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Rounding the house’s corner to the garden, she’s bombarded by the smell of fresh, cold dirt and the sight of tulips and daffodils—jonquils, she thinks, touching the one at her ear—and a magnolia tree that looks like it’s ready to explode into flower.
Near the edge of the east lawn, Mr. Vanders sits on a funny, crooked bench that looks more like it’s made for meditation than for gardening. Or maybe it’s just the slow, contemplative manner in which he’s digging. The garden and yard are covered with uneven, random holes and piles of dirt.
“Hello there,” Jane says, not wanting to interrupt, but wanting him to know he’s not alone.
He attempts to speak but instead begins sneezing.
“Bless you,” says Jane.
“Thank you,” he says, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. “Forgive me. I’m allergic to spring. Going for a walk, are you?”
“I needed to clear my mind,” Jane says, gesturing with her book hand. “I’ve been feeling muddleheaded. So I came outside for some air. Should you be gardening if you have allergies?”
“We mustn’t neglect the gardening,” says Mr. Vanders. He sneezes again, explosively, then sighs, stretching his back.
The damp chill is doing wonders for Jane’s mental clarity. Jasper sniffs happily at the holes Mr. Vanders has made, then starts digging one of his own. Jane feels an urge to go for a jog across the yard and toss her book like a javelin.
Mr. Vanders closes his watering eyes and turns his dark face to the sun. Jane can see every fine line crisscrossing his skin and wonders if the day will come when sudden little details will stop being about Aunt Magnolia, when the lines in the face of an old person won’t make her think, Aunt Magnolia will never be that old.
She remembers, with a start, that Mr. Vanders knew Aunt Magnolia. Before she started feeling so foggy, she meant to investigate. “I haven’t managed to talk to Mrs. Vanders yet,” she says, “about my aunt.”
“Mm-hmph,” says Mr. Vanders, not opening his eyes. “Maybe after the gala. She’ll find you once it’s all over with.”
The gala, Jane remembers. The gala is tomorrow. The details of this day are trickling back. She takes one great, big breath and decides that never again will she go into the library. “Apparently something happened with a Brancusi sculpture?” she says. “Of a fish?”
Mr. Vanders opens his eyes, blows his nose. “Apparently.”
“We’re lucky Lucy St. George is visiting, since she’s an art investigator,” Jane says, with a sudden flash of the jailbird umbrella. “It’s scary, actually, isn’t it?” she says. “If someone in the house stole a piece of art?”
“Yep,” Mr. Vanders says, not sounding scared, or even particularly interested. Jane considers his messy garden. It’s unclear what he’s doing besides creating craters.
“Do you like gardening, then?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” he says, grasping his back. “My lumbar region is in agonies and I couldn’t tell a flower from a weed if my life depended on it. But I’m trying to approach it as an exercise in mindfulness.”
“Is it working?”
“Not particularly,” he says wearily.
Jane watches Jasper root happily around in his hole. Then she anchors her eyes on Tu Reviens again.
“Have you always lived here?”
“Aside from college and grad school and some travel,” says Mr. Vanders, “yes. My parents worked for the Thrashes. I grew up here, and have watched Octavian, then my own son, then Kiran and Ravi and Patrick and Ivy, grow up in this odd, wonderful house.”
Jane considers the winter garden. “Even the glass of that wall is a patchwork,” she says, indicating the panels.
“Just part of the house’s lopsided charm,” says Mr. Vanders.
“Is it? Kiran says that Charlotte thought the house was suffering from its origins.”
“Well,” says Mr. Vanders. “We all suffer from our origins in one way or another, don’t you think?”
Jane thinks of her own story. Her father had been a high school science teacher. Her mother had been near the end of her dissertation on a new meteorological explanation for why it rains frogs. She’d been invited to speak at a weekend conference on Frog-Inspired Architecture in Barcelona and Jane’s parents, in love with their eighteen-month-old baby but exhausted, had decided to make a thing of it. They’d left Jane with her mother’s younger sister, Magnolia. This had been difficult for them, and for Jane’s mother in particular, who’d just weaned Jane. She’d almost canceled the trip at the last moment; she’d almost contrived to take Jane along. But Magnolia had told them, No, go, see the churches, eat paella, get some sun, spend some time alone. The plane, hit by lightning, had lost an engine, then crashed during landing. Jane didn’t remember them; she only remembered Aunt Magnolia, who had used to cry, sometimes, when it rained frogs.
It’s hard for Jane to miss something she can’t remember. Or does some part of her miss it? Might it be buried and unseen, but something on which the whole of her life rests, like the foundations of a building?
“What about a house?” Jane says to Mr. Vanders. “Can a house suffer from its origins?”
Mr. Vanders purses his lips at the house. “I guess if this house were a person, it’d be a reasonable candidate for an identity crisis. Poor house!” Mr. Vanders cries, holding his arms out suddenly, as if he’d like to embrace the house. He intones in a hearty voice, “You are our Tu Reviens!”
“Do you think that helped the house?” Jane asks, amused.
“Well,” says Mr. Vanders, “the more we accept our lack of cohesion, the better off we are.”
“Oh?”
“Let go of the illusion of containment and control!” he says, flinging out his arms.
“Good lord,” says Jane, trying to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Vanders having conversations like this at night while sitting in bed.
“If the house is distressed by its lack of cohesion,” says Mr. Vanders, “it’s because of society’s unreasonable expectations for integration.”
“I see,” says Jane, not seeing.
“The house could also be suffering from a diagnosable psychological disorder,” he says. “Why shouldn’t a house have dissociative disorder or even a severe narcissistic disorder? In a different universe, we would call in a house psychologist and get it the help it needs. Though presumably the house, being a house, isn’t suffering at all, except from clogged gutters.”
“What did you study at school, anyway?” asks Jane.
“Oh, this and that,” says Mr. Vanders.
The French doors of the back terrace distantly open and Kiran comes out. She wades toward Jane through tallish grass, then skirts the dirt piles at the north edge of the gardens. She seems distracted, her face closed and trapped someplace far away. Jasper, meanwhile, is bounding around in his now very deep hole, licking something and making frenzied yipping noises at Jane. He seems to be trying to get her attention. Jane crouches down, tucks her book into her lap, and attempts to wipe mud from his fur with her hands.
“Hey, Mr. V,” says Kiran vaguely. “How are you?”
“Decimated by pollen,” says Mr. Vanders, appraising her with a quick glance. “How are you feeling, Kiran, sweetheart?”
“Marvelous,” Kiran says, an obvious lie. “Come play bridge,” she says to Jane.
“I don’t know how to play bridge,” Jane tells Kiran, still making dubious attempts at wiping mud from Jasper. “And my hands are dirty.”
“I’ll teach you,” Kiran says. “Come on. Phoebe needs a partner.”
Phoebe. Jane saw Phoebe in the servants’ wing last night, with Patrick and Philip and a gun. She keeps forgetting about that. Should she tell someone? What if Phoebe stole the fish sculpture?
Jasper shoots out of his hole and rolls around in the grass, barking. He pops up again, shaking himself out, surprisingl
y clean. “All right,” Jane says, wiping her hands on the damp grass. “I’ll try bridge.”
She grasps Winnie-the-Pooh carefully between her wet thumb and forefinger and pushes herself to her feet. Maybe spending some time with Phoebe will clarify things.
Glancing into Jasper’s hole as she passes it, Jane notices something long, pale, and opalescent inside. “Nice talking to you, Mr. Vanders,” she says. “By the way, Jasper seems to have unearthed an interesting long, white rock.”
