424
PARTISAN REVIEW
than a man's should be, there had crept the note of senility's sour
protestations. Yet, in a
sen~e,
he looked exactly as he had when I last
saw him: his seven static years had done no more than reinforce what
had been there all along.
It was here that I had seen him last. I had told him goodbye
while he pruned the rhododendrons. Then, I had longed to confirm
our kinship by some gesture which, no matter how brief, would unite
us for its duration: a look, perceiving me at last from the eyes that
benevolently studied the shrub and shears, a clasp of the hands that
tenderly ministered to the leaves and blossoms, or a word from the
mouth that an hour ago had elegantly and incisively said, "Of course
you may stay as long as you like. It
i~
your privilege." I had come
out to
him,
believing that the crisis had not been reached yet, that
there was still time to deflect the catastrophe. But he did not look
up, and the stretch of grass betwe·en us seemed unnavigable.
As
I
stared at
him
stupidly, a naive tear in either eye, I realized that my
misery
was gauche for I knew that my father did not see our estrange–
ment in the heroic dimensions that I did. And so I had turned at last
and facing the house, my back to
him,
had said, "Well, goodbye."
Before he echoed me, I heard, several times, the snip of his shears
and the rustling of the rhododendron leaves.
We moved tonight from shrub to shrub and from the bed of
zinnias to the rose-bushes, and he murmured that he hoped I was not
bored, although he knew I was not interested in flowers ("something,
as you remember," he said, "I never understood in you" ), but that
it was
his
habit to spend half an hour in the garden every evening
after dinner. An abrupt movement in the grass unnerved my citied
feet and I asked my father if there were snakes here still.
"Of course," he laughed. "One wouldn't want one's garden to
be incomplete. Besides, they kill the spiders."
We slowly approached the far end of the garden where
his
splendid azaleas were planted and the japonica and where three moun–
tain ash trees dropped their scarlet globules on to my mother's grave.
Our advance, deliberate and silent like that of acolytes toward the
sanctuary, enclosed us in a parenthesis whose solemnity, for me, was
trumped-up, and I, to demolish the ambiguity of my role, said lightly,
"How the ash trees have flourished."
"Yes. The soil here welcomes anything. John Stuart, whom you
may remember, was surprised when he came to visit me some years
ago, at my choice of decoration for this part of the garden. 'Red?'
says he. 'And something so foreign to us? I'd thought you would
plant junipers.' And still, when I had explained my reason to
him,
