Paullina Simons: The Summer Garden

“Of course,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile.

Tatiana threw away her red New York nail polish, her flirty post-war ruched and pleated New York dresses, her high-heeled New York greenbelt brilliant Ferragamo shoes. Something happened to him when he saw her in New York things. What’s the matter, she would ask, and he would reply that nothing was the matter, and that would be all he’d reply. So she threw them all out and bought herself a yellow muslin dress, a floral chintz dress, a white cotton sheath, a blue wrap dress—from Maine. Alexander still said nothing, but was less quiet. Now he talked to her of other things, like Ho Chi Minh and his band of warriors.

She tried, tried to be funny with him like before. “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”

“Sure, tell me a joke.” They were walking up a Stonington hill behind a huffing Anthony.

“A man prayed for years to go to paradise. Once, going up a narrow path in the mountains he stumbled and fell into the precipice. By a miracle he grasped some sickly bush and started crying: ‘Anybody here? Please, help! Anybody here?’

“After some minutes of silence the voice answered: ‘I am here.’

“‘Who are you ?’

“‘I am God.’

“‘If you are God, then do something!’

“‘Look, you asked me for so long to be brought to paradise. Just unclench your hands—and immediately you will find yourself in paradise.’

“After a small silence the man cried: ‘Anybody ELSE here? Please—help!’”

To say that Alexander didn’t laugh at that joke would have been to understate matters.

Tatiana’s hands trembled whenever she thought of him. She trembled all day long. She walked through Stonington as if she were sleepwalking, stiff, unnatural. She bent to her son, she straightened up, she adjusted her dress, she fixed her hair. The churning inside her stomach did not abate.

Tatiana tried to be bolder with him, less afraid of him.

He wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jimmy, or the other fishermen, or anybody. Sometimes in the evenings, as they walked down Main Street and looked inside the shops, he would buy her some chocolate, and she would turn up her face to thank him, and he would kiss her on the forehead. The forehead!

One evening Tatiana got tired of it and, jumping up on the bench, flung her arms around him. “Enough with the head,” she said, and kissed him full on his lips.

His one hand on the cigarette, the other on Anthony’s ice cream, he couldn’t do more than press against her. “Get down,” he said quietly, kissing her back without ardor. “What’s gotten into you?”

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you man o’ war!

Alone with Anthony, in their daily wanderings up and down the hills of Stonington, Tatiana made friends with the women who ran the stores and the boys who brought the milk. She befriended a farm woman in her thirties up on Eastern Road, whose husband, a naval officer, was still in Japan. Every day Nellie cleaned the house, weeded the front garden and waited for him on the bench outside, which is how Tatiana met her, just skipping by with her son. After talking to her for two minutes, Tatiana felt so sad for the woman, viscerally remembering grieving for Alexander, that she asked Nellie if she needed help with the farm. Nellie had an acre of potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers. Tatiana knew something about these things.

Nellie gladly agreed, saying she could pay Tatiana two dollars a day from her husband’s army check. “It’s all I can afford,” she said. “When my husband comes back I’ll be able to pay you more.”

But the war ended a year ago, and there was still no news of him. Tatiana said not to worry.

Over coffee, Nellie opened up a little. “What if he comes back and I won’t know how to talk to him? We were married such a short time before he went to fight. What if we find out we’re complete strangers?”

Tatiana shook her lowered head. She knew something about these things, too.

“So when did your husband come back?” Nellie asked with envy.

“A month ago.”

“So lucky.”

Anthony said, “Dad didn’t come back. Dad was never coming back. Mama left me to go find him.”

Nellie stared dully at Anthony.

“Anthony, go play outside for a minute. Let Nellie and me finish up.” Tatiana ruffled Anthony’s hair and ushered him outside. “Kids these days. You teach them to speak and look what they do. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

That evening Anthony told Alexander that Mama got a job. Alexander asked Anthony questions, and Anthony, happy to be asked, told his father about Nellie and her potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers, and her husband who wasn’t there, and how Nellie ought to go and find him, “just like Mama went and found you.”

Alexander stopped asking questions. All he said after dinner was, “I thought you said we were going to be all right on ten dollars a day.”

“It’s just for Anthony. For his candy, his ice cream.”

“No. I’ll work at night. If I help sell the lobsters, it’s another two dollars.”

“No!” Tatiana quickly lowered her voice. “You work plenty. You do plenty. No. Anthony and I play all day anyway.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Play.”

“We’ll have time for everything. He and I will be happy to help her. And besides,” said Tatiana, “she is so lonely.”

Alexander turned away. Tatiana turned away.

The next day Alexander came back from the boat and said, “Tell Nellie to stuff her two dollars. Jimmy and I worked out a deal. If I catch him over a hundred and fifty legal lobsters, he’ll pay me an extra five dollars. And then five more for every fifty legals above one fifty. What do you think?”

Tatiana thought about it. “How many traps on your trawl?”

“Ten.”

“At two legal lobsters per trap … twenty at most per trawl … one trawl an hour, hauling them up, throwing most of them back … it’s not enough.”

“When it comes to me,” he said, “aren’t you turning into a nice little capitalist.”

“You’ve sold yourself short, Alexander,” Tatiana said to him. “Like a lobster.”

Jimmy must have known it, too—the market price for lobsters increasing, and Alexander receiving many job offers from other boats—because he changed the terms without even being asked, giving Alexander five dollars extra for every fifty legals above the first fifty. At night Alexander was too tired to hold a glass of beer in his hands.

Tatiana marinated Nellie’s tomatoes, made Nellie potato soup, tried to make tomato sauce. Tatiana had learned to make very good tomato sauce from her friends in Little Italy, almost as if she were Italian herself. She wanted to make Alexander tomato sauce, just like his Italian mother used to make, but needed garlic, and no one had garlic on Deer Isle.

Tatiana missed New York, the boisterous teeming marketplace of the Saturday morning Lower East Side, her joyous best friend Vikki, her work at Ellis Island, the hospital. The guilt of it stung her in the chest—longing for the old life she could not live without Alexander.

Tatiana worked in the fields by herself while Nellie minded Anthony. It took her a week to dig up Nellie’s entire field—one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes. Nellie could not believe there was so much. Tatiana negotiated a deal with the general store for 50 cents a bushel, and made Nellie seventy-five dollars. Nellie was thrilled. After twelve hours on the boat, Alexander helped Tatiana carry all hundred and fifty bushels to the store. At the end of the week, Nellie still paid Tatiana only two dollars a day.

When Alexander heard this, his voice lost its even keel for a moment. “You made her seventy-five dollars, we carried all the fucking bushels down the hill for her, and your so called friend still only paid you your daily wage?”