The Box Garden (27 page)

We linger over our coffee with the languor of passengers on a steamship, the last leg of the journey in sight. The wedding looms ahead-three-thirty in my mother’s living room—but even that event is overshadowed by the liberating awareness of our separate departures, the return to our other lives which, like real sea voyagers, we view with a mixture of reluctance and anticipation.

“Martin,” Judith says after breakfast as she tidies my mother’s kitchen, “did you see that thing in
The Globe and Mail
about the judge?”

“No,” Martin answers, “what judge?”

“You know, that Supreme Court judge, old what’s his-name. Seventy-six years old and getting married.”

“Oh yes,” Martin says, “I think I
did
see the headline.”

“And he’s marrying a woman about the same age. Second marriage for both of them.”

“Hmmm,” Martin comments.

“So it’s not so odd really, people getting married in their seventies.”

“Who ever said it was odd?”

“Maybe it’s the coming thing.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s logical, when you think of it,” she says thoughtfully. “There’s a nice—you know—economy to the whole thing. In fact, it sort of fits in with the recycling philosophy.”

“Oh?”

“After all, here’s Mother getting an escort and chauffeur. And Louis is getting a cook and housekeeper.”

“Is that all?” Martin looks up amused.

Judith scours the sink with energy.

“Is that all?” Martin asks again. Then he starts to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Judith asks turning around.

But Martin is laughing too hard to answer.

My mother spent almost all morning at the hairdresser’s.

It had been Judith’s idea: “Look,” she had reasoned with her, “you don’t even have a hair dryer. And it’s so damp this morning your hair will never dry. It would be a whole lot easier if you just went down to that little beauty place next to the Red and White. Eugene could drive you over, couldn’t you Eugene? And you can have it washed and set and be back by noon.”

“It’s such a waste ...”

“I’ll phone right now and see if they can work you in. I’ll explain ...”

“There’s so much to do here ...”

“Charleen and I can tidy up the house. You have a nice restful morning under the dryer. I’ll phone ...”

“I don’t know ...”

“I’ll ask if they can take you at ten-fifteen.”

She had gone. Judith had won. It was in every way a sensible plan, but I had been appalled by my mother’s quick surrender, her willingness to be led. This weakness is something new; she is getting old.

“She’s getting old,” I say later to Judith.

“Yes,” Judith nods briskly. She is plugging in the old vacuum cleaner, and I watch as she attacks the living room rug. How realistic Judith is, how offhandedly she deals with the externals of life. She knows how to manage our mother, how to persuade her against her will, and she accepts her victories with stunning ease.

The vacuum cleaner is thirty years old, an upright Hoover with a monstrous black bag, and the sound of its roaring motor fills the house.

I picture my mother in the hands of a bullying shampoo girl in platform shoes, I think of the painful plastic rollers and the chemical sting, the scorching heat of the hairdryer, the futile aggression of
Harper‘
s Bazaar, and suddenly I am swept with a desire to rush out and find her and protect her. That is when it strikes me that I must ... love ... her in a way which Judith would never comprehend.

“It’ll do her good to get out of the house,” Judith yells over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.

Yesterday morning Louis came to put in the shrubs I had bought. He worked slowly but with pleasure.

“Good healthy roots on this one,” he said, patting the soil around a mock orange.

“I don’t know why you thought I needed more bushes,” my mother called to me crossly from the back door. “There are already more than I can look after.”

“I like the smell of a mock orange,” Louis said to me. “When it’s in bloom it’s the most wonderful perfume in the world.”

After my mother went back into the house, Louis whispered to me, “Remember what we were talking about yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” I blinked.

“About that friend of yours. The priest.”

I stared.

“You were going to ask him to come to the wedding.”

“Oh,” I breathed, “oh, yes, I remember.”

“I’ve been thinking it over. And on second thought maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea after all.”

“Oh?” I said.

“I appreciate it, I really do, but you know, a stranger and all,” he paused and nodded almost imperceptibly toward the house, “maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

Later, when he had finished the planting, he went inside the house. He and my mother sat at the kitchen table talking a little and drinking coffee, Louis stirring in sugar, and my mother primly, awkwardly, perseveringly sipping. Seeing them sitting there like that I had a sudden glimpse of what their life together would be like. It would be exactly like this; there would be nothing mystical about it; it would be made up of scenes like this.

Not that I understand the complex equation they teeter upon, or the force that brought them together in the first place. It occurs to me that there are some happenings for which the proper response is not comprehension at all, but amazement and acceptance.

Eugene drove my mother to the hairdresser‘s, and Seth, feeling restless, went along for the ride. While they are gone Judith and I vacuum and scrub, dust and polish. Martin, whistling, helps us wash the windows with vinegar and old newspapers. Then we stand back and regard the living room with its old, slipcovered chesterfield, its bulky armchairs, dark tables, heavy curtains and the rounded archway into the even gloomier dining room. It is scrupulously clean, but for all the crowding of furniture it looks barren, pinched and depressing.

“We’ll put the lace table cloth on,” Judith decides. “That should help a little.”

Martin takes the tablecloth down from the top of my mother’s linen cupboard, and throwing it over his arm, begins to tap out a soft cha-cha-cha. “Ta ta tatata, ta ta tatata,” he sings as he whirls and swoops in the narrow space between the china cupboard and the dining room table. The tablecloth swirls and circles, cascading to the floor as he steps deftly and lightly around the chairs. “Down, down, down South America way,” he hums to the lacy folds.

Judith smiles at him lazily. “You’ll tear it, Martin, and then you’ll catch it.”

“Then I’ll catch, catch, catch, catch it,” Martin sings, dipping gracefully past us.

Judith takes the cloth from him and opens it on the table. “Well,” she eyes the yellowed edges, “you can’t say it looks exactly festive.”

But then Eugene comes in the front door carrying armloads of spring flowers.

“Flowers!” I exclaim.

“I never thought of flowers,” Judith marvels.

“Voila!” Martin cries, and, slowing to a cool elbow-spinning, shoulder-dipping softshoe, he shuffles into the kitchen to look for vases. For an instant—it couldn’t have been more than a second really—I wish, feverishly wish, that I could dance away after him. I wish Judith would stop frowning and tugging at the edge of the tablecloth, and most of all I wish Eugene would stop standing there in the doorway, heavy and perplexed, with the tulips slipping sideways out of his arms.

Then Judith cries, “You’re a genius, Eugene, I love you.”

Then something happens: I look at Eugene in a frenzy of tenderness and begin to be happy.

Yesterday afternoon Louis offered to cut the grass.

“It’s too much work,” my mother told him, “especially after putting in all those useless bushes.”

“I’ll cut the grass,” Seth volunteered.

My mother considered, “Might as well keep busy,” she said. “Idle hands ...”

Seth laughed; he seems to find his grandmother’s sayings shrewd and amusing. He carried the old hand mower up from the basement, oiled it carefully and began cutting back and forth across the tiny back lawn.

Watching him, I suddenly remembered the box of grass I had left behind in Vancouver, Brother Adam’s grass. I had left it on the window sill, abandoned it without a thought, when I might easily have arranged for a neighbour to come in and water it. By the time I get home it will probably have turned brown; in all this heat it might even have died. How, I demanded of myself, had I been so neglectful?

The idea came to me that there may have been something willful in my oversight, that I may unconsciously have conceived a deathwish for my lovely grass, hating it while I pretended to love it. (The mind is given to such meaningless mirror tricks.) Had I subconsciously recognized Watson in those lengthy, grassy letters, had something about them touched a vein of familiarity, a flag of memory? Toying with these thoughts, I couldn’t decide, but my aptitude for self-deception pressed me closer and closer toward belief. Poor Brother Adam, his love of grass which I had believed was prompted by an Emersonian vision of oneness, was only one more easy commitment, an allegiance to a non-human form, a blind and speechless deity. And poor Watson, his life hacked to pieces by his endless self-regarding; every decade a ritual pore cleansing, a radical, life-diminishing letting of blood. (After he had disappeared down the fire escape, after the excitement of seeing Seth had died down, I had picked up the book he had been reading; it was titled
The Next Life
.)