The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  Sterling stared out to the road. I thought of Randall at his mother’s grave. How he had finally turned and shrugged, signaling for us to move on. “Alas, poor Yorick,” he said, “I knew him well.”

  8

  The automobile appeared out of nowhere, the kind you don’t see anymore but one that was then considered quite grand: its running board and chrome bumper shined as if with spit. It caught the noon sun as it turned down the long drive—a flash of silver— then bumped along, a panic of dust in its wake. Sterling slowly stood, his two big hands pushed against the faded rose cushions for leverage, then balance. The automobile came to a sudden stop, everything quick about it. Someone who looked like a policeman scurried out of the driver’s side and ran around to open the passenger’s door. I had followed Sterling’s lead and stood. Now I watched as a stout woman emerged from behind the trunk, shaking dust from her dress. Ruby, though at the time I had no idea. She looked out toward us, raising a hand to shade her eyes. I saw an older woman with blue-black hair and high color. Of course, if I had known this was Ruby I might have watched her differently; I might have stared. But to me she was simply a pretty stranger walking briskly toward us, her shading hand now extended.

  “Sterling!” she said.

  “Ruby,” he said, his voice younger, or steadier. I’m sure I must have startled at the name.

  Sterling limped forward to greet her and they embraced in the way of old movies, of past times, of days when people who had once loved waited years between encounters.

  “This is Tom,” she said, introducing the man in the uniform. “He drives for me. They won’t let me behind the wheel. It’s a tremendous conspiracy because I’m certainly fine but they say I’m wound too tight to stay on the road.”

  Ruby looked at me and then back at Sterling. “Oh,” said Sterling. “This is Patricia’s daughter. She was a great friend of Randall’s.”

  “You knew Randall,” she said. She held out her hand in a way that made me unsure whether to shake it, or to curtsy and kiss it; she was that kind of woman. “I’m his aunt. Ruby.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, opting to do neither but remaining like an idiot with my hands at my sides, amazed to be there in front of her. Ruby turned away and brushed past the two of us. Tom had disappeared back inside the automobile.

  “Exactly the way I remember,” she said, standing before the sofa, arms crossed like someone examining a particularly swaybacked mare. “A bit worse for wear but I think I can match the original material. There’s that store on Seventh Avenue that specializes.”

  She turned back to us; we stood watching, transfixed by the storm of her, the efficiency. “Darling!” she said. “Do you remember when she found the set? You would have thought it was—” Here she broke off, as if suddenly remembering something. She sank to the sofa as Sterling limped over to sit beside her. “And Randall, too?” she said. Sterling nodded and took Ruby’s hand to stroke. “Better Jeannie never lived to hear,” she said. “It would have killed her. Torn her heart in two, baby,” Ruby said, and I remember, even then, thinking how strange the word baby sounded. Not an endearment I would ever have heard between my parents, or between the parents of anyone I knew. It was urban. Exotic and smoky and entirely out of place across from cornfields. But then I already knew Ruby was other.

  • • •

  She had come from New York City, where she once worked as a hat designer. In fact, those were Ruby’s creations I had seen Mother admiring on some of the younger farm women. She had quite a reputation in New York, her name frequently in the papers before the war when she would make a yearly trip across the Atlantic on the Normandy or the Queen Mary, there to see the latest fashions, to bring them back to New York City society. She had dated Harpo Marx, it was rumored, though she never married. When I met her she must have been in her late fifties. She wore rings on every finger, and a short strand of pearls she told me she had bought with her first paycheck, back when she was an apprentice in a milliner’s shop. I didn’t know what a milliner was and I pictured it as having something to do with a mill, poor Ruby standing in an apron grinding wheat into flour, refusing to remove her short strand of pearls.

  She stayed for lunch. She didn’t have much time. She had driven down from New York the night before and had spent the evening with friends in Wilmington at the DuPont, she said. She had to get back before the next day. She had come for the sofa, apparently having written to Uncle Sterling about this beforehand. Mother remained gracious, though there was a tinge of something, irony, I suppose—did she, too, know?—in the questions she posed to her, as if she understood that some of Ruby’s answers were embellished for the sake of the girls, certainly for the sake of Betty, who hung on Ruby’s words as if they were the very pearls from around her neck.

  Ruby glowed with the attention. Her hair really was glorious, brushed to a sheen and pulled back in a French twist, and blue eyes the color of Randall’s. She made a party of the lunch, gesturing for Tom to bring in from the car what she had brought from a deli catessen in Wilmington: sliced meats and deviled eggs and pastries we hadn’t seen since before the war. She had suggested we have a picnic on the dining room floor, since not a stick of furniture remained, and even Sterling had gone along. We sat, legs crossed, a tablecloth spread out beneath us and the food piled in the center.

  “When I heard the news that Sterling was going to sell this old house and all the furniture I had to come,” she said, winking over at me. “I knew he wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about that sofa and it had been Jeannie’s great love.” Here she paused. “After Sterling, of course. And darling Randall.”

  She looked away quickly and bit into something. The silence, or the presence of the silence, weighed us down. It was oddly corporeal, as if at that moment darling Randall had entered the room and now sat on the windowsill watching.

  “Remember his hair?” Ruby said, turning back to us, to Sterling, actually. He might have flinched; he might have steadily looked back at her. “The day he was born I thought the doctor would faint dead away. He said he had never seen such a full head. And not just the head! But down the back. I thought he would faint dead away.”

  Mother cleared her throat. “You were visiting?”

  “Pardon me?” Ruby said.

  “Were you visiting then?”

  Ruby and I both looked to Sterling.

  “Ruby had come to be with Jeannette,” Sterling said.

  “I see,” Mother said.

  “But what a beautiful boy he was,” Ruby said, still looking at Sterling. I had already turned back to her, trying to detect a flush, or some sort of clue that I, alone, might understand. But there was nothing; she fingered her pearls and seemed to be thinking of other things.

  • • •

  Tom drove as quickly down the drive as he had approached, the sofa strapped to the roof with twine and leather belts. Ruby may have waved from the window, or it might have been the tree reflections on the brightly polished glass. The two of them disappeared eventually in a cloud of dust, Mother, Daddy, Betty, and I standing near the front door waving. The whole encounter had the feel of theater, with Ruby slashing the backdrop and stepping in, displacing the rest of us and then, too quickly, leaving the scene, stepping out, stitching up the slash to a point where it was almost perfect— the magician, the seamstress—so that indeed looking closely you might never see the narrow seam through the clouds, the oaks, the long dusty drive, the fields across the way where the young boys and older men who had earlier thronged the front yard now drove their horses, pulling plows that churned the ground black.

  • • •

  Daddy said it was close to the time we should head back to the Dew Drop Inn. It had been a long day. Mother wanted to stay a while with Sterling, though we did not see him—the dining room empty, cleared of the tablecloth, the picnic basket. Even the presence of the silence had left, as if Randall, with everyone gone, had walked out himself. Perhaps it was thinking this that made me realize where
Sterling must have been. I snuck away and ran through the Gallery of Maps, up the short maid’s ascent to the narrow staircase, turning sideways, groping in the dark but still hurrying and finally pushing through the swing door into the longer hallway that led to Randall’s room. His door was closed but I paid no attention. I pulled it open and stepped in.

  Sterling sat in a corner of the window seat, looking out. Perhaps he had watched Ruby’s leaving from there.

  “I thought of something,” I said.

  Sterling turned to me. His bad leg, propped on the window seat, looked endearingly casual, as if he had attempted to arrange it into a position suggesting leisure. “Come on,” I said.

  I didn’t know whether Sterling would follow me or not, but I went. I heard his awkward clumping and tried to slow down, but I was filled with the dangerous excitement one feels right before telling a secret, when you know that the secret will amaze and astound the listener. I slipped down the narrow staircase, my breath quick, then waited at the entrance to the Gallery of Maps. He caught up, his own breathing labored. “This way,” I said, trailing my finger across the continents. When we got to Africa I stopped and located the thin line Randall had first showed me. I pushed with some force until the door gave—warped somewhat by the late spring humidity—and flattened to the floor. “This way,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  He went along. In retrospect I understand how extraordinary it was, or perhaps how profoundly Ruby’s visit must have affected him, for Sterling to follow so faithfully.

  The air felt as dank, as wet, as it had the last time. I crawled ahead in darkness, tempering my breath, willing it to slow: every sound made giant, the darkness so entirely complete that it cut off your hands, blinded you. I think now of those fish I have read about that live in caves deep at the bottom of the ocean. What are they called? I can’t remember. The point is the fish have gone invisible from that dark; are erased by it, their skin literally transparent.

  This is how it felt in there: somehow possible to disappear entirely. I crawled toward the center of the dank little room, or what I believed to be the center, my eyes adjusting, and found the matches and candle. I lit the candle, though it seemed shorter than I remembered, as if Randall had returned to the slaves’ hiding place before leaving for war and sat for a long time looking. Perhaps. I placed the candle back in its stand and scooted away to give Sterling a better view. The truth is the hiding place was minuscule, barely the size of a good closet. Sterling held the candle up to get a better look, and I leaned against one of the walls, my jumper sticky with perspiration and the humidity of the tiny space. Sterling seemed transformed by the room, no longer a person to make me afraid, simply a friend with whom I was sharing my secret.

  “There were five of them,” I said. “Ghosts. A mother and a father and three kids, I think. He said he’d see them not like ghosts you would imagine, the ones that rattle around, but like people who’d lived here all along. He said it was as if he were the ghost and the ghosts were the ones who belonged here. People who had always been here but ones he never paid much attention to before. Sometimes, he said, he’d walk into a room and they’d be there on chairs or standing together looking out the window and they’d turn to him and then right there, as he watched, they’d fade away like a photograph left in the sun too long.”

  The words spilled out, as if earlier, having lost my hands, my feet to the dark, I was nothing but words and hearing. Sterling looked back at me through the flame.

  “He said they never made a sound and he didn’t either, because they were about seeing, they were about being seen. I never knew what he meant by that, but I’m telling you exactly how he told me. He said the first time he saw them they were in the kitchen sitting around the big table and he thought, for a minute, that maybe your cook had some friends visiting. And then they faded. It was like a big picture book, he said. A big family album flipped from page to page. Every room he could remember where he had seen them and how they had been gathered. And he said he never learned their names but that was okay, because slaves’ names weren’t names at all just things they were called temporarily. Or called for no reason. Like emperors’ names, Roman emperors: Cassias, Caesar. He said everything about them was temporary and wrong and borrowed from somewhere else, and that made them more slaves than being slaves made them slaves. Also being bought and sold, he said. Like it wasn’t so much being bought, he said, it was the possibility of being sold. He read about it. And each time he’d see them they’d be a little stronger, stay a little longer before they faded and he couldn’t quite describe what they looked like but he said he thought the children were two boys and one girl and it was the girl he liked best because she was the one who sometimes smiled and she had two braids on either side of her face and she couldn’t have been more than seven, eight years old and wore a dress and sometimes smiled, oh I told you, and anyway, he said he knew he would find their hiding place, because he knew from reading that this was where the underground railroad went and that probably this family came up from Virginia or Louisiana and wasn’t it strange? That you could just go from here to there, from owned to free, from dead to alive, and he said one slave girl had walked all the way up from somewhere south and that she had escaped dogs and men with guns and other slaves who were sometimes cruel to those trying to escape and then she had reached somewhere north where she was free but she didn’t believe it and said she would keep walking and she kept walking and she kept walking until she was in Canada and still she wouldn’t believe it, that she was free, and she froze somewhere, still walking, and they wrote a song about her, something about how freedom is in the mind not the place and he said yes; he would have kept on walking, too.”

  I don’t know how long I went on. I think for some time.

  “He knew a lot,” Sterling said when I finally paused. Wax dripped on his old fingers. “He was a wise boy,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did he ever speak to you of her?” Sterling said. “Jeannette?”

  I rubbed my hands on the dank floor.

  “A little,” I lied.

  “He adored her. Was her shadow. He would follow her everywhere, grab her skirt in great fistfuls if she attempted to leave him.” Now I looked at Sterling through the candle flame, his shadow large behind him. From time to time his eyes watered, not with tears but with age, and he would bring up one paw of a hand to wipe them. It struck me how Sterling seemed to be disappearing as surely as that family—the mother and father with their worried expressions (this is how I pictured them), the little girl smiling, her dress torn from the dogs, brambles, and the two boys, their hair cropped short, their dark eyes serious, jostling some for space, twins in need of separate attention.

  “I meant to tell him before he left. I owed it to him, knowing what he was about to do. But I couldn’t find the courage. What idiocy,” he said, and I, stupidly, nodded.

  Sterling cleared his throat. “Ruby and I met in New York. I was lecturing at Columbia. Ruby was friendly with someone from one of my classes. She never had any intention of marrying. I tried to convince her. I told her we could stay in New York. She could work. But she insisted this was impossible.”

  From somewhere I thought I heard the sound of dripping water.

  “Jeannette offered to raise the child. She was more that way. Younger by some years. She had aspirations to enter the nursing profession, though they were vague aspirations. Not like Ruby’s. Ruby knew what she wanted from the beginning. Fame. Or her version of it.”

  I wanted to be in the attic with Betty, feet up, smoking cigarettes and staring at Frank Sinatra pinned in black-and-white just above the headboard. In retrospect, I realize I might have helped Sterling with his story, asked him questions or at least commented. From time to time he would pause. But in truth I don’t think he expected anything of me; in truth I believe he forgot my presence all together. He hardly knew me, of course; he spoke to Randall.

  “Ruby thought it best. She took a lea
ve of absence from her job at the milliner’s and returned to Virginia. I’m sure everyone suspected but in those days you never asked. I wrote to her from time to time and her return letters were cheerful. They were knitting a lopsided blanket, that type of thing. I prepared my lectures. I researched my Edwards biography at the New York Public Library on the weekends, and I suppose you could say I tried to put everything out of my mind. I’m not saying I’m proud of it, just that I’m not sure what I anticipated about the future. The present seemed complicated enough. Randall was born just before the end of my semester, and I asked one of the graduate students to proctor my exams and took the train there. I had never met Jeannette, but somewhere along the journey I decided that I would propose marriage. According to Ruby, Jeannette was a straightforward, clear-thinking girl. A good mother. And she was. A wonderful mother.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “She was a caring wife, and I appreciated her loyalty, to me, to Randall. If at times I looked at her and wished for Ruby, there were days, in the first years certainly, when Ruby was entirely forgotten and we were a real family. She wanted very much to leave Baltimore. The sisters had grown up in Virginia, in the country, and she wanted to live among farms. For the boy. And so I obliged her, as she had obliged me, and when she found this monstrous house and fell in love with it, I agreed. I believe only then did I begin to regret my decisions. I concentrated on my book and spent less time with the two of them. I continued my research, kept a room in Baltimore for the weekday evenings and returned home only on the weekends. More and more, I suppose, I resented the direction my life had taken. When Jeannette became ill, I hired nurses to care for her, and for Randall, and stayed in Baltimore, wishing them away. I suppose I believed her stronger than she was, more willful. She died so quickly. I wasn’t even by her side.”