23. The Hanging Gardens of Lower Westchester
I’d been born into a land of ruins, this much had always been clear to me. The palatial estates that we’d visited on class trips, ostentatious manors that had once held Rockefellers, Van Tassels, Purdys, Jays, Meads, Muscoots. Built in premodern vainglory, their homes now were stuffy, mid-tier museums, open for weekly tours, the grounds and gardens supported by local grants and historical societies and anonymous donors seeking write-offs. Once bastions of the upper-class and their highest culture, now backdrops to weekly farmer’s markets and Kaboozles Clap-Along concerts.
Caramoor! Built in the 1920s by a banker in search of a summer home for his wife to fill with modern art, constructed in a Spanish style with the classic orange-tiled roofs—was now mainly a rental space for weddings and corporate picnics, its rolling hills dotted by perplexing but ultimately unprovocative sculptural installations. The outdoor stage a rest stop for various philharmonics willing of summer tours on their way up to Boston from Carnegie Hall.
Greystone! The famed ninety-nine room mansion of the Untermeyers, overlooking the rocky cliffs of the Hudson river (leveled years ago) now with Section 8 housing just across the busy street. A 150-acre garden overgrown and in semi-disrepair, and all that remained outside its gates was the cryptic name somehow still attached to the nearby Metro-North train station: “Next stop, Greystone!” What the hell town is Greystone? Isn’t this Yonkers? the passengers might mutter to themselves as they journey along the Hudson line.
The Glenview Mansion, now a smallish and eclectic arts museum displaying yarn-murals and colorful installations made of Mod-Podged garbage, surrounding a moldy-smelling planetarium that took school groups three days a week for a guided tour of the stars and, twice monthly, still put up a decent Laser Floyd show for the handful of stoned local retirees who still remembered Woodstock.
Even the pinnacle—the Rockefeller estate—turned over to the State, a massive parkland, a spaghetti pile of running trails for the mountain goat set. A “preserve,” as if it was a mason jar filled with jellied stone fruits, kept on a basement shelf in case of pandemic or apocalypse.
On the other end of the great reservoirs that still hold the city’s Catskill water, is the Muscoot “gentleman’s farm” which had become little more than a petting zoo where I attended summer camps and was taught to feed chickens and care for goats and fear turkeys. Less well-known, but not far off, was the Lasdon Estate, now an arboretum and veteran’s memorial with— bizarrely—a winding walking trail edged with animatronic dinosaurs, the obsession of one of the heirs when they were a child, now rusting away.
Nobody else seemed to care. Hardly anyone seemed to notice. They drove by these things each day as if they either weren’t there at all or didn’t matter anymore. I suppose that’s how most people do feel about history all-in-all. But not me. On my way to school each day I’d pass by the IBM campus on Route 134 and then see the tower of the abandoned Reed house near Shadow Lake, tilting at about a 30-degree angle.
I couldn’t not see it.
Would it fall this year? Next?
Or never?
Would they never fall, exactly? For isn’t this the nature of a ruin, finally: a thing always falling, never fallen.
One reason I paid so much attention to these things was that they were all places my father brought me to witness his work. For fifty years already before I was born, he’d been a groundskeeper for these properties, first when they were privately-owned and now that they were largely publicly maintained. For almost twenty years he’d worked for one of the oldest, wealthiest family in town, the Marvells, whose extensive gardens had necessitated full-time care. Though he’d left that job before I was born, I understood that he was still deeply connected to the network of society types in town, and that he could get favors done by people who knew people at every level around us.
He was well past retirement age by the time I turned thirteen, still drawing on his lifetime of expertise in all the gardens in the area. He was the one they called when a rare grove of still-surviving American chestnuts fell ill, or if the cherry blossoms gifted for the hundred-year-old Chinese Friendship pavilion needed to be maintained before the people from our sister city, Jingchao, noticed we’d let them all die.
There were still Old Money families in Westchester, of course, but by and large they’d been edged out to make room for the new. The Zuckerbergs (parents), the Clintons, the Ochs, the Schliefers, the Steinhardts, the Siegels, and those twin political bogeymen, Roger Ailes and George Soros. They came through town in their black SUVs, hard to tell at a distance from those who’d survived various tech bubbles, or lawyers, or those who’d started chains of dentists offices, or others who did unmentioned things for JP Morgan or Bank of America. We even had some Hollywood and rock n’ roll glamour—in line once at the coffee shop I’d met Ben Stiller, buying a latte, and in the pool once I’d shared a swim lane with a lesser member of Matchbox Twenty. There was still plenty of money to go around Westchester—the golf courses were still booked solid, the parking lots packed with Bentleys and Maseratis and Lamborghinis—our neighbors were not sweating it, as my classmates would say. But it wasn’t the same. I could not escape the ever-present feeling that everything around me still paled in comparison to the Westechester of a hundred years ago. The trees half as high, the apartment towers not-yet-built, the Elms not-yet infested with beetle-born diseases.
We’d once been home to Peregrine Falcons, Loggerhead Shrikes, Bald Eagles, King Rails, Henslow’s Sparrows. Cerulean Warblers, Whippoorwills, Common Nighthawks. The American Black Duck! These, I scanned the tree branches for with my binoculars most weeks, but saw nothing but cardinals and blue jays and goldfinches and the like. I pored over the old encyclopedias that still lined the bookshelves in our basement. Collections sent to my father by the Audubon Society and which I passed the lonely hours of my preteen years studying instead of playing lacrosse and tennis with my well-to-do classmates, to whom I was a kid who dressed poor, and was poor—I suppose. A kid with no mother to schedule his playdates, who’d now become a thirteen-year-old who’d been invited to neither bar nor bat mitzvahs, who did not get called up to go on winter break trips to Stowe or Sugarloaf with my classmates, who did not have a iPhone or an Apple Watch—a kid who preferred birdwatching and garden-tending and filling out intra-library loan request forms to Call of Duty and YouTube. As my neighbors lived, day in, day out, on the imaginary sets of their own Real Housewives of Lower Westchester series, I lived in some parallel universe: overlapping without intersecting. Incongruous: morning, noon, and night. And if that had been all, I’d have been fine, really—content with my lot in life, in the company of a big brain and a ninety-book borrowing limit and a hefty pair of Leica Noctivid 10x42 Binoculars that I’d spent all my summer weeding money on. Yes, I’d have been more than happy with that life, if I only could have kept it just a little longer.
But all things fall to ruin. My father was dying. Of what I didn’t exactly know. Some sort of heart trouble that was, I imagined, perhaps inheritable. He knew it was going to be a race against time, literally. We spoke about it first on my fourteenth birthday, a July morning where we were fighting clouds of gnats in the backyard garden, trying to pull in the first crop of tomatoes from our trellised vines. The juicy red globes stacked up in my basket as my father said he needed to tell me something important: the odds of him making it to my eighteenth, he told me, were slim to none.
“What will happen to me?” I asked him. “Can I still live here?”
A solipsistic response, and one which I regret now, though it turned out to be almost exactly the same concern pressing on my father.
“Not if you’re not eighteen yet,” he said. “I can leave you the house in a trust, with some money I have saved. But they’ll hold it until you’re legally an adult. And they won’t let you stay here alone.”
Making the point that I was more adult already than most eighteen-year-olds I’d met, my father agreed but said, sadly, “But the law is the law.”
“Where will they send me?” I asked. And for a moment I almost believed, like I had at age nine, that my mother would be suddenly revealed to me. That I would be sent off to live with her, whoever she was, somewhere far away. Somewhere better.
But that was not the plan he shared with me—not at all.
“They’ll send you to a foster home,” he said. “Unless you don’t tell them I’m dead.”
I did not understand.
“Bury me here,” he commanded, as we walked out to the spot where he liked to sit and read, underneath a brilliant crimson Japanese maple. He traced out a rectangularish area with one foot and then looked up at me, as if expecting that I would be taking notes.
“I can’t do that,” I protested.
“It’s just a trench. It doesn’t even really need to be all that deep like they say.”
“No I mean, I can’t just bury you and not tell anybody.”
“If you don’t, they’re going to shove you into some kind of room with seventeen other kids with some lady milking the coffers and feeding everyone crackers and water.”
“That’s not—Dad, do we have to figure this out right now?”
“What if I drop dead tomorrow? Or tonight?”
He began rubbing his chest with the back of his hand as if trying to sense if some eruption was, in fact, on its way. I sobbed and tried to tear myself away, dropping fat red tomatoes to splat on the grass—but he had my hand in his other one and was not letting go.
“This is what I want. To be here in the garden. And to know, when I go, that you’ll be fine without me. And we’re going to practice—you’ll see. My signature’s just a bunch of zigzags anyway. You can pay the bills, maintain everything, it’s not hard. You do it all already, don’t you?”
We were not doomsday preppers, exactly, but we were prepared for something—maybe this, now, I realized. Pantry full of pickled vegetables, cellar full of dry goods. Rainwater collection and filtration systems, a wide array of vegetables and fruits and berries growing. There was hardly any need to go to a grocery store, even with him alive, and with just one of us, I knew he was right, I could make it a year or more without much trouble.
“What am I supposed to do when I do turn eighteen then?” I asked my father finally. “I can’t just dig you back up and pass your four-year-old corpse off as a fresh heart attack, can I?”
He scoffed, though I could tell that he had not really settled on a good answer for this. And it was with considerably less confidence then that he did reply finally.
“Say I wandered off. Old people vanish it all the time.”
“They’ll have to look for you,” I complained. “What if they decide to come digging up the yard to see if I murdered you?”
“That’s not going to happen,” he scoffed. “These cops? Here? In this town? They wouldn’t get their manicures ruined over little old me.”
“This is insane, dad.”
“Just think about it.”
I said I would, but my mind never changed from that moment on—not really. There was no way whatsoever I was doing it, I knew.
But I told him otherwise. After two weeks of obsessive pestering, he wore me down and at last I agreed to the scheme, just to shut him up. Just to help him sleep a little easier, and not tax his ailing ventricles to bring about the end already.
And he did sleep easier, after that, though then it was me, at night, lying awake, worrying about it, and even praying to all the gods I didn’t believe in, to just let him stay longer—just long enough. In the meantime I could lie to him about this at least, so if it did happen one day, he’d be able to go to his rest peacefully sure of his plans in place. So long as I didn’t suddenly begin believing in ghosts, I figured, I wouldn’t need to worry about harassment from the Great Beyond.
My father was a ruin himself—he’d have been the first to admit it. Not a Rockefeller ruin, he’d explain, but a subsequent variety—"Cheever ruin,” I sometimes thought of it. His own post-War rocket rise as a businessman fizzling out in spectacular enough fashion: drink, depression, down stocks, decaying physicality. He’d had me so late in life, well past the age that any decent man ought to be fathering children—he’d have been the first to admit this, if not the identity of my mother. And in school I daydreamed to keep myself occupied in the drudgery of classes I’d exceeded when I was still losing my baby teeth. Looking around at the kids in their rows beside me, content in their designer jeans and their goose-down jackets with lift tickets still dangling from the zippers—I thought about their parents who lined up to take them home in Land Rovers and Lexuses. What would be their ruin, I wondered? Tech bubble bursting, drug problems, car accidents, some new crisis unforeseen? I took no pleasure in any of it—none of them seemed at all aware of their downward trending, at least not that I could tell. They’d been raised to believe that all dreams are attainable for anyone with the means to pursue them. Raised to believe that their mothers and fathers had gotten what they’d gotten through deserving, hard work, and not deeply immoral trade-offs: Brian Kellehan, whose father’s company sold predatory payday loans to poor folks. Georgia Wolcoff, whose mother designed high fashion handbags for even wealthier people using alligator and ostrich skin. Peter O’Leary, the son of a Congressman who specialized in lifting environmental regulations, or, excuse me, “job creation.”
It all went on and on, a racket here, a racket there, futilely delaying the inevitable end.
Sometimes I bitterly suspected that my father’s real concern in dying was not that I’d be taken off to some group home by the sheriff, but that, with me gone, no one would be there to care for his true love—the garden. Not that I didn’t think he loved me, but I’d always known that it was not in the same way. He babied that garden; cooed to the seedlings and sang to them. Patiently, he trimmed and pruned them with hands far more cautious than he used on my own haircuts.
The doctors had warned him to take it easy, for the sake of his heart. And yet he was out there daily, hour after hour, in the afternoon sun, hoeing and tilling and yanking up the chokeweed so it could be burned—no matter that the thick smoke that resulted would make him cough and cause his wrists to blister where it caught him sometimes beneath the cuff of his gardening gloves.
All the meticulous work he’d done, for all those years, would be lost, I knew, if both of us were gone. Our paradise lost to nature’s inevitable blight.
Why else did he insist on going over and over it with me, in those final years? How to maintain the raised beds when they split and how to mix the soil properly so it would drain. Dividing, deadheading, propagating, staking… I’d grown up with it all in my blood and yet we covered these things in greater depth than any school subject. Perhaps he knew that I had those things more than covered on my own. Perhaps I ought to have felt proud to be entrusted with his great love, to be handed what little legacy my father had to give me. And so, I followed along, and promised him I’d keep it all going and that I would put him just beneath the Japanese maple tree where he wanted to be put. But I knew I wouldn’t.
Was I scared? Was I stubborn?
It didn’t matter in the end.
When it happened, just the way I’d pictured it so many times, I was totally unprepared. I think maybe we always are. Some part of us just can’t believe that it will happen, even though it is the only guarantee we have in life.
My father dropped dead in the garden on a Spring morning, as he’d been starting to gather up some of the daffodil bulbs that had spread out of their area. But before he could snip them down and store them in the coolest part of the cellar until the coming year—gardening is so full of these wild ambitions—he gasped, then cried, then gurgled, hitting the grass on his left side and rolling back to face the gray skies above. It was probably already over, the EMTs would tell me later, but I couldn’t just let it happen. I ran.
Ran away from him, to our neighbor’s house and called the ambulance.
In what universe would I not have?
Our neighbor, Mrs. Fowler, was home and kept me inside while the ambulance came and a stretcher was eased down the muddy hill and into the sunken area where my father had fallen. I watched from Mrs. Fowler’s window, through her rosebushes, with a plate of her spiced shortbread in my lap that I could not bear to eat. She made me some tea and told me it would all be all right. I don’t know why I let myself believe her. She was from Dover and had a sweet English accent. She said they’d just take him to the hospital, and he’d be home soon, good as new. She’d drive me over after they were done reviving him.
Lies are kindnesses, you see. Not all lies are bad.
They put him in the black bag, zipped it shut, and moved him away. The whole thing took ten minutes from when they’d arrived.
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Fowler said, letting out a little sigh.
I closed my eyes and lay back, thinking that, maybe, I could just simply never open them again and never face the world I’d entered. The guilt I already felt for failing him.
With all my father’s worries about my Dickensian future, it didn’t come to anything so terrible. Not that I understood why, at the time. I had no sense then of the forces that were already being set in motion for my benefit. Mrs. Fowler made the first of a series of secret phone calls in the minutes after the ambulance left. A clandestine network began to come into action through the members of the Westchester Garden Society, of which I knew vaguely that Mrs. Fowler was a longstanding member. Her narrow passion was for roses, and in her yard, she tended to a dozen varieties, some old world and some new, some miniature and some massive, some climbing and some bush-bound. All my life I’d watched them across the street from my bedroom window, yellows and pinks and reds and purples—she had a taste for a kind of soapy color that nauseated me, and the smell of the flowers that often drifted over the road to my bed had, many mornings, woken me unpleasantly. Never had I imagined that I would someday come to live there among them, but this is what happened, as the women in the garden club spoke to husbands in their Elks and Lions and Rotary clubs. A whole civic world activated in my honor. There would be no group home, no subsidized housing in Yonkers, no foster siblings, no qualification for welfare checks.
Instead, I would live for two years with Mrs. Foster, among her curio cabinets and Staffordshire cottages. I knew nothing of the powers that had been wielded for me, or by whom they had been wielded. Only that I was able to stay there, and it was never discussed. In short order, I found myself feeling like one of her many grafted roses, left to root in some new soil, adapting to the environs as best I could.
Of course, at first I intended to spend as much time as possible across the street in the old house, but swiftly I surrendered on this. The rooms felt eerie, not haunted by any ghosts exactly, but rather empty from the lack of any presence, physical or spectral. My father and I had, for so many years, lived side-by-side in general silence, a bit like roommates with only dishes and trash pickup to discuss, going weeks without exchanging many words at all. Now I found myself unable to bear the house without his creaks and sighs and occasional guttural noises.
The garden was another matter. There I could still lose myself in the companionship of our old friends. Busywork awaited me at every bend. I felt like a guest at a dinner party where the host had stepped away just for a moment, left there with companions in his house, entrusted with his valuables. The birds chirped on the same as ever, the weeds grew up and I pulled them out. The flowers bloomed in short order. The rabbits and groundhogs burrowed along beneath my feet, the same as before, with no sense of any loss.
All those natural patterns comforted me. It all went on without noting his absence and so I could forget it for a while too. I talked to the plants, I talked to myself, I talked to him too. Only the sight of the Japanese maple would sometimes remind me that I’d let him down, and so I began to avoid that corner of the yard and left it there.
But because I was not yet 18, I knew that the property remained in the hands of the courts and the banks, even if, ostensibly, decisions about its future were being handled by my guardian, Mrs. Fowler. She did not update me much on the proceedings and I was too grief stricken to ask. I suppose I hoped that if things simply ground along slowly enough, I could make it two years and simply take it all over myself. As it was, I sailed almost a full year in that breeze.
But finally, just before my seventeenth birthday, as I approached a fast-tracked graduation from the public high school, I was interrupted in the garden one afternoon by a woman in a tan jacket and tan pants with a loud pink scarf with a hideous begonia pattern. Her veneers glinted in the sun as she spoke.
“Are you the landscaper?” she asked.
“I’m Tom,” I said. “I live here. Who are you?”
She introduced herself, politely enough, as Carmen Carmichael, from the bank, who had been assigned to inspect the property in advance of putting it on the market.
“This is my father’s house,” I explained. “He died last year. I’m just looking after it until I turn eighteen. It’s in a trust, I think. Mrs. Fowler—she lives across the street, I guess technically I live there too—anyway, she’s handling it all.”
“Mrs. Fowler!” Carmen Carmichael, from the bank, replied with gusto. “Yes, we spoke earlier. She’s been made aware of the visit.”
Without cleaning up, I marched back across the street and asked Mrs. Fowler to come explain to the bank woman that there’d been a big mistake.
But she looked at me with sadness and did not get up off her rose-printed recliner.
“Think it through, Tom,” she said. “You’re graduating. Now or later, you’re going to go to college. I’ve seen the letters coming in—you’re throwing them all out, but I’ve seen them.”
The school counselor had pressured me into taking the SATs, ostensibly so that I did not bring down the school’s average, and so I had reluctantly done so and gotten a higher score than anyone else in the school. Than anyone else in the school’s recent history, according to the counselor. And though I’d sent out no applications, it was true that I was receiving thick mailer packages daily from schools all around the country and getting called by recruiters—I supposed they thought I might be a bargain. But I wasn’t interested.
“I can’t afford all that.”
“They’re offering you full rides, Tom.”
“Maybe. But to like, Bupkissville College of Whatever.”
“Not just there. I saw the mail. Dartmouth? Colby? Vanderbilt?”
“I’m not going to college.”
“Even if you went somewhere nearby,” she said, ignoring me. “You wouldn’t still come home every say and tend to that garden… I mean, come on Tom, what sort of life is that?”
“My life,” I insisted. “The one I want.”
‘How will you live? You’ll need to pay property taxes on the house—and you can’t live on vegetables and jarred preserves.”
I could, actually, but I wasn’t going to get into that with her.
“I’ll work,” I explained. “I’ll do what my father did. I know the gardens around here as well as he ever did.”
She shook her head. “You owe money on the house already, Tom. And I can’t wait another year—your father didn’t leave that much.”
“Just give me a few weeks,” I said. “I can figure it out, I promise.”
[To be continued…]