The Man Who Loved His Wife. Vera Caspary
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city; his real reason was that they knew his disability and spared him the ordeal of speaking before strangers. He often lingered for a walk on streets where there were other pedestrians, tourists no doubt, whose presence gave the streets a slight sense of belonging to a city. Sometimes he drove down to the seedy center of the town to move with a crowd or listen to the street orators.
On one of these Thursdays Elaine’s treasured loneliness was interrupted. Kneeling on the garden path, digging up and separating irises, she heard wheels on the driveway, thought that Fletcher had come home early. From the path came a voice, whole and masculine, “I hope I’m not disturbing you. I just want to look at your garden.”
She turned with loam in her hands. From where she squatted, the man seemed very high, a long stretch of gabardine and tweed. “You haven’t changed much in the garden.”
“You know this garden?”
“I grew up in this house.”
“Oh.” She stood up to see him better. A narrow-brimmed hat shaded a narrow face, bony and sparsely covered with transparent skin, freckle-spattered. His eyes were shielded by close-fitting dark glasses.
“I haven’t been on the hill for a long time. But today . . . I had to see a patient on Geranium Drive so”—a long, freckled hand covered the grounds in a wide arc—“I came to see whether the new owners had ruined Aunt Cora’s garden.”
“New! We’ve been here more than a year, and why,” she challenged, “should we spoil your aunt’s garden?”
“Everyone else does. How could I know you wouldn’t pull out all the plants and put in those bestial-looking plants set in white pebbles? All around here,” the long, freckled hand moved in an arc of eloquent contempt, “they hire landscape specialists,” scorn underlined the word, “to make gardens ugly. I’m glad she isn’t here to see it.”
“Who?”
“Aunt Cora. My foster-mother. She planned and planted this garden.”
“It’s lovely.”
“You wouldn’t know the neighborhood. When I was a kid there was a grove of eucalyptus where that horror stands.” He jerked a nod toward a Greco-Roman contemporary with Regency urns on the roof. “And over there were two enormous pepper trees, male and female. I used to wonder how trees made it.” He laughed; Elaine offered an echo. The man paid no attention. “Modern gardeners don’t go for pepper and eucalyptus. They shed too much.” Uninvited he strode to the shade garden where azaleas and camellia shone pink and rose and white among polished foliage. “I used to resent it when she asked me to rake and carry, but in the blooming season . . . by God, it is the blooming season.” He took off his hat in obeisance.
Dusty red hair curled above a tall brow.
Elaine thought him too ardent but said gently, “I’m grateful to your foster-mother. Her garden’s one of the reasons we bought the place. And the privacy, too. It must have been pleasant to grow up here.”
He was too thickly wrapped in memories to give attention to a stranger. Elaine followed while he strode along the path to the pool. Suddenly, “I laid these stones. The path was originally gravel. How well the dichondra’s done. What a job to pull out all the crabgrass. I got twenty-five cents an hour. But why should you care?”
“I do. You made it lovely for me. At twenty-five cents an hour.”
“You haven’t spoiled the house either.”
The stranger’s compliment pleased her. Elaine valued mellowness and texture, thought the Mexican farmhouse architecture perfectly suited to the climate. The neighbors were always remodeling their houses, turning Tudor mansions into French chateaux, Cape Cod cottages into ranch houses with picture windows. Dazzling white stones and marble pillars transformed Mediterranean villas into buildings like funeral homes, and California bungalows were capped with mansard roofs. “Abortions,” said the visitor as they walked the paths he had laid.
“Why don’t we sit down?”
“I don’t want to keep you from anything.”
“I wasn’t doing anything in particular, just transplanting irises.”
“It’s the wrong season,” he said, and he held a chair for her. He asked her name, learned that she was married, that her husband was retired and generally at home, but always went out on Thursday afternoons. “That’s my free day, too,” he said. “I do my hospital rounds in the morning but unless there’s an emergency or necessary house calls, I try to keep Thursday afternoons for myself. Usually there are emergencies and necessary house calls. By the way, I’m Ralph Julian.”
They shook hands formally. Elaine listened edgily for the sound of her husband’s car. Dr. Julian’s visit would not be hard to explain, but there would inevitably be taut moments when the introduction would have to be acknowledged and Fletcher suffered the exposure of his infirmity. Just the same, Elaine was enjoying the unexpected visit and asked the guest if he would like to see how she had done the inside of the house.
He liked her furniture and hangings, noted the crammed bookshelves in the room which had been his foster-father’s library and enjoyed, after proper protest about not wanting to bother her, a cup of tea. Elaine said she always made tea for herself in the afternoon, and he said it was like old times with Aunt Cora pouring Tibetan tea and serving cookies on a silver plate.
After he had gone and she had put the tea things in the dishwasher, she bathed and dressed in a bright hostess gown to greet her husband. She told him all about the visit of Dr. Ralph Julian who had grown up in this house as the son of Dr. Harry and Mrs. Cora Julian, who had adopted him after their son had drowned in the swimming pool. “When he came to live here he was eight and this seemed the most beautiful place in the world. He’s sentimental about it.”
Sentiment brought Dr. Julian back after two weeks. He brought bulbs of a new tuberous begonia for the shade garden which he still considered his foster-mother’s. Elaine happened to have baked chocolate brownies that morning. Once more the spirit of Aunt Cora joined them. Eulogies were devoted to her cooking. Ralph had her recipe books somewhere in his apartment and promised to look for them. The next week he brought the books, which Elaine refused to keep since his future wife (on the second visit she had discovered that he was a bachelor) would surely want them. All week she copied out recipes and on the following Thursday tried her hand at macaroons. Fruitlessly. It was three weeks before he turned up to collect the cookbooks. There were no explanations as there were no formal dates. He came or did not. Elaine bought three new summer dresses and two pairs of bright slacks.
It was inevitable that her husband would meet the new friend. Ralph had been prepared for the maimed voice and showed neither the layman’s offensive tact nor a doctor’s clinical interest. When the subject was brought up . . . by Fletcher himself . . . Ralph praised the Los Angeles specialist recommended by Fletcher’s doctor in New York.
A few weeks after this Elaine had become ill with the flu. Fletcher’s specialist was certainly not the doctor to attend to her, and while he might have given her the name of a good internist, Fletcher suggested that she call Dr. Julian. Elaine was not so ill that she required that much attention, but Ralph came for daily visits, usually after all his other calls were finished so that he could linger with the patient and her husband. She was a healthy girl and recovered quickly. Nevertheless Ralph suggested a checkup. Fletcher drove her to his office and read magazines in the waiting room while she was with the doctor.
After her heartbeat and blood pressure had been recorded Ralph said, “I’m not coming to visit you anymore.”
Elaine hugged the coarse white examination gown tighter around her nakedness. “Oh dear, I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I. I’ve enjoyed coming to the house again, but I don’t think it’s good for your husband. Lie down on the table, please.”
She had thought she would shrink at the exquisitely personal examination. Austere in his white coat, Ralph Julian studied her with the detachment