I finish it quickly as if someone might catch me out. I wash my dish—God help us kids if we didn’t wash our dish after a snack. A box is under the table, marked Shari in thick black letters. There’s a fusty scent of old paper as I excavate my issues of Petticoat and a pile of my favorite childhood books that further helped set my identity.
The Secret Garden. I stare at my wobbly name I scripted on a Cat in the Hat bookplate inside the cover. Shari R. Diamond.
I put it down and stare at the ceiling. Yes, who on earth would not be happy to land a man like Owen? I’ll finally override my wiring if I just let myself. The onward rush of time always works.
My mother opens the door with that quaint look that accompanies any woman’s new crush.
“You like him,” I say immediately.
“Does it show?”
“It does.”
She flinches. “I haven’t felt anything like that since, well, I met your father. I honestly don’t know how to proceed. I don’t want to step on your—”
“Mom, you have the spark. Proceed.”
Without my blessing, Cathy proceeded with Kevin, but she had her comeuppance—as it turned out she couldn’t stomach him either. But at least she knows now that she has crossed all of her t’s in her search for a Great Jewish Man. The short-lived relationship was uncomfortable for us roommates, even if all of it unfurled away from our apartment. Kevin still refuses to see me as a friend, or even to finally talk things out without the intensity of the day he caught me out. Am I vain if I suspect he dated Cathy as a way of hurting me without seeing me?
“How did you do on your wedding invite list?” Mom says from the couch just before she pulls off her high-heeled supermarket date shoes. She rests her feet on a twenty-year-old ottoman, arms in a stretch, toes stretched, too, the longest line my mother can be.
CHAPTER 20
Sayonara to Volapük
Velma motions for me to go into Dr. Cox’s office.
“I had a brainstorm,” I say preemptively as I enter the room.
“Let’s hear it.”
“I’m officially quitting the dissertation.”
Anger flushes his face: “That’s your brainstorm?”
“I want to write a memoir,” I say meekly. I continue talking even though my dissertation supervisor is glaring at me. “So I didn’t find a Volapükist in New York State. But I have had adventures. For better or for worse.”
I await his answer. Finally, Dr. Cox is ready to speak.
“I needed time to find my true calling. I had two tries at my own dissertation, did I ever tell you that? We’re going to see this Ph.D. through.”
I don’t argue with him.
Dr. Cox stands and offers me a pity hug I don’t really want. Maybe I should bring up my engagement so he doesn’t feel so badly for me. My financial worries are over, that’s for sure. I guess that’s what you call marrying well.
“I’m actually excited about this,” I bravely pipe up.
“I have tenure, sweetheart. I can get you any extension. I can put in a word for more funding. Don’t give up.”
“I’m done, Dr. Cox. No more dissertation.”
I hug him.
There’s no going back.
CHAPTER 21
The Garden Secret
“Owen, where are we going?” I say the day after we’ve landed in London. My fiancé’s been driving for almost an hour now since we refueled our gas tank and stomachs at a petrol station that also sold stale ham and butter sandwiches.
“What do you mean?”
“If you want to get to Dover in time for your research appointment, you might want to turn back around. You took a wrong turn.”
“No, I haven’t,” Owen says automatically.
“Owen, seriously, turn around.” Since the trip to the pet cemetery, I’ve become a master of the road map. “We’re going the wrong way.”
“Not when I have a surprise for you.”
“So then where exactly are we going?” I say, confused. There’s been little tenderness between us lately.
Without even a glance at me, Owen answers. “Rolvenden, three miles southwest of Tenterden on the A28 on the Kent and Sussex border.”
“Why there?”
“For my research.”
“And this will thrill me how?”
“The old home we’re going to is supposed to be magnificent.”
“Then we’ll continue on to Dover?”
I expect a firm yes. The last chapter of Owen’s almost-finished book will focus on Dover, the site of so many important joint American and British war stories. He went there a month ago and he needs a follow-up visit. It was his idea to combine leisure travel and research, to shift the focus away from the very embarrassing lack of progress with our wedding plans. Instead, my driving companion mumbles incoherently.
A glance at his face tells me all I need to know. Jesus. I’m not fighting back. I’m mentally exhausted from the plane trip yesterday afternoon—although at least I’m not paranoid this time. I’m also exhausted from my engagement. Owen’s sister Wendy is practically my enemy now since she spent hours finding the perfect band (after Owen said our specifications were retro hip, jazzy and under two thousand for the night) and on our end we’ve gotten nowhere. Yes, mea culpa—I’ve made a muddle of the big event, avoiding setting a date just like a woman fed up with housework who refuses to face any more pesky stains on washday.
What sort of defense do I have? Maybe we should just go ahead and pull the plug. I know that’s what Owen has secretly been thinking, too.
Since I’ve delayed setting the date again for the third time after the Christmas greet-and-meet, Owen has stopped making any form of sexual advance toward me, and prickles when I touch him in any place that might lead to more physical contact.
Last night after we checked into a bargain hotel he found on Orbitz, I stood over his armchair and optimistically touched his shoulders. We were thousands of miles away from his dad with the daily wedding instructions, and my dead thesis. He looked up from his crossword puzzle, forced a smile. When I went to kiss him he said, cruelly, “Did you know how long Jonah was in the whale?”
Okay, this isn’t a honeymoon, but it is our first big trip overseas since we tried to hunt down Kit almost a year prior. With a lovely blue sky above us, I’m feeling pro-active again; I suggestively put my hand on his thigh. Owen quickly removes it with an “I need to concentrate.”
“What’s the name of the house?” I say sharply a few minutes later.
“I told you,” he says, just as coldly. “A surprise.”
We’ve been through six couples’ therapy sessions already, but why the hell should I get married if this kind of passive-aggressiveness is what I’m up against? If he really loves me, he should be willing to wait until all of my regret over Kit is gone.
Finally, there is a grand estate up ahead of us on the road.
“Do you know someone here?” I say when we park. My voice has softened to neutral but Owen is still particularly unresponsive.
Eventually I spot a sign that will have to do the explaining for me. Great Maytham Hall.
A groundskeeper pokes his head in Owen’s right-side driver window. “You’re too early. It’s only open Wednesday and Thursday afternoons May to September.”
It’s an April Monday.
Owen gets out of the car, motions the guard aside and whispers something. The guard nods his head. Even though I am despising Owen right now, I’m itching to know what this is all about. We step inside a gate, and walk on acres of land with flowering trees. A surprisingly large number of seniors are roaming the large grounds.
Owen’s first words since we parked: “I forgot. He said they’ve converted Great Maytham into a senior’s residence.”
I stand firm on a mossy corner of grass. “Who said? Okay, O—why am I here?”
For the first time in hours, he makes direct eye contact. “Let’s go inside the house and find out.”
“Why are you being so crazy? Why can’t you answer me?”
“You know what? I’ve changed my mind. Let’s look inside later. Let’s have a walk around the place.”
Owen starts walking toward the formal green lawns.
I’m exceedingly pissed off now. I follow a few feet away and raise my voice. “These grounds are pretty, but tell me what’s happening here.”
“It is time for your surprise,” my fiancé says significantly. He leads me by the hand to a brick wall. His long look is as devastating as the one Kit gave me before he stormed off, at turns pitying and hateful.
I’m inwardly shrinking, but outwardly calm.
“What is it?”
Owen hands me a brochure and then—Boom! “I’m leaving you now.”
“What was that?”
“Shari, you don’t really want to be married to me. Deep feelings of affection are not enough. I think that goes both ways.”
I’m speechless. Between Kit’s disappearance and my father’s untimely departure, I’ve had quite enough with the dramatic abandonment.
“Read the brochure,” he continues in a toneless voice. “We’ll talk later. You’ll have to figure out when and where.”
“Where? What?”
He is gone. I’m too shocked to run after him. I stand silently, his strange words echoing in my head.
And then I read:
Great Maytham Hall, which inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is open Wednesday and Thursday afternoons in May. According to Ann Thwaite, biographer of Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden is a book of the new century.
Burnett lived at Maytham Hall from 1898–1907, and wrote many loved books here, including The Secret Garden. This beloved classic, inspired by the old walled garden at Maytham, suggested children should be self-reliant and have faith in themselves, in that they should listen not to their elders and betters, but to their own hearts and consciences.
What else can I do except listen to him? I angrily walk through a wooden door. Inside is a garden so close to the description of Mary and Colin’s garden that I have to think, Whose memory is this? A reader’s or a filmgoer’s? There, under an abundance of greenery, is a man in a gazebo reading a copy of, of course, The Secret Garden.
I brave the chopping block. I touch a shoulder.
Christopher T. Brown sizes up my wet eyes as he holds a hand out.
“I didn’t know you were here until a second ago,” I push out.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Bloody hell! That wasn’t the plan! You were supposed to be here of your own volition.”
But I’m here. And you’re here. I immediately start to weep.
I try to talk. “I wish we could wipe away that day we fought—”
Kit holds my hand to comfort me. “You know you’re not completely to blame. I was going to get around to the whole story on my own schedule. Bloody English. We’re such fools sometimes.”
“I met your grandfather,” I finally manage.
He stares. There’s a long break before he answers again. The birds wait it out, too. “I was going to tell you about my family advantage over you just before we got there.”
I let him continue at his own pace.
“Shari—my grandfather beat my mother when she was young. That’s why I was so secretive about everything. I hate him, but his father is my great-grandfather, and he was by all accounts a remarkable man, a true enthusiast for the power of language.”
“He told me he was awful to her. I have to know—did he rape her?”
“Boy you New Yorkers, you don’t mince words.”
“It’s my very unpleasant theory.”
He breathes out. “Now I know he didn’t. My mother wouldn’t say a word more other than he hurt her. I had to know, too. I became a Volapük academic just to find that out, and eventually I told Robert who I was. By then we were ‘pals’ you see, and he bared his soul.”
“Did Helen know about the real reason for your academic research?”
“Unfortunately, yes. That’s why her betrayal of me cut so deep. I have another story for you. Helen was my wife, you know.”
“I met her, Kit. I know that, too.”
He’s so taken aback that he actually chortles. “What is it that Woody Allen’s mom says in Annie Hall when she’s horrified?”
I laugh, too. “‘Drive a stake through my heart.’”
“That’s it,” he nods.
“You don’t have to tell me anything else.”
“I want to. You can tell me about the meeting later. First I want to say—my reserve—” He struggles for the right words. “My reserve is not by choice—my mother escaped Robert when she was seventeen. My grandmother sided with her husband. Mum met my father in London. She was beautiful, you know? There was that crazy obsession for language in my family, and she spoke well for a farmer’s girl. She simply rewrote her past and married money. My father died when I was fifteen. We weren’t as close as you and your dad, but I did miss him.”
“I’m so sorry about what I said.” I burst out crying again. “The way I accused you—”
This time he lets me cry. “Yes. You practically had foam on your mouth. Drugged, apparently. Or so Owen told me.”
“Owen,” I say distraughtly, remembering the rest of this mess.
“I tried to warn you. Owen is a complicated fellow. He is an angel or a son of a bitch, according to who he interacts with. He’s been with—” Kit stops. “I shouldn’t say this—”
“After what we’ve been through, you might as well say it all.”
“He’s been with Helen for a month.”
“What? No way. He had a business trip here last month, to Dover, for his book.”
“To London, I’m afraid.”
It’s my turn for stunned silence.
“As soon as he realized what he wanted, he carried on your search to find me. He wormed into favor with me. I guess he’s not all terrible, mind you. He didn’t want you to have another crack-up.”
“Is that what he called it?” I say contemptuously.
“He said he knew you would be okay if he found me. He said you were still in love with me.”
“Well, I guess he was right.” I have to keep talking or I’ll fall to pieces again. “Who came up with the plan to meet me here?”
“Dot.”
My jaw drops for the second time in three minutes.
“We’ve been in touch by e-mail for a bit. She e-mailed me after you announced your engagement plans. Apparently you didn’t sound so convincing. “She’s led the charge to get us back together. She wanted to be careful about your mother and Owen’s father though. Your mother is very much in love, you know—”
“That I do know.”
“So I think you’ll be seeing Owen whether or not you want to. After Dot e-mailed, Nigel was the one who really talked sense into me. Funny how brothers can do that. I was moping and—” Kit pauses, slips the Zippo out of his pocket, and readies his rolling papers.
“I’d like to meet your family,” I say, repeating Kit’s words to me from so many months ago.
“And my mother wants to meet you, if you are coming home with me.”
“What did she think of Helen?”
He weighs the question. “She thought she was pretty. And that was good enough for me.”
“Helen is not pretty. You were right. She’s gorgeous.”
“She’s got nothing on you. No one has those big brown laser eyes you have—”
I kiss him. I kiss his head. I kiss his cheek. I kiss his wrist. “Are you real? I missed you so much.”
“So who’s the loon now? You’ve got a loving family, and it appears I’m the one who should be ashamed of my bloodline—”
“We’re both crazy then. I’m loving my family now, and I know I’ll love yours.”
He squeezes my hand. “Mum is going to drag every bloody photo of me out. I’m forewarning you, when I was elev
en in my addicted-to-custard stage I got really, really fat.”
Maybe Kit’s previous confession about his grandfather and mother was too taxing. He starts to bawl. An Englishman is crying. An Englishman is crying for me.
I let him cry as I hold his hand. Five minutes of silence does my soul well. I may well get the knack of the stiff upper lip.
“I had a look about the place earlier,” Kit finally says in a recovered voice. He points: “There’s the old door Burnett found, but it’s bricked up. And this is the gazebo she used to write her books.”
I pat the wood.
“In this seat?”
My cell phone rings, my rich-person’s phone Dr. Zuckerman has prepaid for the year, a really great engagement present. Owen has the same kick-ass plan with all the bells and whistles, unlimited international and national plan, photo capacity and texting.
“I’ll get it later,” I say to Kit.
“You should answer it. It’s probably Owen checking to see if you’re staying.”
He’s probably right. I flip open the phone.
“Hey, Miss S,” Gary Marino’s voice says.
“Gary! You’re calling me in England—”
“What are you doing there? Finally living out your fantasies?”
“Sort of. Long story.”
“I wanted you to be the very first to know, my parents haven’t even heard this. I’m getting married in three months in New Jersey.”
“I’m flattered. You haven’t told your parents?”
“I first want to rub some serious shit in your face.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just got engaged to Sally from the tour. Let me put her on—”
“Gary! This isn’t the—”
“Shari?” says a pert Midwestern voice. “Isn’t this the most amazing thing ever?”
I’m forced into a reply. “Congratulations. Hey, I can say I was there when you met.”
The Anglophile Page 23
