Blessing in Disguise (10 page)

After all,
she
loved to garden—at times, it seemed the only thing that kept her sane.

“Not enough sun,” he told her, shaking his head. “Lobelias need some light, or they get leggy and don’t bloom the way they should.” She loved the deliberate way he spoke, and the way his brown hands cupped the air in front of him as if he could somehow make
it
bloom. “There’s something in the soil, too—that’s what killed the bleeding hearts. Too much acidity, is my guess.”

“There’s always something killing off the bleeding hearts,” Cordelia sighed, thinking of Dan Killian. Then, seeing the quizzical look on Gabe’s sun-cured face with its slightly crooked nose—broken years ago, he’d told her, in a schoolyard fight he’d attempted to stop—she added quickly, “What do you recommend?”

“I’ve mixed some lime in with the mulch, but that won’t cure whatever is bothering you.” Gabe’s eyes crinkled and his mouth stretched in a wide and disconcertingly boyish grin. She watched him pull a neatly folded handkerchief from his back pocket, and the thought stole into her mind—
Somebody’s looking after him, ironing for him.
Her heart catching just the tiniest bit, she watched him mop his brow, then tuck the handkerchief, still folded, back into his pocket. He glanced upward at the cloudless sky. “It’s going to rain. See that red rim around the sun? That means a wet day tomorrow.”

Wasn’t that just like him? she thought. Asking a question, or making a remark, that cut right to the heart of things ... then, just as quick as you please, switching over to an entirely different subject so as not to crowd you too close.

“Well, thank goodness, with this heat I feel like I’m melting right down into my shoes,” she replied, fanning herself with the straw hat she held in one hand. “This is the hottest Indian summer since I can remember.”

It felt good to have changed out of her gabardine suit into a pair of soft old chinos and a cotton blouse still smelling of Netta’s ironing board. She thought ahead to the cool shower she would take after she’d finished harvesting the herbs. But the truth was, she didn’t mind getting dirty working in her garden.

Cordelia gazed around her, remembering what this place had looked like in the last years of her mother’s illness—the rose beds half eaten away by Japanese beetles, the hollyhocks alongside the garage like rangy scarecrows, the orchard of dwarf peaches and plums overgrown and matted with weeds. Even the tulips and crocuses and snowdrops had stopped coming up each spring, as if the effort was simply too much. And the peonies, why, they’d hung their heads in shame. It seemed as though the word had been passed among them that there was no point in their trying to look good, because no one cared.

People are like that, too,
she thought.
If you’re not loved, then you have no love to give.
Maybe the only thing sadder than a weed-choked garden was a barren heart. With Gene, she had basked in the sunlight of a good man’s love. Now all she had was memory. But was that enough?

She thought of Gabe’s callused palm against the handle of a trowel, the deft way he plucked away dead leaves. All around, she saw the evidence of the care that she and Gabe—mostly Gabe—had lavished on this old place, bringing it back to life in some areas, replanting altogether in others. The Old English rock garden where the dilapidated toolshed had once stood, with its trailing ferns and clumps of sweet William and violets starting to die back with Indian summer’s end. The begonia arbor along the shady side of the garage, with its hanging wire baskets of plump fleshy hybrids—Ruffled Double, Sensations, Crispa Marginata. And the raised herb garden, for which Gabe had laboriously hauled the stones up from the creek, one wheelbarrow load at a time.

Right now the forsythia hedge lay dormant, but come April the whole south flank of the stone wall that surrounded her two acres would be a cloud of yellow. Then there would be tulips and narcissi strung like bright beads linking the rows of sweet-magnolia and crepe-myrtle trees. By summer, the roses would be blooming—the trellis of tea roses that arched over the gate leading to the orchard, the shrub roses high and wide as hedges, the grandifloras and floribundas that grew on either side for the curving front walk. Roses with names like Prosperity and Moonlight, Peace and White Dawn. And the fragrance—oh, you could almost sip it, like the sweet wine Gabe made from the elderberries that smothered the wall facing the kitchen garden.

Her garden had perhaps fared better than she had, Cordelia thought. She had nourished it, while her own heart echoed like an empty house.

Is it too late?
she wondered, her gaze falling on Gabe.
Could he possibly be interested in me that way?
Yesterday, she might not have dared to imagine so, but since Sissy had planted the idea in her head, it seemed to be growing.

I could ask him to supper,
she thought. What would be so terrible about that? She knew that he’d gotten divorced about the same time that he’d left teaching. He seldom talked about his ex-wife, but Cordelia remembered having seen her around from time to time, shopping in the Piggly Wiggly or trying on shoes at Rambling Rose. Attractive, slender, dark-haired, and
young.
No more than thirty-eight or -nine. No children, and she suspected Gabe had wanted them, the way he’d spend hours with the Burgess girls next door to her, teaching the names of all the roses, and showing them how to plant bulbs and prune shrubs.

But what would he think? A woman with silver hair, who took pills for her blood pressure and, each time she grew dizzy, feared she might be having a stroke—not like the mild one she’d had last summer, but one that would leave her unable to move or speak?

As she pulled a pair of secateurs from the basket looped over her arm, Cordelia caught him looking at her. He was in the midst of staking a droopy hydrangea branch, his forearms corded, a length of raffia twine clamped between his even white teeth. He straightened, at the same time breaking into a smile that pulled at her heart like the twine that was now being tightened about the stake.

“I think this is my favorite time of year,” he said. “Maybe because we tend to appreciate most that which is in dwindling supply. I think it was Thoreau who said that life near the bone is the sweetest.”

“Right now I’d be a lot happier with more rather than less.” She sighed, thinking of the money still to be raised for Gene’s library. “Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder up the mountain and having it roll back down to the bottom.”

It had been like this all her life, it seemed, starting with her being born south of the Mason-Dixon Line. When she was a teenager, all those squabbles she and Mother used to have about her being too rambunctious and opinionated. And, worse, harboring ideas that weren’t minted in the South, like her views on integration, and women doing more with their lives than having babies and organizing bake sales. Why, hadn’t Mother become positively apoplectic when, instead of following her family’s well-trodden path to Duke, she’d announced her decision to attend George Washington University instead?

Years later, of course, she’d come to appreciate what she’d been too much of a firebrand to see when she was young: the wealth that life in Blessing had to offer. The richness of its earth and the bounty of its rolling green hills. Its unhurried pace that allowed for an occasional misstep. Its people, maddening at times in their antediluvian beliefs, but as true as a plumb line and as steadfast as the levee down at Banker’s Creek.

And with Grace, she’d also gained a new appreciation of her own mother’s trials, trying to tame a daughter whose every action and opinion seemed to fly in the face of good sense.

Yet, at times like these, she wondered if living here all these years had taken some of the edge off her spirit, the way a piano goes out of tune when it’s not being played enough. Despite her position on the boards of Latham University and Hilldale Hospital, she’d grown somewhat ... complacent. She needed the bracing confidence of people like Gabe, who believed she was still capable of more than warming a chair in some boardroom.

“You’ll get your library, Cordelia.” He said it as if it were a simple truth of nature he was observing—the fact that lilies grow from tubers, or that the section of branch from which a peach has been picked won’t bear again.

Hearing him, his calm assured tone, and feeling a touch as light as rain against her arm, she felt her battered sense of purpose begin to revive.

A memory came to her, of the time she’d been summoned to school for a conference with Sissy’s sophomore English teacher, Mr. Ross. She recalled how apprehensive she’d felt, meeting for the first time the man Sissy and her friends were constantly making fun of, nearly choking with laughter over the fact that he’d had tears, actual
tears
in his eyes when he read a Dylan Thomas poem aloud to them in class. Cordelia had anticipated a fussy man of uncertain masculinity, with weak eyes and asthma—like Mr. Denniston, who ran the only haberdashery in town and was rumored to be a homosexual.

And hadn’t she been stunned to encounter the actual Mr. Ross? Ruddy-faced and outdoorsy-looking, with his crinkly brown hair and equally rumpled seersucker jacket that made her think of a young boy lying in the grass, flushed from turning cartwheels. And that slightly flattened nose, which looked odd next to cheekbones as sharply defined as a Comanche’s.

“I’m honored to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Truscott,” he’d introduced himself. His almost quaint formality, and the way he’d wasted no time in ushering her to the chair beside his desk, had impressed her at once. “I was a great admirer of your husband’s, you know. A truly courageous man. I heard him speak once ... on the steps of the Supreme Court, after the decision was handed down on
Sullivan
versus
New York Times.
It was an experience I’ll never forget. Your daughter, she’s very much like him—that same fire, that sense of commitment.”

“Sis ... you mean, Caroline?” Cordelia couldn’t contain her surprise. Even she, who loved Sissy no end, could not imagine those qualities in her soft, placid daughter.

He blinked, then smiled. “Actually, it was Grace I was thinking of. I taught her, too. Let me see, it must be four, five years.”

“But you hardly seem ...” Cordelia caught herself on the brink of rudeness.

“Old enough?” he finished for her, smiling. “I’m thirty-two, Mrs. Truscott. I believe it was my first year at this school—before that I taught in Atlanta. If it hadn’t been for Grace, and a handful of students like her, it might well have been my last. Now, Caroline ...” He paused, and she saw him scratch behind his ear, a habit she would come to know in later years as a signal of mild distress.

Cordelia felt herself growing tense. “She’s doing her homework, isn’t she? She’s not failing, I mean?” Truth to tell, Cordelia rarely saw Sissy read anything unless it was one of those magazines that told you how, if you fixed your hair a certain way, or showed a flair for accessorizing, boys would be falling all over themselves to date you. Most of her time she seemed to spend giggling over the phone with that pimple-faced Beech Beecham.

“No, no, not failing,” he was quick to reassure her. “Though,” he added with a rueful smile, “I won’t deny there is room for improvement. Actually, Mrs.—”

“Cordelia. Please call me Cordelia.” For some reason, she felt safe—comfortable, even—in allowing the familiarity with this boyish man who spoke with such polish.

He gave her a level look, his eyes dark with seriousness. “There was an incident the other day, involving Caroline and another girl. It wasn’t reported, but I thought you should know ...”

Cordelia squeezed her eyes shut, imagining Sissy cringing in a corner, the object of torment by some smarter, prettier, more popular girl.

“... It wasn’t what she did so much as what she said,” she heard him continue. “Caroline called her a nigger. ‘Stupid, monkey-faced nigger’ were her exact words, I believe. After Marvella accidentally knocked a book off her desk.”

Cordelia felt his words hit her like a stinging slap. Sissy?
Her Sissy,
who’d come home from grade school in tears almost every day over some classmate who’d called her fat or stupid? She, of all people, ought to have known how something like that would hurt.

Deep shame flooded through Cordelia. Thank heaven Eugene wouldn’t have to hear this.

“I’ll speak to her,” she said stiffly to this teacher who sat looking at her with such compassion she could hardly bear it. She felt as if he were seeing right through her, and knew exactly how awful she felt. “It won’t happen again.” She started to rise.

Gabriel Ross put out a hand to stop her. “Wait. I wish you wouldn’t. Speak to her, that is. I didn’t ask you here to tell tales, or to have Caroline punished. She punishes herself, far too much. That’s where it comes from, this lashing out, from her feeling she can’t be like the others, that she’ll never measure up.”

“She’s ... a good girl.” Cordelia wanted desperately to smooth things over, to make everything all right.

“She is,” Gabriel agreed. Then he smiled, that heartwarming, luminous smile of his that said, somehow, against all her worst fears, everything
would
turn out all right. “It’s the hurt ones we have to look out for in this world, Cordelia, because, if we don’t stop it where it lives, the hurt, it spreads, like a pebble dropped in a pond, to hurt others.”

Looking at him now, in his battered hat and dirt-stained trousers, seventeen years later, the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes visible against the deeper brown of his tanned cheeks, she was once again filled with a sense of his goodness, of the sureness of his footing ... and, at the same time, of her own helplessness ever to bridge the gap between them.

What would it look like—never mind to the small minds around here, but to her friends in New York, Washington, her colleagues on the boards on which she served—if she, the widow of the great Eugene Truscott, were to take up with a gardener? Not to mention the disparity in their lifestyles. Gabe, with his modest little house down on Oakview Avenue by the Kmart, how would
he
feel about sharing in all this—her enormous house, her generous income from the wise investments she and Gene had made? Knowing him, he’d want no part of it.