第9章 The Undertaker's Garden

The May meeting was held at Annette Wickersham's house on the hill, and it was, for most of the seven who came, the largest house they had ever been inside in Wellerby. Annette had bought it in the year of her divorce, with the settlement money and a loan she had paid off in eleven years, and she had furnished it the way a person furnishes a house she intends to be judged in. The living room had a piano nobody played. The dining room had a table for ten. The garden behind it had gone to a kind of dignified disorder, because she had hired a boy to cut the grass and had never once asked him to touch the beds, and the beds, left alone for two decades, had made their own arrangements. She had prepared. That was the thing about Annette, and it was the thing the circle both relied on and resisted: she prepared. There were chairs in a ring, there was a pot of tea on a tray with a proper strainer, there were three kinds of cookies on a plate, and there was, on the coffee table, a printed agenda. "A what?" Junie said. "An agenda," Annette said. "One sheet. You can ignore it. I only thought, since we're going to talk about the room after the book, we might want to know what we're talking about." The book was *The Undertaker's Garden*, and Annette had chosen it, and she began the discussion the way she had begun every discussion for thirty-four years, which is to say with a question written on an index card and held up in her hand. "What does the daughter owe the father?" she said. They went at it for forty minutes, and it was the best discussion of the year, because the book deserved it: a woman inherits her father's garden and his business and his debts and his secrets, and the secrets are small ones, the kind that live in ledgers and old letters, and she has to decide whether to keep the business or the garden or neither. Vernon argued that the garden was the man and the business was the town. Katia said the daughter kept the wrong one. Romy, who had read it twice, said the daughter kept both and it was killing her and nobody in the book would say so. "That's the point," Annette said. "Nobody in a family says so. That's what the book is for." "To say the thing nobody says," Romy said. "Yes." "Then let's do that," Romy said, and looked around the room, and the room looked back, and Annette felt the afternoon tilt under her, the way it did when a student asked the question she had been avoiding. She said, "Let's have tea first," and poured, and they had tea. --- Annette had one child, a son named Felix, and he was forty-one and lived in a city on the other side of the ocean, and she had not spoken to him in four years. It was not a dramatic estrangement. That was the thing she would have liked people to understand, and could never explain without sounding as if she were excusing herself, which she was. There had been no betrayal and no scene. There had been an accumulation — a visit that had gone badly, a phone call that had ended with her saying something true and unkind about his wife, a birthday card returned unopened, a year of silence that had been meant as a lesson and had become a climate. She had taught the literature of families for most of her working life. She could have told you, in an exam, exactly what the returned card meant. She had simply never believed the texts applied to her, which was the central error of her life and the one she had repeated longest. The room at the top of the stairs had been his. She had kept it for four years exactly as he had left it, and then had not been able to keep it that way any longer and had put his things in boxes in the attic and repainted the walls a color he would have hated, and had then sat down on the floor of the empty room and cried like a person who had just moved house and could not remember why. When she offered it to Romy, in January, she had thought she was being generous. She knew now, sitting in her own living room with an agenda on the table, that she had been doing something else, and that Romy had seen it in half a second, and had refused with a cruelty that was earned. So when the tea was poured and the book was closed, and the talk turned to the room, Annette tried a second time to be useful, and tried it the wrong way. "I've been thinking about the club," she said. "If we lose Denby's, there are real options, and I've written them out. The church hall is available on Sundays for a donation. The Grange is cheaper but has no heat until winter closes it. My house is available, and I mean that, any month, and I don't want a discussion about it, I want it on the list." She looked up. "And I think, if this is the last year in the back room, we should end it properly. A dinner. Invitations. The whole circle, everyone who's ever come, not just the current seven. It's the decent thing." The room did not say anything for a moment, and Annette heard the silence and misread it as agreement, which was the second error, and the bigger one. "Invitations to whom?" Junie said. "To everyone. That's the point." "Eleven years, four or five people a year quit or move or die, and you want to send invitations to a dinner," Junie said. "Annette, half the people who've been in this room have left without saying goodbye. That's not a fault, that's a book club. You'll be sending invitations to people who don't want to hear from us and a few who are dead. It's a nice idea and it's wrong." "It's not wrong to mark the end of something." "It's wrong to decide it's the end," Romy said, from the window, "when it's not your building and not your year and not your call." Annette felt the room turn against her the way a class turns, silently, with its eyes. She had spent her life in rooms that turned, and she knew the feeling, and she knew what she usually did with it, which was to win. She was sixty-six years old and she had a printed agenda and a table for ten and a garden nobody had touched in twenty years, and she was suddenly very tired of winning. "All right," she said. "Strike the dinner." Glenna spoke for the first time since the tea, from the chair by the piano, which she had chosen, Annette noticed, because it faced the door. "Don't strike it," Glenna said. "Put it at the bottom of the list, under January, in pencil, with a question mark. That's where good ideas live until they're ready." Annette looked at her for a moment, and then found a pencil in the drawer of the side table and did exactly that, in front of all of them, which cost her something she could not have named, and which the circle, being readers, understood. --- They left at four o'clock. Annette stood on the porch and watched them go down the hill, five of them in Junie's car, two walking, and the streetlights coming on across the river one after another, as if someone were going door to door. She went back in and did the dishes. She set the chairs right. She put the agenda in the drawer and found a fresh sheet of paper and a pen, and she sat down at her table for ten and wrote, in her small precise hand, the beginning of a letter. *Dear Felix.* She got that far. She sat with it for a long while, and then she wrote two more sentences, and read them, and did not like them, and folded the sheet in half and put it in the drawer under the agenda, where it stayed, and where, from time to time, she would take it out and add a sentence, and never send it, because a letter you are not ready to send is still a kind of talking, and it was the only kind she had. ---