The Red Garden (11 page)

That night there was heavy rain. I slept in the barn, where there were two horses. The horses were surprised to see me, but when I offered them some hay they quieted down. I wished I had a dog to keep me company. I’d seen several collies in town; a few had gazed at me, but none had barked, and I started to think maybe I was lucky if the dogs took a fancy to me. Maybe
I was in the right place at last. I slept beneath a blanket that smelled like grass. In the morning, a man came in and fed the horses and told them they were good boys. He laughed gently when they butted their heads against him, straining to get close to him. He was older than my father, but he wasn’t like a tornado. He was more like the horses. Quiet. He was one of the tall men in Blackwell whose families had known hardship and sorrow, a descendant of the town founders, people who’d lived through blizzards and famine and faced their hardships with the same sure demeanor. It didn’t surprise me that after he’d left, the horses whinnied for him to return.

When my mother went to the schoolhouse, I followed her there. My stomach was growling, but I refused to think about my hunger. Twelve children were waiting for her, all dressed in clean clothes, their hands folded in front of them. They all had brought their lunches, and a few had books. At noon, I went back the way I had come. The side door of the big house was open, so I crept inside when I smelled food. I was so hungry I couldn’t stop myself when I saw a pie on the counter. I took it, the whole thing. I went out behind the house and sat in the tall grass and ate it all. Afterward I was sick, but I didn’t care. I fell asleep right there in the grass until the rain woke me. When I ran into the barn, I felt as though someone was watching me, but when I turned, no one was there.

That night I looked in my mother’s window. She was eating supper. The housemaid who worked for Mr. Partridge had brought some stew and a loaf of bread, then she stopped at the barn and left another loaf. That was when I understood that the man who owned the horses knew I was in his barn.

Late that night my mother went into her yard when the
citizens of Blackwell were all in their beds. She wept for all she had lost and all she had done. Gooseflesh rose on my body as I was roused from sleep. The horses became panicky in their stalls when they heard her cries. The man came out of his house. He stopped when he saw my mother. I could see him fall in love with her right then and there in spite of the mark on her face that my father had left. I hadn’t understood that love could be visible, as real as the grass or the river. But I understood it now. I saw the man’s yearning just as clearly as I saw the horses’ desire for hay.

In the morning, after my mother left for the schoolhouse, I went to knock on the door of the big house. The tall man who lived there introduced himself as Isaac Partridge. He wasn’t surprised to see me. He invited me in and gave me tea and toast. He told me he was sorry he had no more apple pie to serve me. He said he himself had always preferred pie to cake and could eat one in its entirety at one sitting, just as I had done.

I told him there were three things he had to do to make her love him if that was what he wanted. He seemed interested and amused. He said, “Go on.” The first was that he had to give up all drink. He said that was easy enough. He wasn’t much of a drinker. The second was that he had to give her his house and take the cottage for his own. That was easy as well. His house was too big for a single man. The third was that he had to give her a daughter. He looked at me then. “I don’t know how easy that is,” he said. “Easy enough,” I assured him.

That night Isaac knocked on my mother’s door and said she needed to move into the big house. The cottage was infested with beetles and she had to leave until the infestation was over.
He would live there instead since bugs were no bother to him. My mother looked at him carefully, then agreed. Every night for the next week they had dinner together because the cottage had no kitchen and Isaac had no way to make his meals there. Instead he would knock on the door of the house that he owned—where he was now a visitor—and my mother would welcome him inside. They would sit at the table and eat the meal the housemaid prepared. My mother wore her plain brown dress and her hair pulled up. The mark that separated her face into two halves was red in the candlelight, like a flower. Every morning Mr. Partridge would report to me on the progress of their conversation. I would then tell him more about what my mother liked and what she despised. She hated cruelty, people who made judgments, hash for supper, cigar smoke. She loved roses, fresh fish and mussels, trips by boat, books, children. Mr. Partridge listened carefully and wrote it all down in a notebook.

One evening he invited my mother to the meetinghouse for the council meeting exactly as I suggested. That night he proposed that no liquor be served in the village of Blackwell. Alcohol, he said, was the downfall of many good men and there was no reason for Blackwell to aid in mankind’s depravity. My mother gazed at him with surprise as he made this suggestion in his quiet, firm voice. I knew she would be impressed. Since Jack Straw ran the only tavern on his family’s land, and it was well outside the town limits, no one disagreed. The bylaw was passed unanimously. My mother walked home beside Mr. Partridge in the dark. She looked at him for a long time as he crossed the yard to the cottage.

We waited until a clear night for the third step. It was the middle of May by then. I knew my mother sat up at nights crying
over me. I had seen her writing letters to the address in Lenox where I was supposed to have waited. On the eve of our plan, Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, a well-liked couple in town, went out for a walk along the river as they did every night after their supper. I knew their schedule and had been watching them. They would be our witnesses. Isaac Partridge made certain to be walking there too. When I heard him approach and greet the Kellys, I slipped into the river. I was careful to submerge myself in the exact spot Mr. Partridge had shown me, a pool where the current wouldn’t catch me up and carry me downstream. I hung onto a branch and screamed. I thought about Brooklyn and my birthday and the elephant, and soon enough the screams became real in my mouth.

The Kellys watched from the steep bank as Mr. Partridge threw himself in to rescue me, and they helped to revive me. When I came round, I said I couldn’t remember what had happened. Only that my parents had drowned and that my name was Sara. I seemed slow-witted, perhaps from my time in the river, but I soon turned out to be a fast learner. People in Blackwell were amazed by how bright I was. Mr. Partridge adopted me and gave me his name that very week. We both signed papers in the meetinghouse and afterward there was a party where mussels and fish that had been brought all the way from Boston were served. Mr. Partridge gave me the two horses in the barn for my very own and, as a special surprise, bought me a pug dog to keep me company. I loved that dog and called him Topsy, allowing him to sleep in my bed atop the feather quilt. In return for all Mr. Partridge had done for me, I gave him the only thing I had. He married my mother on the first of June. As far as he was concerned, she came from Manchester, England, and had
been educated in Boston. Just as her contract with the town had stated, she’d never had children of her own, though anyone could see she was partial to me. She was the town schoolteacher and the love of his life. I was the girl who had nearly drowned, but had managed to save myself instead, in the year I turned ten.

THE PRINCIPLES OF DEVOTION

1918

M
Y SISTER
S
ARA CALLED ME TO HER ROOM
on the morning of her death. She was in quarantine in the cottage behind our house, stricken with the Spanish flu, unable to eat or drink, her fever so high she had begun to speak with people who weren’t there. In a lucid moment she gathered her strength and wrote a note she then shoved beneath her door. I stood in the yard and read it. It was September and everything was yellow. The bees’ nests were high in the trees, which meant a hard winter would follow. Sara wanted me to grant her a last wish. I had never been able to deny her anything. I was ten years old and she was twenty-five, as much a mother to me and my younger sister, Hannah, as our own mother had been. It was an honor to be asked such a favor. If I was afraid of anything, it was only that I would fail her in some way.

Our parents had died the year before, our father first, our mother soon after. They were bound together, people said. They had never spent a night apart and always called each other Mr. and Mrs., as though still delighted and somewhat surprised to find themselves husband and wife. Sara was our father’s favorite. He called her his charm and said she brought him luck. Even after she’d married Billy Kelly, who later went to war in France and was now in quarantine himself in the navy yard north of Boston, unable to see his wife as she lay ill, Sara had always come to our father for comfort and advice until his death last winter. Now, perhaps because there was no one else, she’d sent for me.

Mrs. Kelly, Billy’s mother, was helping us keep house, but she wouldn’t venture inside the cottage for fear of my sister’s disease, even though Sara had fallen ill after visiting her son. Each evening, Mrs. Kelly carried a tray across the yard. She fixed a bowl of broth, a plate with some dry rolls, and a pitcher of water. She slid the food through an open window. Even though she had no contact with her daughter-in-law, she wore a mask over her face and hurried back across the yard as if our darling Sara was a venomous snake. I refused to look like a coward to my sister. Sara had told me that a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be in need. But there was no rescue for her now. Her skin was pale, and we could hear her coughing far into the night from across the yard. Our younger sister, Hannah, went to sleep with her hands over her ears so she could blot out our dear Sara’s suffering. But I listened. I heard. I sat by my window and wondered what came next, in the world beyond our own.

I
SLIPPED ON
my good blue dress for the visit, even though my black one had been cleaned and pressed and was waiting in the bureau. I didn’t wear gloves the way some people did when ministering to the ill. Sara had always been so brave. Perhaps that was why our father favored her. I didn’t blame him. She’d been a strong swimmer as a girl and had gained some fame when she crossed from Boston Harbor to Swampscott. A small rowboat had tried to keep pace with her in case she faltered, but they had lost her in the fog. Sara told me that seals had followed her, as if she was one of their own. She was photographed for the newspapers with a garland atop her head, a huge grin across her face, soaking wet in her swimming suit. She was the sort of woman who was more beautiful in difficult times, resolute, ready for action. She had always hiked and fished with our father, and she loved horses. She had a natural affinity with them and said people who used a whip when they rode should be whipped themselves. She was also a painter of some note, and her watercolors were prized not just in Berkshire County, where we lived, but also in Manhattan, where she’d studied. She laughed and insisted that even though she had a New York soul, her heart was in the Berkshires. I had one of her paintings above my bed. It was of Hightop Mountain, which I could see out my window. I preferred my sister’s version to the original. When I looked at that painting, I imagined I was Sara, and that for once I could see through her eyes.

Many men had been in love with my sister over the years. Boys in school sent her love notes. Painters asked her to model, but she laughed and told them they should model for her instead. Once a fellow from New York showed up on our doorstep. Our father chased him off by pointing a rifle at him, which was
laughable considering my father’s kind nature and the fact that the gun hadn’t worked for years. My sister’s caller stood his ground, and my father invited him in for dinner. He was a wealthy man, bewitched by my sister’s talent and her beauty, but in the end Sara chose Billy Kelly, whom she’d known since they were in school. He was steady, she told me, like a rock. I was only a child but I wanted to say a man is not a rock. I myself would have preferred a man who was like a river, changing and quick, always a surprise.

I
OPENED THE
door of the cottage, eager to do anything my sister asked. There was a scrim of dust in the air, yellow, like the grass in the fields. The parlor was silent, except for the clock on the mantel. I went to the bedroom and knocked. The door opened under my touch. There was Sara, in bed, her dog lying by her side. Our father had bought her that dog, a pug she named Topsy, when she was little more than my age. He was nearly fifteen by now, ancient for his breed. Topsy was her protector and her friend, her only company since she’d taken ill. Now he stood and barked at me, as if he hadn’t known me my whole life.

“Topsy.” I was startled by how vicious he was. “It’s just me.”

Sara reached to pet him, and he quieted under her touch. Still he glared at me.

My parents had let my sister name me. Thankfully she hadn’t called me something to rhyme with Topsy. I might have been Flopsy if Sara had been a less poetic child. For three weeks I was nameless, a baby in my cradle. At last my sister decided upon Azurine. She said she couldn’t find a name beautiful enough for me so she invented one. It was the name of a watercolor
paint, a wash of blue-green, mutable, gemlike. Perhaps you belong to anyone who names you. If that was so, then it was surely true of both Topsy and of me. Which of us was more distraught to see my sister in such distress, I couldn’t say.