“Yes, they are.”
They started up the path.
“There’s so many people in and out of here all the time I’ve given up trying to keep track. It’s very hectic. But you’ve picked a quiet day. Roger has taken everyone downtown to see the paper office.” Newboy smiled. “Except me. I always insist on sleeping late Tuesdays.”
“It’s nice to see the place again,” Lanya consented. “When will everybody be back?”
“I would imagine as soon as it gets dark. You said you’d stayed here before. Would you like to wait and say hello to Roger?”
“No,” Lanya said. “No. I was just curious.”
Mr. Newboy laughed. “I see.”
The gravel (chewing Kid’s callused foot) turned between two white-columned mock temples. The trees gave way to hedges; and what might have been an orchard further.
“Can we cut across the garden?”
“Of course. We’ll go to the side terrace. The coffee urn’s still hot I know, and I’ll see if I can find some tea cakes. Roger keeps telling me I have the run of the place, but I still feel a little strange prying into Mrs. Alt’s kitchen just like that—”
“Oh, that’s—” and “You don’t have—” Kidd and Lanya began together.
“No, I know where they are. And it’s time for my coffee break—that’s what you call it here?”
“You’ll love these!” Lanya exclaimed as they stepped through the high hedge. “Roger has the most beautiful flowers and—”
Brambles coiled the trellis. Dried tendrils curled on splintered lath. The ground was gouged up in black confusion here, and here, and there.
“—What in the world…” Lanya began. “What happened?”
Mr. Newboy looked puzzled. “I didn’t know anything had. It’s been like this since I’ve been here.”
“But it was full of flowers: those sun-colored orange things, like tigers. And irises. Lots of irises—”
Kidd’s foot cooled in moist ground.
“Really?” Newboy asked. “How long ago were you here?”
Lanya shrugged. “Weeks…three weeks, four?”
“How strange.” Mr. Newboy shook his head as they crossed the littered earth. “I’d always gotten the impression they’d been like this, for years…”
In a ten-foot dish of stone, leaves rotted in puddles.
Lanya’s head shook. “The fountain used to be going all the time. It had a Perseus, or a Hermes or something in it. Where did it get to?”
“Dear me,” Newboy squinted. “I think it’s in a pile of junk behind the secretary cottage. I saw something like that when I was wandering around. But I never knew it had anything to do with the fountain. I wonder who’s been around here long enough to know?”
“Why don’t you ask Mr. Calkins?” Kidd said.
“Oh, no. I don’t think I would do that.” Mr. Newboy looked at Lanya with bright complicity. “I don’t think I would do that at all.”
“No,” said Lanya, face fallen before the desolation, “I don’t think so.”
At the brim’s crack, the ground, oozy under thin grass, kept their prints like plaster.
They passed another vined fence; a deal of lawn, and, higher than the few full trees, the house. (On a rise off to one side was another house, only three floors. The secretary cottage?)
Set in the grass a verdigrised plate read:
MAY
From the five fat, stone towers—he sought a sixth for symmetry and failed to find it—it looked as though a modern building of dark wood, glass, and brick had been built around an old one of stone.
“How many people does he have here?” Kidd asked.
“I don’t really know,” Mr. Newboy said. They reached the terrace flags. “At least fifteen. Maybe twenty-five. The people he has for help, they’re always changing. I really don’t see how he gets anything done for looking after them. Unless Mrs. Alt does all that.” They climbed the concrete steps to the terrace.
“Wouldn’t you lose fifteen people in there?” Kidd asked.
The house, here, was glass: inside were maple wall panels, tall brass lamps, bronze statuary on small end tables between long couches covered in gold velvet, all wiped across with flakes of glare.
“Oh, you never feel the place is crowded.”
They passed another window-wall; Kidd could see two walls covered with books. Dark beams inside held up a balcony, flanked with chairs of gold and green brocade; silver candlesticks—one near, one far off in shadow—bloomed on white doilies floating on the mahogany river of a dining table. “Sometimes I’ve walked around thinking I was perfectly alone for an hour or so only to come across a party of ten in one of the other rooms. I suppose if the place had a full staff—” dried leaves shattered underfoot—“it wouldn’t be so lonely. Here we are.”
Wooden chairs with colored canvas webbing sat around the terrace. Beyond the balustrade the rocks were licked over with moss and topped by birches, maples, and, here and there, thick oaks.
“You sit down. I’ll be right back.”
Kidd sat—the chair was lower and deeper than he thought—and pulled his notebook into his lap. The glass doors swung behind New-boy. Kidd turned. “What are you looking at?”
“The November garden.” Arms crossed, Lanya leaned on the stone rail. “You can’t see the plaque from here. It’s on top of that rock.”
“What’s in the…November garden?”
She shrugged a “nothing.” “The first night I got here there was a party going on there: November, October, and December.”
“How many gardens does he have?”
“How many months are there?”
“What about the garden we first came through?”
“That one,” she glanced back, “doesn’t have a name.” She looked again at the rocks. “It was a marvelous party, with colored lights strung up. And a band: violins, flutes, and somebody playing a harp.”
“Where did he get violins here in Bellona?”
“He did. And people with lots and lots of gorgeous clothes.”
Kidd was going to say something about Phil.
Lanya turned. “If my dresses are still here, I know exactly where they’d be.”
Mr. Newboy pushed through the glass doors with a teawagon. Urn and cups rattled twice as the tires crossed the sill. The lower tray held dishes of pastry. “You caught Mrs. Alt right after a day of baking.”
“Hey,” Kidd said. “Those look good.”
“Help yourself.” He poured steaming coffee into blue porcelain. “Sugar, cream?”
Kidd shook his head; the cup warmed his knee. He bit. Cookie crumbs fell and rolled on his notebook.
Lanya, sitting on the wall and swinging her tennis shoes against the stone, munched a crisp cone filled with butter-cream.
“Now,” Mr. Newboy said. “Have you brought some poems?”
“Oh.” Kidd brushed crumbs away. “Yeah. But they’re handwritten. I don’t have any typewriter. I print them out neat, after I work on them.”
“I can probably decipher good fair copy.”
Kidd looked at the notebook, at Lanya, at Mr. Newboy, at the notebook. “Here.”
Mr. Newboy settled back in his seat and turned through pages. “Ah. I see your poems are all on the left.”
Kidd held his cup up. The coffee steamed his lips.
“So…” Mr. Newboy smiled into the book, and paused. “You have received that holy and spectacular wound which bleeds…well, poetry.” He turned another page, paused to look at it not quite long enough (in Kidd’s estimate) to read it. “But have you hunkered down close to it, sighted through the lips of it the juncture of your own humanity with that of the race?”
“Sir…?”
“Whether love or rage,” Mr. Newboy went on, not looking up, “or detachment impels the sighting, no matter. If you don’t do it, all your blood is spilled pointlessly…Ah, I suppose I am merely trying to reinvest with meaning what is inadequately referred to in art as Universality. It is an inadequate reference, you know.” He shook his head and turned another page. “There’s no reason why all art should appeal to all people. But every editor and entrepreneur, deep in his heart of hearts, is sure it does, wants it to, wishes it would. In the bar, you asked about publication?” He looked up, brightly.