In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Old Gentleman
  • John J. Clayton (bio)

Walking stick twirling, like an old song-and-dance man, Ari takes a stroll around the house he and Sylvia have lived in for over half a century. He’s acting for an invisible camera, declaring that this house and its gardens are his beauties. Everywhere he sees work he’s put in: garden steps, slate shingles, ripe tomatoes. It’s early August. To make music, or anyway rhythm, he runs his stick along the vegetable garden fence, a fence of heavy hardware cloth dug deep down to keep out rabbits. This is mostly his own work, the vegetable garden, though the last couple of years he’s hired a student from the university to help get the plants in. Hard to be on his knees now, hard to stoop. Then the flower gardens. His work, Sylvia’s work. Amazing! From June to late September always something beautiful happening, complex interactions of color and shape. Nature made art.

Bee balm, crocosmia, big white Nauset daisies. Balloon flowers, phlox, day lilies in many colors. Irregular rows of Asiatic lilies, mostly gone by. All to be covered by snow, then the next year restored. The house, too, has had to be restored. When they bought it, Ari and Sylvia, half a century ago, it was already more than a century old. Classical columns in front, tall multi-paned windows on the main floor, three lights across, four down. Nice to look at from across the road, but a little seedy up close. The “Old Gentleman,” they called it. It was old, they were young. It was broken, they were broke. Chutzpah to buy a house then! Their two children were little, but still they somehow found the energy—didn’t they—to restore the house—replace the slate roof and the window sills—and to plant gardens—vegetable gardens at the rear, perennial beds, and patterns of annuals everywhere else.

Sweet equity—sweat equity. The only reason they could come close to affording the Old Gentleman is that Ari could do most of the work around the house himself. He remembers pulling the rotten front porch apart and, with some help from a carpenter, giving it a new foundation, then rebuilding it. Day by day he climbed a ladder and replaced slate fallen from a roof corner—right over [End Page 428] there, he points for no one with his cane—or inserted a fanlight—right there—where one had once arched over the front door.

As he walks and surveys—a little stiff, late afternoon—in his mind’s eye it’s years before: he’s home from university; he puts down his book bag, puts on his jeans, and goes out back to cut boards laid across two trestles, imbibing the sweet smell of wood fresh from the plane, while Sara and Ben swing on a plank he’s hung from a branch twenty feet high. Oh yes, sure, he’s puffing up the past again. They were, after all, just Sara and Ben, sometimes rushing around and giggling, sometimes bored or fighting. The beautiful harmony of his labor and the kids’ play more imagined than remembered.

In that same mental construction he sees Sylvia on her knees planting perennials. She did, God knows, plenty of that. They both did. Until recently she wrote the gardening column for the local newspaper. Would that she could still get on her knees, lug baskets of compost to new beds, even use a post-hole digger to start a fence. Now she’s arthritic. Well, hell—aren’t they both arthritic? And, more ominous, he has a heart condition. Some condition! A nice way of saying that at any moment the blood could get blocked and the heart would burn out like a dry pump. It’s happened once. So he carries his death inside his chest. But he hates tiptoeing as if he were carting explosives.

He sits down at the wrought-iron garden table and hears the tap of Sylvia’s cane on the flagstone terrace. The more terrace, the less damn lawn to mow, he remembers saying to her, as decades ago...

pdf

Share