CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rootstock
WHIT
From The Palmetto Whisper, the following Sunday:
“A certain great house upriver has long been admired for explaining itself to no one. We observe, with our usual affection, that it now has rather more not to explain than usual. The season’s loveliest portrait, you will recall, was composed around an absence.
Absences, in this column’s experience, are not filled by being painted over. ”
?
I have kept a grafting book for twenty years.
Every join I’ve ever made in those rows is in it: the date, the rootstock, the scion, and one of two words in the last column.
Took. Or failed. There is no third word.
A graft holds or it doesn’t, and no amount of wanting moves the entry.
You can stand over a vine and explain to it, at length, in your most reasonable voice, exactly why it ought to take.
It fails anyway. The book doesn’t record your reasons. It records the join.
I read a different document at night now.
It came to that table folded like a place card, and it is on Marguerite Voss’s letterhead, and it has my wife’s name at the bottom in her own hand — the only place at our table her name has ever been in her own hand, which is a sentence I have had to set down and walk away from more than once.
I read it the way I read the grafting book after a bad season: looking for the one line where I made the join wrong and could have gotten the other word.
There isn’t one line. That is the part I cannot get down. It’s every line. It’s ten years of lines, and every one of them says the same word in the last column, and the word is not the one I wanted.
Here is what twenty years in the rows will teach a man, if he’s paying attention — which, about the vines, I was.
You can have perfect scion wood. The best in the state.
Cut clean, healthy, everything a graft could ask for.
And if you bind it onto the wrong rootstock, into soil that was chosen and worked for a different vine entirely, it will not take.
It isn’t the scion’s fault. It isn’t even, in the end, the rootstock’s.
It’s the man who made the join in ground he didn’t choose and never once thought to question, because the ground was his mother’s and questioning it had never occurred to him as a thing a son was allowed to do.
I married the best thing I ever saw, and I planted her at my mother’s table, and for ten years I watched her not take and told myself she was being particular about the light.
She wasn’t particular about the light. She was a living thing in dead soil, holding her color as long as a living thing can, and I called the holding sunshine and let it reassure me, the way you let the last green leaves on a failing graft reassure you right up until the morning they’re brown.
So when the document came, I did the one thing I have always known how to do for Posey. I have done it loudly, in public, at no cost to myself, for ten years. I admired her.
I called the painter — the one Mother uses, who did the four wives on the stair, who did my grandmother from a photograph after she was already gone.
I made the call the way I have made every easy thing easy my whole life: in two minutes, with a laugh, getting a booked man to clear his fall for me before I’d quite finished asking.
I am good at that. I have always been good at that — at being liked, at making the difficult party say of course, Whit, for you, and hang up smiling.
It is the only talent I have ever had that cost me nothing, which should have told me something about its worth a great deal sooner than it did.
I had him work from the Whisper picture: the blue dress, the rail, the chandelier coming down on her like the four-o’clock light she was always chasing in those canvases I never asked to see.
I paid for the largest size. I told him where it would hang — the empty place on the stair gallery, under the sconce, the patched spot that has been waiting ten years for the right painter while I told my wife, annually, that we were still waiting for him.
I thought I had finally found him. I thought the right painter had been me all along, just late.
I had it crated and sent to Tradd Street. To her. I wanted her to see it before it went up — to see that I had done it at last, put her on the wall with the others, where she belonged, where I should have put her in year one.
I want to be honest about the size of my certainty, because it is the most damning thing in this whole account.
I was not nervous sending it. I drove home from the framer’s with the radio on.
I had already, God help me, pictured the moment — her face when the crate came open, the way she goes still in front of work that’s good, and then how she’d turn to me, and the ten years would fold up small and we would simply go on, mended, because I had finally Done The Thing.
That is how a man like me apologizes: he buys the grand object, he stages the reveal, and he casts himself, ahead of time, as the one who fixed it.
I had not considered for one second that the painting could be the wrong gift.
I had only considered how moved I was going to be in the giving of it.
I can give you the exact picture I drove home inside of, because I have made myself keep it since, as evidence.
I had her opening the crate in Bitsy’s garage and going still the way she goes still in front of work that’s good — and then turning, and the ten years folding up small and soft as a drop cloth, and the two of us simply resuming, mended, because I had at last produced the object that fixed it.
I had even decided where I would be standing when she turned.
I had blocked the whole scene like a man who has never once in his life had to wonder whether he would be admitted to a room.
It did not occur to me to wonder what she wanted.
It occurred to me only how the giving would look, and how it would feel to be, at last, the one who had grandly given it.
The crate came back four days later. Unopened.
The framer’s seals were exactly where I’d watched him set them, not one of them broken.
Freight collect — she had made me pay the shipping in both directions, and I sat with that for a long time before I understood it wasn’t pettiness.
It was instruction. Even this cost you nothing until I made it cost you something, and look how small the something was, and look how fast you reached for your wallet instead of the point.
Bitsy drove it up herself, in the back of her wagon, and stood in the Hall’s drive in the September heat and would not come inside.
“You had her painted,” she said. Not a question. “In the blue dress. By Mother’s painter. To hang on Mother’s stairs.”
“Beside the others,” I said. “Bitsy, I finally put her—“
“She left, Whit.” My sister has a way of saying a small word so that it lands like the only word.
“She took her own canvases down off the wall and drove them to my garage, and she is over there right now painting the harbor in a room with a door that locks from her side. She built herself a wall. A real one, that’s hers.
” She held out the freight tag until I took it.
“And you had her painted, by Mother’s painter, to hang on Mother’s wall, in the house she walked out of.
You tried to hang her in the house she left, little brother. ”
She got back in the wagon and put it in gear.
“You didn’t even notice,” she said, “that that’s the whole painting.”
I stood in the drive with the freight tag in my hand and the crate at my feet and the four wives behind me on the stair, each of them painted in her first year, each of them holding still ever since.
I had offered my wife the wall.
It took my sister to tell me the wall was the problem — and that I had spent ten years being its load-bearing son.