But there they were, at Duke’s place in Chiswick—a big shingled house, painted red, with a wide stone-pillared porch and a view of barns, hills, and not too far off in the distance a plant that manufactured creosoted railroad ties.
When they arrived, finally, after twelve days on the road, Susannah was travel-tired and downhearted, overwhelmed simply at being there, of being jerked back into the present tense in a cold Connecticut house on a dark rural road. Ivan was full of energy after all those days cooped up in the van. While he and Duke went out into the cold dark with a flashlight, for a look around the place (woodpile, orchard, frozen pond, all the paraphernalia of self-sufficiency that Susannah, eventually, would become so fond of), Susannah called her father—called, at any rate, the number of St. Theodore’s, hoping they’d hook her up to her father out there and not to Dr. Strauss or Mrs. Campbell or Mrs. Panza, which would mean she was too late and he had died while she was reading a road map in Virginia or screwing Ivan in Mississippi.
But they put him on the phone. “Susannah?” he said, his voice so weak and distant it was as if he were talking from the fictional star settlement she’d been writing about all the way across the continent.
“Dad, Dad, we’re here, we’re in Connecticut. How are you?”
There was a pause, and it sounded as if someone was propping him up on the pillows; she heard him grunt, heard a voice—Mrs. Panza, it sounded like—and then he said, more strongly, “What say, honey?”
“How are you? How are you doing?”
“Where are you now, Susannah? Did you get there? Are you all right?”
“Yes, we’re here, in Connecticut. But how are you?”
“You know how I am, Susannah.” Neither of them spoke; he was being hoisted up again, and drank a little water. She heard a glass tap against the mouthpiece. Duke’s phone was on the stair landing, and she sat on the step and leaned her head against the grimy brown wallpaper; it was ice cold. “There,” he said, not to her. Then, “Susannah?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“You don’t need to call me, you know. I meant what I said. I can do this alone.” These words came through clearly.
“I know, Dad, but I need to know. I’m sorry, I just can’t let you go like that.”
“Susannah? I don’t want you to cry.” If she’d heard those words once from him she’d heard them a thousand times.
“I won’t,” she said, crying anyway. “But don’t say I can’t call, Dad.”
There was another pause. She could hear him breathe, in, out, in—was he asleep? Where was Mrs. Panza? She imagined his pale, lipless mouth open in sleep like a slot, his caved-in cheeks. Then he said, “No,” and she waited. “No,” he said again. “You call, honey. You call if you want to. I like to hear your voice.”
His voice at that point faded away, and Mrs. Panza came on. “Mrs. Cord? How are you? It’s Mrs. Panza. Your father has had his medication and is just about to drop off for a little nap before suppertime.”
“How is he, Mrs. Panza?” A motherly woman, on whose shoulder Susannah had wept, out in the hall, more than once.
“Doing pretty well today,” she said. “He’s holding his own.” There was a smile in her voice, and Susannah could imagine her looking fondly at Edwin as she spoke—her baby. There was a low mumble, and she added, “He says for you not to worry.” Another mumble, prolonged. “He says be good and be happy and not to worry.”
“I’ll call tomorrow, Mrs. Panza. Is that okay? Does it do him any good?”
“It certainly does him no harm, Mrs. Cord,” she said carefully. “You call as often as you wish. Even if he can’t take the call someone will give you an update.”
Susannah carried a suitcase up to the room she and Ivan would sleep in. The cats followed her, the three of them skulking low and wary up the stairs, practically on their bellies. “Think of this as your home,” she said to them; it was what Duke had said to her when he kissed her hello. “For however long,” he had said.
She thought of it as her dark, cold home. It would be dark, she could tell, even in daylight. The windows were small and sparse, with dark green shades pulled down over them. All the light bulbs seemed to be forty-watt energy-savers. There were two woodstoves going, one in the huge and drafty kitchen, one in the toy-littered front room, but the house was still cold. Tiny, invisible gusts of frigid air whisked from behind walls and moldings and window-frames and cut through her jeans, her thin sweater. She unpacked Ivan’s flannel shirt and put it on, and a second pair of heavy socks. From the room next door she could hear voices: the two little girls, aged five, talking in bed, sleepy murmurs with long pauses in between. She lifted up a shade and looked out at the night. She couldn’t see much, but as she stood looking Duke’s flashlight came into view from behind a grove of trees, and she could make out, just, Duke and Ivan behind it, Ivan with his hands in his jacket pockets. They’d have to buy some heavy gloves; neither of them had any. While she watched, he removed one hand and gestured with it. What’s he telling Duke, she wondered—about his women? about Edwin? about the baby they were trying to make? about her? Anything—it could be anything, from what they had for lunch to what they did in bed. Ivan had no secrets except from his wife.
She let the shade fall and surveyed the room. It was what one would expect: stained wallpaper, an old sewing stand, an oak bow-front dresser, a strip of dingy carpet, a sagging double bed covered in a chenille bedspread with a pile of blankets folded at the foot, and the three cats under it. She squatted down to talk to them; three pairs of eyes gleamed; the three cats sat in perfect stillness. She stood up. Creaking floorboards. One wobbly brass floor lamp beside the bed, with the usual dim bulb. Could she write there? Well, why not? The room wasn’t much different, except in temperature, from the bedroom they had left behind on Dimmick Street. Cleaner, maybe. She would hang Ivan’s painting there—the only one they had brought with them, “Cloud House.”
She heard Duke and Ivan come in, and went down to join them. They had supper in the kitchen, sitting on rocking chairs pulled up to the blazing stove. It was the kind with glass doors in front, and they could see the flames licking the crossed logs. There was hot vegetable soup with barley in it, hunks of bread, and cold beer. They held the bowls in their hands, and Duke ladled in the soup. Steam rose from it, along with the smell of tomato and some pungent herb. Duke’s hands were scarred with burn marks—long purplish welts and, across the back of one, a delicate white streak, healed.
“What’ve you been doing to yourself?” Susannah asked him.
“Just handling the stoves,” he grinned. “I’ve never had a really bad burn.”
Ivan was silent, eating his soup with single-minded concentration. It was the most substantial, and surely the most delicious, meal they’d had in many days, but a few spoonfuls made Susannah warm and full, and she stopped eating to ask Duke questions.
“Aren’t the twins cold up there? There’s no heat upstairs.”
He grinned at her again, enjoying his role of hardy New Englander against hers of California naif. “They’ve got thermal trapdoor sleepers on over long johns, and a bed full of quilts, and furthermore they sleep together. I go in to get them up in the mornings for school and they’re cuddled together like kittens.”
“School?”
“Kindergarten. Palmer Elementary School, on the other side of Chiswick. They take the school bus.” He relished imparting this information. Susannah could see that his daughters enchanted him—just the fact of their existence, their presence in his life, their trap-door sleepers, the name of their school. “Is that where you went, Susannah? Palmer School?”
“No—mine was just called Chiswick Elementary School. Though I suppose it could be the same building. I don’t know where it’d be from here. I’ve lost my bearings.”
But she remembered Mrs. Garmer, and rows of inky desks, and dusty hardwood floors, and her friend Ellen Moffat, who also had a terrible mother. Ellen’s threw tantrums and had weeping fits; thi
nking back, Susannah realized Mrs. Moffat must have been alcoholic, like her own father; she dimly recalled the smell of booze, a blurred look in her eyes. Mrs. Garmer was the fifth-grade teacher, she had pimples and a crown of braids. Susannah was always in trouble, the principal (Miss Clelland?) calling her mother, and Rosie giving Susannah the silent treatment.
“And who looks after them, Duke? I mean, when they get home from school?”
“I do,” he said, surprised. He was stocky and handsome, a little shorter than Susannah, with a neat pointed nose, mild no-color eyes, a cherubic face with long, turned-down lips, and thinning hair hanging to the middle of his ears. He had neat, aristocratic wrists and ankles, and quick, square hands. His wife, Margie, had been a tiny woman, curly-haired, competent, with gold stars in her pierced ears. She wore a light blue nurse’s uniform, and that summer when the Cords came to Connecticut for the funeral and stayed with Duke and Margie, when Susannah had been so sick and desperate, she used to look at Margie—a nurse with gold stars twinkling at her ears—and think Help me, save me. And she and Ivan were, of course, helped and saved, by luck and money, and it was Margie who was lost—killed not long after in a car crash on Route 95.
“The bus doesn’t get them home until four o’clock, and I’m here by then,” Duke said. “If I’m not, Ginger looks after them—that’s my neighbor, in the white house across the road and down. They love Ginger.”
Susannah wondered: will they love me? “I’m afraid of children,” she said to Duke, and Ivan stopped eating and said, “For Christ’s sake, Susannah, that’s what I mean,” as if he were continuing an old conversation. As indeed he was. “Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake.”
When Duke said, “You’ll love the twins, Susannah, and I know they’ll love you. I don’t want you to worry while you’re here, I want you to throw yourself heart and soul into your new life and get a little happy,” and whacked his warm hand down on hers, she knew what Ivan had been gesturing about out there in the dark.
Duke and Ivan talked about the restaurant: about money, about the lease, about ordering equipment, about quantity cooking. Most of what Ivan had speculated about on the road was proving to be wrong-headed; Duke knew all about it, it would be all his doing, all his ideas. They had the money—her grandmother’s legacy, expanded through some lucky investing—but Duke had the experience, and the head for practicalities. He had managed a health food store for five years, he’d cooked for two years in a vegetarian restaurant and another two years in an Italian restaurant in New Haven, and if his soup was any indication, he was a good cook, sure enough.
Susannah felt as they sat there that they were in the hands of a wise doctor, or guru, or shrink—that as things stood Duke would be a father figure not only to her but to Ivan, and she wondered how and where Ivan would gain the upper hand, for she knew he’d have to have it in some aspect of their new communal life. Maybe by becoming a father? Surely a proud new daddy doesn’t need a father figure?
She didn’t know Duke very well. He was an old college buddy and fellow seminarian of Ivan’s. Duke, though, had left the seminary after a year, while Ivan went on to be ordained, to batter at the walls of the priesthood in a slum parish in Buffalo, New York, and finally to leave not only the priesthood but the church, split for California, and hook up with—among others—Susannah. He and Duke had kept in touch via occasional and expensive phone calls, one visit from Duke to California, their trip east three years back, and an annual Christmas card from them to Duke. From what Susannah had observed of Ivan’s friendship with Duke, it seemed to be composed of equal parts rivalry, affection, and a set of vague shared aspirations—toward what it would be hard to say precisely, but what it came down to was an aspiration toward whatever they didn’t have at the moment: first holiness, then freedom, then mainstream respectability, now Yankee self-sufficiency. And there they all were, breaking wholesome bread around their woodstove, with the aspirations of Duke and Ivan rising in the air around them.
Susannah decided to share them, however vague. She believed in Ivan (she must believe in Ivan; what other choice had she?). She would believe in Duke, too. And most of all she believed in the holiness of the heart’s affections. Where had that phrase come from? what poem? She couldn’t recall, but she said it to herself as she sat in the stove’s heat, listening to Ivan’s travel stories, listening to Duke’s plans for the restaurant. “You name it, Susannah. You’re the writer,” Duke said. “Come up with something poetic.” It would be real, then; it would have a name; it would materialize in a happy confusion of pots and pans, and tables and chairs, and the smell of cooking. She had been unaware, until that stove-lit moment of certainty, that she had ever been dubious about the project.
She settled down easily at the house on Perkins Road. After the first shock of its dark draftiness, she began to like it. The hugeness of the place pleased her—the high ceilings, the maze of unheated rooms, the vast empty attic, the clutter of outbuildings, the calendar-scene view behind the house, to the west, of a red barn on a hill, a white farmhouse, cows. Even the red-flagged mailbox, shiny black against the white snow, filled her with delight when she trekked out in her boots for the mail. And from the front porch, Duke said, the factory would be nearly invisible in summer when the trees leafed out. From her bedroom window she could see Duke’s six apple trees, gnarled as witches, and the frozen pond surrounded by stiff brown weeds.
They did little for the first few days but talk, eat, and drink beer, sitting around the kitchen stove in heavy sweaters and wool socks. Susannah listened, chewing her cuticles, while Duke and Ivan reminisced about their college days and the seminary. All their stories were absurd, designed to make themselves look as silly as possible; they liked looking back from their thirties at their frivolous and misguided youth, and there was an unspoken satisfaction between them with how well, after all, they’d turned out.
Susannah and Ivan told Duke about California, where he’d been just that once and was reluctant to travel to again. He was scared of earthquakes—afraid, since Margie’s death, of disasters in general, cautious about cars, protective of his daughters. Susannah told him about the time she and Carla had taken Carla’s little boy skiing at Big Bear, outside Los Angeles.
“We had to rent him a snowsuit—can you imagine? Southern California kids don’t own them.”
They all looked at the hooks by the kitchen door crowded with the twins’ well-worn and grubby collection of snowpants and down jackets, the pile of mittens and wool hats in a basket on the floor, the tangle of boots left on newspapers to drip, and Duke laughed. “Sounds like paradise, right about now. Sometimes I think if I have to zip another boot or hunt up one more lost mitten I’ll just flip out, and the little men will have to cart me off to L.A.” He looked at Susannah in belated surprise. “You ski?”
“Oh no,” she said. “I sat in the clubhouse and watched.”
“Just watched? All afternoon?” Duke look amused.
“I read old magazines. People magazine, and Time. I learned a lot.”
“Normally, Susannah is sort of out of touch,” Ivan said, waggling his eyebrows as if to say: understatement of the year.
“I thought writers had to have their fingers on the pulse of the world.”
“My writing is strictly other-worldly,” said Susannah, smiling at them both, wondering how soon she could stop being sociable—a guest—and get to work. Her half-formed story pulled at her; even as she sat talking, bits of it wandered into her head, fanciful fragments mixed up with Duke’s striped socks, cold beer, Ivan’s laugh. In the evenings, the twins played in the front room and the three adults, sitting in the kitchen, could hear tags of their conversation. Everything they said made Duke chuckle, or smile secretly to himself with pride. His mouth turned down at the corners when he smiled, giving him a rueful look. Susannah wondered whether it tormented him that his little girls, with their tiny hands and feet, and their light, curly hair, looked so much like his dead wife, or whether it co
nsoled him. She tried to imagine herself, Ivan dead and gone, with her baby grown to a miniature version of its father, but she didn’t linger on the thought; it horrified her, and she looked with great respect at Duke, who was able to enjoy his children, and to enjoy life in spite of what it had inflicted on him.
She wished she could make friends with the twins. She suspected she would, in time, but for the moment she couldn’t think of anything to say to them, couldn’t talk to them and tease them as Ivan did. She merely observed them, with wary interest, as if they were extraterrestrial beings, or some new and intelligent breed of cat—alien creatures. Their conversation fascinated her; they could, often, be one person talking, so closely did their twin thoughts connect. Once Susannah heard them jointly telling a story to the cats:
“So they went down the dark, dark path.”
“And it got darker and darker, like a tunnel.”
“All the bushes and plants closed in.”
“And the flowers.”
“And they walked and walked until they came to a cave. And what do you think was in it?”
“It was a beautiful princess with long silver hair.”
“And she said, ‘Won’t you come in and play with my cats?’”
“They seem very precocious,” she said to Duke, and he smiled his turned-down smile and blushed.
Sometimes it snowed, lightly, never lasting. Large wet flakes drifted dreamily down, letting the wind bat them around before they settled and melted. Once there was a snow day, and the twins were home from school, exuberant at the holiday. Susannah, shyly, played a game called Sleepy Time with them. You had to match pairs of pajamaed animals and tuck them into little cardboard beds. She had a feeling they let her win. She made them cocoa, and they sang “Oh Susannah” to her. She liked the way they fussed over the cats, who bore all their attentions, except being dressed in doll clothes, with surprising aplomb.
The Garden Path Page 9
