Why hadn’t Mellon gone exploring down below the way I had?
He poked me in the shoulder again. “So what did you find?”
Mellon: impatient. I’d discovered a world of wonders in my friend, as well as in the subterranean world he’d opened to me. “Well, once you climb the trellis and go over, across the brass stairs, there’s a cinder path, lined with cactus and these strange purple vines with flowers.”
He nodded for me to go on, an odd expression on his face. I took a sip of my now-tepid tea, and leaned against his warm, strong arm. “About fifty feet down – the pathway slopes down – the way forks. I decided to pick right every time, and the path branched about five times.”
I indicated each fork in the path with my pinkie, touching his finger as we traced my recorded footfalls together on the page.
“And then . . .” I hesitated. What I was about to say was amazing, unbelievable, and breathtaking – but I could never unsay it. I savoured the silence before words.
Mellon nodded for me to go on. He was ready.
“I came to a door.”
He leaned forwards even more. “To another garden.”
“Yes.”
He wrinkled his forehead, nibbled at his lower lip. “And you jumped the wall and climbed the stairs.”
“Yes, Mellon! It was so amazing.”
“And what did you discover at the top of the stairs?” His voice sounded dry and precise, like a lawyer doing a routine courtroom cross-examination in a boring town somewhere far, far away from where we lived.
“It was a speakeasy. I came up through the wine cellar, and all these guys in zoot suits sat in a row along the bar. It had a huge polished bar, even bigger than the West End. And there were – showgirls there, too. Wearing flapper dresses and strappy shoes.”
“Astonishing. And what else?”
“The barkeeper knew me, Mellon! He nodded and smiled. Offered me a ‘whiskey neat, on the house, girlie’!”
Mellon’s face went alabaster, like somebody had turned him into a decorative figurine. “You didn’t take it. Tell me you didn’t drink it!”
I leaned up against the whole side of his lean, warm body and looked up into his face, so close I could have kissed him. But I resisted. I didn’t want to steal our first kiss, not in the middle of his panic. “If I did drink it, Mellon, would I have made it back?”
He hugged me again, and I felt a tremor in his fingers, very slight, where his fingertips pressed against my bare arms. “Promise me you won’t do that again. Jump the wall, all alone.”
“But it was amazing, Mellon. I’m a history major . . . you can just imagine what that was like!”
“No, promise me. As a boy, I swore to my grandfather never to venture past the garden walls. I never imagined you would just go ahead yourself, without telling me first. Mireya, you astonish me.”
I drew back, caressed his cheek until his eyes went from wild tomerely troubled. “Mellon, I was free. I met myself down in that pathway, you know? I have to go back. I have to. But I want you to come with me.”
“It’s beautiful, but it’s dangerous.”
“It’s worth it. Come with me!”
When he didn’t respond, I gave in to the temptation and ran my fingers through his glorious, thick blond hair. “Come with me. We’ll take the left-hand path together. Don’t worry . . . your grandfather will never know.”
The left-hand path was wonderful in a completely different way, one that Mellon seemed to find less threatening than the dangerous speakeasy with the all-too-knowing barkeep. We found a walled garden after only two branchings of the path, and we emerged to rolling fields high on a bluff overlooking what would someday become Passaic, NJ. I recognized the view – it was the same as the one in my tiny bathroom window.
A single Indian woman with a baby on her breast sat cross-legged, and she nodded as we walked by. It was autumn, full daylight, and the leaves sprinkling down into Mellon’s hair were orange, white and blood red with purple streaks. I carefully filled in my map before we returned to the walled garden under the Columbia University chapel.
Over the next few weeks, my hand-drawn map got more complicated looking than the NYC subway map. I redrew it on to a much larger piece of paper, started naming the pathways so I could keep them straight in my mind, but even so, the twining paths and interlocked gardens crowded each other over the smudged page.
What adventures we had underneath the streets of New York City, Mellon and I. I could write a whole book about it, and someday maybe I will. From the days of Peter Stuyvesant to the Revolutionary War, to the Second World War to hazy futures beyond our own lives, Jonathan and I explored a city unfolding in time as well as space. We always came back, sometimes with difficulty but more often with a familiar, homecoming ease. But I always left something of myself behind.
In all these times and places I found a single constant, a central point more changeless than our own walled garden: Jonathan Mellon himself. Steadfast, mysterious, bearer of secret fears he wasstrong enough to carry alone. And no matter where and when we went, we agreed our favourite place and time was our own.
