The Winter Gardeners
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In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away. A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge. The Winter Gardeners spend a summer of sultry afternoons nursing Rob, languidly drinking cocktails and trying to picture Nude Descending Staircase in their supposedly Cubist garden. Soon, however, they find themselves in a court room, where their family's values are on trial in a case reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde.
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WINTER GARDENERS
who has taught me so much about
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She meditated on Dr. Amicable’s words, her admiration for his passion unlikely to become anything veneratory, it having reached a level beyond the erotic. But there was something about Shakely’s artlessness that she was finding more and more appealing, more visceral, the longer she allowed herself to live within the over-wrought aestheticism of her own mind. Giggy gulped some more beer and ran the long nail of her left pinky along the edge of the chaise longue, surprised to find it snag on a slit in the material. This lazy sew struck the matriarch as not simply unfortunate but embarrassing, even peculiar. The whippet’s effort to steal her attention failed. The chaise longue, like much of her furniture, had come from her deceased mother’s long-since-demolished-but-once-five-star hotel in Zurich, the Ambassador’s Arms. Home Away from Home, for Ambassadors and Kings. A tear in the fabric of the furniture was a tear in the fabric of her memory.
Giggy’s concerns about the material were rooted in the images that she recalled of herself as a pert thing curled up on the chaise while Mama played the piano in her eccentric way – charming, really, with a pained anxiety coming through in the brief silence that foreshadowed each sudden poke of Mama’s only index finger. Watching her play, one could not help but think of a chicken learning to type – an impassioned chicken, unquestionably, but still … These fond, formative memories made it all the more troublesome to imagine that the piano and the chaise longue, which had all this time remained as united as wealthy Siamese twins, might soon be separated. They were all she had left of her childhood and now she was giving one of them up to the constable’s charity bazaar. She could still hear Mama, in a continental English as reassuring as a receding thunderstorm, proudly inform the baronets who sojourned every season on their way to the Black Forest mineral baths, of the refinement of the hotel. ‘Five stars, five of them, dahrlinggs,’ she would zsazsa. ‘It takes talent to whip up a hotel like this one. A bucket of talent. And I’ve got a bucket.’ The memory brought back to Giggy her mother’s last years of pain, of waning hope – not pride, as the daughter had once thought, but desperation. One recurring image, only one, as Giggy left in search of her destiny – that of Mama standing as glorious as a Rhode Island Red next to the piano, wagging the pointed nail of a finger in warning. The sun ricocheted off the mother’s aurora of auburn hair. It was the brilliance of the locks, Giggy later lied, that caused her to tear. Oh yes, Giggy had her own bucket, a bucket full of painful memories. If only she could sell them, she thought, instead of the furniture.
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