. “We are together. It is enough.”

  She fell silent, and the tears overflowed her great, bruised eyes and trickled down her cheeks. They were no longer crystalline—they were just tears. But when Victorine licked them from her fingers, it seemed to her that they tasted sweet.

  Walpurgis Afternoon

  The big thing about the new people moving into the old Pratt place at Number 400 was that they got away with it at all. Our neighborhood is big on historical integrity. The newest house on the block was built in 1910, and you can’t even change the paint scheme your house without recourse to preservation committee studies and zoning board hearings. Over the years, the Pratt place had generated a tedious number of such hearings—I’d even been to some of the more recent ones. Old Mrs. Pratt had let it go pretty much to seed, and when she passed away, there was trouble about clearing the title so it could be sold, and then it burned down.

  Naturally a bunch of developers went after the land—a three-acre property in a professional neighborhood twenty minutes from downtown is something like a Holy Grail to developers. But their lawyers couldn’t get the title cleared either, and the end of it was that the old Pratt place never did get built on. By the time Geoff and I moved next door, it was an empty lot where the neighborhood kids played Bad Guys and Good Guys after school and the neighborhood cats preyed on an endless supply of mice and voles. I’m not talking eyesore, here; just a big shady plot of land overgrown with bamboo, rhododendrons, wildly rambling roses, and some nice old trees, most notably an immensely ancient copper beech big enough to dwarf any normal-sized house.

  It certainly dwarfs ours.

  Last spring, all that changed overnight. Literally. When Geoff and I turned in, we lived next door to an empty lot. When we got up, we didn’t. I have to tell you, it came as quite a shock first thing on a Monday morning, and I wasn’t even the one who discovered it. Geoff was.

  Geoff’s the designated keeper of the window because he insists on sleeping with it open and I hate getting up into a draft. Actually, I hate getting up, period. It’s a blessing, really, that Geoff can’t boil water without burning it, or I’d never be up before ten. As it is, I eke out every second of warm unconsciousness I can while Geoff shuffles across the floor and thunks down the sash and takes his shower. On that particular morning, his shuffle ended not with a thunk, but with a gasp.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  I sat up in bed and groped for my robe. When we were in grad school, Geoff had quite a mouth on him, but fatherhood and two decades of college teaching have toned him down a lot. These days, he usually keeps his swearing for Supreme Court decisions and departmental politics.

  “Get up, Evie. You gotta see this.”

  So I got up and went to the window, and there it was, big as life and twice as natural, a real Victorian Homes centerfold, set back from the street and just the right size to balance the copper beech. Red tile roof, golden brown clapboards, miles of scarlet-and-gold gingerbread draped over dozens of eaves, balconies, and dormers. A witch’s hat tower, a wrap around porch, and a massive carriage house. With a cupola on it. Nothing succeeds like excess, I always say.

  I like to think of myself as a fairly sensible woman. I don’t imagine things, I face facts, I hadn’t gotten hysterical when my fourteen-year-old daughter asked me about birth control. Surely there was some perfectly rational explanation for this phenomenon. All I had to do was think of it.

  “It’s an hallucination,” I said. “Victorian houses don’t go up over night. People do have hallucinations. We’re having an hallucination. QED.”

  “It’s not a hallucination,” Geoff said.

  Geoff teaches intellectual history at the university and tends to disagree, on principle, with everything everyone says. Someone says the sky is blue, he says it isn’t. And then he explains why. “This has none of the earmarks of a hallucination,” he went on. “We aren’t in a heightened emotional state, not expecting a miracle, not drugged, not part of a mob, not starving, not sense-deprived. Besides, there’s a clothesline in the yard with laundry hanging on it. Nobody hallucinates long underwear.”

  I looked where he was pointing, and sure enough, a pair of scarlet longjohns was kicking and waving from an umbrella drying rack, along with a couple pairs of women’s panties, two oxford-cloth shirts hung up by their collars, and a gold-and-black print caftan. There was also what was arguably the most beautifully designed perennial bed I’d ever seen basking in the early morning sun. As I was squinting at the delphiniums, a side door
opened and a woman came out with a wicker clothes basket propped on her hip. She was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, had fairish hair pulled back in a bushy tail, and struck me as being a little long in the tooth to be going barefoot and braless.

  “Nice legs,” said Geoff.

  I snapped down the window. “Pull the shades before you get in the shower,” I said. “It looks to me like our new neighbors get a nice, clear shot of our bathroom from their third floor.”

  In our neighborhood, we pride ourselves on minding our own business and not each others’—live and let live, as long as you keep your dog, your kids, and your lawn under control. If you don’t, someone calls you or drops you a note, and if that doesn’t make you straighten up and fly right, well, you’re likely to get a call from the Town Council about that extension you neglected to get a variance for. Needless to say, the house at Number 400 fell way outside all our usual coping mechanisms. If some contractor had shown up at dawn with bulldozers and two-by-fours, I could have called the police or our Councilwoman or someone and got an injunction. How do you get an injunction against a physical impossibility?

  The first phone call came at about eight-thirty: Susan Morrison, whose back yard abuts the Pratt place.

  “Reality check time,” said Susan. “Do we have new neighbors or do we not?”

  “Looks like it to me,” I said.

  Silence. Then she sighed. “Yeah. So. Can Kimmy sit for Jason Friday night?”

  Typical. If you can’t deal with it, pretend it doesn’t exist, like when one couple down the street got the bright idea of turning their front lawn into a wildflower meadow. The trouble is, a Victorian mansion is a lot harder to ignore than even the wildest meadow. The phone rang all morning with hysterical calls from women who hadn’t spoken to us since Geoff’s brief tenure as president of the neighborhood association.

  After several fruitless sessions of what’s-the-world-coming-to, I turned on the machine and went out to the garden to put in the beans. Planting them in May was pushing it, but I needed the therapy. For me, gardening’s the most soothing activity on earth. When you plant a bean, you get a bean, not an azalea or a cabbage. When you see that bean covered with icky little orange things, you know they’re Mexican bean beetle larvae and go for the pyrethrum. Or you do if you’re paying attention. It always astonishes me how oblivious even the garden club ladies can be to a plant’s needs and preferences. Sure, there are nasty surprises, like the winter that the mice ate all the Apricot Beauty tulip bulbs. But mostly you know where you are with a garden. If you put in the work, you’ll get satisfaction out, which is more than can be said of marriages or careers.

  This time, though, digging and raking and planting failed to work their usual magic. Every time I glanced up, there was Number 400, serene and comfortable, the shrubs established and the paint chipping just a little around the windows, exactly as if it had been there forever instead of less than twelve hours.

  I’m not big on the inexplicable. Fantasy makes me nervous. In fact, fiction makes me nervous. I like facts and plenty of them. That’s why I wanted to be a botanist. I wanted to know everything there was to know about how plants worked, why azaleas like acid soil and peonies like wood ash and how you might be able to get them to grow next to each other. I even went to graduate school and took organic chemistry. Then I met Geoff, fell in love, and traded in my PhD for an MRS, with a minor in Mommy. None of these events (except possibly falling in love with Geoff) fundamentally shook my allegiance to provable, palpable facts. The house next door was palpable, all right, but it shouldn’t have been. By the time Kim got home from school that afternoon, I had a headache from trying to figure out how it got to be there.

  Kim is my daughter. She reads fantasy, likes animals a lot more than she likes people, and is a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because of Kim, we have two dogs (Spike and Willow), a cockatiel (Frodo), and a lop-eared Belgian rabbit (Big Bad), plus the overflow of semi-wild cats (Balin, Dwalin, Bifur, and Bombur) from the Pratt place, all of which she feeds and looks after with truly astonishing dedication.

  Three-thirty on the nose, the screen door slammed and Kim careened into the kitchen with Spike and Willow bouncing ecstatically around her feet.

  “Whaddya think of the new house, Mom? Who do you think lives there? Do they have pets?”

  I laid out her after-school sliced apple and cheese and answered the question I could answer. “There’s at least one woman—she was hanging out laundry this morning. No sign of pets, but it’s early days yet.”

  “Isn’t it just the coolest thing in the universe, Mom? Real magic, right next door. Just like Buffy.”

  “Without the vampires, I hope. Kim, you know magic doesn’t really exist. There’s probably a perfectly simple explanation for all of this.”

  “But, Mom!”

  “But nothing. You need to call Mrs. Morrison. She wants to know if you can sit for Jason on Friday night. And Big Bad’s looking shaggy. He needs to be brushed.”

  That was Monday.

  Tuesday morning, our street looked like the expressway at rush hour. It’s a miracle there wasn’t an accident. Everybody in town must have driven by, slowing down as they passed Number 400 and craning out the car window. Things quieted down in the middle of the day when everyone was at work, but come 4:30 or so, the joggers started and the walkers and more cars. About 6:00, the police pulled up in front of Number 400, at which point everyone stopped pretending to be nonchalant and held their breath. Two cops disappeared inside, came out again a few minutes later, and left without talking to anybody. They were holding cookies and looking bewildered.

  On Wednesday, the traffic let up. Kim found a kitten (Hermione) in the wildflower garden and Geoff came home full of the latest in a series of personality conflicts with his department head, which gave everyone something other than Number 400 to talk about over dinner.

  Thursday, Lucille Flint baked one of her coffee cakes and went over to do the Welcome Wagon thing.

  Lucille’s our local Good Neighbor. Someone moves in, has a baby, marries, dies, and there’s Lucille, Johnny-on-the-spot with a coffee cake in her hands and the proper Hallmark sentiment on her lips. Lucille has the time for this kind of thing because she doesn’t have a regular job. All right, neither do I, but I write a gardener’s advice column for the local paper, so I’m not exactly idle. There’s the garden, too. Besides, I’m not the kind of person who likes sitting around other people’s kitchens drinking watery instant and listening to the stories of their lives. Lucille is.

  Anyway. Thursday morning, I researched the diseases of roses for my column. I’m lucky with roses. Mine never come down with black spot, and the Japanese beetles prefer Susan Morrison’s yard to mine. Weeds, however, are not so obliging. When I’d finished Googling “powdery mildew,” I went out to tackle the rosebed.

  Usually, I don’t mind weeding. My mind wanders, my hands get dirty. I can almost feel my plants settling deeper into the soil as I root out the competition. But my rosebed is on the property line between us and the Pratt place. What if the house disappeared again, or someone came out and wanted to chat? I’m not big into chatting. On the other hand, there was shepherd’s purse in the rose bed, and shepherd’s purse can be a real wild Indian once you let it get established, so I gritted my teeth, grabbed my Cape Cod weeder, and got down to it.

  Just as I was starting to relax, I heard footsteps passing on the walk and pushed the rose canes aside just in time to see Lucille Flint climbing the stone steps to Number 400. I watched her ring the doorbell, but I didn’t see who answered because I ducked down behind a bushy Gloire de Dijon. If Lucille doesn’t care who knows she’s a busybody, that’s her business.

  After twenty-five minutes, I’d weeded and cultivated those roses to a fare-thee-well and was backing out when I heard the screen door, followed by Lucille telling someone how lovely their home was, and thanks again for the scrumptious pie.

  I caught her up under the copper beech.

&nbs
p; “Evie dear, you’re all out of breath,” she said. “My, that’s a nasty tear in your shirt.”

  “Come in, Lucille,” I said. “Have a cup of coffee.”

  She followed me inside without comment and accepted a cup of microwaved coffee and a slice of date-and-nut cake.

  She took a bite, coughed a little, and grabbed for the coffee.

  “It is pretty awful, isn’t it?” I said apologetically. “I baked it last week for some PTA thing at Kim’s school and forgot to take it.”

  “Never mind. I’m full of cherry pie from next door. “ She leaned over the stale cake and lowered her voice. “The cherries were fresh, Evie.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Fresh cherries? In May? You’re kidding.”

  Lucille nodded, satisfied at my reaction. “Nope. There was a bowl of them on the table, leaves and all. What’s more, there was corn on the draining board. Fresh corn. In the husk. With the silk still on it.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.” Lucille sat back and took another sip of coffee. “Mind you, there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. Ophelia’s a horticulturist, after all. Maybe she’s got greenhouses out back. Goodness knows there’s room enough for several.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of corn growing in a greenhouse.”