The Red Garden (16 page)

“You didn’t bring me any tomatoes?” the bartender, Bob Kelly, joked. They’d gone to high school together and were vaguely related through marriage. Hannah had been Bob’s tutor
for a season or two. He couldn’t write an essay to save his life. He was deaf in one ear, so he hadn’t been called up to service. “Now I won’t get my wish,” Bob said.

“Meaning?” Hannah had decided to order a meatloaf sandwich even though she usually only had a salad for dinner. She was suddenly hungry. She had been working hard, forgetting meals, existing on iced tea, tomatoes, and Popsicles. Canning and putting up chutney and tomato sauce had taken up every other evening this week. The rims beneath her nails were scarlet. Her fingertips were scorched.

“People get their heart’s desire when they eat the tomatoes from your garden,” Bob informed her. “Or so I’ve been told.”

They both laughed. Hannah was a good egg when she let her hair down.

“People are pathetic.” She shrugged. “They’ll believe anything. If it’s true, then where’s my heart’s desire? I’ve practically eaten a bushel of tomatoes just this week.”

“Hard times make for simple minds,” Bob suggested. “What do you hear from Azurine?”

Half the men in town had been in love with Azurine at one time or another, and Bob had been among them.

“Out saving the world,” Hannah remarked. She missed her sister terribly.

“I’ll bet she’ll come back speaking French,” Bob said wistfully.

Hannah laughed. “Are you expecting my sister to come back?” Hannah had finished her sandwich and beer, so she stood up to go. It would still be broiling in her parlor when she got home. “Would you leave Paris to come back here?”

T
HE TOWN HAD
decided to go forward with the yearly Founder’s Festival, even though so many of Blackwell’s sons were posted overseas and would be absent. A stage had been built in Band’s Meadow. Every year the drama society mounted a play about the plight of a local ghost called the Apparition. This summer Jenny Linden, aged five, had been given the starring role. As Hannah walked home from the Jack Straw Bar she spied a crowd huddled around the child, who was sprawled out in the grass, crying. No one could get Jenny to stop wailing—not the drama teacher, Grace Campbell, nor the other children gathered in a circle. Even Jenny’s own mother couldn’t comfort the child. Hannah felt herself drawn across the lawn. She sat down beside poor Jenny and patted her hair. When she heard children cry, she was always undone. She had lost a sister when she was quite young, and in some ways she’d never gotten over her grief.

“I was the Apparition when I was your age,” Hannah told the distraught little girl. Jenny looked at her, baleful, still tearing up. “I was nervous, too. But I remember how I felt when everyone applauded. I felt as though I was a star in the sky.”

Jenny hiccoughed, but she’d become attentive. The Apparition only had two lines.
It’s me, sister
, and
I’m leaving this earth, but I’ll never leave you
. Under Hannah’s tutelage Jenny practiced her part even though tears still shone on her face. She quickly improved with a little coaching. Hannah clapped her hands appreciatively.

“I can always tell who’ll make a good Apparition. You’ll be perfect,” Hannah encouraged Jenny, who had forgotten all about crying and had instead begun to think of stars up above and how brightly one might burn on the wooden stage if it should ever fall from the sky.

By the time the adults thought to thank Hannah Partridge, she was gone, walking through the meadow, burning not with light but with despair. She would never get her heart’s desire. More than anything, she wanted a child. Find a husband, someone might have told her, get married, have a baby or two—all easily accomplished even in a small town such as Blackwell. But Hannah was not interested in men. She never had been. She refused to speculate on what this might mean, or admit to the crushes she’d been aware of. She only knew that if she didn’t wish to be someone’s wife, she couldn’t have what she yearned for most in this world.

T
HE
F
OUNDER’S
D
AY
celebration was not as elaborate as it had been in past years. In order to conserve electricity, the fairy lights weren’t strung through the trees. No new costumes were sewn, and instead, the old ones were patched and seamed. The wooden bleachers were hammered into place even though they were rickety and should have been replaced. Still, there would be great fun at last. Carnival rides were set up on the green, and food stands sold homemade cookies and cakes. Ice cream could be had in paper cups or piled into cones made of waffle batter. Although there was no circus this year, no musicians, not even the chorus from Lenox, a troupe of actors had been hired to come from New York and present a series of skits.

The actors were staying at the Lamplighter Motel. Within two hours of their arrival, they had grown bored with Blackwell. The town council was paying a small fee and expenses. When split among four people, it was barely worth the effort, but the two couples had decided to think of the job as a vacation.
They would do their best to take advantage of what little Blackwell had to offer. They swam in the Eel River, which they found shockingly muddy and cold. They hiked up Hightop Mountain, where the women, Charlotte and Abbey, panicked when surveying the wilderness, vowing they’d spied a bear. They ate peach pie at the coffee shop and peered through the dusty windows of the history museum, which had been closed since the war had begun. The foursome wound up at the Jack Straw, where the men played darts with the locals and the women asked for whisky sours, not that there were any maraschino cherries to be had in all of Blackwell. Hannah was at the bar when the request came in. She grinned at Bob Kelly, then took two cherry tomatoes from the basket she’d brought him, placing one in each glass.

“They’re city people,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the two actresses. “They’ll never know the difference.”

After the drinks were delivered, one of the actresses came up to the bar. Her name was Charlotte Scott and she was tall and elegant, with long dark hair. She wore a black dress and high heels. She didn’t look like anyone in Blackwell.

“Was that supposed to be a joke?” she said.

Hannah turned, ready with a smart remark—something about it being a cherry tomato, and wasn’t that what she’d wanted? But when she faced Charlotte she said nothing at all. Her face flushed and she felt a fool.

“Cat got your tongue?” Charlotte had her hands on her hips. Her eyes were piercing.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Hannah said.

“I mean come sit with us, we’re bored to death.”

Hannah might have stayed at the bar, finished her beer, and
left, but Charlotte took her by the hand. “Someone has to entertain the entertainers.”

The actresses had a second round of whisky sours, and Hannah ordered another beer. She was talked into recounting the history of Blackwell, since the museum had been closed to visitors. She told all of the stories she could remember. How the founders had been stopped by a snowstorm on their journey west, how Johnny Appleseed himself had planted the oldest tree in town, how Emily Dickinson had visited before shutting herself away from the world. Hannah was more entertaining than she’d ever imagined she might be, perhaps because of the beers. She ended the history lesson by enacting the meeting between the Apparition and her older sister on the banks of the Eel River from the second act of the Founder’s Day play.

“ ‘I’m leaving this earth, but I’ll never leave you,’ ” Hannah quoted and was met by applause. She felt somewhat flushed by the turn her solitary evening had taken and the praise for her sudden starring role. The men came over and introduced themselves, James Scott and Stanley Franklin. James was Charlotte’s husband and Stanley and Abbey were engaged.

“Real name, Fishman,” Charlotte whispered gleefully about her spouse. “Men.” She sighed. “All is vanity.”

At the end of the evening, Charlotte decided they should trek over to see Hannah’s house, since it had been the founder’s home, and they had come all this way for Founder’s Day. It made sense for them to steep themselves in local lore, adding bits and pieces of Blackwell’s history to their skits. The group walked along in the green-tinged summer dark, drunk and cheerful, out for a lark. It was good to forget the war and all the losses in life for a little while and just let loose. In the space of an
evening, Hannah and Charlotte and Abbey had become great friends.

“I’ll bet you’re dying to get out of this town,” Charlotte said. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Considering.”

“Not at all,” Hannah answered, confused. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

“Oh, come on.” Charlotte gave her a look. “This isn’t for you.”

They’d reached the front door, which Hannah proudly informed them was the original, the first door on the first house in Blackwell. When she led them on a tour, they were particularly impressed with the rifle over the mantel that had belonged to the founder.

“You know what they say,” James Scott announced regally. He was handsome and lanky with a wonderful, deep voice that sounded vaguely British. “If you see a gun in act one, it had better go off in act two.”

The gun hadn’t worked for years, Hannah informed him. Someone had broken the triggering mechanism ages ago. “Act two had better be something completely different,” she said, and again everyone laughed, charmed by her matter-of-fact humor.

They went out the back door, up to the gardens, past the gate into what had always been called the red garden, now planted with more tomatoes than the four New Yorkers would ever have imagined could be found in one town, let alone on a single plot of land. The scent of the vines was overwhelming, a mixture of sugar and sulfur.

“Hence the tomatoes in our drinks.” Charlotte laughed. “Now I get it.”

She and Abbey danced through the rows of tomatoes, their arms linked around each other’s waists, as the men applauded.
Then Charlotte grabbed Hannah and they danced as well. When they came to the end of the row, where the vines were overgrown and met to form a bower, Charlotte leaned forward to kiss Hannah. The kiss was so hot and fast Hannah thought she had imagined it. But when the actors left, waving from the street, she was still burning.

I
N THE MORNING
, Hannah stood at her window and drank iced tea. She gazed at her garden, but she didn’t bother to water or weed. At last she left home and walked to the Lamplighter Motel. At the desk she asked Betty Harkness where the actors were staying, fumbling over her explanation, finally saying she was their official guide. It was even hotter than the day before. There were hawks circling in the blue sky, and the asphalt in the parking lot felt as though it was melting as Hannah walked across to the Scotts’ room. It was number seven and she wondered if that meant good luck. She stood and tried to peer through the curtained window, agitated, there to accuse Charlotte of misunderstanding. She knocked at the door. Her head was spinning. When at last Charlotte appeared, she grinned, then grabbed Hannah’s hand to lead her inside, saying, “What took you? I could only get rid of them for so long. Now we only have an hour at best.”

There were two double beds. They went to the one that was unmade and fell into it, already kissing. In moments they were naked and entwined. Hannah felt the way she had when she’d been cast to play the Apparition, her body in one place, her mind racing. She’d been terrified then. She remembered what her sister had told her on that long-ago evening, to let go and not
think about anything else. She did that now, even though she could hear a car in the parking lot, though she knew that outside the sky was bright and the hawks were still above them.

They were dressed and sitting on the bed when the others returned from their outing. Charlotte’s hand was inching up the back of Hannah’s blouse and her touch was burning. Hannah wished she wasn’t so fair; surely her blushing would give her away. The actors filed into the room groaning, exhausted from their hike, kicking off their shoes. Their second foray up Hightop Mountain had been just as much a failure as the first. This time Stan had been stung by a wasp, and they’d stopped to get ice at the coffee shop on their way back.

“God, I hate the mountains,” Abbey exclaimed. She rubbed her feet and poured herself a drink from a bottle of vodka. “What I wouldn’t give for a bucket of ice.”

“Take this,” Stan said, offering the small wedge of ice that had helped bring down the swelling on his arm. “It’ll put a sting in your drink.”

James threw himself onto the bed and grabbed Charlotte around the waist, pulling her back with him.

“ ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,’ ” he intoned regally as he sank into the mattress. “If I ever mention hiking again, slap me,” he told his wife. “Hello, local girl,” he murmured to Hannah, pulling her down on the bed as well. “I’ll bet you don’t mind wasps and mountain trails and bears.”

Hannah laughed and pulled away, quickly rising to her feet.

“I only stopped by to wish you luck,” she remarked.

“Never do that!” Abbey cried. “You’ll put a curse on us. Luck has nothing to do with good fortune.”