So I did. The Mad Gardener was full of mistletoe and poinsettia, and Christmas cacti hung in big red pots in the front windows. The whole place smelled of pine. Eve, I remembered, was busy helping holiday shoppers when I arrived. A few minutes later, Sam walked in. He and Eve exchanged greetings, a little awkwardly. They were acquainted, I could see, but it was also clear they didn’t know each other well, nor had they seen each other in a long while. Perhaps seven years, they guessed aloud. Give or take.
Introducing us, Eve said that she and Sam (whose last name she couldn’t recall) had met at a play, years before. On one of her theater trips—when she was still in Ithaca. I, she informed him, was her cousin. She’d pointed at me vaguely as she turned away. Sam and I chatted; he bought a wreath. And we walked out together.
“CAM,” SAID Danny, her voice reeling me in. “Remember this garden? Behind that townhouse where Sam used to live?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I do.”
She exhaled slowly. “Okay, then. So now can you tell me something you haven’t yet?”
I shook my head. “Eve told me the same thing she told you. She and Sam had been acquainted once. That’s all.”
“Did Sam ever say anything different? Or add anything new to what you’d heard from her?”
“He said the play at which he’d met Eve was Long Day’s Journey into Night. Ever see it?”
“No. I read it in college.”
My capacity for speech seemed to be returning. I was able to describe to Danny a scene recounted to me by Sam: his first sighting of my cousin. “Sam said they were sitting next to each other. He’d originally planned to go to the play with his housemate, who got sick at the last minute, so Sam had an empty seat on one side and Eve on the other. They chatted during intermission, and she told him this was the second time she’d seen the play. She’d attended the premiere in the mid-Fifties, which meant she would’ve been in high school. Jordan must’ve taken her.”
“What did Sam and Mom talk about? Did Sam say?”
“Apparently Eve said something about how the Tyrone family was no more messed up than her own. And he asked her jokingly, does that mean your mother’s on morphine, like Mary Tyrone? She said her mother was dead. Then he asked about her father, and Eve said he wasn’t dead but he might as well be. Sam remembered that statement . . . But Danny, what’s any of this got to do with—”
“I’m trying to make sure the stories match up,” she cut in. “The three of you told me pretty much the same things. The basic version is: Sam and Mom met at the theater, and he visited her where she was staying in the city—someplace in the Village—a few times during the week after. They didn’t lay eyes on each other again until about seven years later, when Sam walked into The Mad Gardener—the day you were there. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said evenly, “here’s my scenario: they hooked up a couple of other times, too.”
AS A show of comprehension, the bobbing of my head was deceptively automatic.
Danny gazed at me. “Should I keep talking?”
“Yes,” I managed.
“Sam wasn’t involved with you or anyone else when he met Mom. She was just . . . somebody he had sex with a few times, within a short period. She returned to Ithaca, and six weeks later she learned she was pregnant.”
Danny pointed at the Halloween photo. “This was taken by Sam’s housemate—Henry, was it?—nine months before my birth. Mom and Sam were going to some costume party that night, at a friend of Sam’s. Henry took the snapshot, and Mom asked if she could keep it. Henry asked Sam if he wanted it. Sam didn’t care one way or the other. He was impossible to identify—just some guy in a hat and a mask. Mom was identifiable, though. And she’d never liked pictures of herself floating around. So she took this one.”
Danny hesitated. “None of this would’ve come up if I hadn’t pushed Sam. I was riding a hunch, and I confronted him. I told him I’d never speak with him again if he didn’t talk with me about it—about Mom . . .”
“When did you do this?”
“Just a few days ago.”
Sam hadn’t known, then, when he and I talked about Danny after our trip. We’d both been in the dark.
“I told him I was sure he and Mom had been involved sexually,” Danny continued. “He was flipped out by that, as you can imagine, but he began talking. And it was clear to me he still had no idea who I actually was. I mean, he’d given no thought to the fact that he’d slept with my mother nine months before my birth. What might’ve happened just hadn’t registered with him . . . When I told him about this photograph, he remembered the Halloween party, vaguely. And then, when I told him what Mom had written on the back, he finally got it. I didn’t have to spell it out. He offered to do DNA testing, but I told him as far as I was concerned, that’d be a waste of time. All we had to do, I said, was stand in front of a mirror and look at our eyes . . . Sam agreed with me. He was in shock, but he agreed. By that point the whole thing was clear to us both.”
THE WHOLE thing: Danny had used that same phrase, I remembered, back in May, when she was cleaning out Eve’s apartment. Then the whole thing’s behind me, she’d said. But it wasn’t. It was still in front of her—of all of us.
She opened a bottle of seltzer and poured me some. My mouth was completely dry; swallowing was an effort.
“Can I keep going?” she asked, and I nodded.
“There was still the question of the insemination procedure,” she resumed. “Sam urged me to take another look at the hospital’s invoice. It listed the procedure and the date, November 5. Mom must’ve been tested for pregnancy in late October, just before leaving for the city—on the understanding that she’d be inseminated when she returned. And she tested negative and didn’t bother to get tested again.”
“So the insemination was pointless.”
“Yes. No one knew that, though—and Mom was the only person who might’ve wondered. But she didn’t.”
“Did she use contraception?”
“Sam recalls asking her about that. And she told him not to worry about it. Though in fact she wasn’t on the pill—she told him that, too. I think by then she’d simply come to believe she’d never conceive except by artificial insemination. She’d had so many lovers over the years, and she’d never been pregnant, even though she was often sloppy about birth control. She said as much to me once.”
Danny paused for some seltzer. “Given what you’ve told me today, I guess it’s an open question whether the sperm donor for the procedure was Jordan or Billy Deveare. We’ll never know—not that it matters. Mom got pregnant, and I was born, and seven years went by.
“Then Sam walked into her shop, the day you were there. That’s when it must’ve hit her—she must’ve seen his eyes, their color, and realized . . . By that time, of course, she’d already named Billy as my father. There was no point rewriting the script. Yet she had to state the truth somewhere, so she wrote it on the back of the photo.”
“But Jordan could still have been—”
“Do you honestly believe that, Cam? I mean, even if he did let her use his sperm, do you really believe, now, that Jordan is my father?”
I could say nothing, think nothing, feel nothing.
“There’s something else you need to understand,” Danny added. “That day he met you, Sam hadn’t gone to The Mad Gardener to see Eve. He happened to be in the neighborhood and passed by Mom’s shop, not even knowing who the owner was. He wanted to buy a Christmas wreath for a colleague. Eve recognized him, greeted him. And then realized who he was. My father.”
OUR VIEW of the playing fields, a green stage ringed by trees, consumed my attention. My mind was refusing entrance to anything else. Danny fell silent, caught up in the park’s early-evening peacefulness; she sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, taking in the scene.
Emerging from the woods, a dog loped along one of the paths bordering the pond. A woman followed at a slow trot, leash in hand. Behind us, a
man gave a cheerful whistle, then lobbed a Frisbee in the dog’s direction. The toss was beautiful—a high, smooth arc—and the dog, tail and ears erect, moved into place. As the disk descended over the playing field, the dog jumped and brought the Frisbee down in a flawless retrieval. The woman clapped, and the dog ran to her proudly with his catch. The man jogged over to them, and the two humans began chatting as the dog stood by patiently, disk in mouth.
Smiling a little, Danny pointed. “Awaiting further instructions,” she said.
Somewhere within me was rampaging chaos, which I was walling off. “Nice to be told what to do,” I replied.
Danny gave me a queer look; evidently my response had landed wrong. “Shouldn’t you be over that by now?”
“Over what?”
“Following orders,” she answered coolly. “Doing what you’re told.”
My expression must’ve revealed my incomprehension. “I’m talking about Jordan and Mom,” she added, straightening her legs in front of her. “You have been the good soldier, haven’t you? Jordan orders you not to say anything about how he died, so you keep it secret until I pry it from you. Mom makes you promise not to talk about the possibility of meningitis, and you say nothing about that either.”
The walls weren’t holding. “How did you know . . . ?” I began.
Danny waved a dismissive hand. “Oh come on, do you think you’re the only one who noticed Mom was having severe neck pain? I asked her about it, and she insisted I not tell anyone. I didn’t put up a fight; there didn’t seem to be any reason to. And you didn’t argue with her either, did you?”
The truth was muscling its way past me, ignoring my pleas for manageability. “No, I didn’t,” I said.
Danny’s jaw relaxed slightly. “Do you know why?”
Promise me. Had it been that—obedience to Eve’s wish for silence? Or something else, a desire for her to disappear, for all the difficulties that had constellated around her to be finally banished?
“I think so,” I answered. “I could’ve given Eve all the right reasons for not surrendering, for fighting back,” I said. “But she wouldn’t have listened to me making the arguments, giving the reasons. She knew them already. And the thing is, I wanted to be a reason, too. And I knew I wasn’t. It felt meaningless for me to make the case—to encourage her to fight back—if I couldn’t offer myself as a kind of collateral. A counterweight to whatever it was inside her that had just had enough.”
USING A little twig, Danny began jabbing at her paper plate, breaking up the shell of a hard-boiled egg. When she’d reduced it to shards, she scooped them up and rubbed her hands together hard before scattering the bits of shell on the grass next to her.
“My mother,” she said, “was a coward. A selfish coward.” She dusted off her hands, and I saw that one of her palms had been lacerated. Little drops of blood dotted its skin.
“Give me that,” I said, pointing. When she extended her bleeding hand, I wet a paper napkin with water and wiped the palm gently. Its small cuts were deeper and more numerous than they appeared; Danny winced softly as I cleaned them. When I’d finished, I placed her open hand on my propped-up knees so it would dry.
“I was more of a coward than your mother was,” I said. I spread her fingers wide with my own, pinning them down. “To me, having a family was like driving too close to the edge of a cliff. It didn’t matter that I had a good husband; I just wasn’t prepared to take the risk . . . That’s what it felt like—not an adventure but a gamble I was almost certain to lose.”
Beneath my fingers, Danny’s twitched lightly.
“Your mother and I grew up under near-identical circumstances,” I went on. “I walked away from the apartment on Ninth Street convinced that having a kid wasn’t a good idea. But Eve knew she’d have one someday. She gambled, Danny—knowing it might turn out catastrophically, she went ahead and had a child anyway. Can you really call that cowardice?”
Danny hissed in disgust. “Mom never wanted to be a mother—she just wanted the idea of it!” She massaged her palm; a few of its cuts had begun bleeding again. “And see what happened! Once I got angry enough at her, I walked off and never looked back. Her kid dumped her after she’d dumped her kid! Mom and I were made for each other. We deserved each other.”
She splashed seltzer onto her hand, then flicked her wrist to dry it. “What happened to Mom—getting meningitis—nobody could’ve anticipated that, Cam. But her dying wasn’t a fluke, as you know. And she knew I’d know it, too.”
She dropped her head between her knees and began to cry. Leaning down, I cupped my hand on the nape of her neck. “Eve wasn’t expecting you to lie for her, Danny,” I murmured into her ear. “She expected nothing. Don’t torture yourself.”
“She was that alone . . .” Her words straddled a line between question and statement.
“Yes,” I said, massaging her neck. “She always was.”
Danny stood up. I was still sitting cross-legged on the ground, and she seemed to tower above me. I felt momentarily small, a little girl staring up at a grown one.
“In your twenties, what were you good at, Cam? By the time you’d reached my age, what had you figured out?”
The question felt like a bright light; I closed my eyes against it. At twenty-eight, Eve had been in possession of a career in landscaping and all the men she could consume. And at that same age, I’d had a worthless job in an antiques shop and only the dimmest sense of my future, in which my father would never desire or accept a role.
“I was good with props,” I said. “I had an eye for objects. I could match them with people and actions—with scenes. Other kinds of connections were . . . more problematic.”
“And then Sam came along?”
“First Jordan died. Then Sam came along.” And you: you came along, I wanted to say, but couldn’t.
SHE REACHED down and extended both hands to me.
“We need a break. Let’s go—we can keep talking, but I need to move.” She waggled her fingers before me, a sign for me to take her hands so she could pull me up.
I pointed at her lacerated palm. “It’s okay now,” she said. Gripping me solidly by my wrists, she leaned back, matching my weight with her own as I brought myself upright. Face to face with her, I saw Sam’s eyes.
“Danny, would you like to come to my place?” Please, I begged silently. “I’ll make us a snack, we’ll have a glass of wine. It’s only seven o’clock. If we hustle, we might catch the sunset from my building’s roof.”
She glanced at her watch; I held my breath. “I have to make a call—”
“Oh, you’ve got plans, then don’t change them,” I broke in, forcing myself to sound unaffected.
“No,” she said, “it’s fine. Really. It’s good. Let me just . . .” She stepped a few yards away from me, pulled out her cell phone, dialed, and began speaking in a low voice.
As I packed up the remains of our picnic, I watched her pace in a small circle. At the end of my last dream—it came back now—she and I had spun round and round, so fast we’d risen off the sidewalk. We’d been held together and pulled apart, simultaneously.
Like Meyerhold’s cartwheel: that happy gesture of the body, powered purely by sorrow. A similar paradox.
Danny put away her phone and shouldered her bag. “Ready?” she asked.
“As we’re likely to get,” I answered.
INTERLUDE
THIS ISN’T a proper intermezzo, merely a swift interruption. (Picture an actor dashing across the stage, declaiming as he goes.)
Just one point. By recalling that cartwheel from her first dream, Camilla confirmed what I’d suspected. We’d come full circle, she and I: Meyerhold’s spark had hit its mark. What I’d hoped for had come to pass. I’d done my job; I could let myself off the hook.
Why, then, did I not feel released?
Partly because Camilla wasn’t—not yet, not quite. I knew she would be, ultimately; about that I had no doubts. But I was also ambivalent, in the w
ay a parent might be, perhaps, watching a child achieve independence. One realizes there’s no accounting for what will ensue, no heading off of calamities.
The problem, in a nutshell? Simply this: the concern of other people is unavailing, irrelevant. It lacks any agency. It stops nothing bad from happening.
What, I wondered, had Seva made of that truth, once it had dawned on him? With what emotion had it saddled him?
Terror, I should think, at the realization that there’d be no one to bail him out.
When one is in one’s prison cell—actual or self-created—however one has landed there, love becomes the only key to the door. As Camilla would shortly discover.
And so we pick up again, in medias res. No more dreams for me to stage. I head to the wings, awaiting the curtain’s fall.
TEN
BY THE time Danny and I got to the Village, the sun was low and the sky rich with orange and mauve. I was eager to go straight home, but Danny wanted to pass by The Fourth Wall. On the subway, she’d told me she had some ideas for my shop’s front door, which was in need of repainting—but she wanted to take a quick look at it. A little detour, she said. Just a couple of minutes.
We proceeded toward Bedford Street, zigzagging westward. When she was eight or nine, Sam and I used to play a game with her on these same streets. We’d each grab a hand and lift her off the ground, cackling happily, so her sleek legs would pump forward and backward—very much as I’d been swung back and forth in my latest dream, before Danny and I began spinning together . . .
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