The Box Garden (28 page)

It is a good thing Eugene kept the rented car because it turns out to be quite useful. At noon he picks up my mother from the hairdresser’s and brings her home. Seth arrives a few minutes later by foot; he has had his hair trimmed and, smiling sheepishly, he allows us to admire him.

We eat sandwiches standing up in the kitchen, and then Eugene drives Martin and Judith to Union Station to meet their children who arrive on the one o‘clock train.

I hardly know Meredith and Richard, and Seth has never seen them. Richard is shy, somewhat sulky, and, after three hours on the train, wild with hunger. Meredith at eighteen is beautiful. Judith has told me that her daughter’s beauty has made her own aging bearable. “It’s an odd consolation, isn’t it?” she said. “You’d think I’d be jealous, but I revel in it.”

Meredith kisses her grandmother with surprising force. “Well, how does it feel to be a bride again?” she bursts out.

“I was just going to lie down for my rest,” my mother says in a wavy-toned way she has.

“Right now?” Meredith’s eyes open wide.

“Just for an hour. I always have a rest after lunch, you know that.”

“Hold it for five minutes, Grandma. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?”

“You wait here. I’ll set it up in the kitchen.”

Meredith, shopping bag in hand, races into the kitchen, opens her blue umbrella on the kitchen table, balancing it carefully on two spokes. Underneath it she arranges a dozen small parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with pale pink ribbon.

“Okay now, Grandma. You can come in.”

“What in the world ...”

“It’s a shower, Grandma, a kitchen shower.”

“But I’ve got everything I need ...”

“I know, Grandma,” Meredith dances around the table, “but you’re a bride, you’ve got to feel like a bride.”

There is a new set of measuring cups in copper-tinted aluminum.

“But I have some measuring cups ...”

“But they’re all dented and ancient. I noticed last time we were here.”

There is a new ironing-board cover.

“Now you can throw that old rag away.” Meredith chortles.

There is a little needle-like device to prick the bottoms of eggs with.

“So they won’t break when you boil them,” Meredith explains.

“But all you have to do is add some salt ...”

There is a wooden spoon. A new spatula. A twisted spring for taking lumps out of gravy. Two tiny soufflé dishes in white china.

“For you and Mr. Berceau,” Meredith tells her joyfully, “and you can put them right in the oven.”

There is a miniature ladle for melted butter. A painted recipe box made in Finland. And a beautiful, new streamlined egg beater with a turquoise plastic handle and whirling, purring, silvery gears.

“Lovely,” everyone agrees.

“Just what you needed.”

“Meringues, cakes ...”

“—a beauty—”

“But I have an egg beater ...”

“Grandma, smile. This is your wedding day, you’re a bride.”

While my mother rests we set up the presents on the buffet. There aren’t many. Judith and Martin are giving bedspreads.

“Two bedspreads?” I ask.

“Well ... yes. One seemed sort of, you know, suggestive. I mean, that’s the way she might see it. Two sort of cancels out the whole thing. One for the guest room and one for her room, more like a general refurbishing. God, I hate all this delicacy, but you know how she is, and the fact is, we couldn’t think of anything else.”

Eugene has bought them a kitchen radio which we think was rather an inspiration, a trim little model in white plastic with excellent tone and a year’s guarantee. And since my shrubs hadn’t been very successful, I decided yesterday to buy something else, something small but personal: I decided to give them my complete works, my four books of poetry.

Curiously enough my mother has never read anything I’ve written. She has, in fact, never expressed the slightest desire to do so, and a species of shyness has prevented me from ever sending her a copy. Furthermore, though she is not an astute reader, it has always worried me that she might comprehend something of the darkness in my poetry. It might wound her; it might remind her of something she would rather forget.

But now seemed like a good time to make a presentation. Like Judith, I had begun to know that I might never be able to talk to her. Who knows? Perhaps this was a way.

I had to buy the books retail by going to a bookstore and paying the regular price instead of getting them directly from the publisher as I normally do in Vancouver. Eugene and I went downtown yesterday to a very large bookstore, and there, in the poetry section, I found all four of my books. (They have recently been re-issued as a rather attractive set.) My picture in rainbow hues smiled happily at me from the back covers.

It was an altogether surreal experience to be buying my own books; I felt as though I were participating in a piece of cinema vérité. I felt, in fact, extraordinarily foolish placing those books in the hands of the cashier at the front of the store.

She checked the titles and then she turned the books over to check the price. Now, I thought, now she’s going to suffer a brief instant of confusion; then her mouth will fall open in astonished recognition.

But none of this happened. Instead she took my twenty dollar bill, slapped it down on the cash register, sighed sharply, and snapped at me, “I suppose this is the smallest you’ve got.”

“Yes,” I said weakly, faintly, “I’m afraid that’s all I
have.”

Meredith and Judith and I make three bouquets, one for the dining-room table, one for the mantle of the artificial fireplace and a tiny one to set on the telephone table by the front door.

“Shouldn’t we save some for Grandma’s bouquet?” Meredith asks. “Or is Mr. Berceau bringing that?”

Judith and I stare at each other; neither of us had thought of a bridal bouquet. “Damn it,” Judith bursts out, “I should have ordered something.”

“Maybe Louis
will
bring one,” I say, not very convincingly.

“Hmmmm,” Judith says, “I doubt it.”

“I don’t suppose she could carry some of these tulips?” Meredith asks.

“Not really,” Judith says, “tulips aren’t quite the thing for a bridal bouquet.”

“Maybe if we phoned a florist right away ...” I begin.

“Lilacs!” Meredith says. “They’d be perfect.”

“I don’t know,” Judith says doubtfully.

“They’d make a perfect bouquet,” Meredith assures us, “and there are tons of them in the backyard. And they’re at their best right now.”

“Well,” I say, “why not?”

“The only thing is,” Judith hesitates, “well, you know how Mother always was about lilacs. They’re just weeds, she used to tell us. Remember that, Charleen?”

“No,” I reply, “I don’t remember her ever saying that.”

“We were always wanting to take a bunch to school—you know-flowers-for-the-teacher sort of thing. And she’d never let us because she said they were just weeds.”

“I don’t remember that,” I say again, and saying it I am conscious of a curious lightening of heart. It is somehow wonderful and important to know that at least part of the burden of memory has been spared me.

“But lilacs are beautiful,” Meredith protests, “they’re heavenly flowers; I can’t think of more gorgeous flowers. I’ll make a bouquet for Grandma, just leave it to me,” she
says

Eugene, who is not normally introspective about his profession, just as he is not particularly critical or adula tory about it, once told me that he occasionally has moments when he is visited by a sharp sense of unreality. It happens most frequently when he is delivering to his young patients lectures on the importance of brushing their teeth. For a moment or two he feels himself undergoing a dizzying separation: suddenly he is the farmboy from Estevan eavesdropping on a solemn, middle-aged professional in a white jacket who is piously pressing for dental hygiene as though it were a system of morality. He is invariably self-amused when this occurs and at the same time awed by the transcendental experience of seeming to overhear himself.

I had something of the same feeling myself yesterday talking to my mother about Greta Savage; I had replied to her questioning with a calm I hadn’t known I possessed, and hearing myself I had felt very close to being the person I would like to be.

“What are you going to do about that woman?” she asked.

“What woman?”

“That crazy woman. That kidnapper.”

Without really intending to, I heard myself defending Greta, explaining to my mother that Greta had taken Seth as an act of love. She loves Seth, and, in a neurotic, labyrinthian way, she loves me too.

My defense of Greta was all the more surprising because I defended her instinctively. Like the kind people of the world—like Eugene-the-orthodontist—I had judged with instant charity; like the good folk in fairy tales I had performed magic, spinning gold from straw, transforming apples to golden guineas. Kindness, kindness—a skill which I have nourished and rehearsed and worried into being—had jumped out and taken me by surprise. Without thinking, without laborious reflection I had fallen into its easy litany.

Even more surprising, it had given me a temporary ascendancy; my mother had been silenced; perhaps kindness and bravery have a common root.

“Greta acted out of love,” I told my mother again, and, overhearing myself, I knew it was true.

“Here comes Louis Cradle,” Martin calls from the front window.

“Louis who?” I ask.

“Louis Cradle. And he’s all zooted up.”

Judith, setting out teacups, explains, “Berceau is French for cradle.”

“Oh,” I say, for an instant stung by my ignorance—how spotty my education was—was I going to spend a lifetime meeting such voids?

Louis Cradle, Mr. and Mrs. Cradle. Mentally I thrust about for the symbolism, cradle of a new life, no, too pat, the sort of pearl the “pome people” dived after—the “pome people” could never leave a paradox unturned, seeing life as a film strip jerking along from insight to insight, a fresh truth revealed every three and a half minutes—better forget about symbolism; yes.