The Winter Gardeners. Dennis Denisoff

      We also acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the

      Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through

      the Ontario Book Initiative.

      NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA

      CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Denisoff, Dennis

      The winter gardeners / Dennis Denisoff.

      ISBN 1-55245-129-1

      I. Title.

      PS8557.E484W56 2003 C813′.54 C2003-904962-0

       This story is for Ivan,

       who has taught me so much about

       unconditional love without expecting

       to learn anything from me in return.

      A DAY IN THE HEARTLAND

      They had been waiting for Constable Loch to come and remove the furniture from Giggy Andrewes’s gazebo, when sleep had overtaken them. The air felt brittle in the hush of the afternoon and the peculiar bloomless plantings in the garden chafed against each other like shards of glass or weapons of soldiers eager for war. The blades glistened in the sunlight. So rarely did the breeze sigh through the tangle of Giggy’s garden that any rustle from the exotics seemed less an act of appreciation than a mockery. The occasional cry of one of the peacocks pierced the air as if the creature were struggling to affirm its existence in the summer town of Lake Wachannabee. Each cry tinged Giggy’s property, she recently conjectured as she introduced her nephew and his reticent friend to the garden such a short time ago, with an aura haunted by the history of Wachannabee Gorge and the indigenes that the British explorers first found among its caves and contours.

      It was not until the gauzy sunlight began to spill over the rims of Jem’s eyes and into his brain that the boy began to awaken. The nephew met the haze of the Ontario summer with the glazed indifference of an opossum, but eventually the pinkish blur of fleshly limbs strewn about the gazebo shed its aura and took on the bodily order of Giggy, Cora and himself. The mosquito netting undulated, paused, undulated again in the heat as it cast gentle whippings of shadow against the young man’s cheeks. He hung lazy across the coffee table from his aunt, his slender candle-wax fingers furtively plucking the harp of soft threads worn through near the crotch of his cut-offs. The gesture belied his willingness to respond to his aunt’s unconscious overtures for attention.

      Cora’s limbs remained sprawled across the cedar-slatted floor, shifting occasionally among the pages of the exploration narrative that Dr. Amicable was editing. The hairs on her left arm glowed like strings of honey. A drop of saliva fell from her bottom lip onto the top page of the manuscript.

      Back, back and back again Giggy’s eyes flickered to the last glazed scrap of strudel on the tray near her ankles. The gesture evoked the rhythmic sway of a ceiling fan and Jem found himself disturbed by its consistency. His aunt’s mind was elsewhere, perhaps once again thinking over the Fafaist Manifesto or reevaluating the decision she had made over a year ago to have the gazebo stuccoed. Caught trusting a Cubist, she now owned an extension that, in her view, was nothing more than an architectural goitre on the soft, solid facade of the Winter Garden. She would never again act against the advice of Miss Emily of Crew, who prided herself on clairvoyance ever since she had correctly forecasted Mavis von und Graf ’s death in a street fight in Niagara Falls. The architectural blight no longer made Giggy weep, no, but, combined with her recent infatuation with Russian melodrama, it did give her complexion a distinctly seedy pallor.

      Her entropy was not aided by the fact that she had begun reading these Russian novels with no expectation of finishing them. Cora had more than once seen her hostess’s tongue wrap about the sounds of a single line for four or five minutes or even more before finally lolling on to the next as hesitant as a rural virgin before the glory and might of the Sultan himself. It had been rumoured by Lady Bella Clasp, the veterinarian of the flaming hair who lived next door, that Giggy had spent weeks with one solitary finger piously retracing the opening line of Anna Karenina as her mind concocted permutations as evocative as the position of the Asian-American woman who at present rested at her powdered feet, the pages of Robert Shakely’s exploration narrative nestling her body in an unearthly, phosphorescent glow.

      Cora was sleeping with her arms akimbo and her smooth legs bent and overlapping like a pair of inebriated seagulls, their tone confirming her familiarity with the stationary rower in Giggy’s basement. Even now, gazing at her, Jem could feel in the back of his brain the sensual, rhythmic pounding of the machine, its mechanisms whirring like a flock of rubber-band airplanes sent spinning by a cluster of knee-knocking schoolboys into the heat of a white Italian sky. Had he been aware of her preference for consistency before inviting her north, things might have turned out differently for all of them. For him, muscle development – even the thought of muscle development – had always made his belly, nurtured for years on cocaine and the blackened seafood of the Louisiana bayou, grrrr. But now, since the ‘murder,’ all of his senses were benumbed.

      Suspense is so stilted, he thought, so dishonest, and all people prefer to be trusted. Unfortunately, this veneration of clarity had in itself provoked some members of Lake Wachannabee to lie. Soon speculations were spilling from the lips of the townsfolk like seeds from poppy pods. In truth, nobody was sure yet that it would be deemed a murder but, for the sake of veracity in the long term, everybody was operating under that assumption. It was so much easier, really.

      For Jem, the reaction was numbness. Just now, as he lay belly down, he was fully unaware of the trickle of sweat that was lurching its way along the moguls of his spine like a drunk meandering toward the lake’s edge to wash away his sorrows.

      ‘I do declare. Auntie?’

      ‘Yes, dear?’ Giggy loved her nephew’s little bayou twang that, as rare as the burble of an albino catfish, caught the attention of all who heard it. Despite the fact that Jem had not been living at the Winter Garden for many months, she found herself often thinking of him as her son and had to struggle each time to cast the notion aside because of the limitations it implied for their relationship.

      ‘No, it’s nothing.’ Since Jem’s arrival, the two had begun to develop a system of communication that depended less and less on words. If language ever failed them, she would come to muse, it would be not because of their inability to converse but due to the inadequacy of the words they held in common. Their years apart seemed in fact to have made them more attuned to each other. The detritus of daily life, the responsibilities and irritations of raising a child or of being raised, had not corseted their relationship or cluttered the characteristics that they now valued so highly in each other.

      ‘Everybody loves children,’ Giggy had once tried to convince the PTA when presenting her closing arguments against a school field trip that required a brief but intimate sojourn on her property, ‘more purely when from a distance, through that sort of impressionist haze that obscures their faces or at least their mediocrity or, shall we say, when the love is allowed enough irresponsibility to become more akin to the respect one gives friends or colleagues.’ Then, to prove her gravity, she had turned in her summation to a Metaphysical. ‘It was, I believe, John Donne,’ she had offered, glancing at the smudged ink on the