I came to Bosco for the quiet.
That’s what it’s famous for.
The silence reigns each day between the hours of nine and five by
order of a hundred-year-old decree made by a woman who lies dead
beneath the rosebushes-a silence guarded by four hundred acres of
wind sifting through white pines with a sound like a mother saying
hush. The silence stretches into the still, warm afternoon until it
melts into the darkest part of the garden where spiders spin their
tunnel-shaped webs in the box-hedge maze. Just before dusk the wind,
released from the pines, blows into the dry pipes of the marble
fountain, swirls into the grotto, and creeps up the hill, into the
gaping mouths of the satyrs, caressing the breasts of the
sphinxes, snaking up the central fountain allée, and onto the
terrace, where it exhales its resin- and copper-tinged breath onto
the glasses and crystal decanters laid out on the balustrade.
Even when we come down to drinks on the terrace there’s always a
moment, while the ice settles in the silver bowls and we brush the
yellow pine needles off the rattan chairs, when it seems the silence
will never be broken. When it seems that the silence might continue
to accumulate-like the golden pine needles that pad the paths
through the box-hedge maze and the crumbling marble steps and choke
the mouths of the satyrs and fill the pipes of the fountain- and
finally be too deep to disturb.
Then someone laughs and clinks his glass against another’s, and says …
“Cheers. Here’s to Aurora Latham and Bosco.”
“Here, here,” we all chime into the evening, sending the echoes of
our voices rolling down the terraced lawn like brightly colored
croquet balls from some long-ago lawn party.
“God, I’ve never gotten so much work done,” Bethesda Graham says, as
if testing the air’s capacity to hold a longer sentence or two.
We all look at her with envy. Or maybe it’s only me, not only
because I didn’t get any work done today, but because everything
about Bethesda bespeaks confidence, from her slim elegant
biographies and barbed critical reviews to her sleek cap of shiny
black hair with bangs that just graze her perfectly arched
eyebrows-which are arched now at Nat Loomis, as if the two of them
were sharing some secret, unspoken joke-and set off her milk-white
skin and delicate bone structure. Even Bethesda’s size-she can’t be
more than four nine-is intimidating, as if everything superfluous
had been refined down to its essential core. Or maybe it’s just that
at five nine I loom over her and my hair, unmanageable at the best
of times, has been steadily swelling in the moist Bosco air and
acquired red highlights from the copper pipes. I feel like an angry
Valkyrie next to her.
“Magic,” says Zalman Bronsky, the poet, sipping his Campari and
soda. “A dream. Perfection.” He releases his words as if they were
birds he’s been cupping in his hands throughout the day.
“I got shit-all done,” complains Nat Loomis, the novelist. The
famous novelist. I’d had to stop myself from gasping aloud when I
recognized him on my first day at Bosco-and who wouldn’t recognize
that profile, the jawline only slightly weaker than his jacket
photos suggest, the trademark square glasses, the hazel eyes that
morph from blue to green depending (he once said in an interview) on
his mood, the tousled hair and sardonic grin. Along with the rest of
the world (or at least the world of MFA writing programs and bookish
Manhattan), I had read his first novel ten years ago and fallen in
love-with it, with its young, tough, but vulnerable protagonist, and
with the author himself. And along with the rest of that little
world I’d been immersed in these last ten years, I couldn’t help
wondering where his second novel was. Surely, though, the fact that
he’s here is a favorable sign that it’s only a matter of time before
the long-awaited second novel is born out of the incubator of
silence that is Bosco.
“It’s too quiet,” Nat says, now taking a sip of the single-malt
scotch that the director, Diana Tate, sets out each night in a
cut-glass decanter.
David Fox, a landscape architect who I’ve heard is writing a report
on the gardens for the Garden Conservancy, holds up a Waterford
tumbler of the stuff, the gold liquor catching a last ray of light
as the sun impales itself on the tips of the pines at the western
edge of the estate, and proposes a toast, “To Aurora Latham’s Sacro
Bosco-a sacred wood indeed.”
“Is that what the name means?” asks one of the painters who’ve just
joined us on the terrace. “I thought it was a funny name for an
artists’ colony-isn’t it some kind of chocolate milk housewives made
in the fifties?”
The other artists, who are just now straggling in from their out-lying
studios and cabins like laborers returning from the fields,
laugh at their cohort’s joke and grouse that the writers, as usual,
have taken all the good chairs, leaving them the cold stone
balustrade. One can’t help but notice that there’s a class system
here at Bosco. The writers, who stay in the mansion, play the role
of landed gentry. Nat Loomis and Bethesda Graham somehow manage to
make their identical outfits of black jeans and white T-shirts look
like some kind of arcane English hunting wardrobe. Even unassuming
Zalman Bronsky, in his rumpled linen trousers and yellowed,
uncuffed, and untucked dress shirt, looks like the eccentric uncle
in a Chekhov play.
“She named it after the Sacro Bosco garden in Bomarzo-near Rome,” I
say, my first spoken words of the day. I’m surprised my vocal cords
still work, but, after all, my book-my first novel-is set here at
Bosco, which is why I know that the estate isn’t named for a bedtime
beverage. I address my remarks to David Fox, though, because
the other writers, especially Bethesda Graham and Nat Loomis, still
scare me.
Just remember, the director told me on the first day, never call Nat
Nathaniel, or Bethesda Beth. I smiled at that evidence of vanity on
their parts, but then I remembered that I’d been quick enough to
modify my own name to Ellis when I published my first story. After
all, who would take seriously a writer called Ellie?
“She saw it on one of the trips she and Milo Latham took to Italy,”
I add, “and was inspired to create her own version of an Italian
Renaissance garden here on the banks of the Hudson.”
We all look south toward where the Hudson should be, but the
towering pines obscure the view. Instead we are looking down on
crumbling marble terraces and broken statuary-statues of the Muses,
whose shoulders are mantled with the gold dust of decaying pine
needles and whose faces (at least on the statues who still have
their heads) are cloaked in shadow and green moss. The hedges and
shrubbery-once clipped and ordered-have overgrown their neat
geometry and now sprawl in an untidy thicket across the hill. The
fountain allée, with its satyrs and sphinxes who once spouted water
from their mouths and breasts, leads to a statue of a horse poised
on the edge of the hill as if it were about to leap into the dark,
overgrown boxwood maze-Aurora Latham’s giardino segreto-at the
bottom of the hill. Somewhere at the center of the maze is a
fountain, but the hedges have grown too high to see it now.
“Actually, the garden’s closer in design to the Villa d’Este at
Tivoli,” Bethesda Graham murmurs, sipping her mineral water. “The
idea of all these fountains and the springs running down the hill
into a grotto and then out to the main fountain and from there to
the river and finally to the sea … Aurora wrote in her Italian
journal that she wanted to create a garden that was the wellspring
of a fountain like the sacred spring on Mount Parnassus.” Bethesda
pronounces Aurora’s name as if she were a contemporary who’d only
moments ago quit the terrace. Of course, I remember, she’s writing a
biography of Aurora Latham. Bethesda’s the expert here.
“The whole hill is a fountain,” David Fox says. “One might even say
the entire estate. Pumps draw the water up from the spring at the
bottom of the hill and then pipes funnel the water down the hill
though a hundred channels. On a night like this we would have heard
the water cascading down the terraces like a thousand voices.”
Zalman Bronsky murmurs something. I lean forward to ask him to
repeat himself, but then the words, half heard and still lingering
in Bosco’s perfect silence, sound clearly in my head.
“‘The eloquence of water fills this hill,'” I repeat. “How lovely.
It’s iambic pentameter, isn’t it?”
The poet looks startled, but then he smiles and takes out of his
jacket a piece of paper that has been folded in quarters and begins
to write down the line. When he sees it’s too dark to, he gets up to
go inside. The artists have already gone inside for dinner, their
manual labors having given them keener appetites.
“What happened to the fountains?” I ask David Fox, but it’s Bethesda
who answers.
“The spring dried up,” she says, taking another careful sip from her
glass.
“Not a particularly good omen for those who’ve come to drink at the
wellspring of the Muses,” Nat says, downing the last of his scotch.
“We might as well go inside for dinner.” He looks into his empty
glass as if its dryness stood for the dried-up pipes of the
fountain. Bethesda takes the glass from him as he gets up and
follows him through the French doors into the dining room.
David Fox and I are left alone on the terrace looking down on the
overgrown garden.
“So when you finish researching the garden, will it be restored?” I
ask.
“If we get funding from the Garden Conservancy,” he says, draining
the last drop of scotch from his glass. I get up and he reaches a
hand out to take my wineglass. As his hand brushes mine, I feel a
tremor-as if the pipes of the old fountain below us had come to life
and were about to send forth jets of water, into the last lingering
glow of the sunset. The garden wavers and quakes like a reflection
in a pool of water, and I see a slim white figure swimming at its
center. I force my eyes shut and, ignoring the sweet, spicy smell
that has swept over the terrace, count to ten. When I open them, the
garden has gone still and I can see that the slim white figure is
only a statue standing below the western edge of the terrace and the
scent of vanilla has faded from the air.
“You’re right,” I say, “it is prettier as a ruin.”
He laughs. “I agree, but I never said anything of the kind. The
Garden Conservancy would have me fired if I did.”
At dinner I sit between Zalman Bronsky and Diana Tate. I’m glad I’m
not next to David Fox, because I’m still embarrassed at what
happened on the terrace. Of course he hadn’t said that the garden
was prettier in ruins. It was only my imagination. Sometimes after a
day of writing, after listening to the voices of my characters in my
head, I begin to imagine that I can actually hear their voices.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Ghost Orchid
by Carol Goodman
Copyright © 2006 by Carol Goodman.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Ballantine Books
Copyright © 2006
Carol Goodman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-345-46213-0
