Where Lilacs Still Bloom (24 page)

Shelly’s wrapper needed washing, so she took it to the laundry room along with other personal items. It was Monday morning, the day for her to fill the tubs and build the fire to heat the water. She liked it that students were assigned the time by reverse alphabet, and this term there were no people whose surnames began with letters after the
S
in Snyder. Well, Mrs. Thorpe, of course, but she lived off campus, as did most of the lecturers. Only the instructors stayed with students on the dormitory floor. Shelly liked the hard stirring of her clothes that let her put strong feelings into effort. Her favorite class was Gardening Out of Doors with Miss Hetzer, for the same reason. She got to shovel and dig and put her back into a task, which transferred the ache in her heart to a muscle ache in her arms and her legs.

Bill had not been happy when she’d returned from her
tour of the Lowthorpe School and had advised him of her plans to enroll. His mother had feigned a terrible illness the next day, and Bill stayed home that week from his classes in Annapolis to look after her, which both angered Shelly and hurt her since he would never cancel classes for her. She was angry because in between her mother-in-law’s coughing—how had it come on so quickly?—the woman managed to put suggestions into her son’s head about the frivolity of his wife. “She goes bicycle riding, wearing those bifurcated skirts!”
Cough, cough
. “I’ve seen her jumping up and down in the back garden, rolling one way and then another, one hundred times. ‘Exercising’ she calls it. Looks to me like one of those strange religions one reads about in that
National Geographic
magazine.”
Cough, cough
. “And now she wants to go to school? At her age? For women? I suspect it’s a cauldron of suffragettes. Don’t you let her go, William. Don’t you let that woman run your life into ruin!”
Cough, cough
. Her mother-in-law would recover as soon as Bill returned to his classes, but not before Shelly and Bill had a week of arguing.

“It’s beyond discussion,” Bill had told her, as he fixed mint tea for his mother. “No wife of mine is going to be gone to another state for months on end, to what, draw plants? There are plenty to draw right here in the garden, if that’s your interest, though I must say it’s a new interest. One of your fleeting interests, I suspect. Like the lyceum attendance.”

“I attend horticulture meetings regularly.”

“And see where that’s gotten you.”

“The few friends I have here, that’s what it’s gotten me.” She’d stood tall and straight as he poured hot water through the tea caddy. It had been months since he’d made tea for her, even longer since they’d sat and just talked about what the future might hold for them. She changed the tone. “What’s happened to us, Bill? I keep looking for yes in your face, and all I see is no.”

Startled, Bill spilled the tea. She reached for a towel and held it to his hand, her fingers closing over his wrist, his palm. Once that touch would have brought currents of emotion through her and Bill as well. She pressed against his hand, urging the feeling to reappear, to reach him. He looked at her, really looked at her, and she felt his own sadness in the gaze, a sadness she longed to alter.

“Shelly, I—”

His mother coughed from her bedroom.

Bill pulled the towel from his hand, lifted the teapot, and carried it away from her. Carried everything away.

She’d packed her bags and left the next morning before anyone else was up. She opened the front door and heard a sound and turned. There stood her mother-in-law, looking chipper and in the bloom of health. She smiled, then coughed, pressing her hanky to her smirking lips as she waved a tepid good-bye.

That had been more than a year ago. At least Bill hadn’t
refused to pay the statements the school sent, or she couldn’t have remained. Perhaps it was better this way. She could take every course in each of the four subject divisions, which would require another year or so. But then what? She stirred the tub of her clothes. Cauldron of suffragettes. Her mother-in-law’s charge still irritated. She’d found no suffragettes here, only natural beauty, living things needing nurture to survive. As the months passed, she found she liked the lack of stressful talk—there was no need to defend all the time.

She loved having her hands in soil, earth like face powder come together, patting around the roots, careful not to cover the crown, being wary of overwatering. These were things discussed at the horticultural meetings, but here, at the school, they were like a religion, each plant looked after with reverence.

With her sleeve, Shelly wiped her forehead of perspiration. She lifted the soaked wrapper and twisted it as free of moisture as she could before sinking it into the boiling rinse water. Her eye caught the dying rhododendron outside that had been discussed at length in the Gardening Out of Doors class. The rhododendron had been planted wrong, where it could not flourish. It had been exposed to the harsh cold, though of course rhodies thrived in mountain zones with heavy snow and intense cold. The consensus was, the plant was dying.

Laura Hetzer had used the occasion to discuss what
plants need—what all living things need, she admonished—and looked for ways they might work to restore it. “Though there are times when one must simply pull the plant up by the roots and toss it aside, as it is gone. Dead. Finished.”

Is this my marriage?
Shelly wondered.

But she found herself focused on restoring the rhodie as a necessary task. Her desire to repair had not lessened since she’d been here. She still wasn’t sure she should go home in December, to see if she and Bill could replant the seeds of their relationship. Her mother-in-law’s words—or was it her cough—and Bill’s bowing to them made her think it wasn’t possible. She had no way of mulching a marriage back into health by herself. She still hoped Lowthorpe might give her those tools.

In the classroom, Shelly took her seat, surprised when Mr. Dawson, the instructor, introduced Cornelia Givens “who will be interviewing some of you today, if you care to participate, as she is working on a story about our school and its students. She’s from California.”

Murmuring followed. Mr. Dawson coughed loudly to gain order. “Ladies, if you please. Are there volunteers?” Every hand except Shelly’s went up.

“Could I ask you to suggest a few students?” the reporter said. She was a petite woman who wore her hair in that new fashion with a french twist. Her smallish hat—with one short feather—cocked jauntily to the side.

Mr. Dawson looked over his glasses. “Mrs. Snyder would be a fine interviewee. She’s one of our few married students. And she has a special interest in rhododendrons.” Mr. Dawson urged Shelly to raise her hand. For some reason, Shelly complied, her palm barely reaching her chin. “Now that you’ve properly met, perhaps you can find a time after the class to talk. Will that work?” Both women nodded, and Mr. Dawson assumed his instruction, while Miss Givens took notes.

Shelly didn’t know how she felt about being singled out for an interview because she was married. She wasn’t at all certain how long that status would remain.

Cornelia Givens sat across from Shelly at the end of a long table on the dining porch. Several other girls, including a few instructors, spoke quietly, eventually leaving just the two women alone. Clanks of dishes from the kitchen provided background, and when they couldn’t hear those noises, there were birds chirping in the trees beyond the screened porch.

“This is such a lovely place,” Cornelia began. “How did you first hear of the school?”

“I attended horticultural meetings in Baltimore where I live, and they planned a tour to visit the Hampton Gardens, a fabulous estate. While we were there, the head gardener spoke of Mr. Child as one of the primary landscape engineers in the country. It’s a very old estate. And he said that Mr.
Child was a lecturer at the Lowthorpe School. I’d never heard of it before and thought it intriguing, all female students in an occupation usually reserved for men. Not unlike your own profession, Miss Givens.”

“Please. Call me Cornelia.”

“And I’m Shelly.”

“It’s true I have an interest in rhodies, but my favorite plant is a lilac,” Shelly said.

“I like them too,” Cornelia told her and mentioned Hulda Klager.

The two talked away the afternoon, walking through the grounds, then back to the screened porch for afternoon tea. When students entered the hall for the evening meal, Cornelia and Shelly looked up. “Is it that time already?” Shelly said.

“I’ll be here for a year myself if I take this long with one interview.” Cornelia started to return her notepad to her bag, then hesitated. “Is there one lesson you’ll take away from this course, a lesson about life perhaps?”

“Egad, I’m no philosopher—not that I wouldn’t like to study Plato and Aristotle.” Shelly sat, thoughtful. “This past year I’ve found there are lessons in these plants—many lessons—testaments to faith and an acceptance that it’s the root structure as much as anything that predicts the kind of plant you’ll have.”

Now that she’d said it, Shelly wondered if that was what was missing in her marriage: a solid foundation where sturdy roots sank deep into family and faith and that could weather
the trials of living and, best of all, permit deep feelings to bloom year after year.

Cornelia finished the interviews and stayed an additional day just to wander around the campus, taking in scents and sights that spiced her writing. In the kitchen, she chatted with the cooks, inhaling the aroma of fresh spinach salad with a hot bacon dressing and asking (and receiving) the recipe for a fruit drink combining apples, grapes, lemon juice, and ginger ale. She visited greenhouses and tried her hand at designing a small garden plot, realizing as she did the enormous task involved in creating a garden that matched one’s vision.

The school suggested that graduates would find work in designing and planting for small estates, village parks, and forwarding-thinking cities. “People will more likely move to a town with a welcoming flower garden beneath its city sign than a pile of weeds blown up against its center post,” the school’s founder told her. Flowers spoke as clearly as Cornelia’s words did, maybe even more.

As a result of the interviews, Cornelia planned a side trip to Arnold Arboretum run by Harvard University, where it was said there was a special lilac garden. That might lead to a series of stories about great arboretums across the country. There did seem to be a growing interest in the natural world, what with President Roosevelt urging Congress to set aside protected areas of landscape for all to enjoy as parks. She’d
made notes on the journey itself, hoping she might sell a few pieces to travel magazines. She’d learned so much in this brief trip, not the least of which was confidence. She was a good listener, and people liked being heard. That was worthy work, even if she never got a story published.

But if she didn’t get the stories published, what would she live on? She couldn’t survive on the beauty she saw.

“Cornelia, I’m so glad I caught you.” It was Shelly, breathing hard, running down the hill as Cornelia headed for the cab. “I wanted to give you this. It’s a lilac start, from a variety here. It does well in neutral soil and cold weather. I had permission to cut it and meant to give it to you when we said good-bye earlier.” She handed it to Cornelia. “Keep it moist, and you’ll be able to plant it when you get home to California. Or maybe give it to your lilac friend, Mrs. Klager.”

“She’s not really a friend.”

“Would you ask her if she’ll send me a cultivar of one of her new varieties?”

“She did say she likes to give them away. I’ll write and ask her. Should she send it here?”

“No.” Shelly handed Cornelia a piece of paper on which she’d written her address. “I’m going home at Christmas. And God willing, I’ll bring my husband back here next spring to see if the rhodie made it. But something back home needs tending more.”