Yeah, maybe he was James Dean, I thought meanly but didn't say. I picked her brain some more about the Peacocks and local history, then when I couldn't stand it any longer, I popped the big question. "Any idea what will become of the garden?"
I was not the first to ask.
"Well," she said heavily, grateful for a new line of gossip. "People have been traipsing in and out since yesterday. I've seen three landscapers' trucks this morning," she said, unnecessarily puttering with the dusty costume jewelry in her display case. "I just hope it isn't that awful Mr. Chiaramonte. I don't know what Richard sees in him. He was here again this morning." She wrinkled her nose as if there were any doubt what she thought of him.
Great. Competition already. And from landscapers established enough to have a fleet of vehicles with their names plastered on the sides.
"Of course, it's Richard's decision. After all, he is the president," she added, stretching out the verb and hinting that there was a story there, too; but time was short and I didn't take the bait. She peered out of the thrift shop's high casement window and into the parking lot, where she had a tire-level view of any visitors. "I don't see his car, but it's such a lovely day, perhaps he rode his bicycle."
"I noticed a silver Specialized when I parked," I said.
"That's his. Go on, dear. He'll need lots of help," she said. "And you are one of our best customers. I held this for you." From behind the counter she pulled out the lamp. It was one of those aggressively ugly lamps from the fifties that optimistic sellers on eBay refer to as Eames era, an amorphous green and gold affair almost three feet tall from base to finial with a ring of small sputniklike balls shooting out of the top. Frighteningly enough, I already owned the perfect lampshade for it.
"I'm not exactly dressed for an interview," I said, as she painstakingly wrapped the lamp in copies of the Bulletin so old I wouldn't have been surprised to see NIXON RESIGNS on one of them. Suddenly I felt amateurish and grubby in my baggy jeans, sweatshirt, and ever-present Knicks hat.
"Don't be silly," she said, finishing up. "You're a gardener—he won't mind. And Richard's a newcomer, too, you know. From Boston."
I took the lumpy package, said good-bye, and made my way up the stairs. To the right was the exit to the parking lot, and to the left was the long corridor to Richard's office, the hallway filled with vintage photographs from Springfield's past. I caught my reflection in the glass of one of them and made a feeble attempt to fix my hair. What the hell—all Stapley could do was say no, and what ever he decided, it wouldn't be based on my having hat hair. Outside his office, I took a deep breath and tried to exude an air of competence. I knocked.
Richard Stapley was in his seventies, a little over six feet tall with thick white hair and a closely cropped beard. His dark eyes were framed by thin wire-rimmed glasses, and he wore the womb-to-tomb WASP uniform of light blue Brooks Brothers shirt, khaki pants, and Top-Siders.
"Have a seat," he said in a way that was outwardly friendly but still made me feel like I was there to take dictation.
The bicycle had undoubtedly kept his weight down, but he still looked like he was no stranger to good food, good wine, and good cigars, as evidenced by the decanter, humidor, and crystal bonbon dishes on his credenza. Just under the portrait of Winston Churchill.
"One of my heroes," he explained, when he saw me staring. "Do you play?"
Was he hitting on me? Maybe I didn't look as bad as I thought I did. "Excuse me?"
"Do you play golf? Those look like golf clubs in your package."
Inez had wrapped my lamp in so many layers of newspaper that it did indeed look like a set of golf clubs.
"No." I laughed, finally at ease.
Stapley settled into his tufted leather chair and got right to my point. "I expect you're here about Halcyon. I've gotten very popular with the gardening community since poor Dorothy passed. She was a fine woman," he said, clipping off the end of a fresh cigar and rolling it between his fingers. I hoped he wasn't going to light up, but I was hardly in a position to protest.
I spoke too fast, babbling incoherently about why I was the right man for the job, even though I wasn't sure what the job was. Stapley nodded sagely, occasionally smiling at one of my obscure gardening references, which I couldn't believe he actually got. (Ah, yes, what would Vita Sackville-West do?)
I was not optimistic, but less than hour later, he was giving me a hearty, politician's handshake and wishing me well on the job. Somehow I'd managed to convince him I could handle the restoration of Halcyon's garden. And he'd managed to convince me to do it for next to nothing.
"Here's a copy of our Halcyon file," he said, handing me a bulging manila folder. "Helen Cox at the library should be able to help you dig up a bit more. And the Society will hold a small event, just some wine and cheese, to raise funds for any new plants you may need. Give me a wish list and we'll see how much we can pry out of some of these old tightwads around here." I was on cloud nine.
He led me out to the front steps of the building to say good-bye. From the corner of my eye I saw his eyes narrow at his neighbor's joyously tasteless holiday display.
"You won't be sorry, Mr. Stapley."
"I have every confidence in you."
I needed to celebrate. There might have been no one at home to party with, but Babe would fill in nicely. Things were quiet at the diner, just a handful of stragglers and some teenage boys working up the courage to flirt with Babe.
"You again?" Babe said, looking up from her book. She switched a wooden coffee stirrer from one side of her wide mouth to the other. "You got nerve, after trashing my menu. What's with the cat-who-ate-the-canary grin?"
"I got it."
"You didn't get it here."
"The job. I got the job." I looked at her suspiciously. "Why aren't you more surprised?"
"Why should I be?"
"I don't know. I was. I'm not a native, and although I am incredibly talented, it's not as if I have a lot of experience."
"Stapley's not a native either—he's only been here thirty years or so."
"You guys are tough. Look, I'm not sure I want anyone else to know about it yet, okay? There may be a few noses out of joint that I got the gig instead of one of the established nurseries."
"I won't say boo, but you should consider not walking around saying 'I got it! I got it!' if you don't want people to know."
I smiled and spun around on one of the duct-taped counter stools, promptly banging my foot into a nearby seat and the man on it.
"Try not to wreck the place," Babe said. "The Bon Appétit photographer is coming later."
I mumbled an apology, and continued. "It was almost as if he was expecting me. I talked nonstop. I was sure I wasn't going to get the job, so I figured I had nothing to lose. I wowed him," I said, moving from surprise to swagger in a nanosecond. "Some of your voodoo charm must be rubbing off on me."
Babe gave me a lopsided smile. "Stick with me, kid."
I banged my hand on the counter, this time sloshing my neighbor's coffee. "I am so sorry. I'm not usually such a jerk. I just got a bit of good news."
"So I gathered," he said. "Don't worry. Mum's the word."
"My name's Paula Holliday. Can I buy you another coffee?"
"Gerald Fraser. That's okay. Nature's way of telling me I've had enough. I'll take a rain check, though. Congrats on the job." He folded his paper, got up slowly, and made his way to the door. Sitting down, he looked fit and ready to spring, so I was surprised to see him move so stiffly out to the parking lot.
"Who's that?" I asked, after he was gone.
"Like he said, Gerry Fraser," Babe said. "Nice guy. Ex-cop. Comes in a few days a week. Walks over from Sunnyview."
Despite the creaky moves, Fraser hadn't looked more than fifty, fifty-five tops. "A little young to be in a nursing home, isn't he?"
"Injured on the job. Some sort of mandatory retirement."
"Looks okay to me."
"Now you're a doctor?"
She used the chewed-up coffee stirrer as a bookmark, and started making my iced coffee with the dregs of this morning's pot. I leaned over the counter on my elbows and motioned toward her book. "Whatcha reading?"
"Biography of Jim Morrison. I was just a child, of course, but he and I shared a beautiful moment once. The man was a god, if you get my drift." She raised her voice just a bit, so the booth full of raging hormones could hear her. It had its intended effect.
"So, uh, when do you start on that thing we're not supposed to know about?" she asked in a more natural voice.
"ASAP. I'm going over there now to get started. I've got research to do, and I want to make some sketches and collect soil samples first. In fact, better make that iced coffee to go."
Stapley's file included directions to the Peacock house. I hadn't been to that part of town before—three-acre zoning kept out the riffraff like me, but Halcyon wasn't hard to find. As Babe had mentioned, it was weird, not your basic New En gland saltbox. There were turrets, spires, domes, and loads of tiny windows—a drunken collaboration between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Antonio Gaudii Cornet.
Back in the day, Halcyon had been snidely referred to as "Peacock's Temple." More recently, it'd been dubbed the Addams family house by local kids. They'd dare each other to egg it on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, and I wouldn't have been surprised if more than a few of them had done the nasty in the Peacock's hidden, overgrown gardens. Apparently, Dorothy had been a good sport about both kinds of intrusions.
The iron gate was open, and one door was off its hinges. I rolled up the weedy gravel driveway and parked in a partially cleared spot on the right side of the house. I grabbed my backpack and took a quick inventory—plant identifier, camera, note pad, Stapley's file, trusty Felco nippers, Ziploc Baggies, labels, trowel, gloves.
Years of broken branches, leaves, and general garden debris littered the front garden. There was old storm damage, and one enormous rhododendron had rotted out from the center, splayed open like a blooming onion, but the good bones were evident. New growth struggled against the weight of the dying branches.
Although still comfortable financially, the Peacock sisters inexplicably hadn't engaged a landscaping service in years; and each year, Dorothy and Renata did less and less themselves. Stapley seemed to think the last time the lawn had been mowed Jimmy Carter was president. It looked it. Against the odds, scattered bulbs were coming out, peeking through the layers of leaf clutter. Another hopeful sign.
The early spring day was brilliant and chilly. It could have been fall, and I was as nervous as if it were the first day of school. "Get ahold of yourself. There's nothing here but a bunch of half-dead shrubs," I said out loud.
"I beg to differ" came a cool voice from behind a large arborvitae in serious need of pruning.
I must have jumped a foot. "Hi. I didn't think anyone else was here."
"Clearly. I used to live near here. I stop back sometimes, to see what's become of the old place." She looked around. "It's hard to believe all the Peacocks are finally gone. Flown the coop, so to speak." So much for respect for the dead.
Halcyon's other visitor was a striking woman—of a certain age—with short auburn hair brushed off her face, the way you can wear it when you have luminous skin and perfect bone structure. Her arms were folded across her chest, holding a large clutch purse, and a woolen shawl was perfectly, effortlessly tossed over her shoulders in that irritating way that some women can pull off and I cannot, but hope to by the time I'm fifty.
"You've got your work cut out for you. In their prime, these gardens were lovely. So were we all, I suppose." She lost herself in her thoughts for a moment, then recovered.
"You must have seen them in pictures, right? You couldn't have seen them yourself."
"Of course I did, flatterer. Dorothy Peacock was one of my teachers, and an old"—she waited for the right word to come, "—an old beau of mine used to cut their grass. Not recently, as you can probably tell." She nodded at the overgrown meadow behind me.
"Really? I'd be very grateful for any advice or information you could give me." I whipped out one of my cards and handed it to her, still searching for a pen and paper to get her info. "E-mail is always the easiest way to reach me. Now, if I can just get your coordinates, phone number, maybe an e-mail address . . ."
I jogged back to my car for a pen. By the time I'd finished rooting around in my backpack, she'd silently wandered off.
"Thanks a lot," I muttered to the late March air.
Well, it wasn't the Pine Barrens. She was around here somewhere; I'd catch up with her later. I wondered how she knew I was here to work on the garden. Guess I wasn't dressed for anything else, although in this getup, I might have been a burglar.
Whoever she was, she was right about one thing: I had to get cracking. I got out my pad and Richard's file. At some point I'd make a detailed map of the garden, but for now a rough sketch would do.
The magnificent elm in the photos was gone. Dutch elm disease, I was guessing. Sometime in the 1930s a boatload of beetles stowed away in a shipment of veneer bound for the United States. The beetles carried a fungus, and the rest, as they say, is history. By the sixties, over fifty million elm trees in the United States were dead.
The pines were in good shape. Removal of a few broken branches was really all they needed. The rest of the shrubs in the front garden—rhododendrons, azaleas, andromedas, viburnum, forsythia—and the lawn were wildly overgrown but nothing that couldn't be pruned into submission or fertilized back to life over time. Very few things in the garden were stone-cold dead. Plants have this incredible will to live and if there's even a glimmer of life in something, I always think I can coax it back to good health.
Oriental bittersweet and euonymus burning bush, the Connecticut equivalents of kudzu, were running rampant. I had a love-hate relationship with the burning bush, but the bittersweet would have to go. Labor intensive but not impossible. I was counting on Hugo Jurado's help. Hugo was my own part-time gardener. Going from a fat regular income to a slim irregular one had forced me to make some economies, but I'd sooner give up food than give up Hugo. He was from Temixco, a small town about two hours south of Mexico City. A tireless worker, Hugo juggled three jobs and sent almost every penny back home to his silver-haired mother. He'd probably own the town, or be its mayor, in a couple of years.
Although a complete restoration of the garden would take numerous growing seasons, I knew Hugo and I could make a dramatic improvement in as little as sixty days. Things were looking up. I started designing new business cards in my head and thinking of an easier, less obscure name for my soon-to-be-successful company.
The Peacocks' wraparound porch had been filled with containers and window boxes. I couldn't tell from the faded black-and-white photos what kind of flowers they'd held, but if I stuck with the classics—sweet alyssum, petunias, nasturtiums—I'd be fine.
Like a happy puppy, I lumbered around to the back of the house. It was like slamming into a brick wall. What ever confidence I'd had a few moments before totally vanished. The back garden was a disaster area. And so much of it. A large herringbone brick terrace, cracked and choked with weeds, held about a dozen moldy planters. Guarded by two moss-covered stone dogs, a short flight of stairs led down to an allée about ten feet wide and a hundred feet long, lined with dead or dying boxwoods. The path looked like pea gravel, but upon closer inspection I saw it was crushed oyster shells, much of it ground to dust. At either end was a garden, each approximately one thousand square feet.
The first was walled, with a central raised bed. According to the file, the other had been an herb garden; only the rampant mint betrayed its former use. Beyond them, there was an overgrown privet maze; half a dozen spindly hemlocks barely screened out the neighbors.
On the far side of the allée was
a freestanding stone wall covered by espaliered pear trees. Behind the wall stood a row of cypresses, at least two dead, separating the garden from a lawn that sloped down to a rickety floating dock. Broken statuary, a falling-down greenhouse, a tiny shed, and a musty-looking cottage completed the picture. Only the gnomes were missing.
I retraced my steps and sat down on the brick terrace, somewhat shell-shocked. I checked the pictures again. It had been impossible to appreciate the size of the job from the photos I had. On paper it looked like a few manageable beds, in person—Monticello. No wonder those old ladies hadn't kept up with the landscaping. What was I thinking when I said I could do this? What was that idiot Stapley thinking when he gave me the job?
Tears were welling up, but I willed myself not to cry. My attack of self-pity didn't last long; it couldn't. Otherwise it was back to sucking up secondhand smoke at film and TV markets and feigning interest in yet another documentary on the Kennedys or World War Two, and I definitely didn't want that.
I walked to the walled garden on the left side of the property. The walls were about eight feet high with arches and openings in the style of an Italian giardino segreto, or secret garden. In the corners were medium-sized understory trees and shrubs, including a fifteen-foot leatherleaf viburnum, bursting with health, and an evergreen magnolia covered with fat golden buds. Overhead, the dogwoods were still beautiful and looked vigorous, unusual since they don't have a very long life span. In a month or so, they'd explode, some pink, some creamy white. Underneath were hostas and peonies, their pointed, reddish crowns just starting to break through the crusty top layer of soil.
I shuffled through the papers in the file. The walled garden had been Renata Peacock's contribution. It was a white garden. Moonflowers, clematis, bleeding hearts, nicotiana, spirea—anything white that would catch the waning light and shimmer in the evening. A few crumbling columns and stone benches lined the walls of the garden room, which were covered with wisteria, Virginia creeper, and a thick mat of English ivy. I sat on one of the cool stone benches, imagining the property sixty or seventy years ago, beautiful and as serene as its name would suggest, a place where well-heeled young ladies sat with their tea and cakes, oblivious to the world outside the boundaries of their cozy retreat.
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