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By Root 4410 0

the irises a kind of broken-glass white within rings of persisting blue, roll nervously, looking from one side of him to the other. “In truth I meant every word of it. I’m a farmer’s daughter Mr. Angstrom, and I would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa. I’d say to him, ‘Why don’t you plant buckwheat if you must fuss in the ground? Now there’s a real crop. You raise the wheat, I’ll bake the bread.’ I would have, too. ‘What do we want with all these corsages that after they’re gone we have to look at their ugly leaves all the year round?’ I’d say to him, ‘What pretty girl are you growing these for?’ He was younger than I, that’s why I took advantage of my right to tease him. I won’t say by how much. What are we standing here for? Old body like mine stand still in one place you’ll be rooted fast.” She jabs the cane into the grass his signal to extend his arm. They move on down the alley of bloom. “Never thought I’d outlive him. That was his weakness. Come in out of the garden he’d be forever sitting. A farmer’s daughter never learns the meaning of sit.”

Her unsteady touch on his wrist bobs like the swaying tops of the giant spruces. He associates these trees with forbidden estates; it gives him pleasure to be within their protection. “Ah. Now here is a plant.” They stop at a corner and she lifts her dangling cane toward a small rhododendron clothed in pink of penetrating purity, a color through whose raw simplicity, as through stained glass, you seem to look into the ideal subsoil of reality. “Harry’s Bianchi” Mrs. Smith says. “The only rhody except some of the whites, I forget their names, silly names anyway, that says what it means. It’s the only true pink there is. When Harry first got it he set it among the other so-called pinks and it showed them up as just so muddy he tore them out and backed the Bianchi with crimsons. The crimsons are by, aren’t they? Is today June?” Her wild eyes fix him crazily and her grip tightens.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Memorial Day’s next Saturday.”

“Oh, I remember so well the day we got that silly plant. Hot! We drove to New York City to take it off the boat and put it in the back seat of the Packard like a favorite aunt or some such thing. It came in a big blue wooden tub of earth. There was only one nursery in England that carried the stock and it cost two hundred dollars to ship. A man came down to the hold to water it every day. Hot, and all that vile traffic through Jersey City and Trenton and this scrawny bush sitting in its blue tub in the back seat like a prince of the realm! There weren’t any of these turnpikes then so it was a good six-hour trip to New York. The middle of the Depression and it looked like everybody in the world owned an automobile. You came over the Delaware at Burlington. This was before the war. I don’t suppose when I say ‘the war’ you know which one I mean. You probably think of that Korean thing as the war.”

“No I think of the war as World War Two.”

“So do I! So do I! Do you really remember it?”

“Sure. I mean I was pretty old. I flattened tin cans and bought War Stamps and we got awards at grade school.”

“Our son was killed.”

“Gee. I’m sorry.”

“Oh he was old, he was old. He was almost forty. They made him an officer right off.”

“Still—”

“I know. You think of only young men being killed.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“It was a good war. It wasn’t like the first. It was ours to win, and we won it. All wars are hateful things but that one was satisfying to win.” She gestures with her cane again at the pink plant. “The day we came over from the boat docks it of course wasn’t in flower that late in the summer so it looked like just foolishness to me, to have it riding in the back seat like a”—she realizes she is repeating herself, falters, but goes on—“like a prince of the realm.” In her almost transparent blue eyes there is pinned this little sharpness watching his face to see if he smiles at her addlement. Seeing nothing she snaps roughly, “It’s the only one.”

“The only Bianchi?”

“Yes! Right! There’s not another in the United States. There