"What is this?"
"Watch."
The title "America's Best Gardeners Speak Out" flashed across the screen. Then a dowdy woman appeared on a garden path. It was like watching a distant member of the British royal family—an old revered Duchess or something—touring the grounds of Buckingham Palace. She began describing various flowers she remembered from childhood ("and on the trellises hung the sweetest wisteria") when the image froze and disappeared into static.
"I have no idea what . . ." I began.
"Wait."
It flickered back to life, and there was Henri walking through a greenhouse in a loose tan shirt with rolled-up sleeves. I gripped the chair's leather arm. But I couldn't look away—my curiosity was aroused. I found myself searching for stitches, scars, rivets—signs that he'd been made—or the unholy aura of a creature summoned from another world.
The dowdy woman's voice came in disembodied narration again: "It all begins for Henri Blanc with finding the right seedlings for the harsh Vermont winters, which he does by working closely with local greenhouses."
He began strolling through a garden with the old woman, proclaiming the virtues of "controlled wilderness" and speculating about whether having a garden might help "us all" to "reconnect with nature" in a more "symbiotic" way. "In America, just like in Europe," he said, "it has always been fashionable to dominate nature. To bulldoze it and make it safe and comforting. What I like to do is to bring back a little of the danger, to set my gardens in remote places, to have the threat of the wilderness encroaching on all sides. I think it helps people appreciate the garden more, to see it as the remarkable thing it is, but also temporary, fragile. It's really a sense of humility I want to bring out."
"Humility," said the old woman. "That's not a word one often hears from an award-winning gardener."
"It's an approach to life, not just to gardening. I see the two as very connected."
"This sense of connectedness comes across in most all your work. The gardens you design—I've always thought—are more like extensions of their surroundings than separate little domains."
"They are both separate and connected. The feeling I want people to have is, at first, not even to know they've entered a garden, and then, when they realize it, to say: ‘Of course!' I want it to be more a gradual seduction than an overwhelming display."
"How very French."
[Laughter].
Then the dowdy woman said: "And here's Yvonne, our lucky garden owner." The screen suddenly filled with a middle-aged woman with dark hair cropped short like a medieval knight's.
"Isn't Henri wonderful?" said the old woman.
"It's really incredible what he can do."
"What's your favorite part of the garden?"
Yvonne turned to Henri, and I could see it in her eyes, the same thrall he held Klara in. "It's all so magnificent, it's hard to say which particular— The colors, for example—your use of colors, the way you contrast them? It's like an artist." Henri thrust his hands into his pockets and flashed a modest smile. Yvonne turned to the old woman: "There's also, you have to see this. His attention to detail is just amazing. Right over here. Do you see these tulips? When you walk down this path, the tulips get closer and closer—the path narrows until it's gone, and you're, like, standing in the middle of tulips, tulips all around. Or sitting, I guess, because he's put a bench there—do you see? And to get out again, you literally have to tip-toe so you don't step on them. Tip-toe through the tulips!"
"Oh that is just precious," said the old woman. "I didn't know you had such a whimsical streak in you, Henri."
"Well—"
"I'll have to try that. Can we get the camera in there? OK. Here I go!"
We had to watch the old woman walk to the end of the path and sit gingerly on the little bench. She raised her chin, straightened her arms, and placed her hands on her knees like a preening girl. Then she tip-toed out, squealing with delight.
"Do you see?" Klara said. "What we're trying to do?"
I stared at the screen. "What about his other clients? Were they also single women of a certain age?"
"That isn't the point, Milo."
I almost laughed. "He's using you. And you don't even know who he is."
She slammed down the remote. "This isn't one of Father's novels."
"You really have no idea?"
"Stop it."
"Believe me, you'll wish you'd written this one yourself."
"Written what?"
"How he's trying to get rid of me. Maybe in the same way he got rid of Father. By making me afraid. And then . . . "
"Nobody is getting rid of anybody. You're here to stay, and so is he. Frankly I don't care what happened in the past. We're a family."
"All three of us?"
"You know what I mean. This garden is important to me. We might even film it for a television show if everything turns out, if we can recover from the sodium nitrate. And we will. We'll make it even better than before."
The video had paused, freezing an image of the old woman's quivering, constipated lips. She was staring at Henri, who was bent over, sleeves rolled up. He did look like a typical gardener, and I began to wonder, despite everything, if I was wrong about him—if he really was a gardener, perhaps one who hoped to take advantage of my sister but not one who was Father's fictional character come to life.
Then I saw his arm.
"Are you OK, Milo?"
"My God."
"What is it?"
"You have no idea who this man is. He could be a psychopath."
"What are you talking about? If you have something to say, just say it."
"How old is this video?"
"From last year. Why?"
"Look at his arm, Klara."
"Yes?"
"Do you see a tattoo?"
She fumbled for the remote and snapped off the video player. She must have seen its absence too, but she just sat there letting the television's chaotic light play across her face, letting it bathe her in frantic nonsense, while I wondered: had the gardener been transformed into Keith? Did that explain the mystery of the two Henris? "That doesn't prove anything," she eventually told me. "A lot of men might get a military tattoo only later in life, after they've left the army."
"Even men who claim they're dedicating themselves to the very opposite of what the army stands for?"
"Maybe it's a symbol of what he's left behind."
"Or a symbol of something else?" I waited to see if she'd respond. When she didn't, I said, in a thin voice: "Don't you recognize it?"
"Why should I? I've never known anyone in the Foreign Legion."
"Think about Father's work."
"His fiction?"
"Keith Sentelle has the exact same tattoo."
Klara turned to me, and for a moment I saw it—the same fear that was coursing through me. "No, no, Keith's is, was—I don't remember a horse. I remember a snake."
I closed my eyes. "True, it was from a different Foreign Legion regiment. Still, could that be a coincidence? And what about the scar on his thumb? The obsession with nature's dark side? The way he wielded that knife?"
"Henri feels inspired by Father's novels, by his dangerous vision of the woods. And every gardener has scars and is good with knives."
"What about his background as a police officer?" I pressed. "Surely you can't ignore that."
"Keith wasn't a cop, Milo."
"He was a crime scene photographer. It's a passing reference only, but it's there."
"It probably also says Keith likes hamburgers. Do you want me to see if Henri likes hamburgers, too?"
I remained silent, because I could tell her sarcasm was forced—that she wasn't nearly as confident as she made herself seem.
"He's just a gardener, Milo," she insisted, a little too loudly.
/>
"He's trying to break up our home. Accuse me of terrible things. And then what will he do to you?"
She threw up her hands, her fear replaced by exasperation. "I refuse to be afraid of ghosts or coincidences or unsolved mysteries or anything like that anymore. I don't care about the past. Not yours, not his. I want to put it all behind us."
"But it's not so easy, is it? It has a way of insinuating itself into everything."
"You're trying to make me afraid of him."
"No, I'm trying to make you see. Perhaps that's why Father was so afraid. Because he'd come face-to-face with the true power of his fiction."
"This is lunacy."
"Henri keeps talking about rebirth, rejuvenation. Don't you get it? He's not just talking about you or the garden, he's talking about himself."
"Please, Milo."
"Can't you at least acknowledge the risk? We have everything to lose. The question for you is: is it really worth it? Just so you can look at some pretty flowers?"
Her mouth tightened in a bitter little spasm; I knew I'd gone too far. "The garden isn't just pretty flowers," she said. "It's not even about me anymore. It's something larger. I've decided to dedicate it to Mother and Father's memory. It's going to be a memorial garden. A place where people might come to honor them and have readings and the like. I won't let the accident be the end of them."
I sat perfectly still, not saying anything. I don't know why this, of all things, sent my mind reeling. Perhaps it was the sudden notion that I was suffering for the sake of Father's fans, so Klara could lead them on tours and make witty remarks and never, ever allow us to forget the past. And why was she pretending it was not about her? It was always about her.
"Was this your idea or Henri's?"
"Both. My point is, it's meant to put the past to rest."
I knew she was under Henri's spell—otherwise she'd never be so naïve. "Yet all it will do is keep their memory alive."
"Alive, yes, but not part of us anymore. It will be out there, not in here."
She pointed at the room, at herself, and for a moment I was tempted to believe it—that we could externalize our fears, plant them and trim them and pull them up by the roots if they grew too wild. But that's not how it worked. "No," I said. "You'll become a parasite on Father's memory. One of those children who . . ."
"Stop it," she said. "I told you I want this antagonism to end."
"That's not really up to you."
"Don't do this, Milo."
"Or what? You'll investigate Mother and Father's death? Show that I was responsible? Is this what you'll have over me for the rest of our lives?"
She put her hands over her ears. "Stop!"
"Maybe you believe it. Maybe you believe the lies of someone you've just met over your very own brother. Maybe this is your idea of family loyalty."
"I don't even know you anymore. All you do is hole up in the study."
"I'm working."
"On what? Stupid models nobody cares about?"
I rose to my feet and rushed across the room and ejected the DVD. Before Klara could reach me I'd bent it in half. "And who cares about this?" I shouted. "It's nothing but a disc of plastic!" She tried to take it away. I wouldn't let her. "Nobody cares what you do either!" I yelled as she loomed over me. "Nobody has ever cared except me! Don't you understand?" I never saw her hand. All I heard was her athletic grunt; all I felt was the dry-ice sting across my cheek. I dropped the disc. She snatched it up. She glared at me stone-faced, then turned and marched away, her pale ankles churning up her skirts. So this is what we've come to, I thought. Full-circle back to the physical memory of pain—to the days of the baton.
The Master was an ancient man, voice cracked and grinding,
And when our man, our Keith, did find him
Holed up inside his attic heaped with art, he smelled the paint,
And glue and clay and wax, and that decayed and languid taint
Of something else. Burnt flesh? Singed hair?
‘What are you doing there, and there?'
The Master asked, while tossing down two photos,
Keith's latest work, the Faulkner twins, extinct as dodos.
They're propped beneath a pair of trees, and facing one another,
FACING OFF, the work was called, because—how clever!—
They had no faces anymore, he'd cut them both right off their heads
And hung them limp from branches over their death beds.
‘Too neat! You're showing off!' the Master snarled
And bade him try again, but Keith just gnarled
His fists and said: ‘You're old, you can't see genius anymore.'
The Master paused, and nodded, his eyes keeping score.
‘You know that everything is language, grammar,' the old man said,
‘Take murder, stories, art—they're all the same. And when you've seen and read
As much as I, you realize that genius is quite rare.
Most people just manipulate the forms they're given. No one dares
Do anything that's new. The forms are comforting, a blanket to a child.'
‘A child?' Keith said, unable to believe his ears. ‘A child?'
‘A faceless figure?" shot The Master back. ‘You're copying Magritte.'
And that's when Keith first knew he'd need a wholly new conceit.
All night long the shadows crept across my bedroom walls. Elaborate shifting shapes that reached to me with rotten-leaf arms, yearning hollow eyes. I told myself: they're only shadows, only figments of my imagination. I even glanced out the window and saw how the shapes were formed—by the trees and moon. Yet when I turned back it was like they mocked me: So you see what made us. So what? We're still real.
This was what haunted me, the notion that they could be both shadows and real. That the shadows were like their camouflage—that they hid there waiting for the unsuspecting, the confident sunny daytime people who couldn't see the magic until it was too late. In the same way I imagined Keith had been waiting, hiding in plain sight, that he was both a fiction and real somehow. I tried to look at the situation logically, telling myself that perhaps I was just afraid of Henri—of this former investigator now investigating me. But there was too much else. Too many signs. I'd unlocked their mystery. I'd seen behind their façade. Logic was almost a debasement now, a violation of the sacred vision. I knew well what horrors Keith was capable of—using his knife, his teeth, even on one occasion an overgrown fingernail, to disembowel his hapless victims:
A stroking curl of finger down her skin,
And then surprise! A thrust, a gouge, until he'd limned
Her belly with her own dark seeping juice
Of life, of death, an open sluice
To bathe his hands in . . .
I pictured Henri's hands—hand smeared with dirt that very first day. I thought: he was showing me already. Yes, every part of him seemed ominous now—his teeth, his lips, his nose. For Keith, killing was an intimate art. He literally burrowed himself into it, hoping to excite all the senses. What had he said once? That a warm body was like pudding to a child? Half the fun was getting it all over yourself.
Yes, I knew there was more—things I couldn't yet see. I was still an initiate, finding my way—the light remained dim. Father loved to embed his novels with puzzles and red herrings, unexplained phenomena and unreliable narrators and even private jokes, like the time he'd named a heinous villain after an editor who'd dismissed his work. About Keith's origins he'd written only that he'd been raised
By good and caring folk with only one small minor flaw.
You see, they liked their infants raw.
I'd always wondered what this meant, whether to take it literally, as in Keith's parents ate babies, or more symbolically, as in they didn't school their children. I vaguely recalled
some academic dust-up over this point, and in the grey early morning hours I crept downstairs, where I found a volume of scholarship by the first professors to take Father seriously. Of course I gleaned nothing from them. They were critics, not prophets. Their greatest enlightenment was that "a large share of Keith's horror lies in the fact that he appears sui generis, a self-created monster" and that "like all agents of divine wrath, Keith is more force of nature than man."
I thought of this last line as he came to us in the crisp early-morning sun—his car gleaming, his smile a crooked gash—like a force that would always return: a battering wave, a Northern wind. He parked in front of the garage. He was alone. I watched as he opened the garage door, careful not to make a sound. I could see him in the Volvo's bay, kneeling on the concrete floor, running his palms over the grease spots like a painter or a priest. He spent several long minutes in there. Then suddenly he glanced up. He was studying the wall: the exact spot where the wire-cutters and Chilton's Guide had hung. I thought: how did he know where they'd been?
He quickly exited the garage and closed the door. He came into the house with his key. He must have surprised Klara in the kitchen. I heard a clattering pan. She sometimes made oatmeal for herself on the stove. They talked. I couldn't hear what about. They were whispering, and I discerned only the occasional word: "expert," "study," "proper." I tried to form sentences out of them: "experts study properly" or "we could hire an expert to study the garage and send the results to the proper authorities." Anyway it didn't matter. The image of Henri kneeling, almost genuflecting, in the Volvo's bay had given me an idea, a way to divine more.
I hurried down the long hallway to Mother and Father's room.
Nothing had changed from the night of their deaths, nothing removed, not the yellowed newspaper that lay folded on their bed, or the dusty curtains or Mother's night-time glass of lithia water or the worn leather slippers, the jars of perfume and skin cream and tubes of crumbling lipstick. It was like a mausoleum to before. I threw open the closets. There were Mother's sequined dresses. Father's old black fedoras. Shoes I was sure Mother had never worn and a white tuxedo that I recalled vaguely from old wedding photos. But it was Father's more pedestrian attire that I pulled off their wooden hangers. A tweed jacket, rumpled Oxford shirt, corduroy trousers.
The Garden of Blue Roses Page 13
