The Red Garden (15 page)

T
HAT NIGHT HE
couldn’t sleep. He thought of his brother tossing and turning in his bed, fevered, losing consciousness. He thought about how beautiful the woman at the river had been and how he’d felt alive in her presence. The next morning he went looking for her again. When he found her, they sat together by the river. She was both intensely present and inaccessible. There, and yet removed. Once more Susan wouldn’t answer any of his questions. The day was far too short, and before they knew it the afternoon was gone. All at once she told him he had to leave. It was evening; the lack of sunlight panicked her once
more. Ben, too, should hurry, she told him. He should run back to Mrs. Carson’s house before anyone else might appear. Indeed, Ben saw a boat coming down the river in the darkening light.

“Your husband?” he asked, for there was old man Kelly, a lantern on the bow of his boat, not three hundred yards away.

“You think he’s my husband?” Susan laughed and sent him off.

That night Ben Levy went back to the Jack Straw Tavern. He needed some company.

“Find yourself a character?” Joshua Kelly asked.

“A few.” Ben nodded.

“And did you meet her?” Joshua wanted to know. “My uncle’s wife?”

“She says she’s not his wife,” Ben confided. He had been wondering if perhaps he should do something to save Susan. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. Although he had never thought of himself as heroic, any man with half a soul would have begun to imagine he might rescue her and have her for his own.

“Is that what she says?” Joshua gave Ben a drink on the house, since he was going bankrupt anyway. “Well, that’s what happens when you find your wife in the Brattleboro Asylum up in Vermont.”

Ben Levy walked back to town in the dark, baffled by the way he felt. He had no idea why he couldn’t stop thinking about a woman who was a stranger and nothing more. It would soon be September, and the air was cool after the sun went down. He reached Ruth Carson’s house, but continued walking, through the woods and the low bogs, to the river. He felt confused, as if he had drifted inside a dream. Waking up was out of the question.
He now understood himself to have fallen in love, like a stone dropped into a river. He was a man quite out of his senses. He went to the place where he had found her, and soon enough she came to sit beside him in the dark. They held hands. She told him that she was married.

“You can come to New York with me,” Ben said. “No one will know you’re married.”

“I’ll know,” Susan insisted.

She stood up and took off her clothes. Her black coat, her boots, her dark dress. He held her there right on the ground, not thinking about the mud or the cool air. He felt the way a drowning man might, gasping, barely surfacing until they were done. At last she pulled away. “If I was yours,” she said, “I know you’d set me free.”

She told him never to look for her again or to speak her name. Before he could argue with her, she went to the edge of the river and dove in, leaving her clothes behind. Ben ran after her, calling, but she was soon submerged under the water and quickly swam away. Ben ran through the woods, but when he reached the shack, he saw the fisherman at his door with his lantern. There was no choice but to make his way back to town.

In the morning, he couldn’t eat the breakfast Ruth prepared for him. It was the date he was meant to leave and travel to the other Berkshire towns, but instead he sat on the porch steps thinking all day. He felt maddened by the crickets calling, by the faint watery air. He told himself he should go home where he belonged, get himself to Albany or Amherst and take the first train. At twilight he went back down to the river. There was the fisherman, Horace Kelly, filleting trout and tossing the fish into the smoker.

“Are you looking for something?” Horace said when he saw Ben Levy in his good shoes with his shirt buttoned to the collar and a set look on his face. “I think you made a wrong turn at Wall Street.”

“I came to talk to you about Susan.” Ben hadn’t planned to talk about her at all, but there it was. He’d said her name.

“Susan?” Horace Kelly said. “So she told you her name. Well, she’s right there.”

Ben looked around. There was no one.

“Right over there.” The fisherman pointed to a rope stretched from tree to tree. On it hung a burlap bag that twisted back and forth as if caught in the wind. But there was no wind. It was a still evening.

“Go on,” the fisherman urged with a laugh. “Tell her you want her to run off with you. That’s what you came here to say, right?”

“I don’t think this is funny,” Ben Levy stated.

“No,” Horace said. “You wouldn’t.”

Ben noticed Susan’s black coat and boots in a heap near the smoker. He looked at the fisherman, who’d gone back to filleting his catch. Ben went over to the burlap bag. He took it down and opened it. Inside was a black eel struggling to get out. Ben shut the bag.

“That’s her,” the fisherman said. “Still want her?”

Ben went to sit in a chair by the smoker.

“I caught her one night and I kept her,” Horace said.

Ben understood that he was sitting with a lunatic. He wondered if it was the fisherman and not his wife who’d been incarcerated up in Brattleboro.

“She was so beautiful I couldn’t throw her back,” the fisherman went on. “Even though she’s asked me to again and again.
She says she has a husband, and that he’s waiting for her, and that she can only be true to him. I’ve caught thousands of eels, but I can’t catch him. I try every night because I know he’s right around here, trying to get her back. I’ve seen them talking. I’ve seen them do more than talk.”

Ben Levy had a fleeting thought of Jerome Avenue, and the one kind of tree that grew there. He thought about his mother sleeping on the couch, and his brother’s funeral, and the night he stopped writing his novel, and the drinks he’d had on the train up to Albany. He felt sick at heart.

“As for me, I’ve had enough of her,” the fisherman said. “I was thinking of cooking her. Throwing her into the smoker. But now you’ve come along. What would you give me in exchange for Susan?”

Ben Levy laughed despite the madness of the evening. “I have nothing, sir.”

“I doubt that,” the fisherman said, looking him over. “I’ll take your shoes.”

“My shoes for Susan?”

The fisherman nodded. Ben Levy slipped off his shoes. The fisherman got up, retrieved the burlap bag, and tossed it at Ben’s feet. Ben took it and made his way through the woods. He half imagined that the fisherman might shoot him in the back, or perhaps Susan had been hiding in the shack and would come running after him, but the woods were silent. He walked on, barefoot. The mud was cold, and the dark was sifting through the trees. When he got to the clearing where they’d met before, Ben went down to the water. New York City seemed like a dream, and this, the dark river and the burlap bag in his hands that he lifted into the water, was all so real. He opened the bag.
At first nothing happened, then the eel swam out in a dark flash. It was a large eel, much larger than most, and there was another like it waiting in the shallows. Ben Levy watched them and then he walked on, back to Ruth Carson’s.

Ruth got him a pair of boots from the used clothing box at the church. Ben waited for seven days thinking Susan might return to him. He had Calen Jacob and the other boys in town search for her in all the secret hiding places they knew around the river, but they found nothing. He asked the pastor to send out a search party; he even had the sheriff called in from the next township, but in the end everyone agreed. The fisherman’s wife must have left the old man, hardly a surprise to anyone in Blackwell. She’d been young and beautiful. A man like Horace Kelly would never have been able to hold on to her for long.

When Ben left Blackwell, he didn’t bother to collect stories in any of the towns along the road to Amherst. He got on the train, buying his ticket with a donation Ruth Carson insisted he take. He was more than a week behind schedule, but no one at the WPA faulted him for that. People got lost out in the countryside. That’s what maps were for. On New Year’s Day Ben went to the Plaza. He told his colleagues about the banker’s family who lived in the church, and the lynx with one eye, and the tavern where the owner had shot himself after a fire. He left out the story of the fisherman’s wife, however. That one he kept for himself, and he wasn’t surprised when he lost the bet, or when he proceeded to buy a round not just for the winner, whose story concerned a beekeeper who’d been stung a thousand times, but a drink for one and all.

KISS AND TELL

1945

H
ANNAH
P
ARTRIDGE WAS FAMOUS FOR HER
garden. That year, she had planted more than eighty tomato seedlings. She’d worked all through June, crouched down on her hands and knees in the dirt. Her tawny blond hair had turned red from the gritty soil. In the evenings, when she showered, the tub needed to be scrubbed every time. Now it was August and the fruit was ripening. In all the belladonna family, only tomatoes weren’t poisonous, though the leaves could be lethal if boiled into a tea. Tomatoes hadn’t even been considered fit to eat in Massachusetts until the mid-1800s. Now there were hundreds of varieties for cultivation. On summer evenings when Hannah’s neighbors walked by, they could smell the bitter green scent of the vines. They peered into the huge yard, where
the twilight gleamed green and shadows stretched far into the woods. If they stood still enough in the first humid waves of nightfall, it was almost possible to hear the plants growing.

The large farms around town had closed down, the fields were bare, the barns empty. Food was at a premium when not homegrown, costly and hardly first-rate. Even in a small town such as Blackwell, beef and butter were rationed. There was a war to fight, and many of the young men who would have been working the local farms had been sent overseas. Thirty women in town had husbands in the armed services. Another twenty were the mothers of sons who had enlisted. Few people bothered to cook sit-down dinners these days, especially those who were missing a husband or son. The coffee shop had a new Victory menu, with simpler, more inexpensive fare. That was the extent of nightlife in town. People went to bed earlier than they used to, frightened by the darkness of the world beyond Blackwell.

Hannah was thirty-five that year. She was young and attractive, yet she felt her life had not yet begun. Why then did it seem as if it were already over? Hannah’s sister Azurine, who had studied to be a nurse, had gone off to France to work in the ambulance corps. Azurine was in the battle zone, facing the terrors of the world, driving over muddy fields, performing surgery she hadn’t been trained for should a doctor be unavailable, falling madly in love with one doomed man after another, spending torrid nights in their beds, and mourning each one before he had walked out the door.
There may not be another chance to live
, she wrote to her sister.
If not now, when?

Hannah sat in the parlor in the evenings to read Azurine’s letters. The windows of the house were open and a fan was set
up, yet it was beastly hot. Hannah wore a slip and nothing else. She kept her long, graceful feet in a pan of water in an attempt to stay cool.

The only way to fight evil is with joy
, Azurine had written.
Forget everything we’ve ever been taught
.

Hannah’s skin was blotchy with heat, her pale hair was pinned up. Her knees were still dusted with red earth from her day’s work in the garden. Hannah considered herself to be plain, especially when compared with her sister, but her face in repose was incandescent. Had any man in town seen her at that moment, had he walked past and happened to have spied her, he would have realized she was beautiful. But no one saw her, and she couldn’t have cared less about the impression she made. The moths repeatedly hit against the windows, convinced they were headed in the right direction, heedless of the wire screens that stopped their flight. Hannah pitied them. Who but a fool would stay in one place and butt her head against the same window time and again? A fool who should have been in Paris, who never should have stayed home, but one who seemed tied to this garden and this house.

Hannah retained a stony aloofness. She had always been known as the serious sister, absorbed in her chores, tending to be somewhat standoffish. Still, people were drawn to her. She had an uncanny ability to gauge who was in need, often appearing at someone’s back door with exactly what they yearned for most: a pot of split pea soup, a bottle of milk, a blanket for an ailing baby, a spray of red phlox from her garden. As the summer went on, she had less to give, with nothing more than tomatoes to offer her neighbors. There was a glut of them, so many they fell from the vines in the night. The patter of falling fruit
sounded like hail, waking people who lived nearby from their sleep. A rumor began that if Hannah Partridge came to your door with her wicker basket, your wish would be granted. It started when ten-year-old Eric Hildegarde found a rabbit in the grass after Hannah stopped by. Eric had always wanted a pet rabbit and was overjoyed to find one beside the back door. His father built a hutch in the yard the next day, and maybe that was what Eric had wanted most of all but hadn’t known it: to spend the day with his father learning how to use a hammer and saw.

Mae Jacob, whose husband, Steven, was serving in Belgium and had been out of contact for weeks, received a letter from him the afternoon Hannah delivered a bagful of crimson tomatoes that were perfect for sauce. The next day Mae told her neighbors she’d dreamed of her husband when she slipped his letter beneath her pillow. She didn’t dare to share the details of the dream, which were far too personal, but she credited the tomatoes from Hannah’s garden for her new hopeful outlook, as well as the letters that had begun to arrive on a regular basis.

Hannah was unaware of the rumors about her garden until the evening she decided to hike over to the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. She had walked to the edge of town in search of a place where she could escape the heat, but even the countryside was stifling. With its darkened windows and its long wooden bar, the Jack Straw seemed promising. Hannah wore a summer dress and sandals. As soon as she was inside she perched on a wooden stool directly under the ceiling fan. She whirled around once on pure whim, then ordered a cold beer.