The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

She hadn’t intended to fall in love with a priest. Not seriously. In the early days of their friendship, with its exhilarating and argumentative chatter, Dennis claimed that it was only talk that he was after. “I’m not courting you, you know.”

  “I know that,” Sara said. “You’re a priest.” Dennis was the purest person she had ever met. She was fascinated by his disregard for her charms; the more he seemed immune, the more she could not stop herself from trolling for his desire.

  “I’ve never talked with a Jewish woman,” Dennis said one day. They were eating lunch in Cambridge, in a cellar café with yellow walls.

  “And how do you find us?” Before he could answer she added, “Actually, I’m not sure I’m representative.”

  “Do you think I am?” he countered. “Representative, I mean. Do you suppose we’re all the same?”

  “Of course not,” Sara said. “But my Jewish friends complain that my particular religious sect is not even Jewish: ‘Too many gods,’ they say, ‘and only one adherent.’ ”

  Sara’s book group was reading Ezekiel––wheels and eyes and flames, lapis lazuli and gold, likenesses and appearances. The group, all women, mostly Jewish, found her lovable but suspected that she was hallucinatory, for she claimed she saw gods everywhere: She said she was often “bumping up against the divine.” Her friends didn’t really know what to make of it. Though of Jewish descent, she seemed to them like some nondenominational mystic, some sort of rogue or ronin, who, through no virtue of her own, was born with a particular sensitivity, the way others might show from earliest childhood musical or mathematical brilliance.

  Explaining herself to Dennis, Sara told him that in contrast to his god or the god of the Hebrews, all of her deities were stunningly minor: God of the Doorknob, she confessed, God of the Hinge, God of the Ball Bearing or the Missing Jacket Button.

  “Oh,” he said. “Now I can place you. The ancient Romans had a goddess of the hinge, named Cardea. Forculus was their god of the doorpost, and Limentinus the god of the threshold. I don’t know if they had gods of the doorknob or the missing button, but they had so many small household deities that they could have. How does it feel to be an ancient Roman?”

  Sara smiled. “It makes the world sort of…glow.”

  How had Sara reconciled such consorting and holy mischief with her work as a research biologist? For one thing, she would never mention these small gods to her scientific colleagues. For another, the bio labs at Harvard were full of closet theists of one kind or another. Some gave public sermons at the morning prayers in the chapel of Memorial Church. Others invoked the notion of “non-overlapping magisteria.” Sara belonged to neither camp.

  Perhaps because of her odd connections with the divine, Sara was drawn to people who were ordained in the normal religions. Sometimes she would work in the Divinity School library, and take her meals in what she called the Divine Café. Perhaps, when she first encountered Dennis Lombroso there, she had, on some unconscious level, been hunting for holy men.

  Dennis had not been hunting for anyone. After his studies at Boston College and Loyola, he was simply taking a class in anthropology at Harvard at night, to help him with some of his summer projects in Africa.

  Finally Dennis started to telephone Sara in the evenings. She pretended to be unaware but she could feel the heat rising. When they met for coffee in Cambridge he brought her things from his garden: tulips wrapped in newspaper, bunches of green coriander and thyme. She could foretell how their story would go and was anxious about his eventual fall. All the gods in the world, large or small, were no match for the human heart.

  * * *

  —

  SARA HAD SPENT the night before the garden party at her parents’ house. It had been a rattled night. Whenever the storm was quiet the cries of forest animals would cut through the darkness, one pair right below her window sounding like a snake fighting with a teakettle. When finally she slept she dreamed she was a very tall plant; she didn’t fit completely in the bed, something to do with her roots or her fronds.

  Now, up on the roof, Sara was surveying everything, starting with her mother’s garden spread out below her. Normally there would be a sweet primness on this first day of June, but because of the unusually warm weather it was displaying all the erotic wildness of late July, raucous in parts, lush and green. She took in several deep breaths. She wasn’t sure what her family would make of Dennis. She herself didn’t know what to make of him: In between moments of deciding she should leave him, she longed for him. He was at the other end of each of her thoughts. Pluck any strand in the universe and it would be made of the threads that linked him to her. Within minutes he would be here at the house. This made time quiver with aboutness.

  They had both known their relationship was to be without future, offspring, or consequence. The one time she had dared ask Dennis about their future he had told her that the only way he could see himself leaving the Church was feet first. Perhaps they would break up tonight. She shouldn’t have invited him, didn’t know why she had listened to her brother, Adam. Maybe it was time that the whole thing ended.

  Dennis’s messages from the past few days now seemed dark and full of portents. Early this morning Sara had phoned him knowing that his voice would soothe her after the turbulence of the night. Which it did, except that just before he hung up he happened to utter that hackneyed phrase so full of menace, “We have to talk.” She knew that this phrase was anti-performative: It always meant there would be no more talking, no more of the whispers and exultations of lovers.

  “We are talking,” she replied, stunned. “Hi.”

  “You know what I mean,” Dennis said. “Face-to-face.”

  “Oh,” she said. She looked at the phone as though she were holding a small animal with vicious teeth, not quite dead. She dropped it onto her bed without hanging up and left the room. Dennis had beaten her to the breakup. Had it been a race, then?

  * * *

  —

  “NOT BESIDE STRANGERS,” Pindar murmured.

  But Celia had left the garden.

  * * *

  —

  BORSUK THE GARDENER was carrying chairs from the dining room to the long table in the garden. “Last up from the table in this world,” he called out to Chhaya, the cook, “first at the banquet in the next.” As he positioned the chairs, he thought of how they would ruin the lawn by the end of the party. Luckily last night’s electrical storm had brought no rain with it. He went to the garage and loaded folding chairs into his wheelbarrow. Mrs. Celia had borrowed them from her university.

  Borsuk’s history varied each time it was told, and the Cohens had given up trying to piece together the man’s true story. He was Polish; that much seemed sure. Perhaps he really was, as he sometimes claimed, a distant relative of Celia’s family. When Pindar had first met him, while at a conference in Poland, Borsuk had been the curator of a small museum in Krakow, but he soon lost favor with the Communist authorities. Then came difficult times, he said, after which he had worked as a waiter and finally had no job at all. Now that Pindar and Celia had sponsored him to come to the States, he worked as their gardener and he said that he was as close to being happy as he could imagine. He lived in an apartment over the garage, where he filled his notebooks with Polish writings in the evenings. When they asked him what he was writing about, he would smile and say, “Just writings. You know. Just things.” When they asked about his family he shook his head and murmured, “Gone.”

  * * *

  —

  LEAH COHEN WALKED in the garden that had once been hers and now belonged to her son, Pindar, and his wife. The long table was finally all set for the dinner party. Under the birch trees she saw Celia talking to young Eliza, who was in tears. The girl stood on the grass in her lime-green socks, and something about the way she stood pierced the old woman and made her blush.

  Leah, at ninety-
one, felt that she had not changed much in the past decade. Her knees worked sweetly, if a bit slowly, as did her hips. Her fingers were agile and she could knit or sew if she wanted, which she didn’t. With the years her face had lengthened, but she was pleased that her ears had remained small, not turning into the flaps that had appeared on some of her friends. Her nose had always been a mighty thing; now it was like the beak of an eagle. Her lips were as full and dark as ever, though her mane, which she still wore loosely on top of her head, was almost pure white.

  When she had been in her forties Leah had hoped to become thin as a lily stalk, so thin and light that she could swerve out of the path of the darts that the gods were so fond of flinging down. During the next half century she never achieved slightness; instead she turned columnar, like an old oak, a bit oxlike through the middle but tall and unstooped. Long walks each day were what kept her old bones alive. She wore running shoes even today, with her long purple dress. They were made of black leather and no one was allowed to notice them.

  Stopping beside the hollyhocks, Leah paused. Heavens! she thought. Life! The world is swirling with possibilities, a universe of things that we can touch with our infinite fingertips, see! She felt as though she were inside the cat’s-eye marble that she had wrapped up to give to Adam as a wedding present. Look! Put your fingers out in the air, like this. Feel it? Feel the swirling? Sometimes we can condense them like mist, the possibilities, and hold them in cupped hands. Here, catch! But who was she silently talking to? She turned back to gaze at the two women, Celia comforting Eliza.

  Leah couldn’t place the appearance of the weeping girl’s bare arms and stocking feet, or the feeling they awoke in her. As old as the century, her world was populated by visions—echoes of old configurations—and she was bewildered and embarrassed when she could not connect these echoes with a definite time and place. She felt now as though she had seen this young bride somewhere else, in the buoyant light of some earlier summer. Was it in Oxford, where Leah had grown up? Or later, in Paris, between the wars? Watching Eliza talk to Celia, Leah had that sharp intake of breath that comes when one forgets to guard against desire, when the heart itself seems to gasp for air.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT WAS I thinking?” Eliza groaned to her future mother-in-law. She had drunk too much for early afternoon.

  “Ah,” replied Celia.

  Eliza put her forehead against the tree. “Why didn’t you force us to elope?” she asked. “My mother has had fits all morning—about the dress, about my refusing to have any bridesmaids. Good Lord. Bridesmaids.”

  “Well, exactly,” Celia said, trying to appear nonjudgmental. Which was hard, for she had, in fact, begged Adam and Eliza to run off without telling her, if they insisted on marriage. Do it all privately, my loves, she had told them. Do it somewhere else. You will be so much happier.

  “She makes it all loom so,” Eliza went on. “She thinks it’s her drama. She knows I’m allergic to all her roses. But she burst into tears at the bouquet I made: alfalfa, clover, timothy, and corn. Oh look, another bat. Man’s dusk is bat’s dawning. It’s much too early for bats. It’s nowhere near dusk. What is that little guy doing?”

  A car door slammed in the distance. Eliza flinched.

  “Dearest,” said Celia. “Be quick. Get yourself away and steal some minutes alone. Go up to the pond. I’ll deal with your parents, everyone.” She reached up and brushed Eliza’s pale hair back from her face, then stepped back and looked at the pretty girl in her cranberry-colored dress. “You can’t go there in socks. Don’t you want some shoes?”

  Eliza shook her head. She pulled off one green sock at a time, stuffing them into her small beaded purse, which had been given to her by her mother for this occasion. Then she hugged the bosomy Celia, mother of the man she loved and keeper of this strange household with all its sweet nights, its unfamiliar words and mysteries and interesting messes.

  * * *

  —

  WITH HIS HANDS in his pockets, Pindar ambled in the direction of the stone wall, trailing smoke. The Solomon’s seal, which should have been in bloom, had already gone by. He would use Jacob’s ladder, then. It was ahead of itself. The whole summer was ahead of itself, with the full heat of August on this first day of June. Voices drifted in from the driveway. Barlows. What did they all talk about at home, around the dinner table? Point of order, point of order? Eliza’s father, Stephen Barlow, looked like someone waiting for a judgeship. He looked as though he always had a gavel hidden behind his back. Toc toc. Would he bring the gavel to the dinner table, along with a stack of thick books with identical bindings, to search for precedents? Toc toc. Turnips overruled. Where’s my soup?

  At their first meeting, Stephen Barlow had asked Pindar if there was something wrong with Adam that he had become a poet—implying that poetry was not a calling but a failure of will or a malady of the soul. Laughing to mask the earnestness of his question, Barlow asked, “Was he…troubled as a child?” He was full of visible concern, as though discussing some obscure neurological syndrome with embarrassing symptoms. Pindar saw that poems, with their telegraphic electricity, their iridescent ambiguity, seemed to Stephen Barlow like ghosts of eels, shadows of bubbles. Pindar had not been able to reply to the question about Adam’s childhood. Instead he had stood there, sucking his pipe, silent as a stroke victim, staring straight ahead until Celia darted over to save him, breaking into their stalled conversation. Celia often kept her antennae tuned to Pindar’s talk as well as her own.

  How could Eliza in her wine-colored dress and light green socks have sprung from the Barlow clan? Pindar wondered. Surely she had been adopted. But then, what about her twin, Harry, with his angular cheekbones and those blue-black ringlets? He seemed like a sweet boy. Perhaps both Eliza and Harry had been changelings, and a pair of infant lawyers, twins, had ended up residing in a different family altogether.

  By the wall Pindar opened his penknife and cut several stalks of Jacob’s ladder. He liked the thought of Harry Barlow as minister. If one had to get married, and if the ceremony had to be Christian, which the Barlows took for granted though Pindar preferred the canopy and smashed wineglass of his own tribe, then someone who had been defrocked the way Harry Barlow had was just the thing. Not defrocked exactly, but expelled from seminary. Pindar sucked sharply on his pipe, then exhaled, surrounding himself with smoke. Harry Barlow had broken into the caged book section of the Divinity School library late one night. It wasn’t clear what he’d been looking for, but he didn’t find it, only art books containing nudes. Not even pornography. No ideas, simply bodies. What a fuss the librarians had made when they found him lying there in the morning, asleep among the naked art. But what kind of a school would still keep books in a cage? Harry was well out of it.

  Of course the boy had some sort of license now. It would all be perfectly legal. Old Judge Thick-Books would have seen to that.

  * * *

  —

  THE DOME OF coolness above the pond throbs with croaking. Dragonflies and damselflies pierce the slanting light that burnishes the surface of the water with fire. At the edges frogs wait to spring.

  * * *

  —

  ELIZA HELD THE skirt of her dress as she stepped into the water. Instead of heaving and railing she ought to be thinking. Consider, for example, the ostrich and the emu; were they, metabolically speaking, more like horses than birds? There was so much she didn’t know. She was still surprised that she had gotten into vet school for the coming fall semester. She would commute from Wellesley to North Grafton. Yesterday she had been wondering about deer and their antlers: Somebody must understand, but she did not, how the antlers knew, each successive year, that they must grow more points or branches than the previous year, the old pair having been shed after the rutting season. Was it some sort of hormone, which didn’t get broken down but just accumulated season after season in t
he maturing stag? All she knew about antlers was that the blood supply was in the velvet. It was said that squirrels ate fallen antlers for the calcium and other minerals. That was why you didn’t find them all over the place in these Brookline woods. Probably tasted a little salty, crunchy like the bones of quail. Perhaps she should get her mother to serve platters of thin-sliced antlers at the wedding lunch tomorrow, as hors d’oeuvres. If antlers were nutritious, perhaps horn was beneficial after all, rhinoceros horn, for example. Except that horn was keratin—like toenails, not bone—like skull. But first came tomorrow. Tomorrow she would be parading under her mother’s arbor, exhibiting Adam to her parents’ friends, making their private intimacies public, trying not to sneeze.

  Pindar’s dog came back from hunting squirrels in the woods and barked at Eliza: Up to your knees in the water? Want company? Any fish?

  “You stay there,” Eliza said. “I’ll be right out.”

  The animal sat, ardent, waiting.

  * * *

  —

  FROM THE ROOF Sara watched Dennis walk into the garden. She knew this evening was not hers, that she should not be thinking about herself. Nothing would get resolved; she wanted to weep—for the complexity and the impossibility of it all. It was sad craziness, her love for this man. Everything felt unsafe, even her place on the roof. In spite of everything, she shuddered with desire at seeing him down there below her, unaware that she was watching him. She had to put her hands down for balance. The hard sun-warmed slates grounded her but she was still so high that her heart kept pounding. She wanted to call out to him but decided to keep silent to prolong the moment—that state of in-betweenness before everything else had to commence.

  Dennis was wearing a light-colored suit that Sara had never seen. He carried a small wrapped package. As he went along the path he stopped to look at the plants. He paused by the kitchen plot to pick leaves from the aromatic herbs and rub them in his hands. He lingered among the flower beds, bending to smell or to touch the petals. When he got to the statue hidden by the yew bushes he laughed, then backed off to see it from a bit farther away. He shifted his head from side to side, then, imitating the figure, he lifted his hands to play an imaginary flute and raised one knee in a Bacchic dance.