Heart's Ease
"The juice of it, on sleeping eye-lids laid,
Will make a man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees."
William Shakespeare: "A Midsummer-Night’s Dream"
"Bring me a pansy, Vonnie, and I’ll tell you what will come of your love," she told the child in her squirrel-tamer’s voice. Maga has never lived anywhere but the city–in this very house since I was a small boy–but she insists on trying to live a country life, tied to the weather, bound to the soil and even, by golly, with wild creatures that tip-toe up to her hand.
All down the three-story side of the neighbor’s brick wall, Maga grew ivy in one of those enclosed back gardens that come half-way up the side of the house. She had a "Philadelphia brownstone"–there’s faint praise–in Old City, made of brick. And along the garden walk, at the base of the Sargasso-growth of ivy, she had set a narrow bed of pansies. I come in to do the rough work, of course, spading a bed and so forth. She used to be a canny gardener, but now she’s getting on in years. Still, she had the foresight to benefit from the new "winter pansies," that have come on the market these last few years. Her city property, even if it was in walking distance of Independence Hall, provided a micro-climate during the winter, not far off from what must be in Athens, Georgia. If a good gardener kills a lot of plants, we’re wonderful gardeners here in Pee Aye, since we destroy armies of pansies every year. It isn’t exactly the heat or the cold–it’s the climate. The whole problem is that pansies are annual plants; they go to seed and die in the heat of summer. We plant them in the spring; they produce their twelve kitten-faced flowers, grow an inch, and fall apart by the end of June. But the newer cultivars winter over–not so well as Maga, who’s a sucker for three-color prints in garden catalogs, would have you believe, mind you. This year, however, she got great results out of them by planting a line of mixed colors in the fall, where they benefitted from the heat radiated by all that masonry and the shelter of overhanging branches of ivy. The neighbor, a bank, was wild over having ivy vines tugging at the mortar in his wall and I’d offered to remove it for her, but Maga wanted it there and the bank’s man had been sent off, muttering what must have been wishes that her years be drawing to a close. They should live so long to see it–any of us, actually. Anyhow, the pansies blossomed and grew right up to Christmas-time and this spring they took off like Jack’s beanstalk. She fertilized the b’jeesus out of them with a vegetarian compost tea to her own recipe, and by Easter here they were throwing up hundreds of flowers, knee-high to little Vonnie, as she bent to find just the right one to pick for her Maga. I always said I got my interest in horticulture from my mother.
Vonnie is four or five, I think, brown-haired, shy as a fawn. I can hardly get near her. Her darker-colored, older sister, Tasha, drifted over, half jealous, to see what was so interesting, when Vonnie brought the flower back to Maga.
"This is called ‘Tickle-My-Fancy,’" she told the girls, with the earnest impression, which being bent-over by leaching bones gives to everything a person says. "Don’t ever pick it when it’s wet with dew or it will spoil your love. Now each of you take a petal–gentle, don’t tear– and pull it off." The girls frowned with care, as their almost-jointless fingers tugged one of the five petals from the flower-stem in Maga’s knobbed grasp.
"I don’t know where you get these names," I called from my lawn chair, across a sunny bed in which the broad leaves of a scattering of tulips were over-growing some spent daffodils.
"We’re Welsh, don’t you remember," Maga raised her voice, but not her head. "The Welsh go way back."
"Sometimes I wonder if you aren’t even older than I think. They’re called ‘pansy,’ from the French, ‘pensée,’ to think or thoughts or something. They make you think," I informed her.
"Of your loved one," she responded, not to let me have the final word. "They have heart-shaped leaves, don’t they? It’s why they’re called heart’s-ease.
"Now, we have three petals left," Maga said, as if just discovering it through her bifocals. "Can we get three more girls to come and pick a petal? But they can’t be married." Tasha, with Vonnie trailing, dashed into the house, to recruit their cousins.
"The Easter party is a fine tradition." I didn’t like to say Maga was getting on, exactly. "But what do you think of the idea that someone ought to offer to take it over for you? Sure, everybody brings something as it is, but still, it must be a lot for you to have us all over here like this."
"No-o," Maga protested mildly, "it gives me something to do. I have nothing but time on my hands."
The back door of the house bounced open on a squeal of springs and the girls tumbled down the two steps, tugging Lorraine’s Birdie and Art’s teen-aged Ansie. Birdie’s little brother tagged along, to swell the crowd. Shepherding-along behind them, my wife, Ann, and our daughter, Leslie, carried plates of little cakes and cookies. Ann sat down with one at Maga’s table and Leslie came over to place the other offering where I could reach. She sat by the little table with me, but kept her eyes on Maga’s vaudeville act.
"Simon still in watching the game?" I asked. Simon was the ne’er-do-well Leslie hung out with. He didn’t often consent to grace our family functions with his presence, so I tried to seem interested..., pleased, even.
"Oh, yeah," Leslie answered, "but they’re losing and he’s asleep in the lounger, so I decided to come out here."
"Aunt Leslie, pick your petal, pick your petal," the little girls cried. "Jimmy can’t because he’s a boy."
"Never give pansies to a man," Maga told them, "or it will bring him bad luck." Jimmy, who had been looking hurt, was satisfied to find himself among us men.
Leslie stood and went over. "I don’t get much choice, there’s only one petal left," she joked as she pulled it off the stem.
"Now," Maga said, taking Vonnie’s petal and smoothing it on the table with a short finger-nail, "we look for the secret signs. Four lines, Vonnie, that means hope." Vonnie gave a little hop and snatched up her petal.
"Tasha has thick lines, see, and all leaning toward the right, look. Isn’t that good? You will have prosperity in love all your life." Tasha let out a whoop and slapped her palm down to grab her petal in a destroying grip.
"So, Ansie," Maga said with seriousness matching the teenager’s aloofness, "my eyes aren’t as good as they were. Is that seven or eight lines?" Transparent as the ploy was, consensus was arrived at. "Seven means constancy in love. Which is the longest, then? The middle? Then Sunday will be your wedding day." Ansie’s lips grew tight and bent, though she tried not to seem pleased.
"Birdie, did I miss your petal?" Maga said. "Where is it? Ah, you have to count them for me." Birdie did. "Nine means a changing heart. You will live an interesting life." Birdie took a half-second to glance around and gathered that no one was going to laugh before she let out a giggle.
"I guess that leaves me," Leslie said, standing dark and tall in the reedy crowd of girls to offer her petal. She could have her pick of the boys. "I have eleven lines and they lean to the left."
Maga looked down longer at Leslie’s petal than at the others. When she spoke, it was without inflection. "Thick lines leaning to the left point to a life of trouble."
"Well, I already have that," Leslie joked.
"Eleven lines are for disappointment in love and an early grave."
"Maga!" Leslie exclaimed. "What are you trying to do to me?" Her voice had started out in a humorous vein, but half way through the short sentence tears started up in Leslie’s eyes and her voice caught. Ann rose to her feet and moved to stand behind her, resting a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. From behind a crumpled napkin, Leslie’s voice was small, "The problem isn’t that he doesn’t like me. It’s just that he doesn’t care very much about anything!" The youngest children leaned together against Maga and stared with open fascination. Loyal hate sparked in Ansie’s puberty-wise eyes, while Birdie’s gaze, caught between ages, flicked from face to face. Ann kneaded Leslie’s shoulder. And me, I didn’t know what the hell to do. What I felt like doing was telling the bum to get out and stay out, but I knew that would only land me in hot water. I wished Maga would stick to her knitting and stop playing the role of Sigmund Freud’s gypsy grandmother.
Maga cleared her throat and took Leslie’s hand. "What you must do, then, is to place a cloth soaked in tea extracted from the pansy on his sleeping eyes. The first thing he looks upon when he opens his eyes, he will love for as many years as there were flowers in the juice." I couldn’t think fast enough how to shut her up. But I knew from long experience she always thinks the way out leads deeper in.
"Well, he is sleeping," Leslie said, throwing the napkin down. "Are there a hundred flowers here? Looks like."
Maga remained serious, "You can only pick one for each year of your life so far."
"Twenty-five, then," Leslie said with a little laugh. "Who will help me pick some pansies?"
The little ones around Maga, Ann and Leslie were all in a dither as they bustled up the path and in through the kitchen door.
I sat enjoying the sun for a bit, but by this time my coffee was cold. As I take it black, no sugar, I dumped it at the base of a nice little dwarf Japanese holly, where it would do no harm and some good. It’s an acid infusion of herbs, after all. As I wandered into the female-filled kitchen to get a refill, Leslie was just taking a glass bowl of flowers and water out of the microwave with pot-holder mitts.
In a few minutes, Ann wandered out to join me in the garden again. "You’re looking an awfully lot like your daughter," I said by way of hello.
"You know," she said, "I was only twenty -three when we married."
"I knew that," I said. From inside the house we heard a sudden excitement of voices. I looked that way. "Sounds like somebody finally scored."
appeared April, 2002