The Girl in the Garden

by Melanie Wallace

  Such specificity often escapes him. He can never remember exactly when Claire bought herself that first camera, but knows it was sometime before she graduated from eighth grade—which graduation he, not Iris, attended—and turned fourteen, for she was already being seen everywhere, biking in and outside of town, always alone, always with the camera. That summer she photographed every animal she espied until there wasn’t a creature she hadn’t, unless it was never let outside or never perched on a windowsill, and so captured on film every household pet and every horse, cow and anything else pastured within a ten-mile radius of her home, paying for the film and paying the local wedding photographer to make contact sheets as well as print what she chose, most likely spending, Duncan realized at one point, most of her allowance on what he considered a hobby and nothing on clothes. He finally brought himself to ask whether she was thinking of the dresses and skirts and blouses and sweaters she’d need for high school; Claire was changing shape before his eyes, and schools didn’t allow girls to wear pants of any sort, never mind rolled-up boy jeans or overalls and oversize flannel shirts or T-shirts, which she lived in—those baggy, shapeless clothes of course actually drawing attention to the changeling she’d become, despite that ponytail. I’ll worry about a wardrobe when the time comes, Claire told him, I’m busy right now putting the finishing touches on my first portfolio.

  That portfolio sealed her fate, or at least the fate she’d already chosen for herself. And, Duncan considers now, not without relief, navigating the road’s hug of the highest bluff of the coastline, determined his fate as well. For one photograph—of Oldman Smith’s three capuchin monkeys romping through a meadow—was perfect: there was Oldman’s pony, its coat and mane and forelock streaked with mud that had dried, making the creature look as if it had been carved in sandstone, leaning back into its bunched haunches that were up against a split-rail fence and looking as humanly spooked as any equine ever could, its taut neck vertical and its head horizontal, its front legs stiff with knees locked, eyeing those monkeys leapfrogging a beeline toward it at some random speed. They were airborne in the photo, in a line, their long tails upright and long limbs stretched in flight above the knee-high grasses; and Claire, upon showing the photograph to Duncan, told him that that moment proved to her how feral—her word—beauty could be. She also told him that she had given a copy of the photograph to Oldman, along with portraits she’d taken of the pony and of his dog, which dog—Oldman later recounted to Duncan—he never thought anyone could get near without losing a body part never mind get the canine to pose, not to mention that the pony—whose headshot was taken from such a close range that he could count its eyelashes one by one—was expert at cow-kicking and had a way of snaking its head and chomping down on human flesh but had obviously, in Claire’s case, done neither.

  Oldman also told Duncan that when he saw that photograph of his escaped monkeys, he teared up. He claimed he wasn’t a sentimental man, having seen and documented enough destruction and desolation and death while working as a photographer with the U.S. Army as it pushed into Germany and made its way to the Elbe to have persuaded, as he put it, the most solemn of believers that there wasn’t much good in being sentimental; and Oldman was the first to admit that he hadn’t started out as a believer in much of anything except chronicling what he saw. At any rate, nothing had so moved him since that first capuchin he’d raised like his own child—having bought and raised the baby monkey precisely because he was a bachelor and childless—turned on him one day and in a moment changed from a clinging and, as Oldman mistakenly believed, loving humanoid that seemed to understand even language but simply could not speak into the creature it was born to be. Who knows why, but most likely because the capuchin sensed in Oldman’s manhood something that didn’t sit well with its budding pubescence, the monkey Oldman had been holding—which had its arms around Oldman’s neck, to the creature’s advantage—leaned back, looked Oldman in the eye, and ripped open with its fangs Oldman’s left eyebrow and, before he could throw the monkey off, filleted at a downward angle the rest of his face, tearing through the cartilage of his nose and ending in the vicinity of the right corner of his mouth. That left Oldman’s right nostril hanging and blood flowing. The experience taught Oldman that monkeys make about the worst pets in the world, and after he had himself sewn up—he told Duncan that the local emergency room’s receptionist actually fainted when Oldman came through the door with his face split in half—he set about trying to understand why that was a fact. He built a spacious floor-to-ceiling, two-compartment cage in what had been the storage room located off his kitchen, which room had its own door with a window that faced the side-yard garden in which Oldman raised mutant pumpkins that one year grew large enough to require a forklift to move them onto and off the flatbed truck that brought them to the annual pumpkin-growing contest at the county fair. The cage had swings and deadwood branches and a trap door between the two compartments that Oldman could open and close so that, once lured into one or the other with food, the capuchin could be contained while the other compartment was cleaned. Oldman then set to reading about monkeys in captivity, only to learn what he’d already been taught, that no one could ever trust to get the wildness out of them.

  And because, to Oldman’s expanding knowledge, there wasn’t an animal farm or zoo in the nation that wanted yet another capuchin, Oldman realized there must be other fools—his word—who’d bought a monkey for themselves or, worse, their children, without an inkling of what was in store. He also decided to limit himself to a thirty-mile radius, then visited every veterinarian within that to inquire whether they knew anyone who had capuchins, and if so, could Oldman have their address. Oldman’s face was as convincing as anyone in their right mind needed as evidence, which is how he came by two other capuchins, both female, one of which had already bitten a child and the other of which had gotten into the habit of throwing its feces at the household dog. So he came to own and truly care for the three for a number of years, despite the fact that they sometimes fought one another and always cannibalized the babies that were born to one or the other female and occasionally latched on to his hand or wrist with their prehensile tails as he was putting food into their trays, reminding him that they meant to harm and disfigure whenever the opportunity presented itself and that he should never mistake the intelligence in their eyes for goodness.

  One or two or all three of them finally figured out how to undo the rather complicated latch on the cage’s door, and when Oldman went to check on them one summer morning they were gone, escaped through the side-yard door Oldman frequently left open for the monkeys’ viewing pleasure. Claire’s photograph was the last that he, or anyone, ever saw of them. Still distraught at the thought of those creatures alone in and maybe wreaking havoc upon the world, Oldman found himself wiping at the tears in his eyes in front of what he later described to Duncan as being the slip of a girl presenting him with the photograph. Not because, as he told Duncan at some point, the photo assuaged his fear that the monkeys would not be able to fend for themselves, or wouldn’t do damage to small animals or children or anything else they took a fancy to harming, and not because it consoled him to see the sheer joy with which they seemed strung in midair as they flew toward his terrified pony, and not even because he realized they were heading due south, direction Latin America, as though they knew where their kind came from. No, that photograph moved him to tears because Oldman, in his own words, knew a work of art when he saw one. Claire, he said, was also as sure of that photo as of herself; her maturity and seriousness simply rattled him as much as that photograph and her portraits of other animals did. It didn’t take more than a long look at her work for Oldman to take her under his wing, that same day bringing Claire and what she called her first portfolio to the town newspaper, where Oldman spent Friday and Saturday evenings developing film shot for its weekly wrap-up of community goings-on. He introduced her and her photographs to the paper’s managing editor, who came to the not-unexpect
ed decision to publish the capuchin/pony photo and write a piece to accompany it that included Oldman’s advice as to what to do if the reader came across capuchins on the loose.

  And that was that: Claire received a check for her first published photograph and signed it over to Duncan because she did not yet have her own bank account, and under Oldman’s tutelage began going through his library, reading every photography book and every photographic journal he had, discussing theory and practice and the history of the art with Oldman, and spending Friday and Saturday evenings in the newspaper’s darkroom at his side. Duncan had mused then, ruminates now, that Claire—better her than those capuchins—most definitely took the place of the child Oldman had never had, and that she became more a chip off the old block than any natural child of his perhaps would or could have been. Too, Oldman became the parent she didn’t have, what with Iris, as Claire stated, cocooned, and her father dead. Whatever Oldman and Claire’s relationship meant to Oldman and Claire, to Duncan’s relief it meant that Claire—who not only didn’t allow him to look upon her parentally, though he did, but also never set boundaries as to what their relationship might become—would not be ensconced in his office or life on Friday and Saturday evenings, and never on Sundays, which she reserved for experimenting with focal points, lighting, angles, and the different cameras and lenses Oldman lent her.

  Relief, yes: he’d been relieved. For how impossible it had been to not be troubled by her, to maintain his equilibrium; evenings after she’d left his office he’d often lock the door and collapse into his chair, trying to reassure himself that she hadn’t the slightest notion of muddling his brain, rendering him insensate, but knowing otherwise: Claire grew perfectly conscious of her effect on him, amusedly relished his discomfort, and patiently waited for him to make the mistake he swore he’d never make. And he kept to his private oath, even when at June’s age—sixteen—Claire announced at the beginning of the school year that Duncan was to take her out and dine with her on Thursday evenings at the Puritan on the town’s main street. It’s the night for going out, she told him, and I have no interest in being with anyone from school; I don’t have girlfriends because my classmates, never mind the seniors, are obsessed to the exclusion of everything else in the world with finding boyfriends who’ll want to marry after they graduate, perhaps even marry them; at any rate, they don’t talk about anything but going steady and becoming engaged.

  Well, as you don’t have any girlfriends, find yourself a beau, Duncan reasoned, urged: I mean, for god’s sake, date someone.

  I’m not interested in dating, Duncan. I’m interested in going out and eating dinner at the Puritan on Thursday evenings, like everyone else does. And there isn’t a person in town who doesn’t know that you happen to be my mother’s, and my, lawyer.

  Maybe I’m spoken for on Thursdays after work.

  Then bring her along, Claire replied, for god’s sake.

  And of course he wasn’t spoken for then, not on Thursdays, and not on any other night. He told himself he didn’t have any choice, asked himself what would be the harm. So that school year and the next, Claire’s last, he locked up on Thursdays and accompanied her to the Puritan, where eyebrows were initially raised and a certain amount of chin-wagging took place, but as time went on no one paid them attention. And he grew used to their being together like that, with their heads bent toward each other, lost in those earnest conversations they held in low tones, Duncan ignoring or shrugging off looks from her that could not be mistaken in meaning; and when those dinners were over he always properly said good evening and saw to it that they properly went their separate ways. Claire—to his knowledge—never glanced back, just headed off into the night as he watched her slip in and out of the pooled streetlamp lightcones and make her way to the bus stop or to wherever she’d left her bicycle or sometimes just continue walking in the direction of her home, especially if the weather was rotten: she always said that inclement weather, rain and snow, sleet and wind, freed her mind from the mundane and let her live, as photography did, in the moment.

  A moment’s gone in an instant, he often cautioned her, you should be thinking of the future, considering college, deciding what you want to study. But Claire would have none of it; by sixteen she was interning at the newspaper, receiving a small salary, being given and always fulfilling photography assignments and working in the darkroom on Friday and Saturday evenings under Oldman’s supervision, improving on what Oldman claimed was an already flawless professional portfolio, intending to work as a photographer, which, as she always pointed out to Duncan, demanded no college training and no degree, just a way of seeing and a will to go anywhere, anytime, to cover any situation or story. And of course Oldman had his contacts and used them. By May of her senior year, Claire had been hired, with a midsummer start date, as a photographer for a regional newspaper in one of the larger cities on the East Coast. Without Duncan’s knowledge, Oldman had driven her—Claire had steadfastly refused to get a driver’s license, although Duncan had glimpsed her behind the wheel of Oldman’s old if sterling Studebaker from time to time—to and from her interview; twelve, fourteen hours’ traveling time in total, Duncan calculated, as he sat across from her at the Puritan on a Tuesday afternoon.

  For she’d appeared in his office at midday, the day after the interview he hadn’t known about had occurred. The ponytail was gone, her dark curly hair cut within an inch of her scalp. Duncan intuited that this change—Claire was never frivolous, whatever she did was done purposefully—was ominous. She said: You need to take me to lunch. And he closed the office and they went to the Puritan, where eyebrows were raised once again, not only because her haircut was so radically different from what townspeople were accustomed to considering stylish but also because school was still in session. For the first time, he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought: he was grappling with what Claire was telling him, that she’d had an interview and accepted a job offer, that she would leave town and become what she already was and had only ever wanted, intended, couldn’t help be. That she needed him to write a note that excused her from school for yesterday and today.

  He didn’t ask whether Iris knew. He sat there, calculating the hours and distance Oldman had driven, before finally telling her his concerns: that she might not be able to handle the pressure, that there would be problems finding an apartment because of her age—although, as she pointed out, she would turn eighteen that summer and, as he knew all too well, upon that age would come into a great deal of money, none of which, Claire told him, she intended to use except to set herself up; that Oldman had already made arrangements for her to stay in a women’s residence for the first three months anyway—and that she’d never spent any time away from the town except when she’d lived with Mabel, that the world was a big and not always hospitable place. He sounded unconvincing, even to himself. They ordered chicken sandwiches and she ate hers slowly, heard him out until he finished cautioning her and found himself flustered because of the way she ate so deliberately, so delicately, looking at him evenly over that sandwich. She finally put what was left of it down and placed her arm on the table, leaned slightly forward, said: You could congratulate me.

  Congratulations, he told her. The silence that ensued made him miserably self-conscious. He pushed away the plate he hadn’t touched. You might not know what you’re in for, he finally managed.

  She nodded thoughtfully, as though considering he might be right, then half rose and leaned over the table, brushed his forehead with her lips, sat back. Duncan, she said, give me a reason to stay.

  He felt himself freefall, came as close as he ever would at that instant.

  I can’t.

  She held his eyes, finally cleared her throat, looked down at her plate, then back at him. Well, she finally pronounced, I just needed you to clarify that. For both of us.

  Claire: Duncan almost says her name aloud, instead slows and pulls over onto the road’s shoulder, stops and kills the engine, gets out of the car, w
alks away from it to the bluff’s abrupt edge and examines the ocean below, its dark surface roiled, variegated, in the waning light. He has, for most of his life, thought dusk to be the most beautiful part of day; now he finds it the loneliest. Claire has stayed in constant touch with Oldman—not Duncan, not Iris—all these years: letters, postcards, long-distance phone calls, clippings, photographs. Duncan followed her career through Oldman, sometimes looked at an atlas to determine where she was or had been, finding the exact position of those foreign as well as Stateside places he couldn’t quite locate in his mind, places he’d never been and would never go. And he’d come to a point in life—after the years it took for him to make peace with the realization she’d never return to the town he’d chosen to live in, convince himself that he could not have done anything other than he had, which was to remain righteous and never trespass the boundaries that being Claire’s guardian placed upon him—where he realized that, despite the fact that as a lawyer he was more interested in truth than in honor, as a man he was more interested in honor than in truth. His behavior toward Claire—not his feelings—had been impeccable. It took time, but somewhere along the line he’d stopped being overwhelmed by how empty his soul was, by the crushing hollowness within whenever he thought of her and whenever Oldman told him what news he had of her. Duncan shakes his head, standing beyond his car, watching the sky and earth and waters go utterly dark. He has never been spoken for. So far as he knows, neither has Claire. He ruminates on his, her, their unspoken reserve: a mere coincidence, he persuades himself, and half believes the untruth.