The Girl in the Garden Read online

  And Duncan knew that early next week, at some moment or other, Oldman would walk in with breakfast or lunch for the two of them in hand and tell Duncan how he’d taken her shopping and afterward made a detour so that he could show her more than just the downtown and a shopping center. That he’d taken her to the port so she could see the fish-canning factories and the mills—shuttered, closed but for the ground floors that now served as outlet stores for woolen goods, although there was also a futureless cigar factory yet in operation—with their central watchtower and a granite-lined canal that had once coursed from the river and turned the great waterwheels that were no longer intact and were barely recognizable as such, being a tangle of yawping, dilapidated spokes and paddles precariously askew. And he’d tell Duncan he’d shown her the mill workers’ apartments as well, old three-story buildings that had been carefully constructed with the same bricks in the same color as the mills, Oldman explaining to her that in the last century the corporation that had created the mills had also put up the workers’ housing to match, then giving her a lesson in what Oldman considered to be regal Victorian industrial architecture whose grandeur had clearly outlasted the factories’ usefulness. And he’d relate to Duncan how she’d taken everything in, the wrought-iron gates, the cobblestone streets that rimmed the factories, the granite sidewalks still extant on the backsides of the workers’ apartments with their porches painted the same shade of gray as they’d originally been. He’d explained that the apartments were now rental units in which lived the elderly in their majority, people whose parents and grandparents had lived in the same apartments and spent their lifetimes working in the mills, and that most of these elderly inhabitants had also worked in them and had held on to those jobs until the end, which came mostly in the fifties. He’d also described to her the company stores, the ragmen and icemen who came in horse-drawn carts to collect old clothes and bedding and to supply ice for iceboxes, the best of which were oak and lined with tin. He’d told her that the mill workers first came from farms and hamlets far and wide, and later as immigrants from abroad, and that they’d had a quality of life they might not otherwise have had, never mind imagined, given they had work and apartments with indoor plumbing and cookstoves and iceboxes, and a company store that gave them credit on everything from clothes and shoes to dry goods and staples. He’d tell Duncan how she’d remained silent, just gazing at the buildings and taking in what he was saying, and that it was a given she’d never seen anything like those great docks rimming the riverfront or those mills and factories or that canal, never mind a town mostly built of brick and stone despite the abundance of trees, of wood, everywhere. So that Oldman had explained—June still wordless, the baby quiet on her lap—that timber never would have done, for while it was true that most houses outside of town were built of wood—some of them were upward of a hundred years old and most of them had never burned down—the factory owners and original town fathers wouldn’t have taken such a chance on the town going up in flames. And he’d recount to Duncan that the only pleasure he’d taken from stepping foot inside that shopping center was the fact that it was obvious, given June’s bewilderment, that she’d never stepped foot inside one either.

  Oldman was the one to strap Luke into the carriage seat of the shopping cart. And despite his intense dislike of the place, he was in turn delighted and sorrowful at how overwhelmed—indeed, cowed—by the magnitude of the place she was, what with a dozen checkout stations neatly placed at the store’s entrance and queues of shoppers and beyond them the expanse of endless aisles stocked to the brim, departments for baby clothes and toys, for footwear and hardware and automotive supplies, men’s and women’s casual and formal wear and outerwear and underwear, hunting and fishing outfits, even tackle—and in a separate area, with its own line of registers, groceries—as well as a food bar with counter and stools, where customers were ordering hamburgers and hotdogs and colas and coffee. Oldman explored the labyrinth haphazardly, the baby slapping happily at the shopping cart’s rail, June wide-eyed beside him, clearly overawed. In the baby department she finally opened the envelope and gave a small gasp, the color leaving her already wan face and she immobile, unable to gather her wits for a moment, turning away and bringing a hand to her forehead. Oldman later told Duncan that he knew then there wasn’t too little money but more than she’d ever had. When she finally turned back to face Oldman, she looked anguished and confused, and said: I don’t understand. So Oldman replied there wasn’t much about money that required understanding, she just needed to spend it as it needed to be spent.

  Which he saw to it she did, outfitting that baby and herself with what he advised they’d be needing maybe even tomorrow, and then, in the end—to his surprise—June asking someone stocking a table of sweaters if there was a knitting and sewing section, which there was, where she carefully selected skeins and knitting and crocheting needles and woolen cloth and a sewing kit. She had more than enough money at the register, Oldman holding the baby until she paid and the items were packaged, and then he handed her the infant and carried her purchases to the Studebaker. Once they were on their way, figuring she might be hungry, he’d asked if she’d like some fried clams, adding that the Puritan had the best ever—and seeing it was about dinnertime anyway and how he was a bit hungry himself, that he’d appreciate her company. Whether because she was hungry or because she felt obliged—Oldman told Duncan that not since the war had he encountered anyone so passive, so emotionally flat, so apparently deadened by constant distress, and that he couldn’t help thinking she’d survived something for reasons she couldn’t understand and certainly didn’t give herself credit for and, moreover, maybe hadn’t even wanted to survive—June finally said, well, only if she, they, weren’t inconveniencing him any more than she, they, already had.

  The Puritan’s interior had a warm glow, its booths covered with reddish-maroon faux leather, and the place was as yet uncrowded. Those who saw Oldman waved or said hello in greeting, and he knew they’d be wondering who the girl and baby were and realized he hadn’t thought about what he’d say about them if asked, decided to just tell anyone curious enough to bring the subject up that she was new in town and that he’d met her through Duncan. They sat in a booth and the waitress brought a highchair for Luke and the baby played with bits of a banana June requested for him before they ordered. When Oldman asked what she’d like, June said she’d have the same as he was getting for himself, so he requested what he always did, a platter of fried belly clams with French fries, and by the time the food arrived he was telling June how the old-timers here still went clamming, how clamming was done. She ate slowly, like someone who hadn’t seen food for a very long time and feared dying from ingesting it, and Oldman recounted to Duncan that she eventually announced that she’d never eaten clams before, hadn’t even known what they might look like cooked. What he didn’t tell Duncan, or anyone, and never would, was that as he watched June eat, the shock of déjà vu, though still unnerving, was making him marvel: the shape of her face, her thinness and height, her bone structure, her pallor, that peculiar opacity to her eyes—no glimpsing the soul through them—and the set of her mouth that suggested a resignation verging on vacuity, the shape of her hands, the way her shoulders sloped and hunched, the slowness with which she ate, were exactly those features and attributes of the one woman—or girl, for who knew how old she’d been—Oldman had utterly, inexplicably and improbably fallen in love with, in the midst of those horrible, and horrifying, circumstances at the end of the war, in a German town like so many hundreds that had been reduced to rubble by ruthlessly repetitive Allied bombings, its survivors a shocked, stunned, starving people—among them the homeless who had once resided there, surely also displaced persons, concentration camp survivors, freed POWs, the demobilized defeated—living in holes in the ground where cellars had been, or in buildings that had no fronts or sides, or in craters or beside mounds that had once been buildings, searching through the devastation for pieces of cloth
ing, broken crockery, tintypes and spoons and forks and knives and pots and pans no matter their condition, something or anything they could patch together or cling to or use, and sifting through the dirt in what had once been streets or gardens or sidewalks for anything edible.

  Oldman first saw her sitting in a fetal position on a rise of rubble, her head buried in her arms and her arms around her knees, her thin wrists and hands hanging limply from the sleeves of a man’s tattered overcoat she’d somewhere found, in pants too short for her legs so that part of her shins and sockless ankles showed above the workman’s boots she’d probably taken off the dead; he saw her in that position in those clothes, and from a distance of about twenty feet took the photograph—as was his job—that would be among tens of thousands taken of the war’s destitute in a decimated land. Oldman took the photograph and she raised her head at the sound of the click, or maybe just raised her head, at any rate saw him and made an anguished, exhausted sound and held her hands up to signal Don’t or Stop, and that second photograph he took—because it was too late to stop—was the only other he had of her, her face partially obscured and the overcoat listing over one of her stooped shoulders, revealing the filthy shirt—also a man’s—she wore beneath it. He called out Okay and let the camera drop as he came closer, and she put her hands down. When he saw her face, a shock wave of certainty shot through him and he knew, simply knew, that this girl, this woman—she could have been sixteen or twenty-six, it was impossible to tell—was the one to whom his heart belonged. Would always.

  Love at first sight.

  He approached her with pity and pathos and a sudden desperation because of his abject certainty that he would lose her, for he was on the move with the army, and it was just a matter of days before the company to which he was attached would be gone; and as he approached her he suffered, for the first time in his life, the fear of loss, a terror of losing the one person he was meant to spend his life with, the one meant to be the mother of his children—although he didn’t think this, since no words formed in his mind; there was simply a certainty coursing through him, releasing from the marrow of his bones—and he knew dread as he’d never known it before and would never know it since, for he was already mourning the loss of her in full knowledge that he’d be bereaved for the rest of his life; and Oldman determined to return and find her again as he warily, cautiously approached, never taking his eyes off her, finally stretching out his hand to stay her as he neared and took from his kit a fork and opened a can of rations and gave both into her hands, then crouched at her feet and watched her eat slowly, listlessly, hardly looking at the food but locking those pale expressionless eyes on his, finally handing him his fork and the can when half empty, wiping her mouth with a corner of that impossibly cavernous coat sleeve. He understood she couldn’t eat more, that she had sense enough to realize she couldn’t eat more because she hadn’t eaten enough in weeks or even months to survive the shock to her system, she must have seen—as Oldman had—the starving devour food and die; but he handed her the can and fork back and spoke to her in English and then in pidgin French, the only French he knew, motioning for her to eat the rest later, but when she didn’t react he stood and reached over and opened her coat and placed the can and fork on her lap, then closed the coat about her. Perhaps she was mute, or deaf, or didn’t understand English or his terrible French—she could have been from anywhere neither language was spoken—so he pointed to himself and said Oldman, thereafter mouthing the syllables silently, ridiculously; and then he pointed to her, that mound on which she sat, and tried in sign language to tell her to stay there, to indicate he would return. But when he came back later that day, she was gone.

  He saw her the next morning. He couldn’t help but think, wanted to believe, that she was waiting for him. He had managed to requisition for himself an extra pair of military-issue socks, a scarf. He gave them to her, along with more rations. He found her every day over five days. On the third day he brought someone from the unit who spoke German to translate for him, but she remained mute and kept her empty eyes on Oldman and gave no indication that she either heard or understood what he had the man translate for him. Try giving her a pen and paper, the soldier told him; and the next day, along with the rations, Oldman handed her a piece of paper with his name and military address and also his home address on it, and although she pocketed the rations she seemed not to know to do the same with the paper, which she held in her hands without looking at it. Oldman folded and stuffed it into one of her outer pockets, then gave her a pen and paper and motioned for her to write. She did nothing, so he eventually took back the paper and put the pen into that inner pocket of her coat. The last time he saw her, he tried to show her that he was leaving but would return, pointing to himself and walking his fingers through the air, then reversing the direction and pointing at the ground where he stood. He drew a heart with his hands, touched his fingers to his lips and placed the kiss they held on her mouth as she studied him passively. He finally spoke to her in a language he knew wasn’t hers, and maybe it was the seriousness in his voice or the desperation he knew to be on his face that made her come off that pile, stand before him, place her palm on the hollow of his shoulder as he reached beneath her open coat and touched her thin waist, traced the bones of her hips. When she drew back, her opaque eyes and her expression revealing nothing, she raised a hand to her heart and tapped her chest.

  She watched him go, Oldman turning back to see her standing there. He returned to the same spot several months later, on furlough, still with the military and hitching rides or walking interminable miles, knowing he didn’t have much time and unsure as to how he would manage to bring her back to the States but knowing he would find a way, do or die. But the rubble was being cleared, streets were no longer a matter of paths winding through the wreckage, people were passing stones hand to hand and reconstructing houses, buildings, their lives; there were a few shops, public wells, food relief stations, some temporary shelters erected by the occupying forces. The heap upon which she’d sat, where they’d met, was gone: there was nothing but an open crossroad in its place. He had the photograph of her with her hands up, her face only partially visible; he showed it to everyone he encountered, searched for her everywhere, and never found her, never saw her again.

  After years passed he found he could no longer recall her face, not exactly, had only a vague impression of her because he’d made himself stop looking at, stop being haunted by, those two photographs he’d kept of her. When June walked into Duncan’s office, there she was—no, not her, but such a likeness of her that he’d caught his breath, had had to gather his wits. And perhaps—for how could Oldman know; that girl, or woman, on that mound of rubble had never uttered a word—if she could have spoken, if she’d ever had, he told himself she’d have had June’s low, soft voice, with its flat cadence, and June’s way of speaking, with a quiet slowness that stemmed from shyness or a sense of inadequacy or perhaps her resolve to never be misunderstood—this last, Oldman would come to realize, was the crux of it, June having misunderstood in a heartbreaking manner the situation she’d gotten herself into and having no way of accurately deciphering the intentions of others—so that she measured every word, mostly said little, spoke plainly.

  Oldman wasn’t moved in the same way he’d been in his thirties and in a faraway land, but June’s uncanny resemblance to the one love of his life—to whom he remained true—stirred his heart, awakened in him a panic he hadn’t felt since being unable to find that girl, woman, who’d once sat solitary in the rubble of the war’s aftermath. By the time introductions were made and June sat down with that baby on her lap, Oldman already knew he would do everything, anything, for her. He would never tell Duncan, or anyone, this, never reveal this even to June, who, upon finishing her meal and sitting across from him at the Puritan restaurant, put her hand to her heart and tapped her chest in that peculiar gesture of thanks he’d only once before witnessed. He will barely admit to himself and never say
to Duncan, or to anyone, that he regretted—at that singular moment but not ever thereafter—that he was too old for love, and she too young.