The Chrysanthemum Garden

All Rights Reserved © 1981, 2000 by Joseph G. Cowley

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

I  WISH TO THANK MY WIFE, RUTH M. COWLEY, FOR THE IDEA AND THE TITLE FOR THIS NOVEL, AND FOR HER HELPFUL COMMENTS ON SEVERAL OF THE DRAFTS.

J.G.C.

FOR MY MOTHER, TRUDY,

AND MY CHILDREN,

BARBARA, CHARLES,

JENNIFER, AND JOSEPH, JR.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SNOW WOULD COME AGAIN, but she would never go back. She felt too hurt now, lonely. He would not come again no matter how long she might wait. But what would she do now, with her life?

She knew, and didn’t know, that he would die. The thought had come before, but she had put it aside. There was still time, and she didn’t have to think of an ending. She had just lived life day by day.

She would wake in the morning when the squirrels skittered across the roof of the house set against the hillside in one of the rough undulations of forest around Monadnock. The light would just be starting to filter through the trees, and the rising sun would disperse the fog, first on the hilltops and later in the valleys.

The mist would linger along the pond opposite their driveway at the foot of the hill, and when she went down for the mail, walking the quarter mile down the winding, torn, tree-enshrouded drive, she would see it hanging white on the pond beyond the rock wall and the meadow.

Sometimes she would sit on what was left of the fence and read the mail there in the early cool of the morning. One morning the galleys for Landscape with Figures, his last book of poetry, came from the publisher (it had only now been released, and there was a display of the volume in the window of a bookstore on Fifth Avenue ).

Going rather excitedly up the long drive and around the outside of the house on the upstairs porch, she found him in the billiard room, standing there with a cue stick in his hands. She told him they had come.

He turned slowly with a look of mock surprise on his lined face, a wisp of white hair rising above one long-lobed ear. It doesn’t matter, he said, it’s too late now.

Whatever did he mean? He was eighty-two and perhaps feeling a brush of death. But he would never have mentioned it to her. Not that he ever seemed afraid; they just never spoke of it.

Sometimes she would catch him by surprise and find him staring into space, a look of infinite sadness in his pale-blue eyes, as if he was still sorrowing for the wife of a lifetime who had died almost twenty years before.

He might turn when he was aware she was present. His eyes would smile, the leathery skin of his face pinching at the corners, pulling taut over the smooth, vein-lined forehead, as if to say, I am still here. I will always be with you. You know always where to find me.

Then he would reach out a hand, trembling, to touch her on the knee or thigh, and she might pull him to her and feel his warm breath on her stomach and look down at his bent head and know she was in love.

The trouble is, she thought, we don’t ever grow old, just the body. Inside him she could see the small boy that no one else saw. This was what made their relationship so special. They could exist outside of time, yet knowing that time was passing and they were growing old, sensing that each season, each day, would never come again.

Waking in the morning, she might reach out her arm to see if he was still there, throwing back the crisp whiteness of the sheet and leaning on her elbow to study him. She was always amazed at how soundly he slept, breathing softly, the gentle rise and fall of the sheet saying he was alive. His skin was so thin as to be transparent, and she could see beneath its sheen the blue network of veins. The few wisps of white hair on top of his bald head reminded her of a baby’s.

Strange, she never thought of herself as being old, though she was almost seventy. As long as she was with him, she couldn’t be. She hadn’t felt old since that time, almost a dozen years ago, when she walked out of her home in Scars-dale and left her husband scowling down into his morning bowl of Shredded Wheat.

She had thought of leaving many times before, especially after the last of the children was grown and living in Denver. Her life suddenly seemed pointless, and incredibly dull. How, she wondered, could she have ever been satisfied with being just a housewife, washing diapers and dirty dishes, when the soul in her longed to be free, longed to seek and find the beauty she knew was waiting for her somewhere, out there?

Once, she had been up all night, pacing through the dining room on the way from the living room to the kitchen and back, smoking two packs of cigarettes and snuffing them out in strategically placed saucers.

From time to time she stared out through the darkened windowpanes into the night-lighted streets that curved down to the Post Road. Toward dawn she was aware of the muffled, distant sound of traffic, and was surprised that it had begun to get light.

The fireplace was cold. She went to the front window to pull back the drape, shivering slightly. Whether it was because she had gotten a chill or, suddenly, her mind was made up and she was either excited or frightened, she didn’t know. All she knew was that it was as if, suddenly, someone had accidentally left the door open.

She looked around on all that past life and didn’t know where it had gone to, including the young woman in the wedding photograph she found the day before while rummaging through the upstairs linen closet looking for some old sheets she might send Jeffrey, who was setting up an apartment in Denver.

She stared at the woman, apparently herself, with no sign of recognition, until she felt herself flooded with pain. She sat down suddenly on the top of the stairs and found, for no reason, that the tears had come to her eyes and were trickling down her cheeks. She pulled up the hem of her dress and wiped them away.

It was not as if it had all been so terrible—except for the night Kathy died. In the early years she had enjoyed setting up a home and raising children. She had felt fulfilled. It was only in the later years that their life together seemed to have settled into a routine.

But she couldn’t blame Frank for that. He had found fulfillment in his work, and the Thursday night bridge, the Saturdays at the country club, the Sunday golf, the occasional movies and TV were all an enjoyable break from his business life. She was the one who was bored.

She felt at times that she was spending her days and years for what was—not dross, but how could she put it?—something that was not quite what she wanted. That wasn’t it, either. If she had several lives, she would want this one too. She wouldn’t throw it away. In her way she loved Frank. He was not a bad person. He was decent, and he had always been a good provider and a good father to their children.

Sometimes, when these thoughts came into her head, she would be aghast at herself. How dare she envision another life for herself? She would have a quick fright that all this, her children, might be taken from her if God ever found out her thoughts. But that was silly. She knew she had a right to dream without feeling guilty about it.

At last, snuffing her cigarette out with a savage energy that flared up and left her trembling, finding it hard to breathe, peering into the shadowed corners of the white ceiling in the front hall, holding on at last with a fierce intensity to the bannister of the stairwell that went up to the three bedrooms on the second floor, she waited for the rage to leave her.

By the time Frank came home from his job in the city (he was a life insurance agent for Northwestern Mutual, with an office on Park Avenue ), the intensity of the feeling would have passed. She would kiss him and go to bed with him at ten, but tentative advances would make her withdraw to her side of the bed, heart and body shriveling at the same time. She wouldn’t fully understand the reasons for this. She was aware only of a residue of unhappiness that precluded any lovemaking.

Fortunately, Frank’s sexual desires had peaked long ago (though this, she somehow vaguely recognized, may have contributed to her sense of unhappiness ), and he did not make any extended effort, beyond the tentative advances to determine how she was feeling, to seduce her. She lay staring into darkness. When he started snoring, she got up and went downstairs and paced the three rooms on the left side of the house until surprised by dawn.

Later, on the way to the cemetery, it began to rain. Morna knew that if it kept up it would rut the roads leading back through the woods to the house. But she wouldn’t go there again. She was through. All that life was dead. She would leave it to the children, who had been cruel in their own subtle way.

They had never accepted her as a replacement for their mother, nor even as the mistress of their father, as if he was beyond such needing, being old, and she was an interloper. Maybe they were jealous because they sensed their father needed her, as he had needed their mother, more, even, than he needed them.

Denny needed her in a way that Frank never had, as the companion of his thoughts and feelings, as someone with whom he could share his most intimate moments, and not just as a wife, someone to make a home and give birth to and raise children.

It was almost, at times, as if the children were afraid she might steal something from them, from him, but what? His love? She had no desire to take any of that away from them. And as far as the money was concerned, there wasn’t much beyond the pension from the university, Social Security, the royalty check every six months from the publisher, and the income from an occasional critical article or lecture somewhere.

But that had tapered off. In these last years she and Denny had been more reclusive than ever. Two years ago NBC-TV had invaded their home, their grounds, and their garden, stringing wires and trampling over the few patches of grass, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Beyond that, someone doing a graduate paper might drop by, or there might be an occasional call from Denny’s agent or one of his literary friends.

However, there weren’t many such friends left. When he sometimes reached out for contact, there was occasionally the inevitable surprise that he was still alive. Denison McArdle? I understood he died years ago!

Deep down, the fame meant little to them. Besides, it was not something she could share, though she had been approached for articles on several occasions, and there was even mention of a book. But she didn’t, not then, not now, want to share their intimacy. And about the poetry itself she could tell them nothing. He never discussed his work with her, never told her he was going to write, nor about what. A poem would suddenly materialize, and she would type it out for him and put it into the shoebox on top of the file cabinet along with the others that might eventually make a book.

On the TV program he had been referred to as the grand old man of letters and praised for his wisdom and his insight. She was sometimes asked what it was like living with one of America’s foremost poets, but she never knew what to say. She was not used to taking him as a personage. Sometimes she would find herself staring at him while he was talking to someone, a reporter perhaps, as if he were a stranger. If he caught her at it, he would wink, and she would turn away, embarrassed.

This, this other, she knew, was just a game after all, and what was real was what they had between them. And yet, in his poetry, he had been able to conceptualize it in a way that made it real for everyone, that intimacy of theirs. Still, it was not the real thing. He knew that and so did she. Neither of them was likely to confuse words on paper with the human beings who uttered them, who wrote them on still mornings when only the fog dripped from the heavy leaves, and the fire shifted as it turned to ash in the grate.

In November the snows would come, the huge wet flakes gathering silently some gray afternoon on the fir trees and the railing of the deck and, like a cap, on the steep slopes of the birdhouse. He would be in the study writing, sitting in the worn leather chair with a yellow pad on his lap, his bent fingers holding one of the cheap ballpoints they bought by the dozen, his slippered feet propped on the ottoman, and the yellow lamplight spilling over his shoulder. He would write and cross out and write again, from time to time staring out at the falling snow.

Invariably he surprised her with the intensity of the feeling he might expose, the sheer beauty of the words he used, showing her something in all its delicacy that she had not really noticed, not been aware of, though she had her own feelings that she was not able to adequately express. But she, he, they both knew that words, too, distorted. They created something of beauty, were certainly not a replica of life itself.

The poems were a thing apart. They meant more to her in the beginning, when they burst upon her heart, opening her mind to ideas, dreams, hopes, beauty she had thought were a phase of late adolescence, and didn’t know were still very much a part of her being. It was as if she had been held captive in a root cellar for three and a half decades and was comfortable with the light of a candle, when suddenly the ground door was opened and