by Peter Straub
Gardener of Heart
Bradford Morrow
I know that I have to die like everyone else, and that displeases me, and I know every human born so far has died except for those now living, and that distresses me and makes most distinctions…look false or absurd.
—Harold Brodkey
Despite the grief I felt as my train chased up the coast toward home, I had to confess that after many years of self-imposed exile it might be strangely comforting to see the old town again, walk the streets where she and I grew up. Imagining the neighborhood absent its finest flower, its single best soul, was unthinkable. Yet it seemed that my visiting our various childhood haunts and willing Julie’s spirit—whatever that is—a prolonged residence in each of these places would be salutary for her. And cathartic for me. We had made a pact when we were young that whoever died first would try to stay alive in essence, palpably alive, in order to wait for the other. Death was somehow to be held in abeyance until both halves of our twins’ soul had succumbed. Sure, we were kids, given to crazy fantasies. But the covenant still held, no matter how unspiritual, how skeptical I had become in the interim. Indeed, I had only the vaguest idea of what to do. Just go. Walk, look, breathe, since she could not.
For some reason, I could envision the mortuary home in radiant detail. A breathtaking late-eighteenth-century neoclassical edifice of hewn stone, two imposing stories surmounted by a slate roof and boasting a porch with fluted marble Doric columns. Huge oaks and horse chestnuts surrounded it where it perched on one of the highest hills in town which, aside from the steeples of local Presbyterian and Catholic churches that rose to almost similar heights, dwarfed everything if not everyone in their vicinity. To think that Julie and I, who grew up several doors down the block from this mysterious temple of death, used to love to climb those trees, play kickball on its velvet lawns, or hide in the carefully groomed hedges, peeping in the windows to giggle at the whimpering adults inside. What did we know? Crying was for babies and the unbrave, Julie and I agreed. We laughed ourselves sick and pissing in the greenery, and now, as I imagined, she was lying embalmed, a formal lace dress her winding sheet, in the very wainscoted chapel whose many mourners gave us so much perverse pleasure to observe over the years of our youth.
Mother would be present at the service, and our father with his third wife, Maureen. Probably a crowd of Julie’s friends would be there, few of whom, actually none of whom, I had ever met. Parents aside, I doubted I’d be recognized, so much time having passed since I bared my émigré’s face in the unrocking cradle of noncivilization, as I deemed home. If only I could attend her rites invisibly, I thought, as the Acela flew by ocean-edge marshes punctuated by osprey stilt nests and anomalous junkyards where sumac grew through the windshields of gutted trucks. As Jul’s only brother, her best childhood friend, I knew what my sibling responsibilities were, even though a part of me presumed she’d find it apt, no, downright hilarious, if I chose to mourn her from our cherished outpost in shrubbery beneath the casement windows.
When I left home three decades ago, I left with collar up and feet pointed in one direction only: away. By some ineffable irony, Julie’s staying made my great escape possible. Being the younger twin—she was delivered a few minutes before I breached forth—it was as if some part of me safely stayed behind with her in Middle Falls, even as a wayward spark in her soul came along with me to New York and far beyond. Julie wasn’t the wandering type, though, and after college and a mandatory trip to Europe, she returned home with the idea of seeing our mom through a tough divorce (where’s an easy one? I asked her) then simply stayed, as if reattaching roots severed temporarily by some careless shovel. For my part, when I left, I was gone. There were many reasons for this, an awful lot of them now irrelevant thanks to, among so much else, scathing but unscathed time.
By informal agreement my father and I rarely spoke, and my mother and I only talked on holidays or during family crises—which are essentially one and the same, by my lights—so when she called on a nondescript day that celebrated nothing, I knew, even before she gave me the news, that something was badly amiss. Her voice, raspy as a mandolin dragged across macadam, hoarse from years of passionate cigarette smoking, made her words nearly impossible to understand. If I hadn’t known she wasn’t a drinker I could have sworn she was totally polluted.
Your…dead, she’s…you’re, your sister’s…
I tried to slow her down, but she was weeping hysterically. Soon enough, I who had always scoffed at weepers became one, too. As tears swamped my eyes, I stared hard out my dirty office window across the rooftops and water towers of the city. A cloud shaped like a Chagall fiddler snatched up from his task of serenading blue farmwives and purple goats, and thrust unexpectedly into the blackening sky, moved slowly over the Hudson toward Jersey. My Julie was dead, my other half. I told my mother I’d be up on the morning train and as abruptly as our conversation, call it that, began, it ended.
Middle Falls lies midway between Rehoboth and Segreganset, east of East Providence, Rhode Island. A place steeped, like they say, in history. One of the diabolical questions that perplexed me and Julie when we were kids was that if there was a middle falls, where were the falls on either side? We knew that Pawtucket means Great Falls, and Pawtuxet means Little Falls. Yet while our narrow, timid waterfall did dribble near the main street of the village, where the stream paralleled a row of old brick-facade shops quaintly known as downtown, even in the wettest season it hardly deserved its designation as a waterfall. Nor, again, were there any neighboring falls. Be that as it may, Julie and I on many a summer afternoon took our fishing poles down there (never caught so much as a minnow), or paddleboats made with chunks of wood and rubber bands, and had a grand time of it by the cold thin water. One of our little jokes was that Middle Falls meant if you’re caught in the middle you fall. Our nickname for the place was Muddlefuls.
Julie, much like myself, was neither unusually attractive nor unattractive. We were plain, with faces one wouldn’t pick out in a crowd. Both of us had brown hair and eyes, with fair skin. We were each slender and tall, given to gawkiness. Since her hair was sensibly short and mine a little long, I suppose that in a low-lit room it would have been possible to mistake one of us for the other. Like me, my twin sister had the thinnest legs in the world, bless her heart, with gnarly knees to boot. She hated hers—wishbones, she figured them, or scarecrow sticks—and as a result never went along with friends to sunbathe on the Vineyard or out on Nantucket. Mine were always a matter of indifference to me, and I never bothered with the seashore, anyway. Two modest people with even temperaments and in good health, entering early middle age, sailing forward with steady dispositions, one a homebody, the other an inveterate expatriate, neither of us ever married. Never even came close. Some of our aversion to the holy state of matrimony undoubtedly was a function of our response to our father’s fickle philandering and the train wreck of a wife he left behind with her lookalike rug rats. At least for Julie all such concerns, from skinny legs to a broken family, had come to an end. Given the chance, how I’d have loved to take the old man aside after the funeral and let him know, just for once, how very much Jul and I always resented his failure to father us. As the train pulled into the Providence station, I found myself hoping that the embalmer was instructed to go light on the makeup. Julie never wore lipstick or eyeliner or rouge when she was alive. What a travesty it would be for her to enter eternity painted up like some Yoruba death mask.
The autumn leaves were at peak, and those that had let go of their branches drifted like lifeless butterflies across the road in the coolwarm breeze. I made the drive from Providence—bright, rejuvenated capital of the Ocean State—to Middle Falls, and as I reached the outskirts of town I was seized by an intuition of something both unexpected and yet longed for, weirdly anticipated. It was as if I were driving from the hermetic present into the wily certainty of the past. Providence, with its sparkling glass office towers and fashionable storefronts,
was transfigured from the seedy backwater whose very name held it in contempt when I was a boy, while the scape around Middle Falls appeared unchanged. There were no other cars on the road so I could slow down a little, take in the rolling vistas of our childhood, Jul’s and mine, and luxuriate in this New England fall day. A flock of noisy Canada geese cleaved the otherwise unarticulated deep blue sky. Look there, Bob Trager’s pumpkin patch, Trager’s where we used to pick our own this time of year to carve into jack-o’-lanterns. Sentimental as the thought was, not to mention foolish, I wished we could walk here again just once, scouting plump ones that most looked like human heads. And, feeling a little silly in fact, I pulled over and rambled into the field among the pumpkins attached to the sallow green umbilicals of their dying stalks, and might even have bought a couple, had anybody been manning the farm stand.
I called out, Anyone here?
A dog barked, unseen in a nearby copse of silver birches whose flittering leaves were golden wafers, barked incessantly, madly, in response. Unnerved, I traipsed back to where the rental was parked beside the road. In a moment that felt dreamlike as déjà vu, as I stepped into the car I mistook my foot for Julie’s—by that, I mean, her shoe was on my foot. No question but my grief, which I had been holding closer to my vest than I imagined, was weighing on me. On second glance the hallucination passed.
Hers was one of those deaths that leave the living in a state of questioning shock. How could this happen to someone so healthy? Yesterday she was alive, vibrant, bright. Today she’s mute, still, dead. Gone in a literal heartbeat. Before my mother and I hung up, I did manage to extract from her the cause of death. Brain aneurysm. Like a blood adder born inside a rose, a fleshy pink rose, or one of those peculiar coxcomb flowers, a lethal serpent which when suddenly awakened understood that in order to live and breathe it must gnaw its way to freedom. How long this aneurysm had been lying dormant in Julie’s cerebrum none of us will ever know. Her death, the doctor assured our mother, was almost instantaneous. That my sister didn’t suffer a protracted demise is some consolation, though one wonders what happens in a person’s mind during the irrevocable instant that constitutes the almost instantaneous. It’s the almost that is appalling in its endless possibilities.
Images from days long past continued to accrue beyond the windshield, like those on some inchoate memory jug, and I knew that while they were exhilarating as an unanticipated archaeological find, they were also a clear manifestation of mourning. Although I was anxious to get home—I’d be staying in my sister’s room, since my bedroom had long ago been converted into a solarium in which Julie tended her heirloom orchids—I was compelled to drive even more slowly, in order to take in every detail of what I had so studiously dismissed over half my life.
A canary yellow and emerald kite in the shape of a widemouthed carp, or Ming dragon, ascended as if on cue above the turning trees, and while I couldn’t see the kid at the other end of its silvery string, I easily pictured myself and Julie behind the leaves, pulling and letting out more line. After all, we had a kite that looked a lot like it, way back when. I drove across a stone bridge, a fabled one when we were young, beneath which hunchbacks and trolls loitered in the dank shadows. (Several women accused of witchcraft were hung there in the middle of the century before last, in good old Commonwealth of Massachusetts style.) My sister and I, left so often to our own devices, and admitted addicts of anything frightening or macabre, would egg each other on to wander down here in the twilight and throw taunting stones at the shadow people who lived beneath the bridge. Once, to our surprise, we interrupted a man under the embankment who chased us—yelping, his pants caught around his ankles—halfway home under the snickering stars. Here was a telephone pole we had once tied a boy to, whom we’d caught shooting at crows, our favorite bird, behind an abandoned canning factory. I could still hear his indignant, pleading screams in the wind that whistled at the car window.
Now I saw the church spires above the sea of trees, then one by one the charming clapboard houses of our childhood, and above all that mortuary roof, gun-barrel gray against the jay-blue sky. There were the glorious smells of leaves burning; a garden of dying asters whose yellow centers were catafalques for exhausted wasps in their final throes; the blood-red cardinal acrobating about in his holly bush. Julie and I loved these things, and today felt no different than decades ago. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn that time had somehow collapsed and, as a result, the many places my work as an archaeologist had taken me—from Zimbabwe to Bonampak, Palenque to the Dordogne—were as unreal as my campus office cluttered with a lifetime of artifacts and books, my affection for film noir and vintage Shiraz, and everything else I had presumed was specifically a part of my existence. My whole adult life, in other words, was an arc of fabrication. Oddly fraudulent was how I felt, unfledged, and in the midst of all this, also abruptly—how else to put it?—liberated. Liberated from what precisely, I couldn’t say. But the feeling was strong. I reemerged from this small reverie to find myself staring at Julie’s pale and slender hands where they lay like wax replicas on the steering wheel. The magnitude of my loss had plainly gotten the better of me. Breathe, I thought. Pull yourself together. And again the world returned to me, or I to it. I pressed forward toward the turnoff that would take me uphill, up the block where our mother awaited me.
Julie did have a boyfriend once. Peter was his name. Peter Rhodes. He was our runaround friend since forever, lived across the street from our house, was all but family. Peter was more or less expected, by everyone who knew him and Julie, to become my sister’s husband. Had it happened, it would have been one of those sandbox to cemetery relationships that are inconceivable these days. Julie and I had the curbs in on Peter Rhodes from the beginning, however, and in my heart I understood they were never meant to be. Still, we did love to work the Ouija board in the basement, by candlelight, little punks goading the universe to cough up its intimate secrets that lay just there beneath our fingertips. Not to mention overnights, when we camped out in a makeshift carnival tent of Hudson Bays and ladder-back chairs. We played hide and seek, freeze tag, Simon Says, all those games that children love. We learned how to ride bikes together, and together we slogged through adolescence. Peter took Julie to the prom when we graduated from Middle Falls High, and I, in my powder blue tuxedo and dun brown shoes, went with Priscilla Chao, a sweet, shy girl who was as happy to be asked as I was relieved that she, or anyone, would bother to accompany me; not that I wanted to go in the first place. We four stood at the back of the gymnasium, far away from the rock band, watching classmates flailing like fools beneath oscillating lights, as our teachers stood nodding by the long sheeted tables set with punch bowls and chips and cheese wheels. In retrospect, I realize how normal—for unassimilateds—Jul and I must have seemed to anyone who bothered to watch. Throughout those years we subtly kept poor Peter at a near-far distance, especially when it came to some of our more transgressive ventures—indeed, he never knew about our passion for the mortuary home, its mourners, hearse driver, gun-for-hire pallbearers, and all the rest. Doubtless, he would have thought us not a little odd if he had any idea about our graveyard rambles under the full moon, headstones sparkling naughtily under their berets of fresh-fallen snow. But then no one truly knew Julie and me. A bond formed in the womb was, it seemed, as impossible for others to fathom as to break. I believe Peter married a nice woman he met during his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer, having fled Middle Falls in the wake of Julie’s rejection of his marriage proposal. To this day, I never wished Peter Rhodes ill. I know Julie didn’t, either.
Like she, I went to college. A scholarship to Columbia saved me from having to lean on my father for tuition money—I’d sooner have committed myself to an assembly line in a clothes-hanger plant. After dabbling in history and the arts, I settled into the sciences and knew early on that archaeology was my calling. Just as Audubon made his sketches from nature morte, I believed the best portrait of a person, or civilization, w
as only accomplishable after the death knell tolled. Schliemann and Layard were like gods to me, just as Troy and Nineveh were secular heavens. Conze at Samothrace; Andrae in Assyria. Grad work at Oxford was floated on more scholarships, and I’d truly discovered my métier, I felt. A first excursion to Africa, and I was all but over the moon.
As with most disciplines, archaeology is fundamentally the art of attempting to understand ourselves through understanding others. All cultures eventually connect. Language, myth, variant customs, mores, bones, are like cultural continental drifts. Put them on a reverse-time trajectory and they relink. They become a single supercontinent called Pangea. My inability, my stubborn refusal to admit to having a true familial home, an ancestral hearth from which I set forth on my specialized journeying, I’d always considered a hidden asset. I had a knack for entering others’ homes, that is to say ruins and burial sites, and quickly understand, sometimes even master, the essential idiom of a locale and its inhabitants. Middle Falls I simply never understood. With Julie gone, if I wanted to comprehend this place of personal origin, I might be forever locked out. All the more reason to honor our covenant. Perhaps, through my twin as medium, I might come to some understanding of who I’d been and was no more.
The house was empty. I assumed our mother had gone out somewhere to finalize arrangements. The front door was unlocked, a practice poor Mom inaugurated after the divorce, saying there wasn’t anything left to steal here (morose absurdity, but whatever), so I let myself in. Odd, she’d obviously been baking cookies, Julie’s beloved peanut butter and pecans, as the whole house was redolent with the warm scent. Maybe she planned to host a small gathering of mourners at the house after the rites. Upstairs in my old room, I saw Julie’s private garden of potted orchids and exotic herbs was as opulent as she’d described it in letters and during our monthly phone conversations (it didn’t matter how distant I was, I never failed to call her). The scent, it struck me, was precisely what heaven should smell like, were there such a place. Fluid, rich, evocative, somehow soft. I closed my eyes and breathed this sensual air, and as I did, a wave of deep tranquillity washed through me. This tranquillity even had a color, a dense matte cream, into which I rose, or sank, it was hard to tell the difference. I believed I was crying, though the cognitive disconnect, however brief, wouldn’t quite allow me to know this with certainty. The episode, like some epileptic seizure of the psyche, finally passed but not before delivering me another of the hallucinations I had been experiencing. As I turned to leave—flee, rather—the room, I caught sight of a vertiginous Julie, alive in the mirror on the wall behind a sinuously arched blooming orchid, her dark eyes as filled with hysteria as mine must have been. Then she was gone, replaced, as before, by myself—and yes, my eyes displayed a scouring dread, not without a tinge of sad disbelief. Nothing like this had ever happened to me, and if they weren’t so eminently real, I’d have insisted to myself that these petit mals were strictly the effects of melancholy. But something else was in play about which I had no clear insight. Some incipient voice inside me suggested that the covenant Julie and I had made as children bore more authority than she and I’d imagined possible. Placing my overnight bag on her bed, I asked myself, Could she have managed to pull it off, to linger, to keep our childhood pact?
