The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  “Listen,” Leah said to Nathan Morrill, waking him from sleep. “Hear the night bird, calling out to the distance? Stay awake for a bit and I will tell you of the whistles of evening in Paris, when I was very young.”

  * * *

  —

  “AFRICA,” DENNIS SAID softly when Sara returned. “I want you to come with me.”

  “God, it’s hot tonight and it’s only the first of June,” Sara replied. “Don’t you want some more wine? Would you like ice? Look at my grandmother. She’s clearly attracted to Eliza’s grandfather, don’t you think? She had threatened my parents that she would bite if they seated her near anyone as old as she is, but now look. She’s falling into his arms. Aren’t they old for that?”

  “Africa,” Dennis repeated. “The Gambia. I know I can’t really ask this of you, but it would be so glorious to have you there with me. There’s just enough time for you to get your shots—a little over three weeks until we leave.”

  “Did you know that my brother and Eliza tried to elope earlier?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “While people were arriving and having drinks,” Sara continued. “You were out in the garden, talking to my mother, I think, but we were all up in the attic. Adam asked Grandma Leah and me to be witnesses, but then Philippa Barlow was snooping around and she ferreted us out and scolded us and told us we had to come downstairs. A bit later we all tried to resume the ceremony up at the pond, but then all the little kids were sent to bring us back and we couldn’t continue.”

  “Why are you doing this, my love?” Dennis asked.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE SECOND time during the dinner party Pindar found himself escaping the table and going into the sanctuary of his house. This need to get away from the gathering was so strong in him that it was like a twitch he couldn’t control. Of course he felt guilty about leaving, but he had been behaving rather well, and who was to know that he wasn’t simply answering a call of nature? Celia had left the table moments earlier and maybe he could find her. Perhaps they could run away together. They could go to the sea. Glancing into the kitchen he saw Chhaya, who was whipping up a white froth in an immense bowl. Borsuk leaned over, watching her. Not wanting to disturb them Pindar went upstairs without speaking. A small while was all he needed, a moment of darkness.

  The bedroom door was locked.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Me,” Pindar repeated, louder.

  Celia opened the door. “You didn’t sound like yourself. Were you whispering?” Celia went back to the mirror and stood there combing her hair. Pindar crept up behind her and looked over her shoulder into the glass, smiling at her. Finally she turned to him.

  “Pindar?”

  “Mmmn?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Mmmn.”

  “We shouldn’t even be here.”

  “No one will notice.”

  “Madman. Barlows in the garden.”

  “They can wait.”

  When elephants who have been forcefully separated for decades are finally reunited, they will wander through savanna or jungle, caressing each other by entwining their trunks and then walking their bodies back and forth along each other, as though their entire skin had an exquisite sensitivity—as though the whole body were a hand, but more sensitive than our hands are, a hand combining all the senses—and they walk back and forth as though bathing in each other, as though for them touch defines both presence and essence, being there and being. A sudden definition of self as part of a joining.

  From the distant woods, the jazz trumpets and snare drum were still playing dance tunes, sexy and old-fashioned—while from the garden down below came laughter and the clinking of silverware against glass. Someone, it must have been Leah, was toasting: To youth, she said. To love. One of the Barlow men exclaimed about the bat flying overhead. A sliver of late sunlight seeped into the bedroom window and glowed in a trapezoid on the floor. A bird called. Gripped by the panic of love, Pindar groaned.

  * * *

  —

  NAT MORRILL GRABBED the bouquet from the brass vase in front of him with his clawed hands. He held it in his lap, caressing the blue, yellow, and white blossoms as though they were small chicks. He brought his fingers to his nose and sniffed, smiled. He raised the bouquet, shook it a few times, and held it to his ear, to listen.

  “What are they telling you, those flowers?” asked Leah.

  “Oh dear,” he said, as though waking up. “You’ve caught me listening to flowers as though they were whelks. Perhaps I can hear the forest or the meadow. Well, who knows? Perhaps I am joking.”

  Leah leaned toward him. “Perhaps you are,” she said, perching her hand on his shoulder.

  “But will you come visit me?” he asked, trying now to keep any sound of pleading out of his voice. “Will you let me come and see you? Will your companion allow it?”

  “My companion? If you mean Miriam, she has been dead these dozen years.”

  “I forgot. Yes. But may I visit?”

  “Of course I will let you visit. We will discuss food. And how to remember.”

  “Remembering, yes. Food. And love?”

  * * *

  —

  “BABAR.” OLIVIA, HIS brother William’s wife, put her hand on his. “Babar, where are you? You haven’t said a word all evening.”

  Despite his profession as a prosecuting lawyer, Barnes had always seemed to Olivia to be the gentlest of all her Barlow in-laws. She felt that she and Barnes were unusually linked although they had never done anything to deserve this feeling.

  Barnes twitched, then relaxed. Olivia was one of his favorites, inside the family, or outside. “Libby, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am an awful dinner partner,” he whispered. He hoped she would think he had laryngitis. Perhaps he did. The larynx of the soul.

  “Don’t be silly,” Olivia said. “I’d rather sit beside you than anybody here.” Barnes had always seemed to her to have all his brother William’s brightness with none of his pomposity or entitledness. She reached for the Pinot Grigio in front of her and poured some into his glass. “What is it, then? Is it very bad?”

  “Oh, Lib, it is.”

  “I thought so. I’ve watched it come over you.”

  Barnes sat back, startled. “Does it show?” Worry darkened him.

  “It has come to cover you like a blanket: desire—”

  “Oh, it’s not desire,” Barnes interrupted, disappointed that she hadn’t understood and relieved that his ailment didn’t show. He kept a hand in front of his mouth as he spoke.

  “You didn’t let me finish. What shows—what I see, at least—is desire not to talk. Not to say a word.”

  “Can you see? Can other people see it?”

  “Not unless they already know. This is something that I happen to understand.” Olivia knew a few forms of verbal reluctance, from her own refusing to mention William’s mistress in Paris to the selective muteness of their three-year-old son, Eli. She paused and looked around at all the guests talking and listening. Directly across from her, Nathan Morrill had placed his large flat hand on old Leah Cohen’s purple sleeve. Beside Leah, William’s youngest brother, Harry, was leaning toward Eliza and Adam and whispering as though blessing them. The children had gone somewhere, had crept away, taking her silent little Eli with them. His sister, Laurie, would watch him; she was good at that, even though she could be ingeniously bossy. Poor little Eli, who had been pronounced fine by the pediatrician; the ear, nose, and throat man; the audiologists; and the speech therapists. Well, they didn’t say he was fine but said he would benefit from lessons. “Give him time,” they all said. “Be patient.” She did give Eli time, and often she even felt that she knew what was going on insi
de his three-year-old mind. But his silence tugged at her heart and pulled at her throat, especially in the evenings when she put him to bed and read him a story. One night, when she sang him a song after reading, she thought she could hear him humming under his breath, and so each night she repeated her singing, hoping that one evening he would follow her and slip, without noticing, into song. Speaking might follow, she thought. Real words. Always Olivia was calm and persistent and patient. There were times when she wasn’t sure she could bear it. She kept her focus on Eli to divert her thoughts from William and what he was doing in Paris.

  Olivia turned back to Barnes. “What about written things? Can you read, or is it there, too?”

  “I can read. As long as I don’t vocalize.”

  “What does Issa say?”

  “The more she talks, the less I feel like saying. Then she practices her Japanese tapes. We’re separating.”

  “Oh, Babar. I’m so sorry. I wondered if you were.”

  * * *

  —

  CELIA AND PINDAR came out of the house each carrying a couple of bottles of wine.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’VE GOT TO stop this, my love,” Dennis said.

  Sara shook her head. “Look,” she said. “I don’t even know if it’s called Gambia or the Gambia.”

  “It changes officially from time to time. Everyone has a different opinion about what to call it, and that opinion, too, can change from one day to the next. As far as I can tell, right now it’s ‘the.’ But that is not what we’re talking about.”

  “Well, it is, sort of. How can I say if I will come to a place with you when I don’t even know its name?”

  “Unnamed territory is often the most interesting.”

  * * *

  —

  CAM WAS STILL watching Naomi. It wasn’t that she was classically beautiful, but she was delicate in a way that made him want to be with her, listen to her, take care of her. Her posture, the way she cocked her head, stretched her slender arms when she pointed to things in the garden, the way she laughed, these were captivating him, as well as her odd combination of seeming mischievous and earnest and knowing. There was something extremely young and very old about her. She made him feel suddenly awake, alert, full of jitters. He looked down the table at his wife and children to try to ground himself, but Amy was facing away from him, Liam had left the table, and Emily was looking at a bug on her finger. Cam turned back to Naomi.

  * * *

  —

  PINDAR SAW THAT Celia was looking at him. She tapped her forefinger on the side of her water glass. Was she telling him to drink water instead of wine? He glanced around the table. The guests turned toward him, suddenly quiet, all the grown-ups, the children having gone off somewhere. Celia gestured by tapping her glass again. Ah, the toast. He was supposed to toast the young couple. She had tried to remind him earlier to think about it, but his mind had been on other things. Now all those faces were gazing at him, expectant, beaming. He hadn’t prepared a word. He would have to think it out during this smiling attentive silence in the course of clinking his knife against his glass. He loved giving talks, but he needed a breath or two. He leaned forward in his seat, bracing his hands on his thighs. He felt relaxed and sweet; perhaps it was the wine.

  The fragrance of the pine trees at the edge of the garden made him want his pipe, but his mission at the moment was with words of blessing and approval. His complete attention should be on Adam and Eliza, without even a filament of digression. As he got to his feet, his back, which usually gnawed at him, was purring. He looked at the forest; he looked at the gathered company. “Earth, air, fire, and water,” he began. “The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles says that these four elements are the roots of everything.”

  Here was the garden he inherited from Leah. Celia, who mostly tended it, called it her sculpture in four dimensions, the fourth being time. Perhaps all sculpture changed over time, with decay and dissolution setting in, rust and chipping and breakage. But marble or bronze evolved so slowly, and their changes were unintended, while the garden was always in visible flux, each morning a new unfolding. Celia always said that the flower beds were a progression of looping actions: each plant opening, blooming, fading, setting seed, drooping, falling; and each seed rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming. And the seasons, the moons and days, the pendulum of darkness and light, the beat of the cardinal’s song. Was the earth, then, our real timepiece? Stop, Pindar. Pay attention.

  “But Empedocles also said that our spirits have successive lives, born sometimes as the fair-tressed laurel trees, sometimes as lions who live in the golden grass….”

  A shifting of the light through the trees made Pindar notice the Queen Anne’s lace in its brass vase. Constellations of tiny white stars swirled in a galactic umbrella the size of his hand—who was above? Who below? Beside their lacy flaring explosive symmetry, the black-eyed Susans gazed at him with their fierce yellow. Wide-open, with none of the hidden turns and caverns of the lilies whose trumpets would be deep enough to incubate in, or at least hide one’s thoughts in, though their scent would be too strong for the dinner table. Damn it. Stop this. He could see that his silence had made everyone uncomfortable.

  “Finally, Empedocles says, after being lions and laurel trees we appear as prophets, poets, doctors, and lawgivers.” Pindar pointed in turn to Harry, Adam, Eliza, and then with a broad sweep of his arm to the rest of the Barlow family. “This is the last stage before our spirits rise to the ranks of the immortals, where beyond human weakness and sorrow we live with the gods and join them at their feasts.”

  Pindar knew he was not supposed to be lost in flowers right now. Nor in Babylon. Though he could see slipping in from the edge of his mind that what he was looking for was somehow connected with flowers, and that redefining the nature of time in terms of gardens meant that he could perform his search, here, in the midst of this toast to his son and future daughter-in-law. Even with the hanging gardens of Babylon now swinging into his mind—terraced and swinging low as that chariot of the ancient poet Parmenides, wheeling so fast that a cosmic whistling roar sounded from its axles as it took him to the underworld—no. No. Back to Empedocles, who had also gone down to the underworld; Empedocles, like Parmenides, was both a poet and lawgiver. Poetry and law. Whew. He was home now. Pindar smiled out at the company and raised his glass.

  “So prophets, poets, doctors, and lawgivers are next to the gods. Empedocles embodied all four of these callings in one person. And we, Barlows and Cohens, by joining ourselves with the marriage of Eliza and Adam, will combine these vocations in one family. In the tradition Empedocles came from, the poet would sometimes go and lie down in an underground cave for several days, going into a trance while a priest kept watch against bears. And from this trance, the poet would awaken with a prophetic vision, often having to do with new laws….”

  Not quite sure how to bring this all to a close, Pindar braced his hands on the table and shifted his weight from one leg to the other, releasing a stiffness that had crept into his back. Setting his left foot down, he happened to place it too close to one of the clay pots holding a citronella candle. A thin tongue of flame licked up his pant leg. There came a smell of burning cloth.

  “Good God.” Philippa Barlow leaped up. “The man is on fire. Somebody do something.” She hoped no one noticed she had taken her sandals off.

  Larissa Barlow threw the water from her untouched glass on Pindar’s leg. She then reached for the pitcher and doused him with more water, just to make sure.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Pindar said to Issa. “I’m very grateful.” He dabbed at his charred pant leg with his napkin, happy to feel that there was no burn. “No harm done,” he announced with a smile. “I didn’t mean to go into a whole lecture here,” he continued. “I just wanted to say what an old and venerable tradition it is to join together th
e ideas and the practitioners of poetry, law, healing, and prophecy—perhaps we should add firefighters as well. Let us drink to Eliza and Adam.”

  * * *

  —

  SARA LOOKED STRAIGHT at Dennis. “What on earth would I do in Africa? Here I have my scorpion folklore project, but there nothing at all.” She added, “Except you.”

  “Here you have only libraries. There you would have the world. There are so many scorpions there that the Gambian national soccer team is named after them. Also, I have some strange archives there, part of a project I’ve been researching on my own for years, having to do with magic and medicine upriver. I haven’t published any of it yet and I have records that may be crucial for you. But it’s not just my archives, for they, too, are just texts—even if they are unique. It’s the people you should see, the people in the compound where I live. If you are doing folklore, you should see my friends there and how they think of and interact with your dangerous little beast.”

  Sara was silent. She pictured scorpions playing soccer. She was trying to avoid the real problem of what he was proposing. “But think of how awkward it would be,” she finally burst out. “All that skulking about, traveling with a priest. Where would I live? When would I get to see you?”