The Garden Path (40 page)

“I've never seen one at home,” said Susannah.

“They're all over New Haven,” said Rosie, amused. “I'll have to take you on an expedition to the big city when we get back.”

Susannah surveyed the tree, the green, the shops, the clear blue sky above the ancient rooftops, with her usual good humor. “I like it here in England so much, Rosie. I've always loved traveling, but I've never liked a place so well—except that little corner of Connecticut.
Your
corner.” She laughed softly, and Rosie realized that Susannah's laugh, vaguely familiar all these weeks, was Edwin's. “Coming there from California woke me up,” Susannah said. “I don't know how else to explain it.”

Rosie had one of her brief, unbidden Ivan-memories: Ivan when she first met him telling her with such vehemence how he hated California, and two months later sitting half-naked in her kitchen homesick for it, for the blue wild ocean and the spaciousness. “I've always heard California is so beautiful,” Rosie said. The remembered Ivan was so vivid before her she could have reached out and touched his warm, tanned chest.

“Beautiful,” Susannah said thoughtfully. “Well, of course, it is, a lot of it. But it's inhuman. At least, that's how it seemed to me.
This
—” She gestured around the busy Bath street, at old stone and flower boxes. “This is human beauty—for people. And the countryside, Rosie—the hedges and the sheep and the hills.” She turned to Rosie with Edwin's smile, wiping the last crumbs from her mouth, daintily, with a paper napkin. “Do you know the Los Angeles metropolitan area is as big as all of Connecticut?” She crumpled the napkin and stuffed it in her skirt pocket, took off her glasses—she wore them for eating as well as reading—and stowed them away, too. “He's gone back there, to California. I don't know if you were aware of that.”

“Yes, I was,” Rosie said. Susannah looked at her in surprise, as if Rosie's words had revealed something important. “I got a postcard,” Rosie added, half-whispering.

Susannah took her hand, impulsively. You wouldn't expect Susannah to be a hand-taker, a toucher, but she always made contact. “Did you love him, Rosie? Tell me that.”

Tears came to her eyes, blurring the little shops across the way.
He was so beautiful
, she thought. Without looking at Susannah she said, “Yes, I guess I did love him.” The simple statement sounded false to her, though the words were true.

“But that was in another country,” Susannah said softly, not letting go her hand, so that Rosie couldn't wipe her eyes, or cover her face when it contorted. Rosie thought:
I never would have done it if I'd known you first, Susannah
, but it wasn't something she could say aloud.

A woman passing, with a basket on her arm, pretended not to look at them. Rosie sobbed once, and Susannah retrieved the paper napkin from her pocket and gave it to Rosie. Rosie wiped her eyes. “Please don't feel bad,” said Susannah. “I mean, feel bad about him if you need to—if you loved him—but not about me.”

“But it's
only
you I feel bad about, Susannah.” She gave her nose a rough, one-handed wipe, and crumpled the napkin in her fist. “Aren't you even angry? Don't you hate me? Are you a
saint
?”

Susannah looked down at her shoes: scuffed loafers, with knee socks forever falling down. She's a
child
, Rosie thought irritably.
A child. She knows nothing
.

“I hated you like poison at first,” Susannah said. “I thought you were a monster. I felt sick whenever I thought of you.” Tears burned behind Rosie's eyes. She breathed deeply through her nose. Her chest hurt. No saint, then, and possibly no wisp. Susannah went on, “But—and this may sound odd—I had my own problems. What happened with you and Ivan was just one more.” Rosie felt diminished and resentful, and then, suddenly, relieved, as if she stood again at the top of Glastonbury Tor looking down at a tiny town, tiny people and cars, and then around at the vast sky. Susannah continued, in a voice that stopped and started, thinking aloud. “Then comes the really strange part, Rosie. Because I began to feel that it brought us together. Nothing else managed to—not Peter, not family feeling, not good will, not even curiosity. But that—” She looked at Rosie with frank affection. “That did it, Rosie. And so how could I stay angry? Look!” She gestured around, her slim hand taking in everything, then swooping to pick up a tawny leaf from the grass. She held it up, laughing. “Look! We wouldn't be here together, we wouldn't be friends, we wouldn't be planning to write your book. I wouldn't have a mother, Rosie.”

A saint, after all, Rosie thought, and pondered it—that those nights with Ivan had led to this, an English city, a plane-tree leaf, Susannah's bright face smiling at her.

“Well, I'm still sorry,” Rosie said. “I caused you pain.” It was what she had wanted to tell Susannah, properly, all these weeks. A formal apology. Now, said, it hardly mattered.

“I'm sorry, too,” said Susannah with a wry smile, and their two admissions wove together and officially blanked out years and years.

After that, they were at ease with each other. Their planned two weeks stretched to three. Rosie tried not to think about her garden; Kiki had promised to weed and water when she could. It would take Kiki's mind off her grandchild, due any minute. Rosie wondered whether the baby had come. She and Kiki had grown close. It was Kiki, after all, who had found her, Kiki and Jim, and she could vaguely recall Kiki cradling her, weeping, while Jim called the ambulance. She sent Kiki postcards: “Still having a great time, the weather is still perfect. How's the garden?”

They went south again, from Bath, into Dorset—Hardy country. They stayed two nights at an inn in Puddletown and went to the Hardy cottage. It was in Puddletown that Rosie took off her sling. It was too soon, Susannah said—against doctor's orders. But Rosie left it off, her shoulder didn't hurt at all, the sling was driving her crazy. “Look!” she said to Susannah, cutting up a piece of beef in a pub. “I'm a grown-up again.”

She was very happy. She began reading the real estate columns in the newspapers with more than casual interest. “If my book makes any money, I just might buy a place over here,” she said.

“Then you could jet back and forth between two gardens,” Susannah said. “And we could write a book about it.
Transatlantic Gardening. Gardening for Jet-Setters. How My Pea Patch Contributes to International Understanding.
”

In the mornings, after breakfast—not every day, but most days—they settled down somewhere to work on the book, usually in a garden. They chose their inns for the gardens, and sitting there in the sun Rosie talked, and Susannah took notes. They were doing the biographical part, the personal bits, first. Rosie talked about her parents, her grandfather and her uncles, the gardens of her childhood, the strawberry bed she herself had planted at age five from runners snipped from the big kitchen garden at Silvergate. Susannah was amazed and gratified at how much she remembered, though to Rosie it seemed nearly everything was lost, or faded so badly by time that only trifles were left, details. But that was what she wanted, Susannah said. It was enough: not to worry. She would take those snippets and quilt them into something tangible.

“You're enjoying this?” Rosie would say, stopping in the midst of an attempt to get something right. “You don't mind?”

“I love it,” Susannah assured her. “Quit fishing. I'm sure you've been told a zillion times that you're a very interesting talker.”

“Well.”

“Please. Go on.”

Rosie told her, too, about her own babyhood, about the gardens in Boston, and Mr. McPherson, and her own hunger for the feel of soil and the sight of green shoots, and how they bought the house in East Chiswick. “I'll tell you when we get back how I began to garden there. I've got photographs of the various stages the yard went through over the years.”

“I'm learning a lot,” Susannah said, scribbling. “I feel like getting down on my knees in that border over there, and digging. Don't you think their dahlias need dividing?”

She wrote without looking, her eyes on Rosie, her ball-point pen skimming over the paper.

“How do you read it?” Rosie wanted to know.

Susannah showed Rosie her notes; they were perfectly legible. “What a talent,” Rosie said. It made her strangely happy, that accurate, impersonal hand taking down her thoughts. She liked Susannah's competence.

“Is it interesting, Susannah?” Rosie wanted to know. “To people who don't know me, I mean? Will anyone want to read this?”

“Sure, if they like gardening. Why not?” Susannah grinned. “This is good stuff, Rosie. They were right to give you so much money. And it's going to be awfully well written. Wait.”

In the evenings, Rosie sat up in bed reading newspapers, and Susannah wrote in her journal and read Keats's letters. Once, when her daughter was in the shower, Rosie flipped through the book. On one page was underlined, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.” Hesitantly, Rosie turned to the journal, a plain, blue spiral-bound notebook, and opened it at random: “We saw Jane Austen's grave set into the stones of Winchester Cathedral. Dignified, plain, no mention of her books, just devoted daughter and so on. I could have wept at the injustice and then thought it didn't matter after all. How many people see the grave? And how many read the books, which is where she really is. Then we sat by the river. River green, melancholy somehow, with yellow leaves floating on the surface, and I wondered if I'm a writer the way Jane Austen and Hardy and Keats were writers, and I didn't think so, and I managed to ruin the afternoon for myself.”

Rosie closed the cover in confusion. She thought back to their day in Winchester, how cheerful and talkative Susannah had been, how she'd made some flippant comment about that Jane Austen memorial; how they had enjoyed the sunny riverbank (where Susannah had had a Cornish pasty and a can of 7-Up); how Susannah had read aloud from a book on cathedrals, comparing the three they had seen. Love for her daughter assaulted her, and when Susannah returned from the shower down the hall, with her hair bound up in a towel and her robe tied tight around little Rosetta, Rosie said, “I was looking through your Keats, I hope you don't mind. I like this line, about the holiness of the heart's affections.”

“And the truth of the imagination,” said Susannah. “Those are the words I live by—Mom,” she added, shaking out her hair. She was trying to call Rosie
Mom;
it wasn't seemly, she felt, to call her mother by her first name. But the attempts were still forced, and either embarrassed or amused them both.

The peek into Susannah's journal bothered Rosie for a while. Then she forgot the snooping and remembered only what she had seen, and what it had revealed about Susannah. She regarded her daughter with curiosity, with care, with respect; for all her openness, her warm touches on the arm, her bubbly cheer, she was as secret as Edwin had been. So why do I love her, when I didn't love Edwin? Rosie wondered, but not for long. The years hadn't improved her ability to think without rancor of her ex-husband. The hell with him, she always thought when she thought of him at all. In Mexico with a wife younger than Susannah: that was all she needed to know. She could easily conjure the rest: Edwin fifty-five instead of forty, aging unbecomingly, loved for his money, a wasted life behind him and Susannah's laugh on his lips—a laugh too high, too giggly for a man.

They drove to Plymouth, to the sea, and climbed an ancient tower for the view from its railed balcony. The high salt wind whipped their hair, and sunlight, threatened by gray clouds far in the distance, gleamed a patternless gold on the dark blue water. Flags strung up for a boat race cracked like whips in the wind. “Over there is the Silvergate Café,” Susannah said, looking out to sea.

A man standing beside them on the balcony grinned and nodded. “Americans always get emotional at Plymouth,” he said. “You go down to the quay there where the
Mayflower
left and have a good cry.”

In a shop on the Crescent, Susannah bought a quilted whale and a quilted dolphin for Duke's twin daughters. Rosie bought one of the dolphins for herself and, half-ashamed of her childishness, presented it to Susannah for little Rosetta—then, when they had left Plymouth and were driving north and east again, regretted the impulse and wished for it back. It was the kind of gift Barney used to give her. She still thought of Barney now and then. Kiki had run into him and told him Rosie had been hurt in an automobile accident—Kiki, scrupulously, had told hordes of people this lie. Barney had sent flowers, with a card: “Coals to Newcastle, but get well soon. Barney.” Tiny yellow roses—no
love, Barney
. Kiki told her he was seeing, seriously, some woman in New London, a teacher. Rosie regretted Barney as she regretted the quilted dolphin; no—
more
, she said to herself, being honest. Much more. She smiled to herself, amused at the comparison, imagining the dolphin in little Rosetta's crib.

She sent a postcard to her editor in New York: “Book going well. Weather perfect. Beautiful country.” The sheep on the hillsides, Susannah said, were like fat brown sausages. The hedgerows were full of elderberries, black bryony, goose grass, old-man's beard. Rosie bought a book to identify them, and she and Susannah took long country walks and then pressed autumn wildflowers between the pages of their guidebooks. They watched the landscape change—but slowly, slowly—to an autumn with a hint of winter in it. There was snow, they heard on television, up north in the Lake District. Green was still the dominant color—it was greener than home, they were sure; autumn was later, more gradual, less dramatic—but the green was now well mixed with gold, and the oak trees were solid brown and dry, their leaves falling fast. Rosie and Susannah made plans to go home.