The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  There was something in the heavy drapes, a green velvet that retained the memory of Jeannette. Beside them, a corded tassel hung, long abandoned and certainly intended to hook them back, to present the stage, the players. Is this where Jeannette sat with Randall as a boy, reading? Is this where she stood long after he had been put to bed and her husband had returned to his study, the door closed? Is this where she walked in the middle of the night, restless? Perhaps. Or maybe she was nothing like I pictured her.

  • • •

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and there Uncle Sterling stood, waiting. “’Bye,” I said to my family, who nodded.

  “This way,” I said, pointing to a staircase in front of us, “though there’s a shortcut, too.”

  “Take me that way,” he said, so I led him out of the parlor and through the old cook’s pantry and the Gallery of Maps, passing the intercom, oddly hopeful, as if I might hear Randall’s voice on the other line were I to lift it from its brass base.

  I opened the door to the back stairway and began the climb. I could hear Sterling struggling a bit behind me, with his cane. He had been somewhat crippled as a child, and his limp grew worse as he aged. I waited midway for him to catch up. In the almost dark of that staircase I turned to see his bald head, his old hand on the banister. “They were smaller in the old days,” I said.

  Then, when he said nothing, I turned back around.

  “Carry on,” I muttered, though I don’t believe he heard me.

  No matter.

  My initial excitement at leading Uncle Sterling through the same drill I had been led through by Randall dulled as we got closer to Randall’s room, and I was reminded, again, of his death. I slowed down my march, feeling Sterling close in behind me, his breath labored. We reached the landing and walked down the hallway. Randall’s room was empty, of course, and vast without him. I let Sterling go first and waited to see if he wanted me to stay or to leave him alone.

  He clomped past, his bad leg worse, I am sure, with the anticipation. The leg was like a tic of some sort; you could read his mood in it. This I later came to learn, since Randall rarely spoke about his father, and the time before Randall’s death had been spent in this house with Randall, only. Now I noticed things about his father. How Sterling leaned heavily on his right side, his left side hitching up a bit when he propelled the bad leg forward. How he swung the leg heavily in front of him, its hidden brace thumping down like an anchor he repeatedly lifted and dropped. How he wavered some now and then, as if the anchor had hit soft ground and would not hold, before reaching the window seat and sitting down, one big hand on each knee.

  I stood at the door unsure. I could have shown Sterling some things: the rotted nail at the window in the far corner, how if you took it out the window hung at a pitch; the initials we had carved in the soft molding near one of Randall’s closets, the braided rug he claimed his mother had made in one sitting, the secret drawers that ran along the window seat. But he didn’t yet ask questions. He simply sat, his head bowed. He might have been weeping, or he might have been asleep. Impossible to tell from where I stood.

  “Young lady,” he finally said, and I must admit I startled; my mind had been elsewhere.

  I walked over to him, wishing for a cigarette. In those days, at least, this is what you often wished for at difficult times, as if the difficult times could disappear in smoke, and when the cigarette was stubbed out, the problem would be solved. I was newly fifteen, believing myself closer to twenty. I’m sure I walked with an exaggerated steadiness. The truth is, I wanted to cry as soon as I set foot in that room.

  Sterling patted the window cushion next to him and I sat down; we were side by side, him with his bad leg stretched straight out, his big hands still on his knees, me with my swing skirt and one of Rita’s hand-me-down sweaters. I wore my hair pulled back straight and clipped, and socks stretched up to my knees. I’m sure I sat with my ankles crossed. This is what Mother had taught us, saying it took no money to have manners.

  We stayed this way for some time and then Sterling cleared his throat.

  “Tell me about him,” he said.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “My son,” he said.

  I pulled my skirt over my knees.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I cringe now to repeat it; he was a father asking about a son.

  “He liked to read,” I said.

  “What kind of books?”

  I shrugged. “All kinds.”

  “Did he ever mention the works of Edwards?”

  “Sir?”

  “I gave them to him once; I found Edwards useful when I was his age.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I see.”

  “He told me about a lot of books. He may have mentioned them.”

  Sterling stood. “Well,” he said. He began to walk, again, clumping around the room.

  “He liked words, too,” I said, as if I had suddenly remembered an obvious detail about him, suddenly remembered, for instance, that he had been a left-handed, champion swimmer, a hero in the state. “See?” I pointed to the words left to learn. They were still there, inscribed in grime. Sterling clumped over and peered at them.

  “These?” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes sir,” I said.

  He put his old hand toward them, and I thought, for an instant, that he might add a word of his own, something lawyerly and Latinate, like habeas corpus; instead he X-ed out each word as if a teacher marking misspellings. Then he turned from the window and clomped out of the room. I heard him on the narrow stairs, descending through the house, a pebble going down a drain, clanging here and there. I didn’t know what to do and so I sat, listening to his descent.

  • • •

  We stayed that night at a rooming house in Sudlersville called the Dew Drop Inn. Betty and I shared a room, and Mother and Daddy were just down the hall. They went to sleep early, Mother saying she felt exhausted from Sterling. “He doesn’t exactly make it easy for us,” Mother said. “And I’d like to remind him that it was at his invitation that we came.”

  Daddy was typically quiet about the whole thing, though I could see that he marked this to time with his wife’s family, and that he would eventually demand some kind of payback. It was that way with them. Give and take. I’m not sure, in the end, whether I’d call theirs a happy marriage, though quite truthfully I’ve seen so few of those I don’t know if I’d recognize one. Mother ran the show and Daddy went along.

  We ate in the Dew Drop Inn dining room, a depressing former living room with stained carpeting and a waitress who doubled as the receptionist. She had little patience with the four of us, and we were left to pour our own coffee and find our own butter rolls from the sideboard. “I didn’t know what to say when he left so I just sat there.”

  “The poor thing,” Betty said.

  Mother looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  “I didn’t see you doing much today in the line of helping,” she said.

  Betty huffed. “I’m not feeling well,” she said.

  “Oh, you and your not feeling well,” Mother said.

  “Anyway,” I said, louder. “I just sat there until I heard him get all the way downstairs and then I came down and he didn’t as much as look at me the rest of the day.”

  “Well, he’s mourning,” Mother said.

  “Exactly,” Betty said.

  “I suppose you might think of a few other things to tell him about Randall,” she said. “Maybe something you read about in that diary of his.”

  I looked down at my plate as if I had never been so interested in Brussels sprouts. I’m sure my cheeks were aflame.

  “You might let us in on a few things as well,” Mother said.

  I shook my head hard. I had only read a few entries, but each one I read was like another piece of him given to me and then taken away; I couldn’t bear it.

  “All right,” Daddy said then. “I’m tired, Mother. Let’s go to bed.” He pulled back from th
e table and I heard the two of them leaving. I kept my face down, trying not to cry. Betty kicked me under the table and said I was a wimp.

  • • •

  The little white tag I had seen on the couch in the parlor now hung off of everything. Mother had waked early to meet Sterling; the sale would begin at ten o’clock. I walked through the old furniture dragged out to the front lawn, the bright morning light fading the upholstery even fainter, exaggerating nicks and scratches in the soft wood. Cardboard boxes filled with kitchen utensils and the detritus of the kitchen drawers were stacked beneath signs written in Mother’s hand: “Yours for Free!” Stained tablecloths and linen napkins were pinned to a clothesline strung between two oaks, the stains like an outdoor Gallery of Maps. I hid among them for a while.

  When we had pulled up, we had seen Sterling and Mother sitting on the faded wing chairs I recognized from Sterling’s study, odd against the backdrop of the old brick house, their faces in and out of shadow as they watched us approach down the drive, Mother waving, Sterling’s face especially stern. This must have been terribly difficult for him, though he had never liked the house among the farms and had wanted to return to Baltimore for a long time. Still, this was the home where he had lived with his wife and son. Now neither lived at all.

  Of course, at the time I knew none of it. I believed him furious at me, a cousin, a friend, unable to offer him anything more of Randall than books, than unlearned words. And what could I give? Randall’s hand in the dark? The look of his letters, propped on the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table, waiting for me to come home from school and discover like golden tickets? Randall’s squeeze good-bye? The smell of the boiled wet wool of his coat? The throng of boys crowding onto the train, Randall just one of hundreds of boys, their arms too thin and hands too big, their ears pink from the cold platform, where they had lingered for the last time with the people they loved? How Randall, his red hair orange against his red scarf, had waved from the train window in the way they do in the movies, though of course no one ran along the side, no one broke from the decorum of wishing men, boys, off to war. Nothing as uncivilized as pure grief, only stoicism. We had watched the train depart silently. Girlfriends waved. I know I smiled, wanting Randall to remember me pretty, knowing that smiling I looked pretty.

  • • •

  I stepped out of the car and went over to Mother and Sterling, threading my way through the end tables and floor lamps, the paintings propped against the legs of kitchen chairs, the fishermen’s trunks and stacks of Life and National Geographic, the Court Reporter, old newspapers, piles of clothing. I noticed the rose-covered sofa a bit apart from the clutter, as if it felt embarrassed to mingle with the more ordinary items.

  “That’s reserved,” Mother said, noticing my interest. Sterling nodded. I could barely look at him. “An old friend. Someone who thinks she’s getting an antique.” Mother laughed, though for what reason I didn’t yet know; I imagined she was gay with the exhilaration of cleaning. She was this way, Mother. She loved spring trips to the dump, anything to be rid of a mess put her in a lively mood.

  “Anyway,” she said, heaving herself up. “I’ve got to get your father to help me move a few things down from the attic. Keep your uncle company, sweetheart.” Then she left.

  I sat next to Sterling in Mother’s wing chair and waited, though Sterling didn’t say a word. He had a dark blue shawl over his legs, and his old hands, resting on top of it, looked like two exhausted white animals that had crawled a great distance. I noticed how thin his legs were beneath the shawl, their twin outline descending out of my view, lost to its fringe. He wore his usual cardigan and another tie; he had dressed himself carefully. This might have been the first time he had met any of his neighbors.

  They arrived slowly at first, turning into the drive in their dusty Fords; riding tractors, or bicycles. They were older men and younger boys, farm wives. They wore aprons or overalls, hats, some, and gloves, others. A few were dressed as if for church services, though this was Saturday. I believe as many came because they had always been curious about this brick house set back from the road as those who were looking for bargains. They wandered among the things, eyed pipe racks and raked through the piles of clothes, flicked the lamp switches on and off, though the lamps were, obviously, unplugged. Everything about them suspicious, they talked out of the sides of their mouths, whispered as if in a library. Mother ran among them. She had brewed coffee and from somewhere donuts were produced. She treated everyone like an invited guest. “My word!” she would say when some gray-haired woman held one of Jeannette’s hats up to her head. “Isn’t that becoming!”

  Soon there were so many people that the things disappeared within them, carted off like crumbs at a picnic of ants. If you had been driving along that road on your way into Sudlersville, you might have thought that old Sterling had had a sudden change of heart, that he had invited the neighborhood to a garden party. The day had blossomed; the leaves caught the light and glowed. Children ran here and there, playing tag. Men and women, sharp and crisp against the day, carried wooden boxes filled with Randall’s shirts and trousers, Jeannette’s dresses, hoisting them onto their bicycles. Others shoved trunks, carpets, whatever would fit into their automobiles—their shirtsleeves rolled to their elbows, their underarms stained, suspenders straining—closing the doors the best they could. I remember one young boy, perhaps my age—too young for the war but almost, almost—riding with his sweetheart, a girl a bit younger with white-blond hair who balanced in the well of his handlebars; she held a desk lamp in her hands and laughed as he pedaled them away, swerving to miss the bumps in the drive. The look of the two surprised me. I guess I had begun to think of this as an old, faded place. They were too young for it, somehow. They might have been Randall and me.

  • • •

  By noon most everything was gone. Daddy had been in charge of the money and he carried the cigar box as if it were a collection plate in church. He seemed to be constantly counting, calculating, mumbling something or another to himself as he passed by on his way to make change. Betty had another one of her headaches and so Mother excused her. Who knows where Mother had gone to: here and there, offering cream to the last buyers, refusing to go lower on the tea set.

  I sat with Sterling as Mother had instructed. He barely spoke, simply watched as the buyers haggled, occasionally answering a question put to him by Mother or Daddy, but mostly silent and, truth be told, not even watching the hagglers. I was the one watching the hagglers. Sterling looked off toward the empty distance, as if waiting for someone due to arrive hours ago. We had moved to the rose-covered sofa (the wing chairs had been sold literally out from underneath of us); Sterling, with his two long legs posted firmly on the ground, reminded me of Abe Lincoln, or the statue of Lincoln in the memorial, his hands carved marble, translucent stone: bony, veined, no doubt hands that held pens that wrote important words. Funny, now, to remember, since Randall’s were so delicate; perhaps they were hands that would have grown to resemble his father’s after all.

  • • •

  I don’t know how much time passed before I realized that everyone had left, the boxes, and tables, and linens pinned to the line bought and carried off to other places, other homes, so that the two of us, side by side on the rose-covered sofa, were the only interruptions in an otherwise natural landscape. Crows looked down from the old oaks, cawing. In the far distance I thought I heard some music. I’m sure I tried to think of something to say, but I was shy, and conversation never came easily. He seemed not to notice—me, or the awkwardness of our postures. He continued to stare off toward the road, his legs, his hands, his entire expression steady. I picked at a stain on my jumper and patted my hair. I crossed and uncrossed my ankles. I noticed again that the roses had faded to the point where they might be mistaken for tulips or lilies or any kind of flower at all, or no flower, and thought of poor Jeannette, buried not far from here in a local graveyard. Randall had once taken me there, not t
o show me his mother’s grave, but to show me all the funny names on the tombstones: Ichabod Applegate, the very Reverend Archibald Bottomspout, an entire clan of Higgensproofs. The tombstone he particularly liked belonged to Eliza Higgensproof, the matriarch, who no doubt would have rolled over several times had she been able to rise up and read her epitaph. Here lies Eliza Higgensproof, it read. She done what she could.

  Jeannette’s grave marked one of the far corners. Her tombstone tilted slightly, Randall explaining that she died during mud season, and though they could have waited for the ground to become more solid before burying her, neither he nor his father had the heart and so they had let the gravediggers put her into soft ground; each day, he said, when they went to visit her grave, she had sunk just a little. Later his father had asked the gravediggers to return, to even the mound. It felt in the end as if they had had to bury her twice. The gravediggers had done their job, though they had neglected to right the tombstone, and it stayed, tilted in the way of ancient tombstones, of the long dead.

  She had no epitaph, I remember, simply her full name, Jeannette Olive Jewell, and the dates of her birth and death. Because the tombstone was so low to the ground, green lichen obscured much of it. Indeed, her grave seemed in great contrast to the rest of the place, particularly on the day Randall and I visited, several Easters back. Around us were pots of white lilies at the feet or the head of the dead, and here and there faded American flags stuck where the hands of the dead might have been. Jeannette’s grave was like a tiny, verdant mountain, something lofty on a flat plain. I remember that Randall wore a navy peacoat, the kind popular at the time, and that he wrapped it tighter to him against the wind. The graveyard was just off a curve in the road, and every once in a while an automobile would skid by, taking the curve too fast, and we would both look up as if the automobile had news for us, an urgent message. The truth is, neither he nor I knew what to do or to say: a mother buried in ground, there, somewhere directly beneath our feet: what are we in the face of this? The bones of her, the skull, the relic of what she was before: a woman whose extravagance came in the form of sunlight, of too-loud laughter, of allowing her son to waddle naked in the garden against the urging of all of them—her housekeeper, her cook, her husband so much older than herself and still, she adored him, truly. I know this. She adored the hands of him, the bony knees, his habit of reading, of clearing his throat before articulating a difficult position. She loved that often she could clap her own hands and lift the gloom in him. Hang it out to dry. Flap it in the wind, begone! where it fluttered up like so many starlings to roost elsewhere.