Where Lilacs Still Bloom Read online

  Frank surprised them each with a pair of white leather gloves as soft as Bobby’s ears with special stitching—different for each girl—along the top of each finger.

  “Oh, Papa, these are beautiful,” Lizzie said and hugged her father. Delia did likewise, rubbing her fingers across the stitching.

  I looked at this man I married all those years before. He never ceased to surprise me with his attention to little things that matter to someone he loves.

  “Mama, you put him up to this.” Delia wagged the gloves at me.

  “No, I didn’t. I’ve been so busy getting the garden up to perfect. Your father never even mentioned a present.” I’d thought the wedding and all the fixings of it would be present enough, but Frank thought otherwise. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it. They’re lovely.” I felt the soft leather.

  “It was Martha,” Frank said. “I asked what she thought a father ought to give his daughters, and she said, ‘Something to keep their hands comforted.’ Course you don’t have to wear them just for today.”

  Martha stood in the doorway so as not to upset the camera arrangement, and she moved aside when the photographer said, “Are we ready, then?”

  “What made you think of gloves?” I asked her as I stepped out into the hallway. I could hear my sisters in the kitchen putting final touches on the cakes. They’d shooed me out some time ago, and I realized everything was as ready as it would get. “Gloves seem like such an unusual wedding gift,” I offered.

  “It’s to keep their hands warm when their husbands are gone.” I turned to Martha thinking then what an odd thought that was. I must have frowned. “When they travel,” she said. She rubbed her own gloveless hands together.

  “Yes, I suppose. Well, the girls love them, and your father was a dear to get them made in time.”

  “That tailor, Mr. Lawson, had them made up. But he doesn’t work with leather, so Papa got him to order in the gloves special.”

  “Lawson. Yes, I heard about him. Moved here from somewhere south. With a daughter.”

  Martha nodded. “She’s a scowling thing. Nelia, he called her. She never smiled the whole time Papa and I were there. Not when I picked up the gloves either. But when I scratched my hand on the edge of a table, she rushed right over to tenderly pat my wrist.”

  Her description of the girl found a little place in my memory that day. I always have been partial to children and wondering what swats of life turned a naturally loving child to one that frowns their days away. Made me ever grateful for my own children and the happiness I saw in their eyes.

  “Your father’s a good man. You find one like him, Martha, and you’ll be the happiest girl in the world.” I whispered that last part since the photographer had turned to shush me. I looked at those two couples and felt tears well up. I couldn’t have been happier for them, such a good life they had ahead of them.

  The Reverend A. W. Burholder officiated, and I never saw two more beaming brides than our girls … except the day Amelia and I spoke our vows. Frank walked them down the aisle, stepping carefully on the white cloth the flower girl sprinkled rose petals on. The day was warm, and we fanned ourselves with stick fans Fritz had fashioned over several days out of cardboard and glue. Reverend Burholder reminded the couples of the sacredness of this service and that their vows were spoken not just before their relatives and friends, their new husband or wife, but before God as well. “It is a three-way promise,” he reminded them, “in sickness and in health.”

  Frank squeezed my hand at the mention of sickness, and I leaned into him to let him know I remembered too, that time of trial last summer. I was so grateful to be feeling better.

  After the ceremony, we ate. Oh, goodness, how we ate! My sisters had each baked a layer cake that took three hours to complete. I’d been grateful for cool mornings when we fired up the cookstove. White frosting covered the cakes, and we’d decorated them with lavender sprigs and tiger lilies. My brother, Emil, made a big to-do over bringing each cake out to set on the tables, and the crowd erupted in applause when the girls cut into their own cakes and then fed their husbands. Such an odd custom, yet one that Amelia and I had indulged in ourselves all those years before.

  The couples left on what would be a short honeymoon trip, each to different locations; I guess they decided they didn’t need to do everything together. Fred and Lizzie left for Portland; Delia and Nell Irving took the steamboat up to Kelso, not as far away since Nell Irving had cows to tend to after the weekend. Frank and Fritz would milk their herd along with our own until they got back.

  “Just leave things for picking up until tomorrow,” I told Martha who had already begun scraping plates into the chicken’s bucket. Ruthie had left with her family and would be gone a few days before they allowed her back to help with the watering of my plants.

  “What?” Frank said. “You never want to leave things unsettled.”

  “Today is special. I just thought … you and Fritz better get to those cows,” I finished.

  “I don’t mind, Mama.” Martha sounded wistful, and I put my arm around her, leading her toward the house. I hadn’t thought of anything special for Martha on this day, even though that had been my intention. Those horses and lilacs had taken my mind from planning a surprise.

  “At least change your clothes first,” I said. “We’ll miss them, won’t we?” She nodded. “But there they go, off onto a life of their own. You’ll be off too before long, finishing your studies. But until then, I’ll need you more than ever if I’m to get any goodness from those French lilacs.”

  “Oh, you and your flowers,” Martha said.

  “It’s always good to have something to look forward to.” I tried for cheerful in my voice. “Especially when you have to say good-bye to something you’ve loved and had daily in your life for years.”

  I picked up lavender twists left on a side table and inhaled. They’d been cut all day, and they still had a fragrance that filled my head. “It’s true, I always have my flowers to bring me comfort,” I told Martha. “But they can’t bring anywhere near the comfort of you.”

  Martha didn’t say a word.

  We walked past the parlor, and with the photographer gone, I stopped, hung the framed photographs back onto the wall. We’d removed them to reduce any clutter in the background. Now I held the picture we’d had taken at Mama’s funeral. I hung it back up as Martha headed upstairs. I walked into the sunroom then to check on my starts, the “other children” in my life. I pressed my fingers in the soil, calculating moisture levels, checking on the lilacs I’d brought inside after the fiasco with the horses. All was well, and I was anxious to begin tomorrow seeing what I could do with what remained of my imports.

  I heard Martha upstairs, changing clothes, I imagined. Her silence when I said she brought me more comfort than my plants still haunted.

  SEVENTEEN

  SHELLY SNYDER

  1904

  Shelly Snyder.” She said her new name purposefully, standing in front of the oak mirror in the room her husband said had always been the guest room and was now the master suite in their Baltimore home. The wedding had been held not in the garden of his fine estate but at her parents’ home in Annapolis, which suited her fine. She had few friends to invite since her father had traveled so much in his military position and they never stayed anywhere long enough to make real friends. Bill’s mother provided only a very short list of guests, so having the wedding “close to your home, dear” had proven a wise idea.

  But that was nearly six months ago, and since then Shelly had shared her husband with his mother, his students, the Baltimore estate, and yes, his garden, which thankfully had been cleared of chrysanthemums despite her mother-in-law’s protests that mums were her favorite flower. This was how she knew her husband truly loved her. This, and because he’d succumbed to a few of her other wishes, including finding a home they might live in, just the two of them. The mums had gone, and she knew that had been a huge sacrifice for him.

 
; “Mrs. Snyder,” she said to the mirror. No, that was her mother-in-law. Then, “Mrs. William Snyder.” She couldn’t decide which sounded more … sophisticated. She was going for sophisticated this day, anticipating conversations beyond children and food.

  Shelly winced at herself in the mirror with that thought. She had nothing to contribute to those subjects. At her mother-in-law’s social gatherings, Shelly wanted to talk about Emmeline Pankhurst’s founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union or comment on the growing popularity of the reform dress, or even that Mr. Ford had started his own motor company and soon they could all be driving rather than taking cabs or walking or riding on trains. But those were not deemed “appropriate.” She hoped at least they might talk about books. She’d recently read one set in the American West called The Virginian. She’d been to Virginia and had never seen anything like the author’s description. She guessed the Virginian had been changed by his environment out there in the sagebrush. Bill was always telling her how the environment could change his posies. She picked up her yellow beaded purse, straightened her hat. Her skin looked white as porcelain, and that surprised her too. She’d always looked robust with pink cheeks, without rubbing geranium leaves on them; a hint of suntan. In Annapolis, the sun warmed her face as she removed her hat and sat on a bench near the bay. These past six months she’d been quarantined in the house with Bill’s mother during the weekdays, reading her way through the library books, attending the occasional teas, but otherwise lonely. Quite lonely. Until Bill arrived home on Friday evening. Even then she had to share him with his mother.

  She’d decided to create this day of independence after a fretful argument she had with Bill.

  “I simply can’t stay cooped up inside this … mausoleum,” Shelly whispered her outrage. Keeping her voice low so as not to alert his mother to their arguments frustrated her almost as much as the clipping of her wings. Shelly wondered if the woman listened at their door. She wanted to open it quickly and catch her at it so Bill could see what she had to deal with. But he’d likely just invite her in and comment on how wonderful it was that she cared so much about making Shelly’s life pleasant. He was so blind when it came to his mother!

  “There are three acres of grounds here,” Bill whispered back. “New blooms appear each day. Why, I suspect the—”

  “Don’t start with the litany of that garden,” she hissed. “You know it better than you know me.” Tears pressed against her eyes. She swiped at them. She would not let her tears speak for her!

  “I want to know only you, Shelly.” Bill reached for her. “You are the love of my life.”

  Shelly stepped back, arms across her chest. “Then why is it I rarely have any time with you? Why is it we do nothing on the weekends except ‘check in on the garden’ as though what I’ve dealt with all week is no concern of yours.”

  “If there were problems, you’d tell me, or Mother would. So when I see you walk out to the carriage, I am the happiest man alive assured that all is well. Until we come inside and you … you …” He searched for words.

  “I argue with you. I argue. It’s the only way I can get you to actually see me.”

  “That’s not true, Shelly. It’s not. I thought you’d be happy here. Everything taken care of. No worries. You have an allowance. You can visit your aunt. Why don’t you do that more often?”

  “I visit her every week. It’s the only time I leave here. I’m a captive.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “Let me come with you to Annapolis. We could stay with my father during the week. It would save you the expense of a room. And we’d be together.”

  He’d considered that; she knew he had. His hands had twisted back and forth as he did when he walked and was deep in thought about his posies. But then he’d shaken his head. “No. I spend my evenings preparing for classes, grading papers, all things that would bore you, and you’d find me even less a social creature than what you long for. I … I thought you understood what my life was like.”

  “I did.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “But I thought you’d allow a change in your life with me in it. It’s as though I’m another potted plant and that you just shifted a few others around so you could make a place for me in the hothouse. Just a pot in the hothouse.”

  “Oh, Shelly.” He’d come to her then and held her, but it hadn’t been enough to silence her. She pushed back.

  “If I can’t come with you to Annapolis … If I can’t go out—”

  “Mother takes you to her club meetings.”

  “I don’t need an escort,” Shelly snapped. “I need a husband. I need … a life.”

  “I’ve given you the best one I have.” There was nothing negotiable in his voice, and she knew then that her thought of making him change, of getting him to be the man she dreamed he was, wasn’t going to happen.

  “Then I will simply tell you now, before your mother tells you later, that I will be going out on my own, despite the ‘impropriety of my independence,’ as your mother calls my desire.”

  So today she was doing just that. She took a cab, noting the lush estates along the cobbled streets. Shelly thought it odd that people of wealth built lavish homes with gracious gardens, then hid them behind iron grates covered with clematis and ivies as though they didn’t want anyone to see what they’d built.

  “Mrs. Shelly Snyder is pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said to herself inside the cab. “Mrs. Shelly Snyder is pleased to make your acquaintance,” she repeated, but emphasized the word Mrs. Yes, that’s how she’d say it at this first meeting of the horticultural society, without her mother-in-law to escort her. If she couldn’t change Bill, she would have to change herself. This was the best way she could think to do it: learn what she could about flowers and hope she could get her husband’s attention with more of her own attentiveness to what he truly loved.

  EIGHTEEN

  NEW BEGINNINGS

  Hulda, 1905

  I walked to the tailor shop to buy new needles, past the mercantile, then the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge that housed the dentist and Dr. Chapman’s office. It was a balmy spring, nearly a year after the girls’ weddings. I’d filled the empty space of their leaving by cross-pollinating, growing seeds from plants. Martha was away at school, so I only had Fritz and Frank to spoil and Ruth when she worked in the garden. I bravely wrote to Luther Burbank, expressing admiration for his work, and he’d responded months later, though the letter was more a pat on my head than evidence he actually understood I shared his enthusiasm for hybridizing. But even his letter didn’t fill the hole I couldn’t name.

  I loved watching my daughters turn into sensitive, joyful wives. Lizzie had a few complaints about being alone when Fred traveled, and I’d urged her to intensify interests that didn’t require his presence. “You always liked azaleas,” I reminded her. “Why not think about hybridizing?”

  “I don’t have the same passion for plants as you, Mother.”

  “Well, let’s get that piano out of here and move it to your house,” I said. “I hoped one day you’d give me lessons, but that’ll have to happen when I’m old. I’ll come to you for them.”

  “That would help,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t realize how much I’d miss teaching. Wish being married didn’t put a stopper at that door.”

  Delia had no complaints at all. That surprised me, because she did have her share of issues growing up, whether a stitch was too wide and needed to be taken out or whether the way a cake rose—and fell—was the result of something she’d done in the mixing or just the nature of that cake. She was fussy like me that way. But with Nell Irving, she was happy as a clam, or so she told me. She worked side by side with him, with the cows and hogs and sheep on their acreage, and said she could see now why I liked to work beside her father so much. “We’re just good friends, Mama. Isn’t that nice?”

  “It is.” I started to tell her how to keep it so by careful tending and by bending now and then to his wis
hes, but she just smiled.

  “I have a good teacher, Mama. Not to worry. I was watching.”

  Frank had tilled a section for the vegetable garden, and it was planted so we’d have beans and beets and peas to eat and can. But now the lilacs were coming on to that perfect time for cross-pollinating, and I had needles to replace for my evening sewing, so I trekked to the tailor. There I saw his daughter, and the idea struck me, the hole I needed to fill.

  “Do you ever let your daughter walk out on her own?” I asked Mr. Lawson. “My garden’s not that many blocks from here.”

  “She’s a handful.”

  The child appeared quiet, shy.

  “I’ve raised three girls and a son, so I think I can handle a little thing like her. What’s your name, child?”

  “Nelia,” her father answered for her. “I suppose I’ve not done proper by her since her nanny passed.” He faced his daughter. “You want to visit Mrs. Klager’s garden?” The girl nodded, and when she did, I saw something familiar in her profile. She’d snuck around the picket fence once or twice, flitting in beneath the shrubs. She did no harm, but I’d wondered who she was. Now I knew.

  “Perhaps she could help me. I’d pay her, of course.”

  He seemed relieved for the invitation, and the girl walked out with me, beginning a summer of her assistance. She’d come early as I’d requested, when the air was still and the bees and birds weren’t yet stirring. I confess, I loved an audience, having people ask about what I was doing and why. Maybe it was the teacher in me that hadn’t found students until the garden. I liked seeing their eyes light up with understanding, especially if the concept was foreign to them as cross-pollinating usually was. Maybe Martha got her interest in teaching from her mother.