The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons
Jane had the opposite problem from Harry. In 1983, barely twenty, just finished with her registered nurse credentials, she married a boy she had known since birth—a fine man named Shannon Clay Jr., Shannon and long-gone Amanda’s oldest son, who runs Barrington Custom Homes for both families now that Alexander and Shannon are semi-retired. In 1985, Jane and Shannon Jr. had a girl, Alexandra, another girl, Nadia, in 1986, another girl, Victoria, in 1989, and yet another girl, Veronica, in 1990. The 1980s were baby boom years for the Barringtons—especially 1989, when six of the sixteen next-gens were born just as the Berlin Wall was coming down. That Harry had five sons is somehow cosmic, but that Jane, the tomboy of the family, in an ironic twist of fate had four daughters—Sasha, Nadia, Vicky and Nicky—when what she and Shannon both desperately wanted was just one little boy, is cosmically unfair. Harry advised them to learn from him and quit at four, because five was so unmanageable as to be comical. He said five was like war. “That’s only because your fifth one is named Samson,” Alexander said to Harry. “Teaches you right to call your son that.” But Jane—afraid not only of another girl but of her mother’s latent twin gene, which so far passed her by—heeded Harry’s procreational advice up until the end of the millennium. Now her newborn son has five mothers, like cooks. He sleeps in the noisy kitchen, adored but unnamed—like a monarch. They’re tortured over his name. Shannon wants his own, and Jane wants her father’s.
Janie and Shannon live just downhill on Jomax in a spectacular pueblo house. Janie is always over.
Anthony, despite great pressures in Washington, tries to coordinate his own visits with Harry’s from Yuma, so that at least a few times a year, their mother and father can have what they love best—all their children in one noisy house.
Anthony, who is 56, is currently a deputy advisor for the National Security Council. He has served three presidential administrations beginning with Ronald Reagan’s. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has gone quiet, as have all the rebellions it was stirring in Africa, across the breadth of South America, and in Southeast Asia—as if once the Gorgon Medusa’s head was severed, all the serpents on it shuddered and died. Now Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam remain some of the poorest countries on earth. And though Alexander has finally resigned his commission—deeming his work finished after the fall of the Soviet Union—as far as Anthony is concerned, the world remains unfixed. Old troubles are brewing on top of new troubles in the Middle East. And new troubles are brewing on top of old troubles in North Korea. There is some intel indication that the North Koreans are not sticking to their end of the agreements against nuclear weapons development. While dealing with them, Anthony has continued to wage his thirty-year-old battle to locate the 1300 still missing soldiers in Vietnam.
In the same vein, he has just returned from Russia, where he met with government officials from Moscow and St. Petersburg to see if they could fix more firmly on the fate of 91 American servicemen missing in Russia since the end of the Second World War.
Over the years he has steadfastly refused a prosthetic; a functional device was impossible with his degree of injury and one for purely cosmetic reasons was insulting. He continued to feel the burning, stinging pain for years and still feels the electrical nerve impulses in his phantom limb whenever he is stressed.
He feels the electrical nerve impulses constantly.
And while there are some things he cannot do (golf, play his six-string, carve turkey), for the most part he manages just fine, and the people who know him stopped noticing the missing arm in the seventies. The people who don’t know him, if they’re in the service, don’t ask, because Anthony is a general, and no one asks a general anything unless they’re invited to, and Anthony does not invite them to. Civilians sometimes ask. In stores, on the street, during Alexander’s VE-Day parades, they’ll say to Anthony, “Hey man, what happened to you?” And he replies, “Vietnam.” They whistle, shake their heads; usually, “Vietnam” is enough. Sometimes they want more. “Did you get shot?”
And then he tells them. “No,” says Anthony. “I was a POW, and the NVA cut off my arm piece by piece starting with my fingers because I kept killing the guards that were torturing me.”
And after that, there is not even a single follow-up breath.
In 1979, Anthony married an Indonesian woman named Ingrid, who was Janie’s twelfth-grade music teacher. Janie introduced her 36-year-old brother to the 24-year-old piano-playing Ingrid at a winter concert. Janie had talked him way up—where he fought, how many tours he had, how many medals he got, how many times he got wounded. She even mentioned in oh-so-casual passing that her brother had only one arm and liked to sing. Ingrid was exotic, musically gifted, and impressed. Anthony married her four months later, and his girls, Rachel and Rebecca, were born in 1980. To their protégé mother’s great disappoint-ment—though they are both at Harvard—Rachel is immersed in Russian studies and Rebecca in English. They are raven-haired Eurasian beauties, combining their father’s height with the vivid Italian-Russian-Indonesian markings from their parents. Few who meet them can see beyond the drama of their looks. In their freshman year, they made a calendar to raise money for the families of the Vietnam MIA/POW. The R-rated calendar was called “The Ivy Girls” and was the number-one-selling calendar in Cambridge. They said their father was too old to see it. This year, back by popular demand, they had to put out a new edition. That is how Washington first laid eyes on Rebecca: he bought the calendar.
In 1985, after two miscarriages, Ingrid finally gave Anthony a son, Anthony Alexander Barrington III. One more miscarriage followed before another son, Tommy, was born in 1989.
Of Anthony’s four children, it is ironically Anthony Jr. who has his mother’s gift for music and his father’s voice; ironic because Anthony Jr. would rather be boiled in oil than touch an ivory or let a lyric note pass his lips. He used to play and sing when he was younger, even played guitar; but no more.
After he came back from Vietnam, and they buried Tom Richter in Arlington, Anthony lived with Vikki. She stopped working, stopped flying around the world; she traveled with him, stayed with him. Since Vikki was a troublemaker, her favorite thing to tell people in response to their slightly nosy, perked-up question, “And how long have you two known each other?” was, “Oh, we’ve been together—on and off—since the day he was born.” And to an even more impertinent, slightly suggestive allusion to the absence of his limb, she would say, “Don’t you worry, the man is still a quadruped.”
They were together until 1977 when she got breast cancer at the age of 54 and died. Anthony was with her until the end. One of the last things Vikki said to him was, “Antman, because of you, comé un fiume tu, adesso lo so—questro é amoré. Ti amo, Anthony. Ti amo. Quale vita dolce ho trascorso con te.”
Vikki never knew her father, and her mother had been lost to her since childhood. She had been raised by Travis and Isabella, her Italian grandparents—who after a Tristan and Isolde inauspicious beginning were married for over seventy years, and were now long gone. Since in death, Vikki had nowhere to go, she was brought to Phoenix and cremated, her ashes scattered over Tatiana and Alexander’s saguaro desert land, and a garden of colt-like ocotillos, red around a yellow sole mio palo verde, planted in her name, ex animo, ad lucem.
Alexander, Anthony, Gordon Pasha, and Harry come back inside and continue their half-time conversation in the dining room, standing like pillars against the white linen walls in their dark sweaters and dark trousers, holding their beers and discussing the latest crazy thing Anthony is doing that Harry needs to build something to protect him from, and Pasha saying, how long am I going to keep mopping up after you? Harry is in charge of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization that used to be the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. He oversees the deployment of the National Missile Defense designed to protect all fifty states from an attack. His interest in it has always been to design a robust and virtually perfect defense system to counteract a large threat, as w
He researches and tests ground-based lasers, space-based lasers, and automated space vehicles while continuing to play politics with the Energy Department over the costs of nuclear power systems in space. He tells his father of the unbelievable resistance he has encountered to his proposals for certain space-based directed and kinetic energy weapons that he admits do happen to have significant power requirements attached.
“How significant?” asks Alexander.
“Well... significant,” says Harry. “But see, I build the defense systems, because that’s my job, and they’re supposed to deliver the energy system, because that’s their fucking job. I don’t ask them about plasma arcs of metallic railguns, do I?”
“I think it’s just as well,” says Pasha.
They’re so absorbed they don’t even see they’re blocking Tatiana’s path to the dining room table, to which she is trying to deliver her own energy system—homemade butter yeast rolls.
“Hmm,” says Alexander, taking one warm roll, as she tries to squeeze past them with the tray. Stepping in front of her, he rips the roll into four chunks, gives three to his sons, takes the tray from her, puts it on the table. She moves this way and that, but they won’t let her pass, surrounding her on all sides, Alexander in front, Pasha and Harry flanking her, Anthony behind her. Periwinkling, she vanishes inside their navy chests, looking up at her husband and her sons, from one face to the other and finally saying, “What? Do you four have nothing better to do than stand idly while I run around with thirty of you to feed?”
“We’re not standing idly,” says Harry. “We’re discussing the fate of the free world.” He bends nearly in half to kiss his mother’s cheek.
“Mom, how’s your burn?” says Pasha, taking hold of her forearm and turning it over. “I see you’ve taken off my dressing.” He touches the wound.
For a moment, the five of them stand mutely together. Tatiana pats Pasha’s hand and says, “Burn is fine. Free world is fine. And you’ve been watching too much football, stop blocking me.” She turns around and lifts her eyes to her firstborn son whom she’s not touching, and who’s not touching her, but who’s watching her silently. His eyes are not peaceful. His limb twitches. He wants to communicate something. But he says nothing.
Jane comes in from the butler’s pantry with her baby in one hand and cranberry jelly in the other and says with exasperation, “Will you step out of her way, can’t you see she’s busy?” She tuts when no one listens. “Anthony, please—you at least, can you go open the door? The doorbell has been ringing for an hour.”
“So if you heard it, why didn’t you go open the door?” Anthony says to his sister.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but not only am I cooking, I’m lactating, too. What are you doing? Exactly. Go open the door, I said. You’re not a general in this house. I don’t have to salute you nineteen times like my brothers do. Now go.”
As Anthony obediently goes to answer the front door, Alexander pulls Tatiana away for a moment into the empty gallery, where he presses her against the wall, lifts her face up and kisses her in brief seclusion before Washington’s eyes peer at them from under palms and photographs.
The person outside is a pretty, very small, blonde woman in her early thirties, dressed nicely and smiling nicely for the holidays, holding a blueberry pie in her hands and a bouquet of blue irises. She introduces herself as Kerri, and says that she is Victoria’s fourth-grade teacher and a good friend of Jane’s, who apparently has invited her for dinner, since Kerri’s family is out East. “You must be Anthony,” she says, looking slightly flushed and intimidated.
Anthony wonders what Janie and Vicky have been saying about him. He lets Kerri through, taking the flowers from her hand. “Blueberry pie,” he says. “My favorite.”
“Really?” She looks pleased, relaxes.
In the kitchen, Anthony Jr. was cornered into a wall by his sister Rebecca who said, “TO-nee, you vile beast, tell me right now what you did to Washington or I’ll tell Dad on you.” Anthony had braved a place he proclaimed he hated (“full of clucking women”) to grab a warm roll, but he hadn’t been quick enough walking back out.
Pushing Rebecca off him, he said, “Like I care. Tell away—and stop calling me Tony.” At nearly fifteen Anthony was a six-foot reed, an inch taller than his sisters. He was dark and Eurasian; all angles and bones and eyes and lips because his hair had been shaved off except for the thin Mohawk line running from his forehead to the back of his neck. He was dressed forbiddingly in black for Thanksgiving, like a Visigoth, and was grim like one, too.
“What did you do to him?” Rebecca repeated. “He’s walking around this house like an apparition, gazing at walls. He won’t even go and watch football with Dad and Grandpa. He hasn’t said one boo to Grandpa, you know how Grandpa hates that. How is he ever going to get to know them?”
“Maybe if you stopped calling me Tony, I wouldn’t have had to take matters into my own hands,” said Anthony Jr.
“Anthony, then, OK,” conceded his sister. “Now tell me what you’ve done to my Washington before I wring your neck. Did you scare him?”
“No,” said Anthony Jr. “I mean—if he got scared, that’s his problem.”
“Oh, no! What did you say?”
“Nothing.” Anthony Jr. paused. “Nothing. He is very nosy, won’t stop asking questions about Dad. He asked me to show him something from Dad’s Vietnam days.”
“Oh, no! What did you show him? His SOG knife?”
“He wouldn’t still be in this house if I showed him that. No. I showed him the most innocent thing. I’m telling you, Beck, if your slam of a boyfriend can’t take a Zippo lighter, he’s got no business in this family.”
“Which Zippo lighter?” Anthony’s old Special Forces Zippo lighters were engraved with all manner of bestial sayings and rude drawings. “What did it say?” She covered her eyes. “Please don’t let it be...”
“This Zippo read, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil,’” Goth-like Anthony Jr. said, lowering his voice only slightly in his grandmother’s children-filled Thanksgiving kitchen, not noticing Anthony standing next to Kerri in the doorway, “‘for I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley.’”
“ANTHONY JR.!” That was Rebecca, Tatiana, Jane, Rachel, all over him.
“Get the hell out of here, will you, and stop causing trouble like always.” That was an unsmiling and unamused Anthony. Kerri was smiling and amused.
As he was being shoved out of the kitchen, an unfazed Anthony Jr. was telling Rebecca, “Like I said, if that silly boy can’t handle a little Zippo, what the hell is he doing with you?”
“Please don’t concern yourself with that, TO-Neeee!” Rebecca taunted his departing back.
Anthony smiled politely at Kerri. “Kids these days,” he said, passing the flowers to his mother. “Jane!” he called. “Your friend is here.”
Dinner was as out of control as only a Thanksgiving dinner could be with fifteen children, all squabblingly bunched together at their own table. Two china plates were broken, five drinks were spilled, the mashed potatoes were almost cold, and someone cut himself with a butter knife. Good thing there was a doctor in the house.
Alexander carved the two birds. At the table, no one, not even the young ones, put food on their plate until Alexander helped himself to his first forkful of turkey. He poured Tatiana drink, he stood to make a toast, he even said Thanksgiving grace over their abundant table, looking at her. “All that we have is a gift that comes from You.”
And there was Washington, watching him, watching her.
The wives sat next to their husbands, all except Anthony’s wife, who wasn’t there. (“Where is Ingrid, Mom?” Jane had asked. “We don’t know and we don’t ask,” replied Tatiana. “You hear me? We don’t ask.” To which Janie, in her inimitable Da
She’s been nothing but trouble. All she does is make his life harder.”) Kerri sat next to Jane, and Anthony sat between his daughters, who mothered him, ladled food onto him, cut his turkey and poured his drink. By deliberate and careful omission, no one mentioned the absent Ingrid. Anthony’s two sons—one chafing at being lumped with “the GD babies,” one disquietingly quiet—sat away from the adults and any possible questions about their missing mother.
Their plates scraped clean of food (oh, they learned, they all learned), the kids were done with dinner in twelve minutes, and a truculent Anthony Jr. was asked to watch Samson in the pool while the adults sat a little longer. He loudly protested. Harry said not to worry, Anthony said, no, he will do it. Tommy pulled at his brother, saying I’ll help you. Anthony Jr. said he didn’t want to leave the table yet like he was a child, and Anthony said he wasn’t being given a choice, to which Anthony Jr. got up with a snark, to which Anthony got up with a clench, which prompted Tatiana to jump up before Alexander got up and things got really out of hand. “Anthony Jr.” That’s all Tatiana said, and the boy fled from the table. Anthony sat back down; everything calmed down. The adults sat another hour. Never mind, said Harry. It’s that age. Ask Dad what you were like when you were fourteen. A small glance passed between Alexander and Anthony. Alexander said, “He was always a good kid. But besides, headbutting was not allowed.”
“It’s not allowed with me either,” said Anthony. “There’s still head-butting.”
To change the subject, Washington said that at fourteen he used to give his own mother a hard time when his dad was not around—which was most of the time.
To change the subject much further—because Anthony himself was not around most of the time—Janie asked Tatiana how long she should nurse the baby. The men at the table—particularly the three grown, mature men once nursed by Tatiana—groaned.