The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “And as for why,” he went on, his steady voice incongruous with his tears, “he left to get married. He’s gone to Vermont. He’s got a job there and everything.”

  “You mean—married?”

  “To a girl—excuse me, a woman he met at his sister’s place last summer. He’s been—”

  There his voice choked and stopped, but Rosie had no trouble filling in: Hollis had been seeing her, corresponding with her, wooing her, bedding her, all this time. Rosie closed her eyes. It was unbelievable. “The little bastard,” she said. “Leading a stinking double life. Oh, Peter.” She opened her eyes. Incredibly, he was grinning at her through his tears with a touch of his old humor.

  “Ma,” he said. “You’re terrific. Pissed off at Hollis because he’s straight.”

  “I’d kill the little bastard if I could,” she said. “I’d tear his heart out with my bare hands.”

  They laughed together, probably a touch too loud and long, and after dinner and a bottle of wine she did hug him while he wept, briefly. Then they sat by the fire and talked about Hollis, and Rosie was again proud of Peter; he didn’t vilify Hollis, didn’t bring up his tendency to drink too much and make an ass of himself, or his dreadful Italian accent. She would have cackled over these things, gladly—her hatred for Hollis was pure and bright and shining—but Peter wanted to talk about the good times. He’d passed through the bitchy stage on his own. He confessed that he’d gathered up all of Hollis’s funny cartoons, ripped them to bits, and burned them. And that he’d stuffed Hollis’s favorite sweater, left behind in a pile for the cleaners, into the trash. And that he spent two days drunk, tossing his glass after every couple of drinks into the fireplace so that he had a pile of shards to clean up when he recovered. But the anger seemed to have passed, leaving behind a resigned, sad tenderness that wrung Rosie’s heart. He wished he had the cartoons back.

  “Tell me the truth, Ma,” he said as he was leaving. “You wish it had been me, don’t you, going off into the sunset with a woman to have babies?”

  Rosie tucked his red scarf around his neck and shook her head firmly. “No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t care who you love, Peter, as long as you’re happy. I really mean that. No jokes. I want you to be happy.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

  She shrugged. “I’m your mother.”

  He hesitated, looking at her there in the front hall. “Then let me ask you this,” he said, paused again, then went on. “You’re Susannah’s mother, too.”

  Rosie stiffened immediately, and dropped his hand that she’d been holding. “So?”

  “Well, I think she’s been unhappy, too. I think she’d like to have your—”

  “Hmm?”

  “Your support.”

  “My support.”

  “Just a word, to say you welcome her back East, that bygones will be bygones.”

  “Bygones never will be bygones, Peter.” She felt her heart begin to thump again, her pulse pound. The anger she’d had to suppress all evening, against Hollis, for Peter’s sake, brimmed over toward Susannah. “She left her mother of her own free will, and she was brought up by her father to be a despicable human being. I haven’t got a reason in the world to give her my damned support.”

  “You’re her mother.”

  “I’m not her mother! I’ve disowned her, and I want nothing to do with her, whether she’s in California or on my doorstep. I don’t even want to talk about her, much less give her my support.”

  He looked at her unhappily. “She’s been calling me.”

  “She’s been calling you.”

  “She called me a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Collect, I assume.”

  “Well, yes, but then she called me again direct. She talked for a long time, about—well, the family, about you, about Dad.”

  “She did.”

  “She really seems to be sincere. I mean, about wanting to make it up with you. I feel bad that I was so snide about her. I don’t think she’s trying to get anything out of you, except—”

  “Support,” Rosie said sarcastically. “In every sense of the word.”

  “Ma …”

  “Go along, now, Peter,” she said, opening the door. It was snowing, very gently. She had never kicked him out before, but she was sick of it—his pleas for Susannah, the way he’d let the girl get to him, her own pounding anger that was beginning to appear ridiculous but which she couldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t shake. “And please drive carefully. And I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe. Do you want to go to a movie one of these nights?”

  He sighed. He drew on his gloves—red woolen ones, with leather palms—and kissed her again, lightly. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go to a movie. You pick.” And then, just before he left, he said, “You’re going to have to face her, sooner or later.”

  She didn’t even answer. She just pushed him out the door, and then watched him go down the walk to his car, get the brush out of the trunk, clean off the windshield. Do the back window, too, she said silently to him, and was relieved when he walked around to do so. He got in the car and drove off—drive carefully, she said to his taillights—leaving her with her anger. It didn’t go away but intensified as she sat by the fire having a last glass of sherry before bed, remembering for some reason how Susannah had abandoned her playhouse after that first summer, declared it was dirty and full of bugs and spiders, cried when Rosie told her she was spoiled, and gone to Edwin for the approval he was quick to give. “Kids outgrow things,” he had said to Rosie, who hadn’t deigned to answer. She had turned the playhouse into a garden shed, and always felt warmly toward the spiders who built their webs in the corners and scurried over the pots.

  When she finished the sherry, she threw the glass at the fireplace, where it shattered, and she felt better. She even chuckled a little, imagining Peter’s pile of smashed glass. But when she went to bed, tired though she was from the late hour, the sherry, the angry bumping of her heart, she couldn’t sleep for thinking of her children. And lest she dwell on Susannah—her tantrums, her school troubles, the fistful of squash she threw at the dining room curtains, the time she rode her bicycle into the box hedge; all this was waiting just outside Rosie’s consciousness for her fury to pounce on—and lest she dwell on it, she thought of Peter, remembering.

  When Edwin left, followed soon by stony-faced Susannah with her three suitcases and a huge plastic bag full of stuffed animals she should have outgrown, and Peter and Rosie were left alone in the house, she felt happiness settle into her and into all the rooms. It was the feeling she remembered from childhood at the start of summer vacation, of infinite possibility, of blessed release. The house, which had for so many years been blighted with the growing enmity between herself and Edwin, between herself and Susannah, between Peter and Edwin, and Peter and Susannah, was blown clean and healthy again by their exit.

  With glee—yes, it was glee, there wasn’t a shred of sadness in her (though for months she couldn’t bring herself to enter Susannah’s room)—with glee she tossed out the old mattress she and Edwin had avoided each other on for so long and bought a new one, hard the way she liked it. She also got rid of the scratchy white muslin sheets Edwin’s mother had given them, which he had always, perversely, claimed to prefer, and bought herself sheets patterned with roses. Edwin had been scornful, after that brief courting period when he’d faked tolerant benevolence, of the roses she surrounded herself with, not only in the garden but in the house. It was something her parents started—roses for their Rose.

  She remembered coming home from school one day when she was eight years old to find her bedroom transformed: rose-colored walls, roses on the curtains, a bedspread to match, roses glowing on the lampshade, the two framed Redouté prints moved from the living room to the wall over her desk, and on the desk a little box whose cover was a full-blown porcelain rose. She was overcome, not least that her parents—garden people, not house people—had done this for her. The rest
of the house was a comfortable shambles; her room was a palace, though what her mother called it sometimes, shyly, fearing to be corny, was “Rose’s Secret Garden.” Now, all these years later, if Rosie had burst into that long-gone rosy room, where even the sun coming in the windows had a pinkish tint, she might have found it garish and tacky—all but the Redouté prints, which she still had. But then it was a heavenly place that summed up all the bliss of her early years.

  And when she and Edwin bought the house in East Chiswick she did it up in roses—not a bower, just here and there a touch, a nosegay. She slipcovered the old wing chair, she hung rose-patterned drapes in the dining room (it was these Susannah hurled the blob of acorn squash at, leaving a stain), she put down a rose-strewn runner in the upstairs hall, she hung the Redoutés and bought a large watercolor still life of roses lying, cut, on a table with secateurs and a pair of old gardening gloves. Something about the way the cut roses, fresh and hopeful but with sharp brown thorns, waited there for the vase and water that don’t appear in the picture appealed to her. Would it be too much to say they reminded her of her waiting, thirsty self? Edwin never liked the picture, thought all her roses were a silly affectation, and even disliked the ones in the garden.

  When he left she overdid it, rosifying the house (as Peter, a smart-aleck twelve, put it) to a perhaps absurd degree.

  “It looks weird, Ma,” he said, weird being the word of the moment.

  “I’m asserting my own personality, Peter,” Rosie told him with a touch of self-consciousness.

  He understood what she was needing to do, of course. He treated the flowered sheets and rosy towels with affectionate amusement. She heard him, one day, apologize to his friend Ronnie, “See, my mother’s name is Rose, so she gets everything with roses on it.”

  “Neat,” Ronnie said, and Peter groaned.

  But then, once, he told her, “It’s not the kind of thing a boy wants to live with,” looking, himself, at thirteen or fourteen, not unlike a dark, graceful blossom of some exotic kind. And though then she scoffed, pointing out that he had his room—a sparsely dressed brown confusion—and the basement rec room with pool table and bare white walls in which to assert his personality, and that the house was hers, dammit, his words affected her, and gradually she “derosified” things a bit, sensing, perhaps, as she let the roses fade, that there were many reasons for Peter’s discomfort with the aggressive femininity of a rose bower.

  But roses aside, they were happy together in their newly roomy, purged house. Peter was a bright, eager, lighthearted boy, a good companion to her always during the lonely parts of those years. Not that he hadn’t his difficult moments, but they were moments—he wasn’t like Susannah, whose sourness was continual, who refused to settle with the world on any terms. Rose didn’t hear from Edwin and Susannah, though her parents occasionally did. She knew they were in New Mexico, where Edwin managed to get himself a company transfer when the divorce became final. She knew when his mother’s money came to him, and she assumed, from the swaggering reports of life deluxe that Susannah’s scrawled communiqués contained, that he had used that money to make more money. But Rosie and her son seldom thought about either of them.

  Was this, as her cousin Deborah used to say, “a shame”? Was it really “too bad” that they hadn’t all parted friends as Debbie’s sister-in-law and her ex-husband had? “A real pity” that they didn’t spend at least Christmas together for the sake of the children? Rosie tried sometimes, though the attempt always either bored or infuriated her, to explain to Debbie that it wasn’t any of those things, that it wasn’t abnormal or sinful or even particularly sad (not to mention none of her business) for the members of a family to dislike each other and want nothing to do with each other. She and Peter, Rosie insisted, were happy without Edwin and Susannah. “Then you’re cold fish,” said her cousin. Rosie turned away with a shrug. “Not to even want to spend Christmas together,” Debbie persisted.

  Rosie could remember Christmases past, and she imagined Christmases present suffused with the malice and discontent of Susannah, with the dullness and pettiness of Edwin—and with the meanness that grew in her own heart in their company—and she said to Debbie, “No, thanks. Peter and I are going to Aruba with Larry for Christmas.”

  Debbie gasped, disapproval turning her face red under heavy makeup. “To Aruba!” She always gasped; everything confounded the poor girl.

  That was 1968, when Peter was sixteen. Rosie was seeing a tweedy lawyer named Larry Bruner. The Christmas trip to Aruba which so shocked her cousin was in fact Rosie and Larry’s last attempt to love each other enough to marry. The venture wasn’t a total washout, compared, say, to that tropical honeymoon with Edwin, a comparison Rosie inevitably made and which endeared to her Larry’s garrulous good humor and constant attention. The three of them were charmed by the gentle blue-green beauties of the place, by sun and sea and tangles of bright flowers, and Christmas presents opened on a terrace under an umbrella. But Larry didn’t like the bond, viewed at close range, between Peter and Rosie. That’s how he put it: “I don’t like it,” meaning he considered it in some way unhealthy but not wanting to say so, even when she pressed him. And she did press him, wanting to hear the words that would part them, knowing they were there to be spoken. But he kept hedging and hinting, telling her meaningful anecdotes from his own life. He himself at sixteen had been hard at work battling his parents at every turn. He couldn’t comprehend a teenage son who was openly fond of his mother, who kissed her not only good night but good morning, and who had no interest in joining the group of noisy, flirting teenagers who gathered nightly on the hotel terrace while their parents crowded into the bar. And he resented her allowing Peter to sit up with them until all hours. She didn’t tell Larry she permitted such liberties—liberties that certainly did sabotage their romance—because she had already decided she and Larry had no future. She preferred Peter’s company to Larry’s—though, when Peter did go to his room at night, what she and Larry did in the privacy of theirs continued to be ingenious and gratifying. Sometimes, lying in bed with Barney or digging in the garden pondering her lost youth, Rosie missed Larry Bruner. But on New Year’s Day she bid him farewell forever, because—this is what it came down to—he didn’t like her son.

  There were other men, of course. She preferred reasonably long, temporarily permanent relationships, the kind in which they installed a toothbrush in her bathroom but still called before coming over. Peter was initially suspicious of each of her beaux. Having learned the vocabulary of the age, he was always afraid they were using her, that she was being taken advantage of simply because she slept with them, that “serial monogamy,” as he called it, was an unhealthy, dangerous lifestyle. But Rosie was lucky in love—up to a point, the point being one just short of remarriage—because she had an instinct for nice men. She had used up all her bad judgment and gullibility on Edwin. After the divorce, she was canny. She developed a nose for phonies, and for the smell of dullness. Her life, during the years of her thirties and her forties, was busy with men, full of delights for both the spirit and the flesh, with here and there a sad parting thrown in for drama.

  Peter got used to his mother’s liaisons and began to have some of his own, the nature of which Rosie had no inkling of at the time. Or very little inkling. He had girlfriends, too. He told her, all those years later, with tears in his eyes, how he had tried to want to do with his girlfriends what the guys at school boasted they did with theirs, and how he had failed. He had taken Nancy Kirkpatrick to the senior prom. Nancy Kirkpatrick had had an aggressive and highly visible crush on Peter all through high school. Rosie could never understand why he didn’t like her—a bright, pretty girl who knew something about gardening. Ideal daughter-in-law material.

  “I couldn’t stand her lipstick,” Peter told Rosie during his Christmas night confession. “She laid it on with a palette knife.”

  “But, Peter, a lot of men don’t like heavy lipstick,” she said.

  He
gave her a reproachful look she’d never forgotten. “Ma,” he said gently, and she blushed. “I’m telling you how I am,” he went on. “You’re not going to talk me out of it. It’s not just a matter of lipstick.”

  She apologized. She swore to herself that from that moment she would accept it. She became by an act of will the tolerant, large-minded mother Peter was so proud of and so amused by, and gradually she became that way naturally, genuinely, wishing for her son exactly what she’d told him she wished—happiness.

  As Rosie lay awake that night, imagining the soft snow falling outside on her garden, she despaired of it, of happiness for Peter. She could think of him only with woe. What would become of him? She wondered whether Hollis had come to hate Peter as she had hated Edwin, had looked on his face as he slept with loathing, had cringed at picking up an article of his clothing or sitting on a chair still warm from his bottom, had come to dread the sound of his voice.… Oh, it was unimaginable. She remembered the sweetness of the two of them together. She half considered getting in touch with Hollis and begging him to go back to Peter, offering him money, weeping on her knees—finding a certain pleasurable disgust in picturing this grotesque scene. It was preferable, at least, to the scene Peter’s last words had conjured up. “You’re going to have to face her sooner or later,” he had said. It was, of course, true, and it edged closer and closer to her imagination until she got out of bed, put on the lights, and went downstairs to her pile of seed catalogs. Susannah hath murdered sleep, she said to herself, making tea and a peanut butter sandwich.

  But sitting down to the catalogs was a treat she’d been saving up all month, holding off until she had them all, leafing through them as they came but waiting for the right moment to actually get down to business, make charts and lists and diagrams and decide what to order. She put on her reading glasses and let the catalogs console her, their thin pages crowded with color photos showing improbable lushness, unattainable perfection, staggering beauty. Rosie got out the paper plots she had made of her garden in spring, summer, fall, to see where the gaps were and what had died or failed or been a mistake, and how she could fill them in. They wouldn’t be taping this year, so this wouldn’t be a television garden, and she could afford to experiment a bit. Should she try a rock garden again? Hers had always failed—hadn’t, at least, equaled the one she remembered at Silvergate that her grandfather had made, with its green and white and blue and purple clusters of tiny Alpine flowers, looking as if nature had done it all by accident. The one Rosie attempted had looked studied and rather silly, and she had eventually ripped out all the plants and let it revert to a rock pile where the Sheffields’ cat sunned herself. But she was tempted by her memory. Or sweet peas: she’d never grown nice sweet peas, though she had dug them deep, mulched with peat moss, watered like mad, and provided expensive “weatherized trellis netting” for them to climb on; and yet she remembered the Painted Ladies and Queen Alexandras that had flourished so easily in the garden in England. And Japanese iris, of course, which she could never get to thrive properly in her yard.