Cast a Cold Eye (3 page)

What troubled her all evening was merely the notion that something had happened to the lighting. Across the table in the dining room, she could barely see her husband’s face, though the customary twelve candles were burning. In the middle of the meal, she excused herself and got up to turn on the electricity. This was not an improvement; now her husband’s face appeared to be unnaturally white. The food also seemed to her to have been tampered with. Her husband was eating with apparent relish; still, she could not disabuse herself of the idea that there was something wrong—perhaps the maid had forgotten to put the sherry in the stew? “You are tired,” said her husband warningly, and she accepted this explanation with gratitude. After dinner, nevertheless, she could not restrain herself from going around to each of the lamps to see if there might be dust on the bulbs. But her finger came off clean.

In the morning, the visual derangement persisted. Her eye was caught, on waking, by a window shade which had been white when she had gone to New York; this morning it was certainly ivory. Slightly frightened, she closed her eyes and took refuge in sleep. When she woke, it was to the light sound of the glass bell calling her to lunch, and to an instant conviction of disaster. There was something wrong, something she had forgotten, something more than the persistent queerness of the light or the fact of her being back once again in her husband’s bed. But her memory would not yield it up until, during a pause in the lunchtime conversation, she happened to glance out the window and saw on the sill the boxes containing the dead petunias. Her husband heard her gasp and his eyes followed hers. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Nothing,” she replied. “Something I remembered.” He did not pursue the topic, and later, when he asked the question (“Have you been out yet to look at your garden?”), she perceived, with relief, that he was unaware of its significance. For him the question was a mere token of politeness, a bone tossed to the idiosyncrasies of her taste. He was still going through the motions of treating her, rather nervously, as a guest, but his heart was plainly not in it, for he did not trouble to wait for her answer.

For her, however, the question had a more fateful sound. She knew at once that she ought at least to go out and look, yet she put it off, for a day, for two days, while she did nothing but lie on her bed, declining to go to the market, plan the meals, make the French dressing, sleeping from time to time, as she had done in the hotel, and waking always with that terrible start of knowledge that tells us, as we come out of ether or alcohol, that something has changed in our lives, though we are not yet sure what it is. If her husband’s question had not been repeated a second and a third time, she might never, she told herself, have made the nearly unbearable effort that took her into the toolshed for her trowel and cultivator and sent her slowly down the garden path to the enclosure in the fields. But the third time his question had had an anxious perplexity in it. Her avoidance of the garden had begun to seem to him abnormal; his mind must be set at rest. For (it had become more and more apparent) he had no comprehension at all of the events of the past week. He imagined that the whole affair was a sort of triumph, that he, the conquerer, guardian of the hearth, had pursued the fugitive nymph and wooed and bullied her home by the sheer force of his will. It had not occurred to him for an instant that the collapse was interior, that, like France, she had fallen, limp, corrupt, disgraced, into the arms of the victor, and so long as he did not perceive this, she had a little bargaining power left. But for the preservation of the illusion, it was necessary that he should believe her unchanged, should have no suspicion of the docility that placed her, not only at his mercy, but at the mercy of every event. Her long hours in her room she had excused on the grounds of emotional exhaustion, but this could hardly be expected to last forever. Already he had begun to look a little critically at the meals, to run a finger over a table that had not been dusted—the holiday, his voice indicated, was over. And now, as she passed his window, she knew that the sound of her footsteps were reassuring to him; it signified the return to normalcy, the resumption of hostilities.

The garden had waited too long, she warned herself; she was too late. Common sense alone could tell you what you might expect to find if you left a garden alone for ten moist days in June. She was prepared for the worst. Yet halfway down the path apprehension gave place to hope, and she began to run, as though this final burst of speed could make up for a long tardiness, as though she might catch the garden in the moment of transformation, effect a last-minute rescue in the very teeth of probability. The garden, however, was gone. Her first impression was that it had disappeared without a trace. In ten days the weeds had swallowed it. The brown enclosure had turned green; the very markers that indicated the rows had vanished, and of the whole enterprise only the fence remained, an absurd testimonial to the fact that this rectangle had been, at one time, the scene of human endeavor. With the first shock, she closed her eyes: this was the nightmare vision she had wrestled with all spring, a ferocious tableau vivant entitled The Triumph of the Weeds, which had appeared again and again to halt her on the road to freedom, to harrow her susceptibilities and appeal to her pity and love. She had turned back before it a hundred times, and when at length she had hardened her heart, she had told herself, I will not be there to see it. Now, however, it was all as she had imagined it, except that the season was not so far advanced and she was here in the midst of it, while the hot furnished room was distant beyond desire. When she opened her eyes again, it was not with the hope of finding some mitigating circumstance, but rather with a kind of morbid appetite to embrace the full details of her disaster. Now she made out the individual weeds, and she saw that while in the field outside there were buttercups and a few daisies already open, here, in her enclosure, flourished only the most virile, the most virid, the most weedlike weeds, the coarse growers—burdock, thistle, milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace; the crawlers—carrotweed, Jill-run-over-the-ground, and especially the choking nut grass, which crawled beneath the earth’s surface and sprouted fiercely above it. No doubt, she said to herself, there was some natural explanation for this—the rankest weeds were perhaps the strongest and their seeds had a longer viability—yet common sense would not prevail; her heart accepted the phenomenon as a judgment and a curse.

It is hopeless, she murmured to herself, leaning against the fence, hopeless; and for the first time her spirit made an acknowledgment of defeat that was not provisional in character. Up to this moment there had been in her mind small recesses of hope to which her thoughts had fled secretly, unavowedly; in her contract with reality, an escape clause which permitted her to believe that what had been done was not irretrievable, that—in this case—dry weather might have retarded the weeds or some magic helper hoed for her (her maid, a thoughtful neighbor, a small boy employed by her husband?); now solidly before her lay the brutal
fait accompli,
the lost garden, irrecoverable, for though something might still be salvaged (a few gray cornflower plants could be made out in the mat of vegetation at her feet), the original design, the mirror of absolute beauty in which she had glimpsed her own image, was shattered. She sank listlessly to the ground and sat looking about her. Quite simply a sentence came to her and she spoke it aloud: “Now,” she said, “I have nothing to live for.”

The patent absurdity of these words acted as an astringent. The voice of common sense spoke again, saying, After all, you have a life expectation of at least forty years and you have got to do something with your time, you cannot just go to pieces, and in any case people do not live for gardens, but for ideals, principles, persons. This particular garden is ruined, but it is still possible to transplant. A second-best garden can be made out of the cornflowers, the zinnias, the cosmos, perhaps even the scabiosa. You can move the stronger plants and in August you will have flowers on the table. She presented this idea to her emotions and waited for the familiar bustle of activity, the rolling back of the sleeves, which turned her heart on such occasions into a large and hospitable house that is being made ready for an evening party. But the motors of anticipation remained cold. The second-best garden could not, even momentarily, command her belief. Like an adopted child, or a second husband, it could never make up to her. The weeds had finished all that. The weeds were, in fact, her garden, the end product of her activities, and the white foam that children call spit, which she saw clinging to the young grasses, was the outward mark of her disease. She remained sitting on the warm ground, idle, without thought or feeling, but ashamed to go back to the house.

This time she heard her husband’s footsteps approaching, but out of pride she would not look up, even when she felt him stop just behind her at the entrance to the garden. “Gosh!” he said. “What an awful situation!” “Yes,” she answered defiantly. “It’s ruined.” There was a silence during which she imagined him to be shrugging his shoulders. Anger began to boil up in her again, and she spun around to face him. The language of their old quarrels rose to her lips, the classical formulae of accusation and outrage. (See what you have made me do, you wanted this to happen, you are glad), but she was arrested by the expression of his face, which was neither jubilant nor indifferent, but full of simple curiosity and wonder. The weeds had finally made their impression on him; never before had he really believed in them; he had considered them to be a chimera of her dark imagination. Now he stood awestruck by this fearful demonstration of their authenticity, and for the first time the two of them shared in silence a single emotion. “What is that awful stuff?” he asked at length, bending down to pull up a spear of nut grass. The root broke off in his inexperienced hands. “Not that way,” she said. “Look.” Her trowel came up with the nut secure. “This is the weed I’ve been talking about all spring.” He examined it, turning it over between his fingers in his methodical way. “Why, it’s a little bulb,” he said. It was not worthwhile to correct this statement; to make the botanical distinction between a bulb and a tuber might simply provide a distraction from the mood of repugnance and terror that had brought them close for a moment. She longed to rush him ahead with her into the particulars of her loss, to say, See what I have been up against, see the sorrel, the field grass, the carrotweed, see where the sweet peas would have been, see where I dug the trench and strewed it with manure, think of the liming and the watering and weeding; she was filled with a kind of wild excitement and joy that he, who had never acknowledged the garden in life, should meet it, as it were, posthumously, and pay his respects. Yet prudence or tact restrained her. The work of initiation could not be hurried. He stood on the brink of her agony in the garden; his wide feet in their brown shoes were planted on one of the surviving cornflowers, as though to illustrate the text of his inculpation—but he must not be pushed. It was enough that he should share, however vaguely, her burden of loss, that her bereavement should to some measure be accepted as his. She waited, half-frightened, half-exalted, for what he would say next.

“Gosh!” he repeated, with intensified feeling, and now she was sure it was coming, the miracle she expected, which might take the form of an embrace, a cry, an apology, but which would be in essence a lament, not so much for the garden as for her, for the dead young lady he had brought back from New York, whom he kept propped up in bed, at the breakfast table, on the sofa, in the odor of corruption.

“You have your work cut out for you,” he said. For an instant she believed that she had not heard him properly.

“Maybe we can get a boy to help you,” he continued in a matter-of-fact tone.

It was over, she knew it at once, yet she made a last appeal. “The garden is ruined,” she said in a stubborn, hostile voice, but speaking slowly and emphatically as though to direct his attention to the importance of this statement.

“Nonsense,” he replied briskly. “You are always so extreme. I’ll call up Mr. Jenkins tomorrow and see if he can send…”

At the mention of the neighboring farmer, her mouth opened and she began to scream. “I’ll kill you if you do!” she shouted. Picking up the spading fork, she plunged it wildly into the ground, tossing sods and plants into the air in a frenzy of destruction. The loose earth fell on her hair, on her face, down which tears were running. She was aware that she cut a grotesque and even repulsive figure, that her husband was shocked by the sight and the sound of her, but the gasping sobs gave her pleasure, for she saw that this was the only punishment she had left for him, that the witchlike aspect of her form and the visible decay of her spirit would constitute, in the end, her revenge. She continued to lay about her with the spading fork, though the original fury had already passed off, until his solid, uneasy figure had disappeared from view, until his last words no longer sounded in her ears.

It was late in August when he came into the living room with a heterogeneous bouquet in which she recognized some of the stubborner flowers of her garden, cosmos and cornflowers and a few blackish red miniature zinnias. Mixed in with these were some weeds, pinkish sprays of bouncing Bet and the greenish-white clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. There was no doubt of it, he had been visiting her garden, and this was not the first time. Toward the end of June she had heard him outside the window, swearing, as he tied up rambler roses; in July, he had brought in raspberries, saying, “Can’t we have these for dinner?” The berries were soft and broken—he had been too late in the harvest. She lay now on the sofa, reading a detective story, watching him as he brought in a vase too tall for his bouquet and crammed the flowers into it. She felt no impulse to correct him; his clumsiness, in fact, pleased her, the ugliness of the bouquet pleased her, just as the stain on the coffee table had pleased her, the spot on her maid’s uniform at lunch. She basked, as she had been doing all summer, in a sly private satisfaction. She was broken but she was also irreplaceable, and her continued physical existence must be, she thought, an unending reminder to him of everything he had lost. She was enjoying in real life the delight that is generally experienced only in daydreams, the sense of
when I am dead, how they will mourn for me, how valuable I shall become to them when I am no longer theirs.