He’d been going to the flower show his whole life. From its advent during the city’s gilded age, his Grandmother Chase’s garden club had been responsible for the tulips framing the main entrance of Phipps Conservatory. Every spring, save the two years he was overseas, he and Arlene helped her weed the massive beds that welcomed visitors inside the grand Beaux-Arts solarium, and even then he’d asked after them in his letters home, knowing she’d appreciate it. He was no poet like his uncle, but the glass palace of Phipps seemed impossibly fantastic and fragile when everything around him had been smashed flat.
Like Easter, the flower show signaled rebirth and the resilience of life, and that first spring after the war, before he met Emily, he spent countless hours silently tending the beds, remembering the narrow roads and mountain towns of the Black Forest. There, on his knees, covered in mud, lost in irredeemable thoughts, he found Sloan, or she found him.
She was a Whitney, famously engaged to a Mellon. He knew her from childhood, from church and the garden parties at his grandmother’s. She’d developed earlier than the other girls, and ran with an older crowd. At fifteen her parents had shipped her off to a Swiss convent school as if she might become a nun. She was tall and slim-hipped and gray-eyed, spoiled as a cat. She scared him. She didn’t care. “You don’t like it,” she said, knighting him with a broken stem, “you can kiss my lily-white behind.” He liked it. She had a Packard convertible she refused to let him drive. They used his rusty Hudson, a jalopy bought with combat pay, parking up by the Schenley overlook, her long bronze hair freed from her scarf. Her neck flushed when she was heated, red as a rash. He’d never seen a black bra before, and was shocked. How easily they betrayed the rest of the world. He could say she confused him, but that was just an excuse. He knew what he wanted was wrong. He’d spent his whole life trying to do right.
Because she was rich and wild he didn’t take her seriously, as if she was slumming, and by the time he understood she wanted him to rescue her, it was too late. They raged at each other, making up tearily, their secret torturing and sustaining them. He gave her a key to his rented room as if it were a ring. They made love recklessly, breaking his bedframe, spilling whisky, shattering lamps. The wedding was announced, the invitations sent (his grandmother received one). “You know this is over once I’m married,” she said. He knew, desperately, yet when it happened, for months he expected her to turn up at his door after midnight, and was hurt when she didn’t. Only later did he read in the paper that she’d moved to New York.
He was still mourning her when he met Emily, and partly out of delicacy and partly because it reflected poorly on him, he couldn’t tell her. He must have been mad, he reasoned. Both of them were, there was no other explanation. He’d loved her but he’d been mistaken. Now he had to pay. He’d thought she was saving him, restoring to him all the strength and beauty of the world. Then why, so many times with her, had he wanted to die?
Where Sloan was unstable, Emily was steady. She kept a log of every penny she spent, and when her aunt June sent a check, she didn’t splurge, just offered to split dinner. She played the piano and wanted to be a schoolteacher. “Let’s keep our hands to ourselves,” she’d say, straightening her blouse. Sloan would have called her a virgin and a grind, but she was fresh and earnest, and she believed in him. She didn’t need to know what he’d done during the war, trusting it was necessary. He was braver than she’d ever be, she said, an assumption he let stand despite dire objections. That she thought him good was flattering, after hating himself so often with Sloan, and he vowed he wouldn’t propose to Emily until he could live up to her rose-colored image of him. Gradually, with her help, he became the man she thought he was, and if the urge to confess never left him, as time passed it seemed less important. He’d had a girlfriend, like anyone else. He rarely thought of her, Emily so filled his life, and then the children, and his friends, his work at the lab. Only in spring, when the tulips bloomed, did he recall Sloan’s neck and the smell of her hair and how they drank in bed and fought all night, trying to save each other from their preordained fates.
Now, standing in line outside Phipps with Emily and Arlene and the whole family, watching Ella take a close-up of a tulip, their weeks together seemed a dream, as if they’d never happened. Sometimes he wished they hadn’t. At others he was grateful. That was Sloan. After all these years, he still didn’t know what to make of her.
“They always look so nice,” Emily said.
“They almost don’t look real,” Lisa said, leaning in to inspect a red one.
“You know your Grampa and Aunt Arlene used to do all this.”
“All of it?” Ella asked.
“It felt like it sometimes,” Arlene said.
“We had help,” Henry said.
“It looks like a lot of work.”
“It was,” he said. “But we had fun.”
“He had fun,” Arlene said. “I didn’t. It was work.”
The line was finally moving. Of course they’d come on the busiest day. Once they were inside he’d be fine. Out here he could see Sloan kneeling beside him, her fingernails packed with dirt, a streak of mud on her cheek, a bright wisp of hair sneaking from beneath her scarf.
Sloan Maxwell, she’d said. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
“Here we go,” Emily said. “Get your tickets ready.”
Lisa took Sam’s hand, Emily took Ella’s. It would be like the tropics inside, the air perfumed, the panes fogged and running with condensation. That was the miracle, he thought. Anyone could raise flowers in a hothouse. Their tulips had grown through the snow, at the mercy of the cold. Though it wasn’t possible scientifically, he liked to believe some of the bulbs they’d planted still bloomed. At the doors, the line split, funneling through a bank of turnstiles. As they shuffled forward, he looked back as if he were leaving her, then turned away, letting Kenny go ahead of him so he was the last one in.