The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  Pindar lifted the bottle of white wine and turned to Philippa Barlow. “More wine for you?”

  * * *

  —

  SARA COULD SEE that Stephen Barlow was arguing with her mother and that Amy Barlow was talking to her little boy, Liam. Taking a deep breath she leaned toward Dennis. “So here we are,” she said in a low, steady voice. “Face-to-face. Or side to side. Close enough. I think you and I have been thinking along the same lines.” She wasn’t going to let him be the first to break up; it was to be a tie.

  “Truly?”

  “Yes, I think we have converged.”

  “Oh. Then you don’t mind my bringing it up?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It will be vastly different,” he said. Then, smiling, “But I’m sure you can handle it.”

  Sara looked at him. Why was he getting happier while she was getting sadder? “Yes,” she said. “We both can.”

  “A huge change,” he said.

  “Change can be illuminating.”

  “And you’re quite ready?”

  “If you are.” She tried to sound jaunty. Why did he want to break up in front of all these people? Shouldn’t they be alone to do this? What if she fell apart?

  “You know how important it all is to me.” He looked down, grinning as he smoothed the tablecloth with his palms.

  “And to me, too.”

  “It will make us even closer, I think.”

  “Closer?” Sara croaked. Her throat had closed up and she could barely talk. Perhaps she was turning into a frog. That was what grief did to the unwary.

  “I know. It’s hard to think of us being any closer. We will see each other in a new light.”

  Across the table Celia had been noting the intensity of this conversation, though she couldn’t hear it because they were speaking so softly. To cut it short, she said, “Sara, sweetheart, could you help your father with the wine?”

  Sara gestured to Celia, gave a broad smile. How did her mother always know when somebody needed saving? Still smiling, she pulled back her chair. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said to Dennis. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  * * *

  —

  PHILIPPA HELD HER glass out to Pindar. “Thank you. Wonderfully cold, this white,” she said. “Of course, refrigerators are harassing me as well. I’m planning to design one with no depth at all, so nothing can get lost at the back.” What could she talk to this man about? She was running out of appliances. She didn’t dare ask him about books. He might answer. She didn’t feel she could talk to him about her work. She loved her work. Most of her clients were at a happy point in their lives where they had enough goods and dollars and now they wanted to give to those who would live after them. And they had enough money to pay for lawyers who could prevent, as much as possible, anything falling through the cracks between the outstretched hands of the generations.

  Occasionally Philippa’s clients showed up in a state of resentful exclusionism: “I don’t want James to get one red cent! I do not even want him mentioned in my will.” Or they would mention James but leave him a derisory sum. And she did have one adamant Boston dowager try to leave only a silver thimble to her least favorite daughter. Philippa had wondered at that point if she and the dowager had fallen into some sort of fairy tale, in which case the thimble would turn out to be worth more than the rest of the estate, which was to be divided among the rest of the heirs in a somewhat thoughtless manner. But such whimsy was rare, and mostly it was the joy of providing down the ladder, stretching from extreme old age to newborns and future-borns, these lines of forward-looking filiation.

  Recently Philippa had been wishing she knew some way to provide for the emotional well-being of successive generations—if only she could write that into her wills. She looked down the table: All her children looked miserable except for Harry and Eliza. What was wrong with them all? She didn’t know if it was true that William was leading a parallel life in Paris, but Olivia looked so sad that Philippa’s heart went out to her. Cam and Amy had been fine, though she hoped Amy was unaware of what Cam was presently doing at the table. And poor Barnes had withdrawn into himself—Philippa knew, without her granddaughter Harriet having told her, that Barnes and Larissa had been snarling at each other for weeks now. She wondered if this was partly her fault.

  Philippa had tried to do something about Larissa. The girl had flair and brains but no calling except for a certain elegance. Finding a suitable charity for Larissa to give her time and energies to had not been easy. The young woman wanted nothing to do with illness or death. Hospitals were out, even the gardens at Mount Auburn Cemetery were too linked to mortality. Adult literacy had not been a good match, for Larissa had felt no kinship to grown-ups who couldn’t read. In short, she needed a charity for people who didn’t need charity: the wealthy and/or the immortal. Or at least the youthful. The symphony and the opera didn’t quite fit, as she wasn’t at all fond of music, but the museums with their galas would be perfect. Philippa had been sure that Larissa would flourish in some gallant committee at the Museum of Fine Arts. That had worked, and Philippa had taken great pride, until Larissa had veered slightly and fallen in love with the extraordinary Japanese collection there. Now she wanted to become a docent. The training program was proving difficult to get into, even though she had majored in art history at Smith, but the girl was showing a sudden doggedness and had taken up studying Japanese. This was so unlike her, this intellectual interest and tenacity, that Philippa had begun to suspect the existence of a beautiful Japanese gentleman somewhere in the picture, which might account, she thought, for the rockiness of the marriage.

  * * *

  —

  WHY DID THE edge of clarity always present itself to him at such muddled times? Pindar wondered. He was reminded of the strange feeling he had on waking from his nap as the dark-haired child was tugging his foot: that all things were suddenly accessible. It wasn’t a question of attaining some lonely promontory on the coast and looking out at a small boat, solitary and lost on the vast empty reach of the sea—the alone with the alone. No, it was here, this very night, in the middle of the together. This dinner party would be his vehicle; this evening’s time would not be wasted.

  Pindar glanced at Philippa and then away so as not to seem to be inspecting her. She was not an unattractive woman, and there were faint signs in her of the girl she had once been. She was not beautiful, though she carried herself as though she thought she was now and always had been. He wondered what would happen if he put his hand on her thigh under the tablecloth. Instead, he sipped some water and wondered at his silliness. But now, as though someone had read his mind, something was rubbing his foot. He choked on his drink. Something was lurking there by his foot, ready to rub again. He paused, stopped coughing, drank more water. At least it wasn’t Philippa, unless she was hopelessly agile and long-legged, as it was his foot on Issa Barlow’s side that had received the attention. Of course, it might have been the cat. He listened for purring, but there was too much dinner party chatter. Then he burst out, “Do you think that intelligence is connected to beauty?”

  Across from Pindar, William Barlow said, “I’ve always found that the loveliness of the Parisian women—”

  Philippa broke in. “That is clothing, not beauty.”

  Her voice had been unnecessarily sharp, Pindar thought. Hoping to mollify both sides, he said, “They do take such pains, the Parisian women. They have all the trappings of seduction. But I wonder if perhaps beauty is something else.”

  Philippa laughed, showing many teeth. She was nervous and didn’t know if Pindar was being ironic about intelligence and beauty. She still thought it odd that the Cohens had chosen to eat in the garden when there was a large enough dining room indoors. Mosquitoes would come, and things with too many legs. The bats were already perilous. Strains of music came from beyond the woods.
There was that other party going on up the road. She had seen those guests getting out of their cars when she and Stephen had overshot the Cohens’ driveway trying to find the house. Those other guests had seemed deft and elegant. Here at this homely and awkward rehearsal dinner she felt, as always, shunted off to the margins of social life, aware of but not present at the glamorous excitement a few doors away. Which tonight had a live jazz band. That was so romantic that it tore at her heart.

  Pindar watched Philippa as she laughed. How different she seemed from her daughter, Eliza, who was still a comforting flaxen beauty. One day, of course, Eliza would wake up and find that her mother’s face had usurped her own and would gasp and call out that there had been some mistake. With Adam it would be the same, only he would find Pindar there instead of himself. The law of generations was ironclad. Pindar himself had turned into the father he had never known very well, who had appeared and disappeared at disconcerting intervals. Gabriel Cohen had sent his blessings for the wedding but claimed to be too infirm to travel. He would be in his nineties now. Pindar’s favorite picture of him showed Gabriel in his mid-sixties, bearded and slightly stooped, standing in a garden outside of Paris. Pindar himself had never been as dapper or elegant as his father appeared in that picture from Bures-sur-Yvette, but their posture was nearly identical—the same sloped shoulders and forward-peering head—though Gabriel’s beard was more pointy. Their resemblance was almost enough to make one doubt mortality.

  Philippa was touching Pindar’s arm to get his attention.

  “Speaking of beauty,” Philippa said. “Your mother must have been irresistible in her day.” She nodded toward Leah.

  In the middle of the long table, Leah was talking with Philippa Barlow’s father, Nathan Morrill. Pindar watched them and hoped that Philippa hadn’t noticed that the pair were flirting.

  Leah had warned Pindar before the party began. “Now, don’t go seating me next to some stain-shirted dotard, just because we’re both old,” she said. “There will be trouble if you do that. There will be spitting and clawing.” She told him to remember back to when she had made him play with some other little boy simply because they were the same age and because she was having tea with the boy’s mother. How he had despised those afternoons. The other boy was always sportive. While the mothers ate curious pale delicacies consumed only at teatime, ghosts of real food, Pindar would have to go outdoors and experience the humiliation of sticks and balls.

  “Remember how bitterly you complained?” Leah said. “Well, it’s even worse at this end of one’s mortal career: ‘Darling old lady, you must meet my palsied droopy-lipped grandparents, my dead auntie. You will love them.’ It’s like being in a stable with strange old cows, all wild eyes and smells and halting ruminations. Makes one want to commit violence.”

  Later, Pindar had laughed when he saw that Celia planned to seat his mother beside Mrs. Barlow’s antique father—rumored to be mentally distant. Sweet payback for all his childhood play afternoons, he thought. But he did beg Celia to put the beautiful young Harry Barlow on Leah’s other side, to compensate for the geezer. Harry was the only male Barlow with any real physical beauty, or any mischief in his soul. Where had they stolen him from?

  Pindar saw that he had to figure everything out right then, while Philippa was speaking to him. For what if Death came and grabbed his arm instead of Philippa Barlow? Shanghaied him and pulled him away to where he would no longer be capable of doing his work. Dread flowed through him, making each vein a thoroughfare of consciousness. The bats darting overhead no longer looked like helpful and comical fruit eaters; they were dark little ideas, too quick to catch. He wanted to throw something at them. He saw, too, that he couldn’t jettison his conversation with Philippa, sitting there beside him only because of the marriage of their offspring—he could not even slight her but would have to concentrate on her as well as on the thing that mattered, the nature of time. This other activity would have to remain invisible to Philippa, to everyone. He would have to pay attention to everything, even the dinner party, which with its snorts and wheezing and sudden laughter reminded him of the sounds a sea serpent might make when surfacing in a warm ocean—its head over there, ready to jump into the unknown upper world and grasp and comprehend the universe; its tail over there, where the young children were sitting, ready to follow wherever the foreparts might lead, leaving in the end its wake traveling behind.

  “Do you think that my father is flirting with your mother?” broke in Philippa.

  “Excuse me?” said Pindar.

  “The old ones—flirting?” Philippa gestured discreetly.

  “Oh,” said Pindar, as though he had not noticed this. He realized that he had been thinking of his conversation with Philippa as an interruption. But that would only be true if time were linear, a single line with a unique direction. Which was absurd. The arrow wasn’t even the proper shape to denote distance. We tend, he thought, to consider distance as though we had nothing but a yardstick or a string and a stone to measure it with, but we experience it as some sort of sprouting and folding and buckling. When we distill it to a single dimension in order to describe it by measurement, we lose the whole richness and feeling of distance.

  He looked now in the direction of Philippa’s gesture. “Oh,” he said again. “Our parents. Do you think so?”

  * * *

  —

  PHILIPPA’S NEW SANDALS pinched a little. No one would notice if she slipped them off for a while. There. Of course she had gotten new shoes and new jewelry for tonight’s dinner as well as for the wedding. There was a ritual need for such purchases, as well as a ritual joy. She had realized as she and Stephen were on the way here—and she wasn’t sure why it had taken her fifty-nine years to see this—that women were really dressing for other women. Men didn’t notice, in her experience, or if they did, they only noticed what women’s clothing had left uncovered—cleavage, neck, arms, legs—while women’s perceptions were so finely tuned to the coverings. Women could place a dress, by catalog or designer; they knew how much it cost as well as what fiber or mix of fibers it was made of. More than that, they knew how it would feel on the body, how itchy or soothing, how constricting or wallowy. And the moment they could not place something—even a shoe, an earring, a handbag—it bothered them and they would shower the wearer with compliments until she proudly, and perhaps a bit ruefully, let slip some clue as to where she had purchased it.

  This was not to say that women didn’t dress to attract men, or to make an impression on them, but it was the women who understood what other women wore, while the men simply reacted.

  In her own family, Philippa knew that tonight it was only her sister, Charlotte, who noticed and understood. Eliza might sometimes notice but didn’t understand much about clothing; she really cared more about cows. And tonight she was too busy being a bride. Philippa’s daughters-in-law rarely commented on what she wore. Perhaps they didn’t dare; she didn’t know. Of the Cohen women, only Mrs. Leah Cohen had properly inspected her, but then Leah was so old, it probably didn’t matter. As for the others, Celia was busy hosting this whole gathering, Sara was too involved with her Jesuit, and Naomi, in her black outfit with the silver-sequined skull, well, Philippa would just as soon not be noticed by Naomi.

  But it wasn’t as though her efforts had been for nothing. The delicious strappy sandals—a bit girlish, but so what—and her bracelets and necklace with the gold wire and quartz stones, these kept her going. But more than that: What the women wore for one another bolstered them all. It defined civilization. If that was too strong, say rather that it gave them all a certain form of courage. And the men, well, even if they never really saw, and didn’t have the language to capture or discuss, they too must feel, on some not quite conscious level, the atmosphere created by the women, and were buoyed or carried along by it. She supposed that something similar could be said for the men, though she doubted their pleasure wa
s as intense and suspected that the courage they got from their clothing was more like that of armor or uniform.

  * * *

  —

  PINDAR TURNED HIS thoughts back to time. What exactly was a moment? Was it the shortest span of time that could be represented by art? Perhaps moments were like sheets of gold leaf, hammered ever so thin, each leaf the locus for new thoughts. Time would then be a matter of layering, so that each second had a stack of moments on top, a baklava of time. Was this why his new Babylonian fragment had the word layers, then a gap where a piece was chipped out, then time? Or was that word branches rather than layers? Perhaps time wasn’t flat after all. In that case, no sheaves like baklava, but filaments like kataifi, those nests made of shredded pastry drenched with syrup or honey. He saw the pastry threads as silver, now, each strand branching into new trees of silvery time growing out from each second, all of them inhabited by breath. For breathing had become necessary to his conception of time, inspiration and expiration. He needed the gods to breathe into him, breathe through him like a flute.