THE UNGRATEFUL GARDEN

“It has not been an unhappy life.  There have been moments of contentment and occasions for pride in the achievements of my children.  Those.  Those more than anything.  Yes,” he thought, “those achievements make the difference.”  Doubtfully, as though struggling to convince himself, he turned away from the window, where he had been meditating, looking out across the yard to the long, narrow strip of garden that bounded the property, behind which a red brick wall and strip of grass between finished the job.  A carpet of leaves newly fallen covered the frost-burned flowers and the grass, and he could just barely hear the motor of the leaf vacuum the gardener carried rhythmically sucking leaves out of the long garden strip.  His wife had been there, too, incongruous but imperious, instructing the young man on his day’s work, but was now gone.  The sky was deep, deep blue, and the morning’s frost, melted now, still sparkled in the grass.  There was a hollowness at the heart of things that threatened to drag him in.  He felt it as a hollowness, described it to himself as a hollowness, but he really didn’t know what it was; he felt it as something he couldn’t define.  It was like a truth hiding behind a sheet hanging on a clothes line—an image that came to him, with a certain wonder, from his childhood.  He could discern a presence there but couldn’t identify it.  It was a great trouble to him. 

     His wife, Elaine, was a practical woman, with a woman’s sense of property and ownership.  She had designed the house they lived in—not as an architect might, all laid out on a drawing table, starting from an empty page.  Rather, when they bought the home some thirty-five years ago, she began to redesign it to suit her sensibility and her needs—beginning with little things and ending with a complete transformation of the building and the grounds.  She more or less had the house rebuilt around her, like a queen bee in a hive.  It was so organic a process, he had little to do with any of it.  He puttered around in the garden, planting this and that, never really taking much interest beyond the work, which he did more for the exercise than for any aesthetic satisfaction the results might bring.  But even here Elaine stamped her possessive nature, hiring a gardener to do her bidding, commanding this and that till she got a kind of photosynthesizing sculpture she could live with.  The grounds were quite extensive, and Elaine controlled every square inch of them—not a blade of grass grew without her awareness and permission.  Pity the poor weeds, any that might dare to colonize this petted patch of earth, he thought, hypocritically.  “Mmmmph,” he uttered gruffly to himself.  It was undeserving of him to harbor such thoughts of her, and he felt his hypocrisy keenly.  He had made her, made them both, what they are, and one mustn’t condemn the creature for the creator’s work.

     Long before his retirement, in his later middle years when he was still physically vigorous, he had felt the hollowness.  He felt it then, when it first began to trouble him, as a deficiency in himself, an inability to care much about anything, an indifference as though the world around had paled and lost its attractiveness to him.  Some people are hedonists and remain so all their lives; while he was never one of these, he had become anhedonic and, in later years, had acquired something of the willed serenity of the stoic.  In the beginning he was able to ignore the feeling.  Family wealth had imparted to him a stature he knew he had not earned.  But he worked hard, nevertheless, and had risen of his own accord into a very minor prominence.  He dabbled at first in politics, but when he found he had support—unearned, as usual—he became serious about it.  Later, after leaving Washington, under his own power and after achieving a reputation for honesty and straightforwardness, he served on two presidential commissions and served his city by sitting on various boards and public commissions where his financial connections and political skills were needed.  He acquired the reputation of being a not-so-liberal, not-so-conservative son of the establishment who gave unstintingly of himself for the public good.  These duties kept him focused and held at bay for a while the unhappiness that began to afflict him more and more profoundly in later years. 

     He and Elaine had breakfasted and she was off on this fine Saturday morning planning a fund-raising luncheon for some cause he didn’t pay much attention to when they talked over their morning coffee.  Never having worked a salaried job, she had nothing to retire from, and so she just continued doing what she had always done, which she did out of obligation and for the pleasure it brought her. He was, mercifully, alone.  He spent more time with Elaine now than ever.  Often he would fall silent and study her.  She would look at him out of the corners of her eyes. Sometimes she would be amused at his apparent ruminations, wondering what was passing through his head; but sometimes she would wonder if he was assessing their lives together, and she would pout and fret and try to shake him out of his mood.

     “Mr. Hart,” she said one evening as they sat together after dinner, “you have a look of regret in your eyes.  Is it directed at me?”

     “Do I?” he responded, all surprised by her intuition.  “No, Mrs. Hart,” he returned, “I have no regrets.”  And he smiled at the gentle formality by which she chastised him for appearing distant and judgmental. 

     He smiled now at the thought of that occasion.  He had no regrets.  Leaving the window and the faint buzz of the gardener’s vacuum, he went to his study, where he kept a bottle of brandy and the four crystal brandy glasses his daughter gave him for Christmas some years ago.  He took a sip of brandy in the morning after breakfast for the calming effect it had on him.  Before his retirement, he indulged this routine only on Saturdays.  But he had taken to it now every morning.  He spent the hours till noon sitting and reading, first the newspaper, then a book—usually a history of some sort, which was now the only reading that could absorb him for the time he needed to spend at it.  The morning hours were the hardest for him to get through. 

     This morning, however, he took up no newspaper, nor book.  He poured a brandy and sat, thinking again about Elaine’s intuition.  Did he have regrets?  As he asked himself the question, he felt a powerful pull on his emotions.  At once, the figure behind the sheet stepped out and showed itself.  He knew, when he saw it, that there was no joy in his life and that there had never been any.  There were many occasions when he should have known, felt, the happiness men call joy—there was his marriage and the birth of his two children; their progress through the early years; their graduations and careers; their marriages; and the milestones in his and Elaine’s years together.  He was alive to all these moments.  For the first time, however, he realized that they were dead in him and that he was to blame. 

     It began, he knew, with that figure who stepped from behind the sheet.  The year was 1948, and he was a sophomore in college.  He lived in one of the houses along the Charles river in the area of Harvard called South of the Yard.  He was one of those students who relied on the special tutoring provided by the House to get by from day to day.  Left to his own devices, he would have flunked out and gone home in shame, and shame was the one motivation that drove him, since he had no particular ambition to leave his mark on the world.   He thought now about his fear of shame and his cheeks flamed.  Lifting the brandy, he held it to the morning light beaming in from the window, and the brandy answered it by fracturing its amber glow through the cut crystal of the glass.  He suppressed his feeling by taking another sip, and then he put the glass down and closed his eyes.  Mathers leaned over and clipped the deep maroon-colored chrysanthemum, leaving an inch of stem with two curled leaves nesting the small flower.  With a sly smile, he reached for Tom’s lapel and pushed the stem into its button hole, then patted the lapel back into place, leaving the dark blossom there.  The two young men looked into each other’s eyes, exchanging an understanding.  The women, dressed in fall colors and large-brimmed hats with lace ties draping over their shoulders, came arm in arm to collect them.  Both women, Radcliff girls, had kept bread back from their noon meal to feed the geese and swans that crowded the banks of the river, looking for just such handouts. 

     “Tom Hart,” Elaine said, “Don’t you look just like you’re going to a funeral with that chrysanthemum in your lapel.”

     “Blame Mathers,” Tom replied, reddening a little.  “He stuck it there.”

     “Well, take it out,” she demanded.  “You look like you’re in mourning.”

     “No, don’t,” Mathers said, as Tom reached for the flower, stopping him.  “It’s fall and that’s a fall color.  Get into the spirit of things!” he said to the girls.

     “Since when is the spirit of things maroon?” Tess threw in, adding her support to Elaine’s argument.

     “You women want everything to be gay,” Mathers said, taking Tess’ arm and guiding her into a stroll along the river walk.  Tom and Elaine followed behind them, arm in arm.  “But fall is the season of ripeness, after which everything dies.  A funereal tone is appropriate, don’t you think, Tom?” he said over his shoulder, looking back toward his friend.

     “I’d rather it were the yellow one,” Tom said.  He left the flower where it was, however, as he and Elaine walked behind the older couple. 

     Mathers detached himself from Tess and told the little group to wait as he walked briskly back to the place near the river where the chrysanthemums grew.  He plucked two small, yellow, just-opening blossoms and came back. 

     “Here, Tom,” he said, smiling broadly, as though he were chivalrically obeying the wishes of the ladies.  He replaced the dark flower with the gay one, tossing the maroon blossom into the river with a kiss and an exaggerated look of longing as the flower drifted away on the slow current, and stuck the other in his own lapel. 

     “Fall is fall, etymologically and factually,” he said, bowing deeply over his knee to Elaine—Mathers’ penchant for the broad gesture making them all laugh, for they loved it when he became theatrical.

     “To be wounded or slain,” he continued, looking again into Tom’s eyes, “to be taken or captured.  And then again,” he went on, “fall is autumn, a time of maturity.”  Here he paused, looking at Elaine, his features declining from the bright cheeriness of his feigned knightly demeanor to that of a curve-backed senior, the transformation assisted by his tousseling his hair and pulling it down in front of his eyes, which had filled with so profound a sadness that Tom yielded instantly to his friend, regretting his comment about preferring the yellow.  The two girls looked at each other, amused and embarrassed by the energy Mathers was putting into his little show, and then broke into gleeful laughter.

     “Oh, you can make even death funny,” Elaine said, recovering her gravity, taking Tom’s arm and hanging heavily upon him.

     The color marked a death all right, he thought, rising from the chair and going to the window.  He looked out from the height of the second floor.  The air was warmed by the sun and the grass had dried, but the leaves were wet still and made the same deep sound as they were mulched by the vacuum the gardener gently swept over them.  The gardener was a young man, maybe twenty years old, and wore a denim jacket over a hooded sweat shirt, leaving the hood hang upon the back of his neck and upper shoulders.  He worked carefully, lifting the wet leaves off the red bark ground cover Elaine insisted on having put down fresh each spring. 

     At twenty, he hadn’t the vaguest idea what his life was going to be like.  He looked out at that young man and wondered what he thought his life would be like ten, twenty, thirty years from now.  Do people ever think such things? he wondered.  Does he think he will be vacuuming leaves from other people’s flower beds, just as he’s doing out there, twenty years from now?  “But Cicero is harder to translate than Caesar,” Mathers said, his sleeves rolled up, his jacket hanging upon the back of the chair.  “I don’t understand why you can do Cicero and not Caesar.  Let’s go over it again.”  He didn’t know why, either.  Perhaps it was because he could follow the thought better in Cicero and couldn’t anticipate Caesar’s meanings at all.  Whatever the reason, he was failing too many of his bi-weekly exams in Latin, and Mathers leaped in to save him.  They worked the late night hours and made just enough progress to get him by.  Mathers never criticized him, on the contrary.  “You’re a blank slate, Tom,” he said one afternoon while they walked along the river, “and I’m chalking up my own idea of an educated mind upon it.”  They talked about Mathers’ ideal of the educated mind, and Tom had his doubts if he would ever rise to that level.  “Salve, Patria, Tomasso,” Mathers said, with infinite patience, then slapped him on the back and put his arm over his shoulders and pulled him to his side.  Often, as they worked late night hours, Tom would fall into a doze.  Mathers stroked his arm then, or stroked his back, rubbed his neck, or ruffled his hair.  The stimulation kept him awake and focused.  As the younger of the two, he felt those mannerisms were an expression of an older friend’s brotherly intimacy and he warmed to the touch.  He did feel inferior to Mathers and appreciated his comforting gestures and his patient efforts to teach.  They had become very close during these tutorial sessions, and without his older friend, he knew he would not have lasted out his sophomore year.  It was not only the Latin; math eluded him as well, and he struggled with French.  If it were not for Andrew Mathers and his taking responsibility for the underclassman, a Harvard tradition and the very reason why the River Houses existed in the first place, he would have suffered the humiliations of failure and gone home to an intolerably protected life in the family’s old house. 

     Standing by the window looking out at the gardener, he called up an image of his friend’s face—he was sitting behind the doors that opened onto the flagstone patio.  Heavy hunter-green curtains hung on each side of the paned-glass doors, concealing him from the view of Mathers approaching the house from the Yard.  Mathers had stopped on the flagstones and stood for a moment, his hands in the pockets of his trousers.  He was in a contemplative mood, unaware he was being watched, for it was a Sunday morning, a time when the house was deserted.  They were only a few feet apart.  The normally alert expression and tense smile his friend carried had turned, for the moment, into a calm, sad-eyed, slack-jawed look that must have been the true face of the young man, the face he allowed to be himself when he had no need for a front.  It had a gentleness and tender sweetness to it that never showed itself to others.  Tom felt he had glimpsed the soul of his older friend and was embarrassed.  He wanted to make his way out of the big room before Mathers could enter but knew if he tried to leave, the other would know he was there, so he held his place, looking out, preparing to accost him as he entered, and make some excuse.

     Thinking of all this now, he felt a rush of the emotions that swirled in him that year.  Mathers was a senior, and seniors at Harvard were the closest beings to God that walked upon the earth.  Mathers’ personal care of him was more than a friendship, it was a gift of surpassing importance.  It made the difference between success and failure.  It shaped the rest of his life.  And his crude and shameful behavior destroyed what might have been the one chance for transcendence life offered him.  “Life is like a garden,” Mathers said.  “Tend it carefully and it will bloom, each kind in its season, but turn your back on it, and it’s suddenly clung with weeds, all your pretty flowers choked out of it.  Weed your life, Tom.  Keep the nasties out of it, and you’ll thrive just fine.”

     “I can never tell a weed from a flower,” he responded, laughing, for they had been talking about Elaine when Mathers launched this digression about gardens, and he thought his friend meant to imply that she was a weed.

     Mathers turned dead serious, then.  They were weekending at Mathers’ family home in Boston, the holiday season approaching.  He was going to leave soon for his own home, and they were passing the time sipping sherry, awaiting the taxi that would take Tom to the train station. 

     “Thank God I wasn’t called during the last year,” Mathers said, referring to 1945.  “I could have been, you know.  If I was, whether or not I survived, we wouldn’t be here now.  But think of it, Tom.  Think of all the wreckage.  The nasties are out there.  Nothing matters when the nasties are out there, and they’re still out there.  Nothing really changes, you know.  What matters is what we do for ourselves.  Only that.  Cultivate your own garden.  Keep the nasties away.  Inside that garden you can live the way you want.  Keep the weeds out.  Keep it secret, if you wish.  But keep it.  That’s the point.”

     “We can’t keep our gardens, Mathers.  You know that.  Isn’t that what history tells us?”

     “You mean Adam and Eve?”

     “Well, yes, now that you mention it, but it’s not what I had in mind.  I was thinking of the war; how we’re always being invaded. . . .”

     “Pshaw,” Mathers threw out, “You’re talking rot.  Imperialism!  I’m talking about you and me.”

     “I don’t understand. . . .”

     Just then they heard the honking of the cab, and he swallowed the last of his sherry, rose, grabbed his bag and coat, and, Mathers holding the door, rushed out.  He heard his friend say at his back as he took the steps down, “Don’t be afraid of who you are.  It’s the only grace life gives us.”  With that swimming in his mind, he sat back in the cab and prepared himself for the journey home.

     He sat back in his chair, resting heavily into it, and closed his eyes.  Time was passing slowly, but he couldn’t read.  He was in a turmoil.  It would be hours before Elaine returned.  He felt caged.  What a garden he had created for himself!  But what he had created was not what Mathers had in mind by the idea of a garden.  He had never created that for himself.  He was too weak.  “Metaphors,” he said aloud.  “Damned metaphors.”  He was so naïve.  So much had transpired that year, and he was unconscious of most of it.  He lacked the necessary imagination.  Mathers had stepped out from behind the sheet and looked across the distance of time—unaccusing, accepting, and loving—and all metaphors fell like rain, cleansing the air, and he was in a turmoil.  Mathers was unchanged.  His dark, wavy hair, his bright eyes, his easy and familiar manner, his self-assurance—all were as they had been.  A feeling of infinite loss pervaded him at the memory of Mathers and a sadness, like an old man’s memory of a long-ago spring, when, as a boy, he discovered all on his own that the world is beautiful, filled him and he felt the burning in his eyes, and he cursed himself for his sentimentality and for the frailty that kept him, literally, out of the garden that the young man out there now was tending for him.

     He rose unsteadily and went downstairs, the brandy, perhaps, influencing his resolve.  He took his old hunter’s cap and placed it upon his head, his wispy white hair sticking out from under it at odd angles.  Then he took his bright red fall coat out of the closet and put it on.  He went out the back, crossed the patio, crossed the wide lawn to the flower bed that ran along the whole length of the wall, and looked one way and then the other for the gardener.  He could not hear the leaf vacuum anymore, and so he decided to just begin walking along the garden, all the way to where the wall divided, one arm of it going into the trees and following the hill, where it eventually meandered back to the wall he was walking along, enclosing what had once been a pasture but which Elaine let return to wilderness; the other going down to the pond, where it stopped.  Elaine made the garden follow the wall to the pond but left the arm that ran into the trees unadorned.  It was a long and invigorating walk; the air was cool but not cold, and the sunshine was bright and clear, and the trees studding the spacious lawn here and there, and those on the other side of the wall, were brilliantly turned.  But these he barely noticed, aware merely that they were there.  All perspired and feeling increasingly unsteady from walking up and down the gentle slopes in the land, he saw the young man, finally, working off in the distance.  He had a truck pulling a wire bin which was filled to the top with mulched leaves.  The young man saw him and waved, then stood, staring across the distance with his hands on his hips, as though he intended to wait for the old man to arrive.  But then he got into the truck and drove up. 

     “Hello, Mr. Hart,” he said as he stopped beside him, turning off the engine.

     “I’m out for a walk, young man, a beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

     “It is,” the young man said, looking curiously at the frail old man, for he tottered unsteadily and appeared winded, as though he had overtaxed himself already.  “You oughtn’t to be wandering so far, sir.  Want to get in?  I’ll give you a spin around the place and ride you back to the house.”

     “No, no,” he said, widening his eyes, but then said, defeatedly, "perhaps, perhaps, but not just now.  I want to look around a bit and breathe the air.”

     They looked at each other, the young man in the cab taking in the older one, who was leaning on the door now, and the old man looking pleadingly into the younger one’s face.

     “What’s your name,” the older man said.

     “Wishern,” said the younger, “Jimmy, Jimmy Wishern.”

     “My name’s Tom,” the older man said.  “Call me Tom.”

     “OK,” the young man said, reddening a little, uncertain about the old man’s attempt at friendliness.

     “How old are you, Jimmy?”

     “Twenty-five,” he said, meekly.

     “Do you make a good living at the work you do?”

     “I make a living, sir.”

     “Do you work for others besides us?” the old man asked.

     “Yes, sir, I do. I work three estates, sir.  Full time between the three of them.”

     “Are you married?”

     “Yes, sir.  Two years, now.”

     “Children?”

     “Not yet, but the time will come,” he said, smiling.

     “I’m sure, I’m sure it will,” the old man said.

     “My wife’s a nurse, sir.  She has a good job.  We want to get a couple years of savings under our belts first.”

     “Well, that’s only wise.  And what then?”

     “Then we take what comes, I guess.”

     “You love your wife?”

     “Of course, sir,”  he said, surprised at the question.

     A tiredness came over him, and his look wavered as he swayed against the door of the truck.  The young man grabbed at the older man’s hand, holding him steady.

     “You’d better get in, sir.  I’ll drive you back to the house.”

     Tom Hart climbed into the cab and gave into his fatigue, which was more emotional than physical.  He didn't know what he wanted to accomplish by coming out to this young man.  He felt a need to do it, but now having done it, it didn’t help at all.  He felt more inconsequential than ever.  He didn’t care what the young man thought.  How foolish he must seem to him.  He was beyond caring about such things.  He wanted to know something, but he didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t know how to question it.  He knew that coming out here was wrong, that there was nothing he could do, not anymore.  He felt ashamed.  He regretted what he had done when he returned to college that year.  One can ask no questions about such things.  They happened fifty years ago.  And since he had known for some time that Mathers had passed, there was not a living soul beside himself who cared.

     The young man pulled up to the back of the big old house, got out of the pickup and came around to the other door, opening it and helping the old man out.  He drove away, and the old man looked after him till he turned out of sight, returning to where his work had been interrupted.  Then the old man turned and went into the house.  “‘Don’t be afraid of who you are.  It’s the only grace life gives us.’  Do you remember saying that?”  He had thought about what he heard Mathers say at his back as he ran down the steps of the town house to the taxi.  All during Christmas those words haunted him, for he feared he knew what Mathers meant by them, and the shame of it was more than he could bear.  For several months after they returned to campus he had kept his distance from Mathers, not always with easy excuses, so that at times he was more obvious than he wanted to be.

     “I remember,” Mathers said, looking him straight in the eye.  They were at the spring cotillion and Elaine and Tess were lost somewhere in the ballroom visiting other girls—a swirl of gowns and tuxes on the dance floor swinging to popular tunes—and they found themselves uneasily in each other’s company. 

     “I’m not who you think I am,” Tom protested.

     Mathers laughed and lit a cigarette, then stared him straight in the eye.  He didn’t flinch at the accusation.  Self-possessed as he was famous for being, Mathers looked sorrowingly at him, instead, and the look shot straight to Tom’s pride. 

     “Don’t look at me like that,” he half shouted, angry and reddening.

     “Tom,” Mathers said soothingly, “we go at life only once.  If Elaine is what you want from it, then marry her.  I’d only be happy for you.”

     They were standing together at the edge of the dance floor, and Mathers began searching for Tess among the knots of people gathered for conversation all around the vast, dim room, not seeing her.  Tom persisted, pushing himself close to Mathers so as not to be heard by passersby.

     “Damn you would be.  I’ve heard you say already what you think of her.  Don’t play the ‘large soul’ with me, Mathers.  I AM marrying Elaine.  I’ve asked her, and our families have met.  We’re committed.”  He was red faced and vindictive.  Mathers looked at him pityingly.

     “Good.  I hope you’re not one of those people, Tom, who are driven one way because they fear the other.”

     “Don’t be so cryptic, Mathers.  You’re so damn superior.”

     “Is that spite I hear in your voice?  Let me give you some advice, mentor to mentored,” he paused for a moment, taking the younger man in, a smile of self-possession on his face that made Tom grimace, an expression which, insinuating how wrong he had been about the young man, cast a sudden shadow into his eyes.  “When love and spite are ravelled,” he went on, looking intently now at Tom, putting a hand on his shoulder, “they cannot be unravelled.  A person confused this way might never know why he does the things he does, and there will be no grace in his life.” 

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tom threw at him, shrugging off the hand.

     “I wish you happiness, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s spite alone that keeps you from seeing it.”

Mathers held out his hand and Tom shook it, and Tom felt he had had his say and made peace with him.  The fact made him feel manly.  They were on friendly terms for the rest of the year, and after that, they never saw each other again. 

     In the silence, he heard the car approaching the front of the house, and shortly afterwards, he heard Elaine come in.  She went to his study and not finding him, came into the hall and shouted for him.  She went to the kitchen, still shouting, her voice beginning to sound alarmed.  Then she saw him.  He was still wearing his hat and coat.  He had come in through the back porch, where they kept a short three-legged stool beside the door to sit on when kicking off their boots or shoes.  He was sitting on the stool, his face flushed and wet from overheating, staring at her as though she were a stranger—his eyes wide and round and bewildered. 

     “What’s wrong, Tom,” she said, her voice shaking with fear.  She had removed his hat, unzipped and took off his coat, and he breathed deeply and leaned back against the wall. 

     “Nothing, I’m all right,” he said. 

     “You’re drenched, just look at you, your shirt is all wet from perspiration.  How long have you been sitting here?”  Alarm was now full blown.  She wiped his face and then went straight to the phone and dialed emergency.  When she came back, she saw him trying to stand and took his arm and helped him to his feet.  She walked him through the kitchen into the living room and sat him down.  He breathed more easily and his flushed, beaming face began to calm. 

     “What happened to you?” she asked, the chain of events she had just set in motion provoking such anxiety, that she felt she might need as much care as he did.

     “Calm down, Elaine, I’m fine.  I’m fine.  I went out for a walk, that’s all.”  He didn’t say it was a walk that took fifty years, at the end of which he found he had come the wrong way.  “I’m just tired.  You shouldn’t have called an ambulance.  But that’s all right.  Don’t fret about it.  We’ll just send it away when it arrives.”  As he leaned back, far away in the distance, he could hear the siren.  He closed his eyes.  Nothing would help.