Occasional Prose (39 page)

He does not want to hear this. His torn soul is in no mood for stock-taking. She’s his breath and his very heartbeat, he cries out, his dear delight. Her tears call forth his—he cannot tell which are which. But more than ever—she must believe it—he needs her steadfast spirit. For his sake, she must not close her mind to hope. He begs it of her. “Oh, calm yourself, my own, my dear Violetta. Your grief is killing me.” What he cannot admit, of course, is that she
is
calm, facing her own extinction. It is he who is agitated. And what he is really begging her is to spare him her death, in other words, not to die.

At that moment, without preparation, when his son’s demoralized state has reached a point close to total abjection, Germont enters the sickroom. He is a breath not of fresh air but of authority, and his concern is not with love but with dignity. Standing in the doorway, he speaks Violetta’s name, loudly, like a summons. “Ah, Violetta!” Behind him appear Annina and the doctor. “You, sir!” she cries happily, struggling to sit up and arrange her laces and ribbons. “Father!” puts in Alfredo, surprised. He has not been aware of the special relation that has grown up between these two. Wholly intent on each other, Violetta and Germont seem for the moment to forget him. She is oblivious, too, of the doctor, who is taking her pulse. “So you didn’t forget me?” she marvels. The father draws himself up. “I am here to keep the promise I gave you. To take you to my heart as a daughter.” His stiff form bends down toward her; his deep voice darkens with emotion. “Oh, generous girl.” In deference to his father’s feeling, Alfredo steps aside. “Alas, you’ve come too late.” The flat words escape her before she can stop herself. “Still, I’m grateful. ...” She would not wish to take away from his pride in the keeping of the promise. With his assistance, she pulls herself upright and embraces him. As they stand clasped in each other’s arms, she catches sight of the doctor. “Do you see this, Grenvil? In the arms of all my dear ones, I’m drawing my last breath.”

Startled, Germont releases her, so that he can study her better. Her tone just now with her medical attendant has been gay, almost teasing, but the father does not like what he sees in her over-bright eyes. “What are you saying?” he exclaims. Then he examines her wasted form. “Great Heaven, it’s true!” he mutters to himself.

He bows his head, shaken, remembering how he had doubted her when she had spoken during their last meeting of her failing health. He had taken it for a lie she had invented to put him off. Obviously he had not known this woman at all, despite the god-like part he had played in her unhappy destiny. Or was the part he played diabolical? The thought occurs to him for the first time. Unfortunately she has to die to prove what she really is—a dying woman—and absolve herself of the last of his suspicions. “Do you
see
her, Father?” the son says vehemently. Germont bows to the stinging reproach. He will have a great deal to forgive himself, if he is able.

“Don’t torture me, I beg you. No more, please! I’m devoured with remorse already. Every word of hers goes through me like a bolt of lightning. Imprudent old man!” Repentance, as always—is that not its nature?—is too late, just like his arrival in this dingy room in a “popular” neighborhood. He shakes his head. “Only now I see the wrong I did her.”

With father and son brooding on either side of her, Violetta is called on to exercise her force of character. The moment is ripe for a universal reconciliation, and she must reconcile these unhappy men, her dear ones, with themselves—their past errors and cruelties—and, more important, with the future. And, wonderfully, she has a plan. From a hiding-place at her elbow, she takes a jewel-case that contains a miniature of herself. Unlocking the little casket—unique relic of her worldly past—she turns to Alfredo, her real love, from whom in her simplicity she has let the hideous specter of duty tear her away.

“Come closer, dear Alfredo. Listen, won’t you take this? It’s the picture of me as I was then, in the good days. It can serve to remind you of her who loved you so.” Alfredo still refuses to hear the note of finality, maybe because it speaks to him in that dreamy, dulcet voice, which affects him like a caress. “No, you won’t die! Don’t tell me that. God cannot have put me here to bear such a torment.” But the dulcet voice overrides his protest and grows dreamier still.

It is telling of the life to come, where Violetta sees a vision, of a pure young girl. Is it the little sister for whom she has made the heroic sacrifice? No, it is another maiden, a girl he does not know yet, the girl who will offer him her heart and whom he must marry, because Violetta wishes it. Sister and bride blur as Violetta gazes raptly into the future. This is the ultimate sacrifice, the crudest and sweetest of all. She has died on the altar of the family and looks down on it from Heaven.

“Give her this little image. Tell her that it’s a present from one who is praying for her, one who’s up above with the angels and prays for her and for you.” The fusion is complete. She has made a gift of her life to a young girl “pure as an angel” and now, in reward, she is an angel herself, offering the gift of her image to another chaste spirit. The unchaste one, chastened, is leaning down from Heaven dangling a holy eidolon, like the girdle that the Virgin on the day of her Assumption tossed to the Apostle Thomas doubtingly watching her mount.

In an ideal sense, it is all true. Violetta, who was never bad except in the eyes of middle-class morality, has become wholly and visibly “good.” This can be a moral fact even if a deception has been practiced on the aspiring soul, even if the new-made angel does not receive a genuine, twenty-four-carat harp, even if it is a shocking case of victimization. In any event, the struggle is over, or nearly so.
Consummatum est.
They gather round her deathbed, Alfredo still begging to be told it is not true, his father repenting, and the doctor and Annie bidding her suffering soul farewell as they see it fly off to join the blessed spirits they believe are “up there.” And, for a pseudo-miraculous moment, Violetta herself is brought back to life, rising to her feet with no sign of weakness. All her pains have left her; her former strength, as if by magic, has come back. But only Alfredo is deceived, crying “Violetta!” in an access of joy. It is a phenomenon familiar to medicine—a last flare-up of life. She falls back on the bed. The doctor feels her pulse. She is dead.

Fall 1983

NATURE PIECES

The Rake’s Progress
*

E
LEANOR PERÉNYI’S TITLE IS
from Marvell: “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green Thought in a green Shade” (“The Garden”). Her genius here, though, is Johnsonian, and I mean it as a high compliment. These witty and useful sallies on the art and practice of gardening are arranged in dictionary form; the entries proceed alphabetically from “Annuals” through “Woman’s Place,” with an appendix on catalogues.

The loose-leaf arrangement is ideally suited to the material, each entry fitting into its well-dug bed of history and legends and yet retaining a certain branching liberty of form. Other non-technical books on the subject have been based, with logic, on the calendar, like the ancient
Works and Days
. The first twelve chapters of Gertrude Jekyll’s
Wood
&
Garden
(1899 and a bible to the present author) run from January through December. The longer English growing season recommends that approach: “There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming, summer,” Miss Jekyll’s second chapter—
February
—begins. A four-part division by seasons, harking back to Thomson and Haydn, is possible too. But Mrs. Perényi’s method, not needing to stick to Nature’s fairly iron-clad schedule, can be pithy or expansive ad libitum, which allows her pleasing changes of tempo. The entry “
MAZES
,” for example, two sentences long, offers the following counsel: “Should you ever find yourself lost in one, choose either the right or the left wall and follow its every turning. You can’t fail to emerge.”

I wonder whether Eleanor Perényi was conscious of Dr. Johnson’s accompanying shade as inspiration in these pages. It may be just an affinity of temperament. If the great lexicographer had been reborn after undergoing a sex change and been interested in the outdoors in the first place he would not be averse, I think, to putting his name to many of these “green thoughts.” The point in common is an unshakable firmness of opinion, often looking frankly like prejudice, as in the famous definition of “
RENEGADE
,” or Mrs. Perényi’s decided views on “
EVERGREENS
,” “
SEED TAPES
,” wood-chip mulches, almost any gardening fashion. Like Johnson, she has a vigor of expression to match her ideas and a range of erudition that surprises by its freedom from pedantry. I knew about fuchsia and funkia, but never guessed (though one could have) that dahlias were named for a botanist Dahl and zinnias for a Herr Zinn. Johnson, though not musical, might have been diverted to learn that Handel assigned his Xerxes an ode to the plane tree: “amor vegetabile, cara ed amabile.” But the basic, the profound, resemblance between the two lies in an empirical cast of mind combining with strict principles to give a dappled effect of waywardness—the signature of a majestic and authoritative yet noticeably human nature. One could not reasonably expect Sam Johnson to be a humbly devout Christian, and yet he was close to that, nor would one expect Mrs. Perényi to be a humbly devout apostle of
Organic Gardening
, and yet she is close to that.

One of the many charms of this delightful book is its lack of claim to professionalism. It is manifestly directed to amateurs by a more advanced member of their tribe. Mrs. Perényi has been an amateur longer and more inveterately than most gardeners and is unashamed of it. In fact it is this in the end that constitutes her authority, even gives her the papal right to an occasional ex-cathedra pronouncement. Confessions of failure, uttered in a forthright, no-nonsense tone, give the author an ascendancy over professional gardening experts, who are in no position to make such avowals without supplying an explanation of the
cause
of the failure.

That is the difference between literature (Mrs. P.) and “science” (Your Garden Columnist). To get to the bottom of her repeated annoying failures—giant blue delphiniums, gentians, sweet peas—Mrs. Perényi, were she an expert, would send samples of her soil to her county extension agent for the usual series of tests. Just like checking yourself into the hospital for the annual exploration. But she has
never sent her soil for analysis, nor her compost, nor the salt hay and seaweed she uses as mulch.
In gardening circles this is as peculiar as it would be to meet someone in New York intellectual circles who has never been to a psychoanalyst or smoked pot. And I will bet that she doesn’t even own a home soil-testing kit. Or a rain gauge. Like any normal gardener, she has failures and sometimes she suspects what has caused them (a dog peeing, for example; a street light shining on the chrysanthemums). But sometimes she can find no culprit. It is a mystery. Like why the hollyhock and foxglove seeds I plant in
my
garden never come up—no, the seed is not old.

Not just the failures. The successes (or luck) she has in her garden are frequently a mystery to her too. She does not know why her tomatoes fail to get the blight, why in fact the whole village of Stonington is blight-free. It is (to repeat) luck. Yet luck by itself cannot account for or excuse success or the lack of it in gardening. Obviously study and hard work are factors. Mrs. Perényi says she does not believe in a “green thumb.” But I imagine that she is simply tired of hearing about it; she is irritated by clichés.

It is clear that experience and common sense, plus luck, count for a great deal with her. Yet isn’t a “green thumb” the proverbial name assigned by common sense to cover a mysterious run of luck in making things grow? Common sense, thus—an ally of folk wisdom—has noted an
x
factor in the whole gardening business. Mrs. Perényi herself subsumes it under “
MAGIC
.” “The lesson for the gardener,” she counsels, “is not to swallow everything he reads in books. ... If you have a question, don’t write your newspaper either. Better to consult the old lady down the road, the one whose porch is covered with moon vines and who grows the blessed thistle (
Cnicus benedictus
) in her garden.”

This old lady, of course, is a witch. Mrs. Perényi has been writing in anger against what she calls establishment thinking in the gardening world—thinking with an automatic, unquestioning bias in favor of the arsenal of herbicides and pesticides employed by the majority. It is understandable that in the context she would prefer “white” witchcraft to black “science,” lunacy (the moon vine, night sister of the morning glory) to sanity. Mrs. Perényi, for all her rationality, is a romantic. If she were not, she would give up the struggle.

Worse, she does not really believe in her anti-scientific magic. When there is no longer any old lady down the road, where does the reader turn? The whole passage is a groan of future-shocked despair. More than a hundred pages later, toward the end of the book, she is writing prophetically: “Already I am something of a freak in this community on account of my vegetables, herbs and fruits. I foresee the day when I graduate from freak to witch.”

Gardening, in this country, is an eccentricity. It is wasteful, time-consuming, expensive, impractical. That home-grown fruits and vegetables
taste
better cannot justify the mad investment of labor. The growing of flowers is still more indefensible as long as there are florists in practice (or, for people who cannot afford florists, goldenrod or Queen Anne’s lace growing free by the roadside). Both pursuits rest on indemonstrable premises. Taste better to whom? Or taste
how much
better? Enough to repay the cost-computed labor? The answer “immeasurably better” will not do. As for home-grown flowers, by what standards, pray, are they superior to florists’ flowers, to say nothing of the eco-approved wild flowers and grasses? Are flowers in fact necessary at all in the ordinary home? Ceremonial occasions seeming to require them, traditionally connected with the rites of marriage and death, are no longer held at home but in the reception rooms and “parlors” of hotels and funeral directors. There is no evident answer to these questions. Only in terms of what are admittedly prejudices can you put up an argument for a dish of garden peas on the table and some home-cultivated flowers (wild don’t last as well) in the middle.