The Box Garden (12 page)

“Yes. In the Beaches area.”

“Are you going to see him?”

Another pause. “Maybe,” I mumble this ‘maybe’, chewing the side of my cup, trying to conceal the leap of sensation this ‘maybe’ excites in me.

“But he is a botanist?” Judith asks.

“Yes. In a way. Actually, it’s hard to tell.”

“What do you mean?”

“He seems to know all about plants. And he sent an article to the
Journal.
I more or less -assumed that only a botanist would submit an article to a botanical journal.”

“What was it about?”

“Grass.”

“Grass? Was it any good?”

“Yes. And no. I liked it. But Doug—you remember Doug Savage, you met him in Vancouver when you were there—he thought it was hilarious.”

“You mean actually funny?”

“It wasn’t funny. He wasn’t trying to be funny at all. It was a serious article, passionately serious, in fact. And scientific in a way. It was a sort of sociology of grass, you might say. He has this theory about the importance of grass to human happiness.”

“Maybe he’s talking about marijuana.”

“No. Just ordinary grass. Garden grass. He’s trying to prove that where people don’t have any grass, just concrete and asphalt and so on, then the whole human condition begins to deteriorate.”

“It sounds a little fanciful,” Judith’s old skepticism again.

“In a way. I don’t understand it all, to tell you the truth. But he writes with the most pressing sort of intensity, something much larger than mere eloquence. Anguished. But reflective too. Not like a scientist at all. More like a poet. Or like a philosopher.”

“But nevertheless the
Journal
turned it down?”

“Naturally. Doug thought it was just plain crazy.”

“And he gave you the job of returning it.”

“Yes. I send back all manuscripts we can’t use. And usually I do it fairly heartlessly. But with Brother Adam it was different. I couldn’t bear to have him think we utterly rejected what he’d written, that we sneered at what he believed in. I mean, that would be like saying no to something that was beautiful. And humiliating someone who was, well, beautiful too. Don’t look so exasperated, Judith. I know I sound fatuous.”

“Go on. You sent the manuscript back to the Priory?”

“Yes. But instead of the usual rejection card, I enclosed a little note.”

“Saying . . .?”

“Oh, just that I’d enjoyed reading the article, at least the parts I understood. I thought I’d better be honest about it. And I said I thought it was a shame we couldn’t use an article like that now and then to break the monotony. Everything we print is so detached. You wouldn’t believe it, Judith. I should send you an issue. It’s inhuman. The prose style sounds factory-made, all glued together with qualifying phrases. And here at last was an article spurting with passion. From someone who really loved grass. To lie on, to walk on, to sit on. Or to smell. Just to touch grass, he feels, has restorative powers.”

“Why grass? I mean, why not flowers or fruit or something? Or trees, even? Isn’t grass just a little, you know, ordinary? After all, there’s a lot of it around. Even these days.”

“That’s partly why he loves it, I think. The fact that grass is so humble. And no one’s ever celebrated grass before.”

“Walt Whitman?”

“That was different. That was more of a symbolic passion.”

“What happened after you wrote to him?”

“Nothing at first. A month at least, maybe even longer. Then I got a parcel. Delivered to the
Journal
office.”

“From Brother Adam.”

“Yes. But you’d never guess what was in it.”

“Grass.”

“Yes.”

We both laugh. “It wasn’t really grass, of course.” I explain. “It was only the stuff to grow it with. There was a sprouting tray. And some earth in a little cloth bag. Lovely earth really, very fine, a kind of sandy-brown colour. It was clean, clean earth. As though he’d dug it up especially and sieved it and prayed over it. And then there was the packet of seeds. Not the commercial kind. His own. He does his own seed culture.”

“And a letter?”

“No. No letter. Not even instructions for planting the seeds. Just the return address. Brother Adam, The Priory, 256 Beachview, Toronto.”

“How odd not to send a note.”

“That’s what made it perfect. A gift without words. As though the grass was the letter. As though it had a power purer than words.”

Judith laughs. “You always were a bit of a mystic, Charleen.”

“But what really touched me, I think, was the parcel itself. The way it was wrapped.”

“How was it wrapped?”

“Beautifully. I don’t mean aesthetically. After all, there’s a limit to the power of brown paper and string. But it was so neatly, so handsomely done up.”
With such touching precision. The paper, two layers, that crisp, waxy paper, every corner perfect, and the knots were tight and trimmed and symmetrical like the knots in diagrams. And the address was printed in black ink in lovely blocky letters.
“I hated to open it, in a way,” I risk telling her.

Opening it I had had the sensation of being touched by another human being; I had felt the impulse behind the wrapping—and the strength of his wish, his inexplicable wish to please me. Me!

Judith smiles and says nothing, but from her amused gaze I see she thinks I am absurd. Nevertheless she’s waiting to hear more. My account of Brother Adam cannot really interest her much—though she is currently writing a biography of a nineteenth-century naturalist and is somewhat curious about the scientific impulse—but she listens to me with the alert probing attention which she has perfected.

“At first I thought of planting the grass at the office, but I was worried it would go dry over the weekend. Besides I didn’t want to answer any questions about it. Doug Savage has a way of taking things over.”
And besides it would have given his imagination something to feed on; he and Greta cherish my eccentricities as though they were rare collectables.

“Go on.”

“So I took the whole thing home on the bus. Seth thought it was a wonderful present, not at all peculiar, just wonderful. And we put in the seeds that same day. There’s quite a lot of sun in the living room. At least for Vancouver. Anyway you don’t need strong sunlight for grass. One of the things Brother Adam likes about grass is the way it adapts to any condition. It has an almost human resilience. He hates anything rigid and temperamental like those awful rubber plants everyone sticks in corners these days.”

“I like rubber plants.”

“Anyway grass can put up with almost anything. I have it in a box by the window and it does well there.”

I have to hold my tongue to keep from telling Judith more: the way, for instance, I felt about those first little seeds. That they might be supernatural, seeds sprouted from a fairy tale, empowered with magical properties, that they might produce overnight or even within an hour a species of life-giving, life-preserving grass. How that night I fell asleep thinking of the tiny, brown seeds lying sideways against the clean, pressing earth, swelling from the force of moisture, obeying the intricate commands of their locked-in chromosomes. Better not tell Judith too much; she might, and with reason, accuse me of overreacting to a trifling gift. She, who has never doubted herself, couldn’t possibly understand how I could attach such importance to a gift of grass seed or the fact that it placed a burden on me, a responsibility to make the seeds sprout; their failure to germinate would spell betrayal or, worse, it would summarize my fatal inability to sustain any sort of action.

“Was it any good?” Judith asks. “The grass seed, I mean?”

“Within three days,” I tell her, making an effort to speak with detachment, “the first, pale green, threadlike points of grass had appeared. I watered them with a sprinkling bottle, the kind Mother used to dampen clothes on the kitchen table. Every morning and again at night. Sometimes Seth took a turn too.”

“And then you wrote to thank Brother Adam for the grass and that was the start of your friendship?”

“Actually I made myself wait two weeks before I wrote. I wanted to make sure the grass was going to survive. By the time I wrote, all of it was up. Some of it was over an inch high. And I cut two or three shoots with my manicure scissors and Scotch-taped them to the letter.”

Judith smiles dreamily; I have managed, I can see, to delight her. “But what,” she asks, “does one do with a box of grass?”

“It’s strange, but I’ve become very fond of it. It’s divinely soft, like human hair almost. And brilliant green from all that water. I have to trim it about once a week with sewing shears. Sometimes I sprinkle on a little fertilizer although Brother Adam says it’s not really necessary.”
I also like to run my hand over its springy tightly-shaved surface, loving its tufted healthy carpet-thick threads, the way it struggles against the sides of the box, the industry with which it mends itself.

“And you’ve been writing to each other ever since?”

“Yes, more or less.”

“Often?”

“Every three or four weeks. I’d write more often but I don’t want to wear him down.” There is also of course, the fact that an instant reply would place Brother Adam in the position of a debtor—and to be in debt to a correspondent is to hold power over a creditor, a power I sensed he would not welcome.

“What do you write about, Charleen?”

I have to think. “It’s funny, but we don’t write much about ourselves. He’s never asked me anything about myself—I like that. And I don’t pester him either. He usually writes about what he’s feeling at the moment or what he’s seeing. Like once he saw a terrible traffic accident from his window. Once he wrote a whole letter about a wren sitting outside on his fire escape.”

“A whole letter about a wren on a fire escape!”

“Well, yes, it was more on the metaphysical side.”

“And you do the same?”

“Sort of. I don’t so much write as compose. It takes me days. I’ve hardly written any poetry lately. All of it seems to go into those letters, all that old energy. Writing to him is—I don’t know how to explain it—but writing those letters has become a new way of seeing.”

“Therapeutic,” Judith comments shortly, almost dis missively.

“I suppose you could call it that.”

“I wish you wrote to me more often.”

“I wish you wrote to me too.”

“We always say this, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Charleen?”

“What?”

“What does Eugene think of your ... your relationship with Brother Adam?”

Judith has always been clever. A bright girl in school, a prizewinner at university; now she is referred to in book reviews as a clever writer. But her real cleverness lies not in her insights, but in her uncanny ability to see the missing links, the ellipses, the silences. Like the perfect interviewer she asks the perfect question. “What does Eugene think?” she asks.

Eugene doesn’t know, I tell her. He doesn’t know Brother Adam even exists.

After a while Judith asks me if I’m feeling hungry. “We could make some toast,” she suggests.

I nod, although I’m not so much hungry as emptied out; a late night hollowness gnaws at me, the grey, uneasy anxiety I always feel in this house. The rain is coming down hard now, leaving angry little check marks on the black window, and the house has grown chilly.

In the breadbox we find exactly one-third of a loaf of white, sliced bread. The top of the bag has been folded down carefully in little pleats to preserve freshness. “A penny saved ...” our mother had always said. Meagreness.

A memory springs into focus: how I once asked for a piece of bread to put out for the birds. “They can look after their own the same as we have to,” she replied. Ours, then, had been a house without a birdfeeder, a house where saucers of milk were not provided for stray cats. This was a house where implements were neither loaned nor borrowed, where the man who came to clean the furnace was not offered a cheering cup of coffee, where the postman was not presented with a box of fudge at Christmas. (Such generosities belonged only to fairy tales or soap operas.) In this house there was no contribution to the Red Cross nor (what irony) to the Cancer Fund. Meagreness. I had almost forgotten until I saw the bread in the breadbox.

“Maybe we’d better not have any toast after all,” Judith says, tightlipped. “She’ll be short for breakfast.”

Instead we make more coffee, stirring in extra milk and sugar. I turn to Judith and ask if she has bought a wedding gift for our mother.

“Not yet,” she says clutching her hair in a gesture of frenzy. “And it isn’t because I haven’t thought and thought about it.”

“I haven’t bought anything either,” I admit. “Not yet anyway.”

“Do you have any idea what she’d like?”

“Not one.”

“Why is it,” Judith demands, “that it’s so hard to buy our own mother a present? It isn’t just this damned wedding present either. Every Christmas and birthday I go through the same thing. Ask Martin. Why is it?”