Ella in Bloom

by Shelby Hearon

  “Would you like to see my cello?” Birdie asked him. “I mean the cello I get to use?”

  In the other half of the house, the plumber flipped the pages of his metal-backed ledger. “You called this same time last year,” he remarked. “You might think about getting the Roto-Rooter guys in, maybe think new pipes.”

  “I’m not thinking about anything but having this place so the john flushes and the tub empties and the sink drains before the teacher gets back from summer in Virginia with her folks.”

  “I understand,” he said. Understanding that we were talking about money. “That your family I saw in there?”

  “That’s them.”

  “Nice. I got me two girls.”

  “I’m glad, Bert.” I left him to do his job and made a call out on Margot-the-teacher’s line. Explaining to Mayfair that my brother-in-law had blown in, catching me in disrepair, and asking could she lend me Felice to stay here with Birdie for a while in the late afternoon and evening, so I could show him the sights. Birdie had the house key on a ribbon around her neck, I told her. I also asked what she knew about the Pink Cafe, where I knew I was going to have to take him.

  “Try the crab cakes,” she said with authority. “Ask the waiter if he’ll tell Daniel—that’s the chef—you’d like the corn galettes. They’re never on the menu, but he usually has some. Suggest to the guy that you two split the tarte tatin for dessert—”

  “Maybe you should take him—?” I joked weakly.

  “Show him the Old Metairie Country Club. Mention the French pewter inlays.”

  “Sure. He’ll believe that. Me, coming from this place, pretending I know that place.”

  “Hon, you have to think like a man. You’re staying in that small gem of yours because the price of land in that area is skyrocketing. Tell him they’ll buy it for a teardown, you’ll get a quarter mil for the lot.”

  Hanging up, I banged my head softly against the rental bedroom wall. I might as well be back at Mother’s house putting on a show, lying my head off.

  When I got back, the plumber bribed and thanked, Birdie was explaining to Red all about the String Project, and how they provided the instruments, and how you tried out. Presenting her life in her forthright, truthful way—and, of course, unwittingly presenting a wealth of other information. Seeing me come through the doorway, she mentioned the apocryphal annual String Project retreat, intuiting that this surprise visit was not entirely pleasing to her mom. (And because her heart was made of gold.)

  What, I wondered, joining them, sinking into the other cushion of the sofa beside Birdie, would my sister Terrell want me to do now that Red was here? Carry through with the charade? Describe her visit here, what we did, what we talked about? But surely, having waded around to my back door (the notice on the front said BELL DOESN’T WORK, GO AROUND BACK), and sized up me and this run-down two-plex, he must have known at once that he’d found something different from what he’d made this trip expecting.

  I told Birdie that Felice could come back with her from the Pink Mall, that I’d leave them spaghetti, that Red and I were going to drive around, then have an early supper.

  “I and Felice can fix something, Mom.”

  “You go on. And be careful.”

  “I’ll see you later, Uncle Rufus. Won’t I?” She threw her arms around him.

  “Sure thing,” he promised. “So long.”

  “Au revoir,” she replied.

  Alone with Red, I felt both relieved and nervous. Relieved, because I wouldn’t have my daughter hearing whatever I chose to tell him. Nervous, because I was going to have to make believable my sister’s visit. It seemed to me his coming here was akin to someone paying for a ticket, taking a seat, watching the curtain rise, expecting to see a performance of A Tale of Two Sisters, and instead, seeing only the backstage crew checking the lights, the extras picking up their props, the stars getting made up, wardrobe unpacking the costumes. My task, as I saw it now, taking a deep breath, was to make Red think the production—Terrell’s visit to my supposedly genteel surroundings—had all been crafted by my sister and me to fool our mother. Not to deceive him.

  “So, what’s the agenda here?” I asked him straight out.

  “I want to see where you took Terrell. I came on impulse. If that’s difficult for you, to be reminded—”

  “I’ll be about fifteen minutes,” I told him, heading into the kitchen’s tiny work space, turning on the burner, chopping up onion, fresh tomatoes, a garlic clove, until I covered the bottom of a hot skillet, adding a little oil, ground meat, then putting it on low. While this simmered down to a sauce, and the water boiled for pasta, I went into my bedroom, behind the table where Red sat waiting in his sock feet.

  Well, now, I silently addressed my open closet, what have you got to offer? My best watering shorts, but maybe the Pink Cafe expected something a bit dressy. Besides, he’d worn a jacket. I pulled on a black T-shirt and, on top, donned an oldish café au lait sleeveless dress, leaving it unbuttoned to the waist. Good? Awful? My brown sandals were already on my feet, matching well my now partially dry hair, which I tried, with little success, to fold into a French braid by myself. Giving up, I held it back on each side with semi-new tortoise barrettes. A nice sienna lipstick completed the look: ready for Red.

  The boiling water had raised the humidity in the kitchen to 89 percent, cooking in minutes the dry lengths of spaghetti, which, drained, I left on the counter with a note explaining how to resuscitate it (plunge into boiling water) and that the sauce was in the fridge to be heated. They could add Birdie’s seven-grain bread to fill up.

  “Okay,” I said to Red, feeling as ready as I’d ever be. I showed him the drill for navigating hurricane aftermath on the Gulf Coast. You carry your socks and shoes. I didn’t say that nobody down here wore socks, since he had lace-up shoes, but maybe next time, if there was a next time (I guess I was thinking about that), he’d know to wear boat shoes or sandals. In the driveway, shaking my feet off like a dog just out of the lake, I told him, “We’ll leave your rental car and go in mine. These streets are a maze of the worst kind; visitors sometimes are lost for several months. I’m surprised you found us.”

  “I spotted your street right off the access road.”

  “I’d have met your plane.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

  “A fifty-fifty chance I would have.” I laughed and cleared a place for him to sit in my heirloom Chevy, moving a notepad, a pair of old tennies, garden gloves, and an empty water bottle to the floor of the backseat. “Does this remind you of your old car?”

  “I hated selling it, the worst way.”

  “What’d you get for it?” I backed carefully out the drive to the sloshy, unpaved road.

  “I forget. Forty-five cents on a new Peugeot? Fifty-five?”

  I turned to look at him, glad to have him in my car. He wore wire-rim glasses, which he hadn’t had at Mother’s, though maybe he wore his contacts for her benefit. He looked more like himself, even in the high-fashion Oliver People’s frames. Getting into this car, shutting the doors, heading out, did remind me of our old drive-up hamburger days. It was intimate to be alone with a man in a car, it was. You could hear him start to speak, hear him shift in his seat, cough, sense his shoulder close by. And nobody could hear what you said to one another and nobody could see how you looked at one another.

  I got a grip on myself and began the tour. “The railroad track there,” I explained, “is the south dividing line of Old Metairie, and therefore of the school district, which is the reason we’re camped out here.”

  “Good location.” He turned half facing me, his seat belt loosened, half looking out the window. He seemed fairly at ease, considering how men hated being a passenger in a car. He tossed his jacket in the backseat while my AC struggled to come to life.

  “I owe our place, such as it is, to Buddy.”

  “I never understood what you saw in that big handsome guy with all the macho moves.”

>   “You mean you never understood what he saw in me. I got him on the rebound.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  I turned around and drove us back through the sheltered enclave of pastel homes that formed Old Metairie—going fifteen miles an hour on the dogleg streets that zigged and zagged so that outsiders couldn’t cut through the pricey area, or find their way anywhere unless they already knew how to get there. Even here, in the high-maintenance neighborhoods, you could see some storm damage: soggy yards, flattened caladium, a sagging crape myrtle, a broken althaea branch. I pointed out to Red a narrow blue-painted home, a frame house one room wide, with porches top and bottom. “You see these shotguns in Central Texas. The old German settlers built them, as they did here.” And then slowed before a lavender story-and-a-half with dormers, porch swing, mulberry shutters. “This is called a cottage here, modeled, as a lot of them were, after small English country places. The French really settled the adjoining parish, not here.” I pulled up at the curb of a familiar Dutch-pink house with white picket fence and white shutters, shaded by a tall magnolia, past its bloom. “I gave Terrell a photo of this house,” I said carefully, “to show our mother.” I hesitated, the car idling.

  But Red did not comment. He did not say: You pretended you lived in that house. He did not say: My wife pretended to me she had stayed in that house. He looked at me, and we sat there for a time, until I moved on.

  By now I’d relaxed considerably. I’d become so used to writing Mother about these streets, these very houses and yards as if they were on my street, as if this neighborhood was mine, that it all seemed natural. Crawling along, making the leisurely turns, I found it so completely plausible that Terrell and I had indeed scouted about to find things to photograph for Mother, to relate to Mother, that I myself almost believed we’d done it. My sister, with her golden hair, in her beige linen shorts and white sleeveless linen blouse, asking could we stop someplace for coffee and a pastry.

  “At her memorial service,” Red spoke aloud from his own private thoughts, “you said, ‘I’m glad you’re still standing.’ That was the most real thing anybody said to me, Ella. I wanted to thank you for that.”

  “It seemed to me that losing someone that way, the way you did, when you were in the midst of”—I hesitated, wanting to say it right—“unfinished business, would nearly lay you out flat as an asphalt drive.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” he admitted, wiping his wire-rim glasses.

  “You sure were a help to me when I came back home pregnant, and everybody else pretended not to notice.”

  “I thought maybe I’d stepped out of line, mentioning it.”

  “You probably had. I’d stepped out of line even showing up. But I wanted to flaunt my belly, however they took it. I owe that to Buddy, too.”

  He put his hand lightly on my shoulder. “You got a good girl out of it.”

  Working my way through the maze of short streets, turning left, right, left, right, I waved an arm at the small lots with their rectangles of grass, front beds edged in monkey grass, wisteria growing along the eaves. “Once these were places where my plumber, Bert, could have lived, or Margot, the teacher who rents half my house, or our mail carrier.”

  “Or my folks.”

  “Or your folks. Now these go for three times the price of my parents’ house.”

  “How come?”

  “Safety. One lock on the door, only decorative fences in the yards. You can take a walk in the evenings. Kids can shoot baskets in the driveways. Fifties’ safety at nineties’ prices, my friend Karl says. He’s a realtor.”

  “The one Birdie mentioned.” He smiled.

  “Protecting her mom.” I smiled too.

  I drove him out of the area and then back between two stone pillars into the hidden heart of old Old Metairie, with its walled gardens, gated drives, historic houses, private police force. Cruising down one of the wide divided streets, ancient live oaks meeting above our heads, I felt on familiar ground. “This is where most of my clients live,” I told him.

  “Your clients?” He sounded surprised.

  I’d forgotten that he had no inkling of what I did. But why should he? To my mother, and my daddy, too, even to my sister, a good marriage, or even a good widowhood, for that matter, meant the woman did not have to work. “I water houseplants,” I explained. “I’m a plant sitter, like a house sitter or a pet sitter.” And, from where we were, I could see the rose lady’s Georgian home, and knew, two streets over, exactly where moonflowers dozed next to Formosa lilies and how the daylight would look filtered through the skylight.

  At the end of the street, I lingered before the pink Moroccan flat-roofed facade of the country club. Six tennis courts lay under wet tarps beside a reviewing stand covered in see-through plastic. A temporary awning sheltered arrivals at the front door. But I did not pretend to know about the new gallery porch along the back with its scent of potted ginger, the Petit Wedgwood Room, or even the famous inlaid pewter bar brought from France. Then I turned and slowly drove back up the street we’d just come down, out of the secure, secluded compound.

  “Did she—” Red looked out the window at the homes, rubbed the back of his neck, then clasped his hands. “That must be interesting work,” he finally said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I love flowers.”

  13

  I decided to take Red to Belle Vue next. A place that was real, that I loved, and where I supposedly had taken Terrell. I wanted him to see where the roses I stuffed beneath the rudbeckia at Mother’s came from, and maybe understand how it hurt to bury them there. But when I pulled into the gravel drive and cut the ignition, my mind stayed on my sister, and for a moment I felt that loss and wondered what I was doing taking Red around, playacting our sisterly visit, when maybe now it didn’t matter. But I’d made her a promise; I was keeping my word. Besides, if she had come (and in my mind I’d begun to think when she had come), I would certainly have brought her here to meet Henry, and to see his flowers.

  After paying the nominal admissions fee to tour the house and grounds, I led Red past the long reflecting pool enclosed by a boxwood hedge, the lily-pad pond with one hundred kinds of ferns on the banks, the English-countryside garden with its stone benches, longstemmed grasses, trumpet vines, and bleeding hearts, to an extended trellis with a dozen different climbing roses.

  “I started coming here to learn from Henry, the head gardener, but then I began to write to Mother about my favorites, pretending they were growing in my own garden.” I laughed, embarrassed to reveal the depth of my deception. “But you saw my yard—”

  “Did Terrell—” But he let that go. He’d left his jacket in the car and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. The humidity had wilted him a bit, and, perhaps, the strain. He looked less like a lawyer than what Daddy used to call, speaking of his studious junior colleagues, a pencil pusher. He clipped sunglasses on his wire-rims and looked around. “This must have been some estate in its day.”

  “This is still its day.”

  We found Henry stooping over, his knees muddy, his face shaded under a wide-brimmed straw hat. He didn’t hear us till I called his name, then with some difficulty he rose and wiped his hands to shake mine.

  “Thank you,” I told him. “The rose bouquet looked beautiful. Each and every one survived the trip and kept its fragrance all weekend.”

  He looked pleased. “Your mama liked our selection, then, did she?”

  “She almost cried,” I lied. “Texas has been so hot, her own garden has dried to straw.”

  He lifted his large hands to the sky. “We drown; they scorch.” He seemed to consider this the natural way of things.

  I introduced the men. “This is Rufus Hall; he’s family. Red, this is Henri Legrand; he’s my teacher.”

  “Don’t know about that, Ella,” Henry said, but he reddened a bit under his sun-browned skin. He did at that moment, straw hat under his arm, face lined as worn leather, look like a farmer in the Rh�
�ne Valley. Or so I imagined. He showed Red his new prize from West Sussex, England, bred in Hamburg when that was part of Denmark, an Alba out of a Damask. He could have been reciting the lineage of queens and emperors, instead of a hybrid of near-perfection, deep-to-palest pink, which could flourish anywhere—except at my mother’s house.

  “How long have you been working here?” Red asked, sounding deferential. He seemed to study the older man with something akin to envy.

  Henry shifted his weight, taking Red’s measure. Was this a genuine question? “I was gardener here when it was a private home. They let me stay on. Now they’ve got a dozen working, and I’m called Head Rose Gardener. That suits me fine. I always did favor the roses.”

  “Ella must have got that from you.”

  “Might be,” he agreed, putting his straw hat on, getting down on his knees. Back at work. He indicated the troughs he was shaping around the base of the rosebushes. “I’m trying to drain their roots.”

  “Glad to meet you,” Red said, standing a minute, as if to add something more.

  He and I walked along to a wooden bench under a lattice laced with white clematis, rooted in a limey soil. I sat, kicking off my sandals and pulling up the skirt of my dress enough to get hazy sun on my shins. I lifted my hair to try to catch a little breeze on my neck, but the sticky air hung still.

  Red, beside me, stretched out his long legs, seeming to consider them, his khaki pants still damp at the cuffs from wading through my backyard. He stared out toward the boxwood wall.

  I waited. I knew he was working around to something; the way he’d rolled up his sleeves; the way he’d been distracted. Maybe he intended to get around to pinning me down; maybe he’d ask a few more of those leading questions, the way he had in Austin. I realized I was on my guard.