SHE WOULD leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias had bloomed. With a decisive feeling of happiness, she set down her trowel and sank back on her heels to rest. Around her lay the brown earth of the converted vegetable garden, a slightly lopsided rectangle, across which careened the flower seedlings in rows that were both neat and unsteady, so that the whole planting, seen from a distance, looked like a letter written by a child who has lost his ruler. If only, she reflected, she had done it the way the book said and marked out the rows with stakes and string. Next year . . . Her heart turned over with horror as she perceived the destination of her thought. She had done it again. Next year, of course, she would not be here. She had been telling herself this for five weeks, yet she could not seem to remember it. Left to itself, her idle mind reached out lazily, unthinkingly, for a plan, as doubtless Persephone’s hand had strayed toward a pomegranate seed.
She remembered all the times she had thought of leaving him before. But there had always been something—the party Saturday night that she did not want to miss, the grapes blue on the vines waiting to be made into jelly, the new sofa for the living room that Macy’s would deliver next week, the man to see about the hot-water heater. And by the time the sofa had come, the man had gone, the jelly had been made, she would no longer be angry with him, or at any rate her anger would have lost its cutting edge and she would have only the dull stone of discontent to turn over and over in her palm.
Now, however, it was settled, this problem that had been agitating her since April, since the morning she had planted the sweet peas instead of packing her suitcase, as she ought of course to have done when he had uttered the unspeakable sentence. Now she had actually set a date for her departure, a date on a real calendar, and not simply on the calendar of her heart, where the years were written as days and it seemed always a matter of a few weeks at most before she would be back with her friends, a returned traveler with a fresh slice of life in her hands and many stories to tell. She had been trying since April to do it, all the while that she went on with her digging and watering and weeding, trying to imagine the flowers in their places in August and herself not there to see them, herself in New York in a hot furnished room. It was a little like imagining her own death, but there had been mornings when she had been almost able to do it, and then she would set down her tools and say to herself in surprise, Why, I can leave tomorrow. There is nothing to keep me here. Always, however, she would have forgotten the petunias, which were growing in flats inside the house and had therefore not fallen under her eye. Suddenly they would flash into her mind, white, ruffled, with yellow throats, blocked out in squares, alternating with squares of blackish red zinnias, with the heavenly blue of the scabiosa making a backdrop of false sky behind them; her heart would contract with love and despair as she saw that she could not leave them—she was in bondage unless they should die.
But to acknowledge this was to feel panic. Speaking to her of time and the seasons, the garden urged her to hurry, to go now, before it was too late, before the wheel, turning, should carry her once again on its slow journey through birth, reproduction, and death. Now for the first time she began to count the weeks. Her sensibility quivered in a continual anticipation of change; she took offense readily, pushed everything to extremes, and, in her mind, renounced her friends, her house, her china, a dozen times a day. Desperate measures occurred to her: if she were to kill the petunias . . . ? Petunias are peculiarly subject to the damping-off sickness. Water cautiously, warned the gardening book. She would stare at the pitcher of ice water on the luncheon table as the heir stares at the bottle of sleeping medicine by the bedside of his aging relative. But always her resolution softened; the grotesque temptation passed, and, trembling, she would slip out of the house, quietly, lest her husband hear her and detain her on some pretext (for he considered that she was working too hard, complained that he never saw her, that her temper was being ruined); she would collect the trowel, the spading fork, the hand cultivator, and let herself into her enclosure, fenced off against rabbits and woodchucks, and there begin once again her penitential exercise, her agony in the garden.
“Why do you do it if it gives you no pleasure?” her husband would ask. “Don’t pretend you are doing it for me.” She knew no answer to this; only once she had turned on him, saying, “Ah, you hate it because it is mine. You would like to see it all go to ruin.” And truly she did not understand why she was doing it, unless it was somehow against him. It was as though she owed these plants some extra and conspicuous loyalty to make up to them for his jealous hostility, which was always waiting its chance, alleging urgent business, sexual desire, anything, to keep her within doors. Sometimes it seemed to her that she stayed on simply as the guardian and defender of these plants, to which she stood in a maternal relation, having brought them into existence. At other times it was cruder. She would not, she would tell herself grimly, give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose the investment of work and love she had made in this rich but difficult soil. She had made a mistake, she knew it; the nurseryman had warned her, “You’re biting off more than you can chew.” Now she would pause occasionally to look out at the weeds swaying in the light spring wind, pressing up against the fence of her enclosure, where they grew taller, fiercer, more luxuriant than they did in the field itself. It was as if the field were a hostile sea which billowed and swelled in the distance with a sort of menacing calm, and spent itself vindictively in that last breast-high green wave which it launched upon her rectangular island. At such moments, dread would seize her; she would shudder and turn back to her task, knowing that every minute must be made to count, lest she be inundated, her work and tools be lost in this watery jungle of nature. And always it was as if he were the ally of the weeds—he was fond of telling her, pedantically, that there was no botanical distinction between a weed and a flower. On mornings when she would hurry out after a rainy spell to find her brown space green with a two-day crop of wild mustard, she would feel him to be nearly victorious; tears of injury and defiance would stand in her eyes as she scratched the ground with the claw.
She could remember a time when it had not been so, when her borders had been gay with simple clear colors, pink and scarlet, lemon yellow and cornflower blue, when her husband had stood by in admiration, saying, “You have green thumbs, my dear.” Then she had been ready enough to lay down her tools, to greet a friend, to go on a picnic, to give an order to her maid; then there had been summer afternoons when he sat on a bench with a drink while she let the hose play gently over the flower beds and stopped from time to time to take the glass from him and sip.
Later, kneeling out in the garden, she would try to decide at what moment the change had come. When she had declined to go with him to the city because there was no one to water the flowers? When he had bought the dog that rooted up the tulips? Ah no, she thought. It had been inevitable from the beginning that the garden should have become suffused with suffering, like a flower that is reverting to its original lenten magenta, for everything returns to itself and a marriage made out of loneliness and despair will be lonely and desperate. And if I have a garden to console me, you will have a dog, and your dog will destroy my garden, and so it will go, until all good has turned to evil, and there is not a corner of life that has not been flooded with hatred. It had become meaningless to draw up lists of grievances (her picture torn across the middle and thrown in the kitchen wastebasket), for to have a grievance is to assert that some human treaty has been violated, and they were past treaties, past reparations, past forgiveness; to invoke love, morality, public opinion was pure simony—in every belligerent country the priests are praying for victory.
How far it had gone she had never perceived until yesterday. She was repeating the flower names to herself: black boy, black ruby, honesty, mourning bride (ah yes, she murmured, that is I, that is I), snowstorm, purity, and last of all the free package thrown in by the seedsman which was designated Peace. Dear God, she had exclaimed, it’s as if I were growing flowers for a funeral blanket. Is it possible that I wish him dead? And at once the vision of herself as a young widow slipped into her fancy, like a view into an old stereopticon. She saw herself pale and beautiful in black, murmuring repentant phrases to some intimate woman friend. (It’s true that we didn’t get along, but I couldn’t have wished this to happen. I am sorry now for everything, and I would like to be able to tell him so. If only he could have known that I loved him after all.) Yes, she thought, if he were dead, I could love him sincerely. And how practical it would be! She would not have to give up anything—the Spode salad plates, the garden, the candy-striped wallpaper in the living room. And she would not have to decide whether to take the roasting pan or leave it (it had belonged to her in the first place). All the objects she had nearly determined to relinquish if she were to leave him, all these things she considered already lost, would be restored to her. And she could move about among them alone; she could have everything the way she wanted it, there would be no one to stop her, no one to say, “Why do we have to have a soup and a salad course? You are spending too much money.”
That was the queer thing, she thought; it was not a question of money. If he died, he would leave her nothing; the commissions would stop automatically, there would not even be any insurance. What he would do for her by dying would be to relieve her of the necessity of decision. How many women, she wondered, had poisoned their husbands, not for gain or for another man, but out of sheer inability to leave them. The extreme solution is always the simplest. The weed-killer is in the soup; the man is in his coffin. One regrets, but now it is too late; the matter is out of one’s hands. Murder is more civilized than divorce; the Victorians, as usual, were wiser.
Really, she said to herself, I will have to get away if I am going to have such thoughts. And a dreadful presentiment flicked her heart, lightly at first, like the stroke of a lady’s riding whip. What if I were to go in now and find him dead by his work table with the blueprints spread out before him? She saw, as if by second sight, what her remorse would be and knew that she could not bear it. In a moment she was stiff with fright. Clearly, she would have to go and look for him, but she could not move. Look, she said to herself, if he is dead the maid will come to tell me sooner or later. I do not have to find him. I can just stay here. But it was useless. By now she was certain that he was dead; one last hope, however, remained. If she were to get there quickly enough . . . She found herself running down the driveway. Outside his window she stopped. It was too high for her to see in. See, she said to herself, almost happily, perceiving the difficulty, there is nothing you can do. But a stratagem occurred to her. By a supreme effort of will she made herself pull up an orange crate and climb onto it. She looked in. There he was at his table, motionless; she could not make out whether he was breathing. For the first time, she saw him with detachment, a man in a brown suit slumped over some papers, like a figure drawn by a painter and left there, a figure unknown, without history, and yet intensely itself. He moved, and was human again; she knew him, she disliked him; it was all right, he was alive. She drew a deep breath and slipped quickly down from the orange crate, before he should turn his head and see her. All afternoon in the garden she kept congratulating herself, fondly, hysterically, as people do when they have had, or believe they have had, a narrow escape. Yet when he came out at five to call her and startled her by approaching quietly, she gave a long, piercing, terrible scream, a scream that seemed to linger in the air long after she had left the garden. In some way, he had caught her red-handed.
This morning, in the garden, the scream was still there. Overnight, delay had become dangerous. A break must be made. The part of her that put up preserves, built terraces, laid in oil for the winter, would have to come to terms at last with the part that knew the train schedules by heart and kept a ten-dollar bill hidden in its jewelry box. A path would have to be cleared through the thicket of obligations with which she had surrounded herself, and it was not, after all, essential that she should choose the thorniest way. If she could not renounce the petunias, she would have them and then go. The important thing was that she should not make a single plan that would carry her beyond the first of August. Resolutely, she picked up her trowel and stabbed it into the ground, next to a clump of nut grass with its bright, spearlike leaves. Probing carefully, she lifted the plant and saw with satisfaction that the nut was there, dangling from the long root. The point about nut grass was that you must be sure to get the nut; otherwise your pains were wasted—within a week the plant would be up again. Hoeing was out of the question; you had to dig, with a spading fork or a trowel. “Why don’t you give it up?” her husband had asked, indifferently, when she had showed him the thousands of green spears of the grass pricking the ground she had just cultivated. “Oh, go away,” she had answered, and yet, often, this was what she most wanted to do, to give up and lie down on her bed and never make another effort, to sleep and have her meals brought up and live like a weed herself, silent and parasitic. But always the flowers pressed their claims; she would picture a few starved cosmos plants waving their thin heads among the tall grasses, and she would feel her heart wrung, as if squeezed out by those strong inimical brown roots. Ah well, she said to herself now, next year will be another matter. Next year nature can have her way. Thank God, at any rate, I did not put in any perennials.
All the rest of the morning she worked along cheerfully. When her maid’s voice called her in to lunch, she got up with docility. Walking along the lane, she noticed that the wild lilies of the valley were nearly in bloom. There was a shady space along the veranda that could easily accommodate them. With fertilizer and cultivation, the blossoms should, by next year, double in size. . . . Some plants with a good chunk of earth were already in her hands when she perceived what she was doing. “My God,” she murmured, “my God,” and dropped the plants back into the hole her trowel had cut. She pressed the earth down around them and trod on it with her foot. It had been a close shave, and the beating of her heart informed her, bluntly, that she must run no more risks. The whole property was pitted with traps for her; she walked in danger and there was no time to lose.
In the hotel, the door had not closed behind the bellboy when she picked up the telephone. She had no plans. Her imagination, working (how long?) in secret, had carried her only this far; she had conceived of the future, simply, as a hand, still wearing its glove, reaching out for a hotel phone. To her first five calls there was no answer. This was a possibility she had not counted on. In all her calculations, it was she who had been the doubtful element, she the expected, the long-overdue relation whose homecoming was hourly anticipated, she the beloved sister whose room had been kept just as she left it; and throughout the term of her marriage, the thought of her friends had jabbed at her conscience: they were waiting and could not understand what could be keeping her so long. Now, at the fifth attempt, she put down the receiver peremptorily, to cut off the drilling, importunate sound that her call, unanswered, was making. For a diversion, she drew a bath, saying to herself that it was still too early, that people were out of town for the summer, that one could not expect, et cetera. Yet, after the bath was over, she did not know what to put on, for she both counted and did not count on an invitation to dinner. To her sixth call she got an answer. How nice, said her friend, that she was in town; could she come Thursday for dinner? Thursday was four days off, and she fumbled a little in accepting. Her great news had become suddenly undeliverable. The context was wrong, yet the news remained, almost sensibly, in her mouth, thickening her tongue. She hung up in haste, lest her disappointment be audible on the other end of the wire. On her seventh call, she was informed that the party had moved to Connecticut; on her eighth, she made a date for lunch on the following day. She was conscious of her own folly in withholding her announcement; she needed help, a job, money, reassurance, but she could not break through the fence of social forms she found erected against intimacy. In these five years, she perceived, she had become a visitor, the old friend from out of town who is at the Biltmore for a few days; in her absence, the circle had closed; the hands she had once clasped now clasped each other and would not part to readmit her to the dance. They had forgotten her, forgotten, that is, her former self, which remained green only in her own memory; for her alone, time had stood still.
She left the telephone and began, reluctantly, to dress. Half an hour later, in the hotel dining room, a man eyed her, and though she bent her head strictly over her dinner, her mind vacillated, wondering whether a stranger might not . . . Discretion, however, warned her that she could pay too high a price for a listener. I must be strong, she said to herself, and, slightly reassured by this small victory, yet shaken by the need she saw in herself that had exposed her to so commonplace a temptation, she paid her check. Back in her room, her magazines exhausted, she picked up the Gideon Bible and read doggedly through Kings and Chronicles, and at last fell asleep.
When she woke, it was too early to telephone anyone at an office. She had breakfast and read the help-wanted columns. There was nothing there for her. By ten o’clock her sense of flatness and embarrassment had grown so large that she could not bring herself to telephone anyone who might be able to get her a job. The inevitable question, the Why, stood ahead of her, bristling with condolence and curiosity; she was not ready for it. Better, she said to herself suddenly, to go to an agency, where no personal explanations were required. In ten minutes she was at Rockefeller Plaza, with the list of her qualifications ready on her tongue. But the sight of the Victory garden, the rows of young radishes, made her own garden take shape before her, like a sin she had forgotten to confess. Oh God, oh God, she said to herself, I am unfit—who will hire me? And it seemed to her that she had not gone far enough; she must discard her whole identity. An inspiration seized her: she might hire herself out as a cook. She saw herself, anonymous, in a maid’s room in the third story of a house in Pelham, saw the bed with the thin blankets and the lumpy mattress, the bath shared with the baby, or the lavatory in the basement. All the wretched paraphernalia of domestic service became invested with glamour for her—she might lose herself and be saved. If she were to go down to Fourteenth Street now and buy herself a cheap dress and some shoes, by tonight she might have a situation. She could leave her own clothes in the hotel room, and when he came to find her, he would find merely Bonwit Teller, Mark Cross, hat by John-Frederics, fragrance by Schiaparelli. She was already, in her mind, selecting the shoes for her new life (patent leather with bows which would do for her day out, or sensible, flat-heeled black?), when some part of her, her conscience or her good sense, warned her that it would not do. It was a child’s dream of revenge (see to what lengths you have driven me). Regretfully, she relinquished the adventure.
Yet, she said to herself, I must do something; by tomorrow I shall be out of money. In her handbag were the few pieces of jewelry she had inherited from her mother. It occurred to her that this was perhaps the moment to sell them; after lunch, with cash in her pocket, she could approach the agencies with more assurance. She walked briskly up toward Fifty-ninth Street, feeling herself lifted once again by that wave of exultation that had brought her down from the country. She was free again, if only for a few hours; all decisions, commitments, were postponed. It was as though the old-gold and diamond shop which she entered presently were the last station in her flight; passing the jewelry over the counter, she divested herself of her last possession; the appraiser counted her out a hundred dollars, and she no longer had anything to lose. She stuffed the money into her pocketbook and hurried back to the hotel.
At the desk, however, she found a message, breaking her lunch date and asking her to call back. At once, her elation vanished. The day stretched empty ahead of her. She turned quickly back to the street and found a Hamburger Heaven, where she ate lunch. Afterward, she went to the movies, and when she returned to her room she did not telephone anyone, but lay on her bed reading the Gospel according to St. Matthew until she felt it to be late enough to go to sleep. She had eaten no dinner. The third day passed off in much the same way: again the movies, and at night the Bible.
On the morning of the fourth the telephone waked her, and she knew at once that it would be he. “Well,” he said, “I found you.” “Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t so hard.” “No,” he replied shortly. “Will you come down and have breakfast with me?” “No.” “Oh, go to hell,” he retorted, and hung up. When he called up that night, he was not sober, and it was she who hung up. She had seen nobody since her arrival. Since the first night she had eaten nothing but hamburgers, and sandwiches at drugstore counters. Notice of any sort had become painful to her: she was unequal to a headwaiter or a desk clerk; she passed in and out without leaving her key; she felt both conspicuous and obscure. She had gone to a single employment agency and filled out an application. Outside the door, she realized that she had forgotten to note down her previous experience, but she could not go back. She was hiding and waiting, both for him and for someone else, some friend or stranger who would come to help her in response to an appeal she had never made. She was living in a state of peculiar expectation, as though she had put an ad in the newspaper, an ad of the most total purport, which God perhaps might answer, and the message she daily expected to find, written out in the hotel’s violet ink and shoved under her door, was not of an ordinary social nature.
Yet this sense of expectancy, of extravagant, unreasonable hope, had for its corollary during these days a strange will-lessness, an attitude of resignation and despair. She knew that it was absolutely necessary that she should bestir herself; her money would soon run out and she would be locked out of her hotel room. Yet she found that she actually looked forward to this catastrophe as a means of release; the credit manager might yet be the Saviour, who, as holy legend tells us, appears in strange disguises. She was, it seemed to her now, utterly at the mercy of chance: a notice of eviction might precipitate her future out of the solution in which it was suspended—she herself was powerless. In her present state, even her flight appeared to her to have been an act of supreme daring; she could not imagine how she could have summoned up the firmness of character to do it. In fact, she said to herself, if she could have foreseen the outcome, she would never have taken the last drastic step, but held it forever in reserve, a threat and a promise—and died, after thirty years of marriage, thinking how different her life might have been had she left him. What folly, she cried, what madness! She had exchanged the prison of the oppressor for the prison of the self, and from this prison there was not even the hope of escape. At six o’clock Thursday evening, she had not decided what to wear for dinner, a long dress or a short. She put two dresses on the bed, but the arguments for each were unanswerable, and at six-thirty she went out and walked until she found a Western Union office, where she sent a telegram of excuse to her hostess, knowing, as she did so, that she was cutting her last line of communication to the world, to the past, to the future.
Yet when he had not called her again by the morning of the sixth day, a faint hope began to ruffle her spirit, like a sea breeze on an August afternoon. If he had given up and returned to the country, something might still be salvaged. She had seen her resolve melt away in these long mornings in the hotel room, and she knew that she was no longer proof against him; if he were to summon, she would obey. With the dissolution of her belief in herself, her case against him had collapsed. Yet, if he were to abandon her, she knew that she would endure, simply because, physically, she was alive and possessed of a certain negative fortitude. Eventually she would go out, she would telephone, get a job, and gradually circumstances would knit a new web around her, as scar tissue will form over a wound, even if the surgeon has not been called to take the proper stitches.
On this sixth day, as the morning passed on and the telephone still did not ring, she felt her spirits rise and an almost forgotten gaiety take possession of her. Surely he must be gone, she said to herself, and now I am really up against it and perhaps it will be fun after all. The sense of being under surveillance was passing off, and she dressed quickly, in her best white dress, black shoes, and large black cartwheel hat. Nothing, she told herself confidently, is more urban than black and white in summer. It was three o’clock and she had had nothing to eat, but the emptiness of her stomach only added to her fine sense of lightness and bravery. The sound of her heels on the stone floor near the elevator was brisk and pleasing, she let her handbag swing gallantly on her bare, tanned arm. For the first time, on pressing the button, she knew precisely where she was going—to call on an old friend who had an important job in an advertising office—and she knew, furthermore, that it was going to be all right, that he would compliment her and take her out to cocktails at a nice place, and that there, over the second drink, an opening would come which would allow her to tell him, quite naturally, quite easily, that she had left her husband. When he would press her—gently—for a reason, it would be merely a question of finding the right formula, of avoiding vindictiveness on the one hand and piety on the other, of packing the truth into some assimilable capsule which her companion could swallow without any noticeable discomfort. As the elevator descended, a sentence spoke itself for her (I would have left him long ago if it hadn’t been for those damned petunias). This was the right note, she recognized at once, seeing in advance the effect it would make in her friend’s face, where the struggle between incredulity and belief would resolve itself in laughter. She foresaw a whole train, a lifetime, of these sentences. (But you say you left him five days ago; what have you been doing ever since? I’ve been lying in my hotel room reading the Gideon Bible.) She smiled, feeling herself on home territory. She was back at her port of embarkation, which she had set forth from five years before, back to her native patois, where jest masks truth but does not deny it.
The elevator doors opened and she saw her husband sitting in the lobby.
Two days later, he unlocked the door of the house and gave her a slight shove forward, as though she were a dog or a truant child. Her first impression was that the house had in a week grown older and shabbier. She stood in the doorway of the living room, looking about her with the eyes of an observant stranger. She noted the paint peeling on the window frames, the place where the wallpaper had been patched and the stripes did not quite meet, the blue chair that had never belonged there in the first place, the stain where her own head had rested on the back of the sofa. Two rather tacky-looking bouquets of bridal wreath stood on the marble-topped coffee table which she had cut down from an old piece; very plainly, they said Welcome Home in the floral language of her maid. Generally, when this kind of thing happened to her, when a room or the face of a lover did not measure up to memory, she would narrow her eyes, as she did to look at herself in the mirror, till the focus had changed and the image become a little blurred; then, with the quick hand of fancy, she would bestow a few decorations on the object—a bowl of flowers, a glass cigarette box—a look of irony, or a smile; and in a few moments all would be well, the face or the room would have subsided, and her eyes, now wide open, could run over it with love. This time, however, though she narrowed her eyes out of force of habit, nothing of the sort happened; the room became dimmer but it did not reassemble itself. “Well,” said her husband, rather heartily, in his business-as-usual tone, “everything looks the same.” This statement came in so patly that she made the mistake, fatal in marriage, of speaking to him as an intimate. “Does it?” she asked. “Really? It looks queer to me. The colors look as if somebody had mixed black in them. Do you suppose she has changed the light bulbs?” “Don’t be silly,” he said, sweeping her ahead of him toward the staircase. “Why should she do that?” “Let’s have dinner right away,” he added, pushing her slightly again, as though he had expected her to express some morbid and contradictory wish. She obeyed him, mechanically, as she had done ever since she had seen him sitting in the hotel lobby. Her defeat seemed to her shameful and absolute. Fortunately, however, her feelings had died in her; there was no rebelliousness, no resentment—in the conquered country, the officials conferred quietly with the captors and the underground movement slept.
What troubled her all evening was merely the notion that something had happened to the lighting. Across the table in the dining room, she could barely see her husband’s face, though the customary twelve candles were burning. In the middle of the meal, she excused herself and got up to turn on the electricity. This was not an improvement; now her husband’s face appeared to be unnaturally white. The food also seemed to her to have been tampered with. Her husband was eating with apparent relish; still, she could not disabuse herself of the idea that there was something wrong—perhaps the maid had forgotten to put the sherry in the stew? “You are tired,” said her husband warningly, and she accepted this explanation with gratitude. After dinner, nevertheless, she could not restrain herself from going around to each of the lamps to see if there might be dust on the bulbs. But her finger came off clean.
In the morning, the visual derangement persisted. Her eye was caught, on waking, by a window shade which had been white when she had gone to New York; this morning it was certainly ivory. Slightly frightened, she closed her eyes and took refuge in sleep. When she woke, it was to the light sound of the glass bell calling her to lunch, and to an instant conviction of disaster. There was something wrong, something she had forgotten, something more than the persistent queerness of the light or the fact of her being back once again in her husband’s bed. But her memory would not yield it up until, during a pause in the lunchtime conversation, she happened to glance out the window and saw on the sill the boxes containing the dead petunias. Her husband heard her gasp and his eyes followed hers. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Nothing,” she replied. “Something I remembered.” He did not pursue the topic, and later, when he asked the question (“Have you been out yet to look at your garden?”), she perceived, with relief, that he was unaware of its significance. For him the question was a mere token of politeness, a bone tossed to the idiosyncrasies of her taste. He was still going through the motions of treating her, rather nervously, as a guest, but his heart was plainly not in it, for he did not trouble to wait for her answer.
For her, however, the question had a more fateful sound. She knew at once that she ought at least to go out and look, yet she put it off, for a day, for two days, while she did nothing but lie on her bed, declining to go to the market, plan the meals, make the French dressing, sleeping from time to time, as she had done in the hotel, and waking always with that terrible start of knowledge that tells us, as we come out of ether or alcohol, that something has changed in our lives, though we are not yet sure what it is. If her husband’s question had not been repeated a second and a third time, she might never, she told herself, have made the nearly unbearable effort that took her into the toolshed for her trowel and cultivator and sent her slowly down the garden path to the enclosure in the fields. But the third time his question had had an anxious perplexity in it. Her avoidance of the garden had begun to seem to him abnormal; his mind must be set at rest. For (it had become more and more apparent) he had no comprehension at all of the events of the past week. He imagined that the whole affair was a sort of triumph, that he, the conquerer, guardian of the hearth, had pursued the fugitive nymph and wooed and bullied her home by the sheer force of his will. It had not occurred to him for an instant that the collapse was interior, that, like France, she had fallen, limp, corrupt, disgraced, into the arms of the victor, and so long as he did not perceive this, she had a little bargaining power left. But for the preservation of the illusion, it was necessary that he should believe her unchanged, should have no suspicion of the docility that placed her, not only at his mercy, but at the mercy of every event. Her long hours in her room she had excused on the grounds of emotional exhaustion, but this could hardly be expected to last forever. Already he had begun to look a little critically at the meals, to run a finger over a table that had not been dusted—the holiday, his voice indicated, was over. And now, as she passed his window, she knew that the sound of her footsteps was reassuring to him; it signified the return to normalcy, the resumption of hostilities.
The garden had waited too long, she warned herself; she was too late. Common sense alone could tell you what you might expect to find if you left a garden alone for ten moist days in June. She was prepared for the worst. Yet halfway down the path apprehension gave place to hope, and she began to run, as though this final burst of speed could make up for a long tardiness, as though she might catch the garden in the moment of transformation, effect a last-minute rescue in the very teeth of probability. The garden, however, was gone. Her first impression was that it had disappeared without a trace. In ten days the weeds had swallowed it. The brown enclosure had turned green; the very markers that indicated the rows had vanished, and of the whole enterprise only the fence remained, an absurd testimonial to the fact that this rectangle had been, at one time, the scene of human endeavor. With the first shock, she closed her eyes: this was the nightmare vision she had wrestled with all spring, a ferocious tableau vivant entitled The Triumph of the Weeds, which had appeared again and again to halt her on the road to freedom, to harrow her susceptibilities and appeal to her pity and love. She had turned back before it a hundred times, and when at length she had hardened her heart, she had told herself, I will not be there to see it. Now, however, it was all as she had imagined it, except that the season was not so far advanced and she was here in the midst of it, while the hot furnished room was distant beyond desire. When she opened her eyes again, it was not with the hope of finding some mitigating circumstance, but rather with a kind of morbid appetite to embrace the full details of her disaster. Now she made out the individual weeds, and she saw that while in the field outside there were buttercups and a few daisies already open, here, in her enclosure, flourished only the most virile, the most virid, the most weedlike weeds, the coarse growers—burdock, thistle, milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace; the crawlers—carrotweed, Jill-run-over-the-ground, and especially the choking nut grass, which crawled beneath the earth’s surface and sprouted fiercely above it. No doubt, she said to herself, there was some natural explanation for this—the rankest weeds were perhaps the strongest and their seeds had a longer viability—yet common sense would not prevail; her heart accepted the phenomenon as a judgment and a curse.
It is hopeless, she murmured to herself, leaning against the fence, hopeless; and for the first time her spirit made an acknowledgment of defeat that was not provisional in character. Up to this moment there had been in her mind small recesses of hope to which her thoughts had fled secretly, unavowedly; in her contract with reality, an escape clause which permitted her to believe that what had been done was not irretrievable, that—in this case—dry weather might have retarded the weeds or some magic helper hoed for her (her maid, a thoughtful neighbor, a small boy employed by her husband?); now solidly before her lay the brutal fait accompli, the lost garden, irrecoverable, for though something might still be salvaged (a few gray cornflower plants could be made out in the mat of vegetation at her feet), the original design, the mirror of absolute beauty in which she had glimpsed her own image, was shattered. She sank listlessly to the ground and sat looking about her. Quite simply a sentence came to her and she spoke it aloud: “Now,” she said, “I have nothing to live for.”
The patent absurdity of these words acted as an astringent. The voice of common sense spoke again, saying, After all, you have a life expectation of at least forty years and you have got to do something with your time, you cannot just go to pieces, and in any case people do not live for gardens, but for ideals, principles, persons. This particular garden is ruined, but it is still possible to transplant. A second-best garden can be made out of the cornflowers, the zinnias, the cosmos, perhaps even the scabiosa. You can move the stronger plants and in August you will have flowers on the table. She presented this idea to her emotions and waited for the familiar bustle of activity, the rolling back of the sleeves, which turned her heart on such occasions into a large and hospitable house that is being made ready for an evening party. But the motors of anticipation remained cold. The second-best garden could not, even momentarily, command her belief. Like an adopted child, or a second husband, it could never make up to her. The weeds had finished all that. The weeds were, in fact, her garden, the end product of her activities, and the white foam that children call spit, which she saw clinging to the young grasses, was the outward mark of her disease. She remained sitting on the warm ground, idle, without thought or feeling, but ashamed to go back to the house.
This time she heard her husband’s footsteps approaching, but out of pride she would not look up, even when she felt him stop just behind her at the entrance to the garden. “Gosh!” he said. “What an awful situation!” “Yes,” she answered defiantly. “It’s ruined.” There was a silence during which she imagined him to be shrugging his shoulders. Anger began to boil up in her again, and she spun around to face him. The language of their old quarrels rose to her lips, the classical formulae of accusation and outrage. (See what you have made me do, you wanted this to happen, you are glad), but she was arrested by the expression of his face, which was neither jubilant nor indifferent, but full of simple curiosity and wonder. The weeds had finally made their impression on him; never before had he really believed in them; he had considered them to be a chimera of her dark imagination. Now he stood awestruck by this fearful demonstration of their authenticity, and for the first time the two of them shared in silence a single emotion. “What is that awful stuff?” he asked at length, bending down to pull up a spear of nut grass. The root broke off in his inexperienced hands. “Not that way,” she said. “Look.” Her trowel came up with the nut secure. “This is the weed I’ve been talking about all spring.” He examined it, turning it over between his fingers in his methodical way. “Why, it’s a little bulb,” he said. It was not worthwhile to correct this statement; to make the botanical distinction between a bulb and a tuber might simply provide a distraction from the mood of repugnance and terror that had brought them close for a moment. She longed to rush him ahead with her into the particulars of her loss, to say, See what I have been up against, see the sorrel, the field grass, the carrotweed, see where the sweet peas would have been, see where I dug the trench and strewed it with manure, think of the liming and the watering and weeding; she was filled with a kind of wild excitement and joy that he, who had never acknowledged the garden in life, should meet it, as it were, posthumously, and pay his respects. Yet prudence or tact restrained her. The work of initiation could not be hurried. He stood on the brink of her agony in the garden; his wide feet in their brown shoes were planted on one of the surviving cornflowers, as though to illustrate the text of his inculpation—but he must not be pushed. It was enough that he should share, however vaguely, her burden of loss, that her bereavement should to some measure be accepted as his. She waited, half-frightened, half-exalted, for what he would say next.
“Gosh!” he repeated, with intensified feeling, and now she was sure it was coming, the miracle she expected, which might take the form of an embrace, a cry, an apology, but which would be in essence a lament, not so much for the garden as for her, for the dead young lady he had brought back from New York, whom he kept propped up in bed, at the breakfast table, on the sofa, in the odor of corruption.
“You have your work cut out for you,” he said. For an instant she believed that she had not heard him properly.
“Maybe we can get a boy to help you,” he continued in a matter-of-fact tone.
It was over, she knew it at once, yet she made a last appeal. “The garden is ruined,” she said in a stubborn, hostile voice, but speaking slowly and emphatically as though to direct his attention to the importance of this statement.
“Nonsense,” he replied briskly. “You are always so extreme. I’ll call up Mr. Jenkins tomorrow and see if he can send . . .”
At the mention of the neighboring farmer, her mouth opened and she began to scream. “I’ll kill you if you do!” she shouted. Picking up the spading fork, she plunged it wildly into the ground, tossing sods and plants into the air in a frenzy of destruction. The loose earth fell on her hair, on her face, down which tears were running. She was aware that she cut a grotesque and even repulsive figure, that her husband was shocked by the sight and the sound of her, but the gasping sobs gave her pleasure, for she saw that this was the only punishment she had left for him, that the witchlike aspect of her form and the visible decay of her spirit would constitute, in the end, her revenge. She continued to lay about her with the spading fork, though the original fury had already passed off, until his solid, uneasy figure had disappeared from view, until his last words no longer sounded in her ears.
It was late in August when he came into the living room with a heterogeneous bouquet in which she recognized some of the stubborner flowers of her garden, cosmos and cornflowers and a few blackish red miniature zinnias. Mixed in with these were some weeds, pinkish sprays of bouncing Bet and the greenish-white clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. There was no doubt of it, he had been visiting her garden, and this was not the first time. Toward the end of June she had heard him outside the window, swearing, as he tied up rambler roses; in July, he had brought in raspberries, saying, “Can’t we have these for dinner?” The berries were soft and broken—he had been too late in the harvest. She lay now on the sofa, reading a detective story, watching him as he brought in a vase too tall for his bouquet and crammed the flowers into it. She felt no impulse to correct him; his clumsiness, in fact, pleased her, the ugliness of the bouquet pleased her, just as the stain on the coffee table had pleased her, the spot on her maid’s uniform at lunch. She basked, as she had been doing all summer, in a sly private satisfaction. She was broken but she was also irreplaceable, and her continued physical existence must be, she thought, an unending reminder to him of everything he had lost. She was enjoying in real life the delight that is generally experienced only in daydreams, the sense of when I am dead, how they will mourn for me, how valuable I shall become to them when I am no longer theirs.
She could see her own case now with the detachment of a historian. Between them, he and she had killed off the part of her that had always excited his anxiety and irritation, the part of her which regarded nothing as final, which was continually planning, contriving, hoping, which lived in the future and slept, like a fireman, fully dressed for an emergency. It was this part of her which had dreamed of flight and deliverance, but it was also this part which had created for itself the small mirages of duty and pleasure which had held her to him for five years. These were not, as she had thought, antithetical selves, but the same thing, the creative, constructive principle which, in its restless anticipation of change, built structures of semi-permanency—a series of overnight cabins that in their extension formed, not precisely a city, but at least a road, a via vitae.
It was this part of her which had incurred his jealousy, for it was obliged to live slightly estranged, to make large investments of passion in private enterprises; yet it was this part of her he now wished back, for he saw that this had been the nerve, and he now longed for a recurrence of the very symptoms whose presence, three months ago, he had detested. Now, by a hundred spells, he was attempting to bring about a resurrection. He appealed to her housekeeping instinct, to her esthetic sense, to her vanity, to her pity; his very clumsiness was an appeal for help, and it was not that she did not hear these appeals; she heard, but, as in a dream, she was incapable of action. What it was all leading up to she understood plainly: a moment ought to come when she would rise miraculously from the sofa, sweep the absurd bouquet from his hands, shake it lightly into form, call for a new bowl, and enshrine the product on the mantelpiece, while he stood by, awkward and grateful, as at a religious ceremony, a secular Easter mass. Yet now she could only lie back and watch, with lowered eyelids, pretending to take no notice, enjoying her poor-man’s pie of irony and contempt.
For the pleasure she took in her untended house, in her careless and unsupervised maid, in her neglected garden (which, however, she had never, since June, seen) was purely negative in character, a compensation for disability. The discomfort inflicted on her husband by the loss of her imaginative faculty could never atone to her for the joy she had once had in the exercise of it. Lying on the sofa, looking about at the dusty bare room, she would feel excruciating stabs of remorse, like the pains in an amputated limb. She would get up and start at some task, but before the candlesticks were half polished, her interest would have died and she would leave them in the sink for her maid to finish. It could not, it seemed to her, go on much longer, and she prayed for him to abandon her. (Her going, on her own initiative, had become utterly out of the question.) On him her life now depended; where renunciation, the withdrawal of love, had blackened the loved objects as frost blackens the flowers in an autumn garden, he alone had survived, evergreen, sturdily perennial, in the season of death. Disliking him as she did, she had never bothered to renounce him, and now her eyes would come to rest on him with a kind of relief—the familiar detested object in surroundings grown strange and terrible. Her glance held in it also an element of calculation: how long, she asked herself, will he be able to stand me? Her own endurance had become infinite, for she no longer lived in time, but he, being real, being alive, might reach in measurable stages the threshold of domestic suffering.
He set the vase down on the table, took his handkerchief, and dusted the surface in a rather bustling way, like a woman who rattles dishes in the kitchen to awaken a sleeper whom she does not wish to be so rude as to call. He cleared his throat.
“You have some beautiful flowers out back.”
She sat up at last to look at him directly, but made no reply.
“You ought to go out and see them.”
She watched him hesitate and then think better of what was in his mind to say. He is afraid of me, she thought, with a touch of pity.
“We ought to have some more of them in the house,” he continued, enthusiastically. “You have got all sorts of things back there. Even your weeds are wonderful,” and he went rattling on nervously, describing the scene in the fields, suggesting improvements—a professional tree surgeon to come for the old apple trees, a wattled fence along the lane, plans she had once proposed and he rejected. She was only half listening; the very idea of these improvements now seemed to her preposterous; one might as well paint a mural in a condemned house.
Seeing that she would not reply, he halted and tried a new tack. He came up to her and took her hand. “I miss the way this room used to look,” he said in a voice that was quite new with him, wistful and childlike in its directness. “Those yellow things you used to have on the coffee table.” For a moment now, she saw it all through his eyes, saw a vision which was less precise and accurate than hers, a rather smeary vision in which the pale, clear, lemon yellow he was thinking of (African marigold, carnation-flowered, yellow supreme) was likely to be confused with the orange of French marigold or of cosmos orange flare, a vision in which energy and whopping good intentions counted for more than anything else and the bigger a flower the better—but nevertheless a vision, an ideal of beauty, of love and the lavish hand; and the sense of his loss, his large, vague loss, overwhelmed and engulfed her own.
She pressed his hand lightly, murmuring, “Yes, I remember,” and then let his fingers drop. He regained her hand, however, and squeezed it. She felt, as once before in the fields, that he was on the verge of some fine avowal. She herself, only now, had made the great leap from pity to sympathy; she grieved for his predicament, of which she herself was the determining factor; could he likewise grieve for hers, whose existence he had never acknowledged, weep with her at last because she could not leave him, because the courage, the more attractive alternative, whatever it was that might separate them, was lacking? “I’ve always loved your flowers,” he said, his voice blurred and high with emotion. “You know that.”
As her ears admitted this lie, this tearful, sentimental, brazen lie, her whole nature rose weakly in rebellion. How dare you, her heart muttered, how dare you say it? Nothing could have been—and at such a moment!—more dishonest; she could have cited him fifty instances which would have controverted him utterly. But the heartfelt insincerity of these words went beyond contradiction, beyond hypocrisy, into regions of spiritual obstinacy and opacity impenetrable to reason, where reason, in fact, and conscience had been cruelly blinded by the will, the will which demanded that everything should be always all right, which had, as it were, legislated the bouquet on the mantelpiece by a kind of brutal denial of color, of tonal values, of the harmony of textures, and which was now enforcing its myth of a harmonious marriage, of tastes and occupations shared, by dictatorial fiat.
And yet there had been the tears in the voice. . . . What the tears meant, she perceived, was that he did love the flowers, now that she had not got them, now that they were no longer dangerous; they had passed, for him and for her, out of experience into memory, and here in this twilight world he could possess them—and her—with a terrible blind rapacity. She saw also that her pity had been wasted, that he had got her where he wanted her; she had been translated, bodily, into that realm of shadows where the will was all-powerful, the city of the dead. She herself was no more to him now than an oak leaf pressed in a schoolbook, a tendril of blond hair, a garter kept in a drawer. But this was, for him, everything: it was love and idolatry. The lie was a necessity to him, a cardinal article of faith. To protest was useless. He could not be shaken in his conviction, but only be annoyed, confused, thrown off. And in a final thrust of rejection, she yielded, conceding him everything—flowers, facts, truth. Let him put them into his authorized version; she had failed them, and would do so again and again. With him, they would see service.
She tightened her clasp on his hand.
“Yes,” she said mistily, “I know.”
The lie came easier, after all, than she would have thought.