by Nancy Thayer
Restless, angry with herself, she rose, straightened her clothes, and went back downstairs. The guests were up and around now in the dining room, laughing at the long mahogany table, having coffee and a late breakfast. Now and then a car would start up with a roar and someone would leave, rolling down the long white-pebble driveway until it disappeared around a bend of evergreens.
No one was in the library now, but someone had made a fire that glowed and flared, warming the room. Catherine pulled her favorite old leather photograph albums from the shelf and curled up on a leather chair. The present faded as she lost herself in pictures of the past. Here was her grandfather, Andrew Matson Eliot, in a full-length beaver coat, top hat, and red mittens, waving at the camera from a group of friends, looking as if he were having more fun than any man had a right to have. He was wickedly handsome. Catherine had heard stories about him. She knew he’d been a cad and was probably responsible at least in part for her grandmother’s retreat from all others. Still, he always looked so exuberant. Catherine smiled every time she saw his face. She wished he’d lived long enough for her to know him.
Here were the pictures of Kathryn’s childhood home, the original Everly in England. Most of the photographs were blurry and curling with age, showing the house sprawling in a grand and formal dilapidation.
In contrast, the Boxworthy family, who now owned the British Everly, looked young, robust, infinitely attractive. Years ago, when Kathryn’s dissipated brother, Clifford, sold the estate to the Thorpes who then sold it to Dr. Boxworthy and his wife, Madeline Boxworthy had written to Kathryn Paxton Eliot. She wanted to revive the gardens and asked for any helpful advice Kathryn might have about how to go about it. This had resulted in a hearty correspondence between the two women, including eventually the arrival of photographs of the three Boxworthy children: splendid Ned, the eldest, and the sisters, Elizabeth and Hortense. Ned was Catherine’s age, the girls were a few years younger. They had always been Catherine’s dream family. They always looked so carefree, so jolly, as if caught in a bit of mischief. She wanted to be them. Or at least, someday, she wanted to meet them.
Suddenly restless, Catherine laid the albums aside and went off to search for her grandmother. Perhaps Kathryn would be in a sociable mood.
Catherine found her grandmother in the conservatory. This was a room Catherine was not fond of, for she found the plants that wintered here—the monstera and philodendron, schefflera and dracaena, the rubber plants and all the hanging plants whose tendrils brushed against her face or caught in her hair—slightly menacing, with their gnarled woody stems and far-reaching, beseeching leaves. Her grandmother’s joy was an enormous jade tree, as fat and glossy in its huge Chinese pot as a Buddha. She had been growing the thing for years.
Kathryn was watering her African violets. First she stuck her finger under each fuzzy leaf, testing the moistness of the dirt, her lips moving as she mumbled instructions about the plants to herself. At sixty-three she was still as ethereal in her beauty as an angel, and just about as approachable.
Every person in her family was a mystery to Catherine. Because her father favored daring, incorrigible Shelly, and her mother doted on baby-sweet beautiful Ann, the only living adult left to Catherine was her grandmother. She had after all been named after her.
But Kathryn was the most mysterious of all. At least Marjorie made it clear that Catherine was the embarrassment and Ann the embellishment of her life. Obviously Drew would feel closer to his male child. But Kathryn was an ambiguous woman, cool and vague, who made only one thing clear: that she preferred the company of flowers to that of people.
Catherine knew from the albums and newspaper clippings in the Everly library that her grandmother had been exquisitely beautiful as a young woman, with a delicate figure, blue eyes, blond hair, and serene, elegant manners. It was no wonder that Andrew Matson Eliot, a brash egotistical New York journalist, fell in love with her during World War I and brought her home to live with him. It was no wonder she fell in love with him—he was handsome, charismatic, infinitely charming. But he loved society and could never get enough of people, while his wife found people exhausting and became increasingly obsessed with her plants and gardens. Before the Depression—and before their divorce—he had bought her this house and the surrounding six acres. The rest of her life she had spent transforming the place into her garden, which was really several different sorts of gardens: an open meadow, which she had sprinkled with wildflowers and bulbs, the forest, the formal garden with its paths and fountains and steps down to the lily pond, the kitchen garden, the cutting garden. Kathryn had stopped pining for her English country home. She had been happy at this Everly—so happy that she hadn’t needed anything or anyone else.
Kathryn seldom left Everly, but she always kept it open to members of her family. Catherine knew that if she chose, she could just move into the big old house. Her grandmother’s maid, Clara, would feed her and shelter her, and her grandmother would never ask when she was planning to leave or why she didn’t go to college or do something with her life. She could disappear from life here.
But the last thing in the world Catherine wanted to do was to disappear.
“Good afternoon, Cathy,” her grandmother said now, and presented a powdery white cheek for a kiss.
“I was in the library. Looking at the albums. I thought you might—”
“Look,” her grandmother said as if Catherine had not been speaking. Kathryn indicated with their eyes what Catherine should see.
Through the open conservatory doorway, Catherine and her grandmother watched as a lady, one of their guests, pointed up at the mistletoe which was tied by a red ribbon to the living room chandelier. A man smiled, took the woman in his arms, and kissed her.
“Mistletoe,” Kathryn began.
Catherine knew at once by the tone of her grandmother’s voice that the older woman was about to launch into one of her lecturing spells. Sometimes she and Shelly and Ann enjoyed these, for their grandmother was full of unusual and often amusing information. The grandchildren had gone into giggling fits at the news that dandelion had powerful diuretic qualities and was known in Europe as “pissen-lit,” or piss-a-bed or pittle-bed.
But often Kathryn’s speeches about her beloved flowers were rambling and incomprehensible, full of Latin and scientific terms. Today, because Catherine was bored, and because she needed someone in her family to pay attention to her, she tried to look interested.
“We treat it so frivolously,” Kathryn said. “Yet mistletoe has a fascinating history. It used to be thought sacred; it used to be worshiped!”
Kathryn sat down on her enormous high-backed wicker chair, which rose above her and around like a throne. Catherine sank onto a wicker stool.
“Mistletoe is a parasite, you know. It has no roots. Think of that. No roots. Then how does it grow? It belongs to Santalales, the sandalwood order of flowering plants who live off of other plants. In primitive times all these plants were considered sacred because of their ability to survive without roots.
“You see, mistletoe grows best in oak trees, which have long been considered sacred. In the winter, when the oak tree leaves have fallen, the mistletoe remains fresh and green. So mistletoe, which does not grow in the ground, but appears high in the sky, came to mean in many cultures ‘life everlasting.’ There are numerous superstitions about it, and it used to be thought the cure for all sorts of diseases.”
Suddenly the older woman turned and looked directly at Catherine with her pale, magic blue eyes.
“Something to ponder, don’t you think? That a living thing without roots, without a home, without nurturing and care, can still flourish, and more than flourish, thrive, and be useful, and even magical. Even if the host on which it begins has turned brown and hopeless, the mistletoe remains green and living. It can move on.”
The old woman shifted on her wicker chair. She shook her head and rubbed her arthritic hands, as if smoothing the bones. “My back hurts. You’re my f
avorite grandchild, Catherine. Sometimes I think you’re the only one in my family who has any understanding of how important flowers and plants really are. But I must excuse myself. I must go lie down. I’m not as young as I once was. No, no, don’t get up. I can manage to get my old body to my room alone.”
Catherine watched as her grandmother, erect as always, but painfully erect, the straight carriage purchased by pain, rose and walked over the flagstones and out of the conservatory. She remained on her wicker stool, looking around her at the plants growing or hanging, green stalagmites or stalactites; it was as if she were inside a breathing, humid cave. She thought that her grandmother was probably a little crazy, but was she crazy to think her grandmother had been trying to tell her something? Did her grandmother think that she, Catherine, was a parasite on a dying tree? Did her grandmother see her own son so clearly?
Through the open French doors, Catherine could see the mistletoe hanging from the doorway. She crossed to it and, standing on tiptoe, reached up her arms and broke off a sprig. She didn’t want to stick it in her hair—someone might think she wanted to be kissed—so she found a pin and fastened it on her sweater, just over her heart.
Chapter 2
New York, 1961
When Catherine returned to Miss Brill’s after Christmas break, she told Leslie about her parents’ threats.
“They’re bluffing,” Leslie said flatly.
But the year unrolled into spring and early summer, and Catherine became the first Miss Brill’s graduate to have “Unknown” printed in the spot in the school newspaper where other students had printed the name of the college they’d attend. Catherine received two warning letters and one warning phone call from her parents, then nothing. Silence. Over spring break in April, her parents took Shelly and Ann to Bermuda but didn’t even contact Catherine about their plans. It was as if, for them, she’d stopped existing.
Luckily she was invited to Kimberly Weyland’s home for some of the two-week vacation. The last few days of spring break she spent at Everly. Her grandmother was engrossed in the gardens already and was glad to have Catherine’s help. Catherine worked at Kathryn’s side, pruning the forsythia and other flowering shrubs, mulching around the rhododendrons, azaleas, and mountain laurel, preparing the ground for the cutting gardens, sowing the cornflower, sweet alyssum, larkspur, snapdragon, poppy, and sweet pea seeds. She enjoyed the physical, repetitive, meticulous work, the sun warm on her back, the air fragrant with lilac and hyacinth blooms, the only sounds birdsong or the click clack of clippers and shears.
One night as she sat dining with her grandmother, she said shyly, “I like working here, Grandmother. Perhaps you should hire me as one of your gardeners.”
Kathryn contemplated this suggestion, then shook her head. “I don’t think so, dear. It wouldn’t be good for my gardens or for you. You’re too inexperienced. And you’re too young to spend your life shut away out here.”
Catherine was never certain just how far she could go with her grandmother into discussions of real life. “I guess you know I’m not going to college. Mother and Father have said I’m completely on my own when I graduate from Miss Brill’s.”
“Yes. I know. They told me.”
Catherine waited for words of sympathy, wisdom, advice. Kathryn was silent. The whole room was silent except for the clink of Catherine’s silver fork against the china plate.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Grandmother.” She was ashamed of the slight quaver in her voice. Kathryn had always disdained sniveling.
“No. Of course you don’t. But it will come to you, Catherine.” She looked directly at Catherine, her gaze intense, the blue as fiery as the dancing tip of a flame. “It will come to you.”
Catherine’s breath caught in her throat. Entranced, she waited.
Kathryn looked away. The moment passed. Pushing back her chair, Kathryn rose. “Shall we take our coffee in the den? There’s a nature show on PBS I don’t want to miss.”
Catherine went back to Miss Brill’s for the final two months of the term in even more of a fog than before. Now the season was heady with celebration and romance; every weekend there was a party or a dance to attend. Catherine had plenty of dates, but there was no one boy she loved; she thought if there had been, she would have married him, simply to have something definite to do with her life. It was not too late, the school counselor advised her, even now, to apply to a college. But Catherine held firm. That was not what she wanted.
Her family did not attended her graduation ceremony because they were embarrassed by her. They sent no graduation present. Marjorie called to tell Catherine that as soon as she moved out from her dorm, she was to stop by the Park Avenue apartment to collect her belongings.
“Do you know where you’ll be living?” Marjorie asked.
“Not yet,” Catherine said.
“You are an obstinate little fool,” Marjorie told her.
“I know,” Catherine agreed.
As she packed in her dorm room, she repeated her grandmother’s words like a charm. “It will come to you.”
Leslie’s father flew all the way from Japan to watch his only child graduate. Afterward he drove Leslie and Catherine into New York, then took them for a celebratory dinner at the Rainbow Room. An odd, remote, utterly civilized man, Mr. Dunham remained a puzzle to Catherine. She’d met him many times. He was polite, but vague. “He’s always off in the Orient, one way or another,” Leslie said of him fondly, and it was true that when he wasn’t actually in the East on his extended buying trips, he was remembering the Orient or planning his next trip there. But at their graduation dinner Mr. Dunham urged the girls to order whatever they wanted and made an obvious effort to take part in their conversation, for the one and only thing he loved more than the Orient was his daughter.
“Daddy,” Leslie said over their baked Alaska, “Catherine’s parents have sort of kicked her out since she refuses to go to college. So! I thought since I’m going to be in Paris for a few years, Catherine should stay at our place.”
Catherine was so surprised, she nearly dropped her fork. Leslie hadn’t said a word about this to her.
Mr. Dunham took a sip of wine. “Leslie, dear, I’m not sure—”
“It would actually be a great help to us, Dad!” Leslie interrupted her father in her enthusiasm. “You know our housekeeper wants to visit her son in Florida when we’re not there, and you’ve said you don’t like leaving the apartment empty. You’re always traveling. I’ll be in Paris. It makes perfect sense for Catherine to live in my rooms!”
Mr. Dunham smiled at his daughter. “Well …”
“Come on, Dad!” Leslie cajoled, stroking his hand. “Please?”
“All right. Yes. Of course. Catherine, please feel free to live at our place.”
Leslie grinned triumphantly across the table at Catherine, then followed up her grin with a swift sharp conspiratorial kick on Catherine’s shin. So easily, it was settled. It had come to her! Catherine thought, smiling.
The day after her graduation, Catherine stepped off the elevator into a small marble-floored foyer. She knocked on the door to Leslie’s apartment.
Immediately the door opened and there was Leslie, hugging Catherine, grabbing at her suitcases, and pulling her inside all at once.
“Come in, come in! You’re really here! This is wonderful! You look awful. Was it awful?”
Catherine shrugged. “Not really. I mean, no one was home when I went to collect my things. They’re all on the Vineyard. I felt a bit odd, but all the drama was over long ago.”
“Good! God, they’re such creeps. Let’s take your stuff to your room. Dad flew back to Japan yesterday.”
Catherine followed Leslie down the long hallway. It was unusually hot for early June, but Catherine was strangely chilled. Walking down the windowless hallway, she shivered. For a few days now everything had seemed a little unreal, or rather she had seemed a little unreal. After the extreme routine and protection of boarding schoo
l, the knowledge that she was out on her own was stunning. Things were moving so fast, she felt dizzy.
This was her new home. She’d been here often before, visiting Leslie, but now she looked at it with a different eye. Just off East Eighty-sixth, the apartment was huge, elegant, even glamorous, full of space and light and Oriental antiques. Leslie’s father’s rooms were at the opposite end. Mrs. Venito’s quarters were off the kitchen. Leslie’s end of the apartment had a suite of rooms, a bedroom and bath, and a large sunny room that had been her studio but that Catherine decided as she looked around she’d make into her private living room so she wouldn’t muck up the Dunhams’ elaborately pristine living room. She’d use the kitchen to cook her own meals.
“There!” Leslie said, plunking down Catherine’s suitcases. “Time for lunch. Oh, Catherine, our last lunch together for who knows how long! I can’t wait to get on that plane to Paris!”
Dutifully Catherine tagged along after Leslie that day, trying not to be a bore to her generous, spirited friend. She’d never envied Leslie more. Leslie was full of plans, hope, movement, color. In contrast, Catherine felt as white and paralyzed as a person in a coma.
The next morning Catherine went down to the street with Leslie to see her into the taxi that would drive her to the airport and her flight to Paris. Leslie was wearing huge hoop earrings and a dress that looked like an ensemble of flowing black rags. On Leslie the outfit looked artistic, but Catherine knew that if she put on anything like that, people would expect her to tell their fortunes. Leslie was Catherine’s age, only eighteen. How had Leslie found her style so soon, her place in life? How would Catherine ever find hers?
The girls kissed and hugged good-bye. Catherine forced herself to keep smiling until Leslie’s taxi had disappeared from sight. Then she let her smile fade. Her shoulders drooped. She went back into Leslie’s apartment, back down the long hallway to her rooms, and lay down on the bed. She didn’t move. She felt as flat and lifeless as a paper doll.
