Warm Wuinter's Garden (20 page)

As Neil had aged from forty to fifty to sixty
and beyond, there had been physical changes, but, for the most
part, they had been slow and subtle. A softer belly, stiffer knees,
a little more gas, a little less hair. He needed a longer hotter
shower in the morning to limber up from the exercise of sleep; he
needed to hold his reading a little farther from his eyes; he
needed to avoid cucumbers and radishes and onions. But, there had
been a comfortableness about those changes. There had been a
slightly rueful humor to the dialogue that went on between his
happy, healthy mind and a somewhat crotchety body. He had talked to
his body, encouraging it or chiding it, as it had chosen not to do
things that he expected it to do. However, in all the talks, there
had never been anger. Just a sweet, comfortable disagreement. Like
telling Queenie not to roll in rotting seaweed. Not so with Bett.
Something ravening. Trying to kill her. Destroying her breast and
chest muscles and armpit and arm. Something wildly hungry. The
frothing, foaming, slavering of a crazed dog. As when, in the
middle of a long, peaceful walk on Sumson’s beach with one hand
holding Bett’s thick callused fingers and the other the empty
leash, a shepherd had come racing up from the point and, without
stopping, without a second’s hesitation, without a sniff, had
attacked Queenie, drawn blood from her muzzle, and, then, attacked
him as he tried to separate them. He had had to hit the shepherd
with the doubled up chain of Queenie’s leash before it ran
away.

No warning. Comfortableness. Then, violence.
They had tried to finish the walk, but all three of them,
especially Queenie with maroon blood congealing on her snout, were
too skittish. It had taken weeks of walks before they were
comfortable on the beach again.

Now, after sixty-six years, the comfort was
gone. His life didn’t fit. The old Bett was gone. There was
something, or might be something, in her which was not to be
trusted. He was finding there was much in him not to be trusted,
too. His anger for one. The sharp spikiness of his anger. Punching
holes in the smoothness of his life. He had worked so hard to be
smooth. To get along. He had spent a lifetime smiling. His hand
gestures, as was true for many Midwest people, were small fillips
and scallops of gracious good will, rather than the wide sweeping
churning and chopping of the East Coast. He had consciously put a
mellifluous tone in his voice. He had wanted to be comfortable with
himself and others. For so very long, wishing and working at the
wishes had made it so.

Then, for no reason, a few of Bett’s cells, a
cadre, had chosen to go their own way. And, a few more. And, then,
a few more. As if Bett’s body were the territory for a revolution.
Cells threw off rules that had been governing them for sixty-four
years. The old ways were threatened. The revolutionaries doubled
and doubled and doubled and doubled again. And each time their
numbers grew, the old comfortable way shrank. The comfortableness
and the fit shrank and shrank. Until the new life of carcinomas and
frozen sections and axillary dissections and adjuvant therapy and
carved out nodes and the horrific meandering of cat scratch
stitches where once a breast had been, where once his handhold into
comfortable sex and comfortable sleep had been, until all these new
things grew and pushed and stretched against the fabric of the old
life, until the fit of the new with the old was so wrong, so
improper, that the old life ripped with the shriek of a tearing
sail and the new life, a life of doubt and fear and anger, a life
of misfitness, of not knowing where a sentence was going nor where
to hold his wife, nor where to focus his eyes when the future
insinuated itself into the conversation, burst through the jagged
hole.

It was hard to know what to do. The doctors
seemed to be so little help. They talked in code in a language with
half the words filled with double rr’s. Was she getting better? Was
she getting worse? What was in store? He asked and they answered
every question with a string of words bereft of information to one
who didn’t speak the language. Insurance was the same. Claims came
back partially paid with cryptic pre-printed phrases marked with an
x to explain why certain things had been rejected. Out-of-pocket
expenses were mounting. Enough that twice he had had to move money
out of savings. If things continued, he would not be able to roll
over all of their CD’s.

Neil was not comfortable with his own money
decisions nor those at work. Conversations with Brad had sowed
seeds of doubt. Poor lending practices had led to catastrophic
failures in Ohio and Maryland. Brad saw many parallels between
those two situations and Rhode Island. Aggressive lending followed
by a weakening economy. Loose regulatory rules and lax oversight.
Haphazard audits. Brad was worried that in a state as small as
Rhode Island, there wasn’t enough mass or diversity to absorb many
mistakes. If something went bad, everything and everybody in the
state could be dragged along.

Brad had asked Neil what he thought about the
large percentage of loans that had been made for commercial real
estate development. Coastal had been very careful with that. As
chief loan officer he had seen to that. Brad had suggested that he
might not want to think that way. The whole purpose of insurance
was to pool risk. If Coastal were careful and no one else was, what
good was their caution? Rhode Island was a pretty small pool.

After thinking about it, Neil had brought up
the question of the bank’s vulnerability with Kenyon Hall. Should
they apply for federal insurance? They certainly would qualify.
Kenyon had listened, but, in the end, he had brushed Neil off.
Kenyon had said that one advantage of a small state was that
everybody knew everybody. If problems occurred, everybody would
pull together. Besides, he knew everybody on RISDIC’s board of
directors. If anything was going to go wrong, he would hear about
it. He told Neil that, with Bett, Neil had enough things to worry
about without making up new ones.

Neil wasn’t sure what to think. He wasn’t
comfortable with Brad’s fears and he wasn’t comfortable with
Kenyon’s reassurances. He just wasn’t comfortable.

Neil hauled in his sheet and reset the tiller
until the SureBett heeled over. He wanted to feel the tension among
the contradictory forces of sail, helm, and centerboard trying to
move his boat in three different directions. He wished that the
wind were stronger so that he could feel the boat taken to her
limits.

Neil stayed on the water for more than five
hours tacking back and forth, with his thoughts making the same
abrupt changes in direction, before he concluded that the best
thing that he could do was to make the decision that Bett was still
Bett. And he should do what he could do to keep that true. As he
headed for the dock Neil knew that the turmoil of making the
decision was nothing compared to what was ahead. He knew his doubts
wouldn’t disappear, nor his anger diminish. But Bett was still
Bett. A comforting thought.

Finally, a hard frost had come. Bett sat on
the window ledge in the cold den. She drank tea and watched the
clear light of early morning sun melt the silvery crystals that had
flocked the grass. Where the sun’s rays struck, the bright green
grass was glistening with dew. In the shade, the leaves of less
hardy weeds and flowers hung curled, black and limp. Bett felt
relief that the harvest was finally over. The heat was finally
gone. The cold, clear killing air had finally come. The growing,
finally, was over. At last, the dahlia roots could be dug.

Bett reached inside her robe to trace the
scar across her chest. The welt felt like a length of electrical
cord had been glued to her chest. Except that it was red. And, the
nurses called it a keloid. But, it always felt warm as if it really
were a cord that had too much electricity running through it. Dr.
Andeotti, her radiologist, had told her that the radiation and the
healing itself could make her flesh feel as warm as if a hot water
bottle were buried beneath her skin.

Heat had been a constant presence inside
Bett’s body since the surgery two month before. She hated its
intrusiveness. She wanted her flesh to be so cold that it shivered.
She’d borne the pain as her body tried to knit itself back together
from the damage of the scalpel. It made sense to her to have that
much pain, if not even more, from the huge wound that had been made
on her. She had even taught herself not to hunker down from its
sharp fingers, but rather to open herself up to it, to welcome it
as part of the path back to a normal life. But, the ever-present
heat that cooked inside her with unrelenting insistence, a constant
bright dry heat as if a light bulb were being held too close,
frightened and discouraged her. The doctors said that the heat,
too, was a sign of healing, but, for her, the hot spot that never
went away, that something that was such a different temperature
than its surroundings, was a feeling to be feared. She wanted
something cold to cool and shrink the spot inside her. She wanted
winter.

Now, for Bett, any difference in her body was
not to be trusted. Every cough was subject to suspicion. Each ache
engendered doubts. Each time she used the toilet she stared at what
she had done to look for signs of betrayal. The day was filled with
a thousand aches and ten times that many worries. Each worry made
her want to pick up the phone to call any one of the audience of
doctors that had been watching her performance over the last two
months.

The radiation was working hard to kill the
cancer cells, but as it streamed into her body looking for those
rampant mutants, it also killed normal cells. She found it hard not
to confuse the side effects of the cure with the disease itself. It
was hard to equilibrate nausea, weakness, pain and the ever-present
heat with getting better. As, day after day, October had stayed
warm, Bett had found herself recoiling at the fecundity of the
earth. She had been a gardener for too many years. Heat meant
growth. Growth scared her. Columbus Day passed and the eggplant put
forth dozens of new lavender blossoms. In the cutting garden,
mature cosmos had dropped seed and those seeds had already sprouted
into a carpet of six-inch tall plants, as delicate as Spanish lace,
growing up and flowering among the woody stalks of their parents.
One afternoon near the end of October, with insects whirring as
loudly as in July, as Bett had walked down the lane to get the
mail, she had been horrified to see that the clumps of violets,
which spent each summer struggling for life among the lane’s thin
crushed stone, had re-blossomed.

On those afternoons when she was tired, which
were many, Bett had sat with her back against the piling at the end
of the dock awaiting air, as cold as ice, to end the feracious life
around her. Winds had come and blown strong and steady, but they
had held the warmth of summer. There had been a period of four days
in mid-October when a southwesterly wind had been unrelenting. It
had blown white caps across the cove and into the heaving groaning
dock. It had whistled around the frames of windows which were still
too bloated by summer’s heat and moisture to be closed tightly. It
had rattled the screen door until she had had to wedge a wet sponge
between door and frame before hooking it. It had beaten down the
hollyhocks so low that at a first glance at the large leaves and
trumpet blossoms trailing on the ground one might have mistaken
them for some exotic variety of squash. Branches of trees being
pounded by the wind had caused wildly careening shadows to run
around the rooms of the house. By the third day she had screamed at
the wind, in a voice as loud as its own, to stop its brutal
pounding. She had been battered enough. Later, after she had calmed
herself down, she prayed that the wind would shift around to the
north. She wished the wind would pull the coldest Canadian air down
across the land. She wanted it to blow fiercely cold air,
unrelentingly, until every blossom head hung down, every plant leaf
was curled, and every maple and oak branch was stripped to its
brown skeleton. It continued to blow for another day, but, the wind
ignored Bett’s wish and continued to stream from the same southerly
quarter.

Fall failed to come. Plants continued to
grow, blossom and fruit. The heat in her chest continued unabated.
As each day stayed warm, Bett’s strength shriveled and the
tentacles of hopelessness lengthened and twisted around her.

Finally, this morning, the cold had come. It
was cold enough to make Bett shiver when she carefully rolled
herself out of bed. She had carried her slippers into the bathroom
and, then, downstairs just to prolong the relief of feeling icy
hardwood floors on her bare feet. Now, looking out the window at
the destruction the frost had brought, Bett felt more hopeful than
she had since that hot noon in August when Dr. Maurer had stopped
murmuring to himself.

All the life around her, which had gone on
and on as if it would never end, had been stopped in a night. Bett
got up from her chair and walked to the window. She put both palms
on the glass. After a minute she pressed them to her chest. A
moment later she left the room.

The rime under her naked heels felt
delicious. The cold made her ankles ache as if she were entering
the frigid waters of Narragansett Bay in the Koster’s annual
Memorial Day summer baptism. Along the shadow of the house, the
heat from her feet burned green holes in the white frost. She
walked out to the cutting garden. The tops of the dahlias hung down
in shame or, maybe, sorrow. The red, white and pink tops of the
snapdragons were soggy. The gossamer of cosmos leaves hung straight
down against their stalks. Finally, it was finally over.

Bett took off her robe and hung it on top of
a stake that helped to hold the rabbit fence in place. She stiffly
bent herself at the waist and with difficulty, because of the
damage to the muscles in her arm, she dragged her nightgown up and
over her head. Bett stood naked in the garden. After several
moments she reached down for a pink granite cobble which she used
in the spring to hold down string when she was marking rows. She
picked it up and held its smooth weight against the mutilated flesh
of her chest.