The Architect of Flowers Read online

  I’ll let you go, she said, her voice strong and breezy and so obviously hurt. She didn’t mean to go all martyr on him, didn’t want to be so heavy and difficult, her son trying to ask if everything was all right.

  Oh, everything’s just fine, she told him—and she watched her feelings catch up to her—felt like a coin was rolling down the slot, wheel tipping some mechanism into motion, this unexpected prize suddenly there in her mouth. Everything’s just fine, she said. Except your father, of course, he’s just died in the greenhouse.

  IV.

  One could make a holiday out of such a passage. Overnight on a train, steady ticker tape of wheels on rails, city devolving into suburbs and farms, and a young man able to find a compartment to himself, able to slowly acclimate himself from one world and life to another. Back in the city he worked in buttons. Glass buttons, plastic buttons, buttons of silver, copper, brass, coral, leather, lacquer, amber, pewter, gold. Buttons of broken china. Buttons of shipwrecked coins. Five, seven, eleven years in buttons and beads and able to recite the breathless rise of the lowly button in his sleep, its underdog days as hopeless decoration, early alliance with suspender and belt, marriage to buttonhole, love affairs with safety pin and clasp hook, mentor to the metal snap, archnemesis of the zipper.

  And for filling his head with such nonsense he was what, again, please? Well compensated? A company man on the rise? Stray buttons clattering to the floor when he took off his clothes at night? Buttons in bed with him when he woke in the morning? And didn’t life just love its little ironies, its little circles and inside jokes, like the one about a certain son of a certain botanist who was fated to—of all things—a life of buttons, even the word itself coming from the French bouton, as in bud, literally, of a flower?

  Surely it’s true, no one sets out to make his head a piggy bank full of buttons, just as no one dreams of becoming the type of man who feels only what when his father dies? Inconvenienced? Annoyed when his mother calls to fetch him home? What kind of son hopes, even briefly, that his own mother would just slip away in her sleep? Who wishes to be done with the entire chore of them, his parents just another task of many tasks on a list?

  His temple to the train’s cool rattle of glass, that swallow’s flight of wires at the window, and it was his share of the greenhouses that he sat there calculating. The gardens, the seed stock, the old farmhouse to expedite. The value of the hill to developers, the woods to lumber interests, furniture to the auctioneer, and not even the slightest groan of shame rose out of him. Not even a seedling of loss or sadness or anything. He began to wonder if a lack of feeling was a feeling. And he worried that it was.

  He might not have wanted to become his father—endless taste of fertilizer in the back of his throat, burn of pesticide in the cuts on his hands, world as small and close as a greenhouse—but at least the old man never sat at a desk counting out buttons like so many nickels and dimes. At least his father hadn’t lived his life by aversion, hadn’t moved always away from what he didn’t want, the old hybridizer not afraid to go toward things, to hope for things, to dream of things. At least his father’s life had been pulled by sunlight, relieved by rain, urged by roots and leaves. Each daffodil, each tulip, every pane of glass in the greenhouse such a matter of life or death to the old hybridizer. At least his father cared about things and kept caring about them, the man caring so much that he didn’t care if anyone else cared, which seemed to make people care, students and tourists and garden societies from the valley practically swooning their way up the hill to the greenhouses and gardens and gift shop, that jangle of bells on the door always ringing. At least the old man and his wife hadn’t spent their days just hoping to feel, hadn’t kept wishing their lives would just begin, hadn’t wasted their nights just yearning to yearn for something.

  The train ran as smooth as a trance, and the hybridizer’s son opened the window and stood and held his face to the wind. He closed his eyes to the gathering speed of wheels on rails under him. And maybe it was the smell of fields, or the feel of rain, or the damp cool of night—maybe it was the tree-softened hills in the distance, or that long call of the engine’s whistle from far ahead—but then maybe it was his father, finally, that urge of seedlings that the hybridizer’s son could feel in his throat. Felt like a tulip bulb in the notch of his neck, crocus corms fingering their way out of him, that first surge of sadness and he was almost happy, the hybridizer’s son almost relieved, as if all he’d needed was a seed to nurture, the littlest seed able to wedge the strongest stone in two.

  And just as this long cry was rising out of him, the door of the compartment clanged open. He jumped back at the noise, a young couple in the brightness of the hall. Sorry, they said—the girl with her pretty laughter—the two of them running and giggling all the way down the corridor to the vestibule at the end of the car. So many ways to go through this life, he thought to himself, wondering what did he really want? And what was he so afraid of?

  He pushed the window closed and sat as the train ran smooth and effortless again, the stillness of movement, night passing without seeming to pass at all. And in this séance of trees and moon he all but saw them, a boy and his father waist-deep in deer brush and empty mill yards. The man could startle flowers from a field in the way other men might start rabbits. He’d summon each plant by name—red button-straw, wild knotweed—the old hybridizer calling flowers to his hand as if calling songbirds, as good as creating every trait of leaf and root by simply handing it to his son. Take the lance-leafed wood fern, its scent of sun-warm hayfields, its leaves closing as if to sleep at night. Take an old mountain ash in the middle of the woods, symbol of grandeur, leaves said to cure warts and rickets, bark a source of blue for dyers, seeds used in spells requiring focus and strength of purpose. Take a stone wall and the double life of lichen—half fungus, half algae—a symbiosis one could rub into dust with one’s fingers.

  And home in the gardens, take the old hybridizer and his wife, companion plants of a kind to each other, carrots thriving next to onions, asparagus next to parsley. Once found them lying naked in the garden together, the boy looking and looking until he knew what he was seeing, their skin glowing against the soil, his mother’s clothes draped over the rose hedge. Have they just made love? Are they really just testing the dirt, as they said, just seeing if the soil is comfortable for seeds? They expected him to believe that? His mother the color of boiled potatoes? His father’s penis hanging like a nose?

  No wonder he couldn’t help but stare.

  No wonder he couldn’t help but look away.

  No wonder he felt so many different things at the same time.

  Above the seat was a reading lamp. Even here he didn’t read so much as weigh the letters in his hands, pieces of mail from his father, props in case he was called upon to say a few words at the service.

  His mother would be seeing to all the arrangements. The church, the cemetery, she’d be the widow at the door, her dress so blue it would practically shimmer with despair, that splash of baby’s breath at her collar for life would go on. Everyone would be so hushed and sincere, the hybridizer lying in the parlor, surrounded by flowers.

  A confetti of pressed ferns from one letter. A line about an early snow from another. A delivery of bees. A quick note on Mendel’s Third Law of Dominance and Progressive Heredity. A postscript, his father’s hand like the tracks of insects:

  I don’t know about people, but I’ve found periods of great changefulness alternate with periods of stability and relative stasis in plants. They seem to leap as well as creep, and novel characters suddenly appear in great perfection, not linked to their parents in any halfway stages. (No doubt a scrap of hope for offspring everywhere!)

  And from the next a sprig of damselweed and his father’s voice he could hear as he read:

  Thank you for the wonderful weekend, which your mother and I enjoy more each time we remember it to one another. Turned out we waited quite a while at the station after you left. Mechanical
trouble, apparently, had to get a new locomotive. Almost called you at work, but a man, a stranger, took us to lunch and told us about the history of this and that place nearby. And in spite of our being so late, it was pure glory when we settled ourselves and got going at long last. A few hours from home and there was another delay. In any case, we kept losing time, the countryside creeping along the final hours, our minds fixed firmly on home. All of which made us feel how you and the city were quite remote to us, remote like the moon.

  Was only the speed of the train in all likelihood, but the letter trembled in his hand. He remembered leaving them at the station that morning, his parents as delicate as ash, everything shades of gray, concrete, steam, steel, sky. They looked so bewildered and lost to him in the city, grins frozen dumb on their faces, same as in the elevator to his office, same as at the alumni club, with his button colleagues joking about Velcro and toggle loops. And in the taxi cab that night, the lights of the streets slurred with rain, and he could still feel his mother as tight as a bird next to him, her fingers strong as talons on his arm.

  Even his mother—he could practically see her—the hybridizer’s wife becoming her devotions, the woman as good as being those fragile houses of glass. And he remembered being this skinny little kid among the hundred-year-old olive and fig trees, leaves and branches bent flush to the slanted roof of glass, the trunks like cables tied to the ground. He remembered how he’d somehow gotten it into his head that he could cut them all free with the claw end of a hammer, the boy chopping at the trees so that the greenhouses could float gently away.

  For miles he rode like this, a wide black shine of lake swinging into view, a stadium of trees, clouds all snowcapped with moon. The conductor called down the corridor as they approached the next station, scrap yards and factories and lights, the squall of crossing bells, passengers and hawkers on the platform, peanuts and pillows for sale, heavy thumps of baggage, mailbags, that pigeon-murmur of loudspeakers, and then forward again, everything as gradual as a ship under sail.

  The car rocked as they picked up speed—and the door to the compartment opened—an older gentleman standing in the light. He apologized for the intrusion, but asked was that seat free by any chance? Not riding terribly far, he said, if that was any consolation.

  The hybridizer’s son moved his things out of the way, the old man sat with a suitcase between his feet, trees flocking close to the windows, pines like crows at the glass, the old man straightening his jacket, loosening his collar and tie. The train ran fast and straight and smooth over darkened fields, and the old man asked, Are you inclined to speak with people on trains?

  I’m sorry?

  I usually like to ask, said the man, as some do find it a burden to make the effort. A condition I completely understand, if you’d rather keep to yourself.

  No-no, said the hybridizer’s son—and he straightened up in his seat—saying he’d just been thinking a little company would be nice.

  The old man smiled and soon told how he was a doctor in a previous life. Small-town practice, he said, mostly babies and broken bones. Wife passed a few years ago. Son lives in the next town. Daughter lives in the city. Precious little else attaching him to the world any longer, just some far-flung grandchildren here and there.

  The two of them watched the trees gather outside, a loud branch against the side of the car startling them, both of them smiling to each other. The train in deep timber for what turned out to be miles, the doctor saying how he loved to travel like this. And so, he said, what puts a young man on a train in the middle of the week these days, anyway? Love or money?

  Probably both, said the hybridizer’s son. My father died today—or died yesterday by now—and my mother called and I got on a train.

  The old man hummed slightly, but he didn’t say how sorry he was, didn’t ask how close they were, didn’t try to fill the compartment with chatter. Instead the old doctor just sat still and quiet, his face almost granular in the light, as if his skin was made of marzipan. And there it was again, that strange surge of sadness in his throat, the hybridizer’s son trying to swallow it away. And when the old man asked what he did in the world, the hybridizer’s son said that he made flowers.

  And because the lie seemed so true all of a sudden—so true and necessary to him—the hybridizer’s son leaned forward and said it again. I make flowers, he told the man. Flowers and vegetables, he said, and he continued to tell what he suddenly most wanted to hear. I listen to plants all day, he said. Which means I care about soil and sunlight and seasons and seeds and dew points. I walk through roses as if they were rooms in my mind. I lie awake at night with the problems of Mendel’s peas and what turns them white and what turns them back to pink. I smell like fertilizer and grafting wax. I always have dirt on my hands.

  And your father did the same?

  He did.

  And your mother?

  Of course.

  And your wife and children?

  Yes, said the hybridizer’s son, I’m lucky that way.

  V.

  There once was a language of flowers. A handful of hawthorn for a safe journey home. Hyacinth for forgiveness. Ferns making everything sincere. And if she dawdled over zinnia this time—flower of maternal love—it was because each orange petal put her son on a train to her. A lifetime of lingering, but at least now it was hope—daisies and bluebells—that drew her through the rooms of the house, at least now it was some promise of happiness—crocus and dahlia—that pulled her up the stairs to her son’s room.

  She stood in the doorway—her husband’s boyhood room, as well, come to think of it—same windows, same narrow bed, same angle of roofline in the ceiling. And she could close her eyes and follow the train along the stitches of track in her mind, the map all watercolor blues of rivers and lakes, tans and browns of mountains, cities marked with circles, towns with stars. The speed would gutter like a candle at his window. Trees would pass, all feathered and silver with night. Nothing she couldn’t imagine about his arrival home. Are you hungry? she’d ask. How was your trip? Should we go find your father?

  She pushed herself from the doorway and drifted down the hall to their bedroom, where she hovered over the old man’s dresser, the nursery catalogues, the papers, a bobby pin he stole from her to clean his ears. There were crows outside in the orchard—might have been bickering for hours, but she heard them back and forth now—and she let herself sit on her husband’s side of the bed. She lay back into that old sag of his body, that smell of fish emulsion in his pillow, that tang of his hair. And when she turned she saw the photos on the bureau, first time in how many years? Her young self as soft and pretty as a stranger. In another frame her husband with a basket of apples. And in the last a skinny boy at the beach. Her son. Such a smile.

  Nearly broke her heart—three photos, three separate frames, each under its own glass—and from nowhere her father came back to her, man pretending to search for her and her sister, two little girls hiding under the dining room table, giggles rising like champagne bubbles in her throat, lace hanging over the side, giving everything a soft focus as he growled and stomped around the chairs. She remembered her father dying, those drowning eyes of her mother.

  Hours, days she lay in the bedroom like this—years she stared at the cream ceiling, shadows of bugs in the frosted light fixture—and in that strange Darwinism of memory she thought of her son chopping at the fruit trees, the boy in tears over the greenhouses, how he said he thought they could float away. She could lie here and walk through the greenhouses and gardens in her mind, a hush of plants and leaves as she went, the old woman bending to listen for echoes all her life, waiting always for the safety of sadness to return, the tired comforts of loss and grief.

  She closed her eyes—and why couldn’t she lie a little longer here?—try to imagine it all happy for a change, her presentiments lifting like air in the curtains, her son riding home on a train, her husband in the seed shed as always. She could see the old man with his pollination c
harts, see him sorting seeds, bundles of drying plants hanging like sleeping bats above him, the hybridizer touching pollen from anthers to stamen, the man talking flowers to her in this dream, describing the rose he was trying to make, the feeling he was trying to bring to life for her, as if all her knots of worry might be untied with a scent or a softness. And in the dream she saw herself sleeping, her husband lying beside her, the two of them under the begonias, the last touches of daylight on the roof over them, glass all streaked and filmy, and that submarine tick and creak of the greenhouse as it cools with the deepening evening.

  It surprised her, that knock of heels on the porch downstairs, the screen door opening, and she sat up as the hybridizer helloed into the living room for her. She got off the bed and stood at the window and listened to him in the kitchen, the water running in the sink, the woman like some attending angel over him. The man started up the stairs and she watched the clouded glass of the greenhouse below, part of her waiting for him to appear in the yard, part of her listening as he approached down the hall. She could feel him stop in the doorway, the volume he displaced in the room, and she swayed slightly and stared at the greenhouse, not wanting to miss his appearing on the lawn, the man already standing behind her.

  What on earth are you doing? he asked.

  She heard herself say hello to him—this faraway voice— and it surprised her, the way she sounded. But what didn’t surprise her these days? She was an old woman, prone to melancholy, and now she was suddenly full of strength, saying she was perfectly fine, in case he was wondering. She looked up at the ceiling and felt capable of anything, as if anything could fly out of her. All she had to do was open her mouth and turn to him.