Stella Bain by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page B

compassion.”
    “Why will a man never say what is foremost in his mind when choosing a bride?”
    “And what is that?”
    “His physical passion.”
    “Well, I see that the frank VAD has returned,” he says in an equally teasing tone. “You’ve spent too much time among the French doctors. When men say they marry for beauty, a healthy passion, as you say, is implied. But we should not be talking about me so much. Though I’m a bit of a novice at the talking cure, this much I’m sure of.”
    They enter a rose crescent, the canes dormant. Stella bends to a dead bloom as if to inhale the scent. She breathes deeply. Another garden of roses comes to mind. She pops her head up and turns to the doctor.
    “I had a garden!” she exclaims. “Yes, I’m sure of it. I know how to deadhead roses and how to prune them.”
    “Where was this garden?”
    Stella shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
    “What was in the garden? Think hard.”
    Stella shuts her eyes. “Roses,” she says. “Daylilies, yellow. Hydrangeas, poppies, and…and something by a fence that bloomed only once…what’s the name? Big, blowsy flowers, white tending toward pink? Peonies! ” She opens her eyes, thrilled to have this memory.
    Dr. Bridge seems intrigued. “Go on,” he says. “Describe the garden to me.”
    “There’s a white fence.” She pauses. “It extends from the corner of a house.”
    “One of the houses you drew?”
    “No. Another house, but I can’t see it. The garden is a rectangle, and there are blue flowers against one side of it. I don’t know what they are.”
    “Who is with you in the garden?”
    “No one,” she says. “Well, maybe someone else is there, below eye level—a gardener, perhaps, but I can’t see who it is. But…oh…it’s going. The garden is going….” She reaches out a hand as if she could pull it back. She looks up at Dr. Bridge. “How did that happen? Where has it gone?”
    “It may return,” he says.
    “Oh,” she cries out again, wrapping an arm around her waist. “It was so close. I could touch it. I could smell it.”
    “Let’s sit here a minute,” he suggests, guiding her to a nearby bench. “Can you see it at all?”
    She gazes into an abyss. She feels bereft. “I know it only in my head as a recent memory in the same way I remember what I had for dinner last night. The immediacy is gone.”
    “Does it feel as if you had imagined it?”
    “Not when it happened, but now I’m not so sure.”
    Dr. Bridge uses the tip of his umbrella to poke the dirt. “When one has a recollection from childhood,” he explains, “the first few seconds are very real, but then it quickly becomes simply a memory. And this is a good thing,” he adds, “or we should be paralyzed with too many seemingly real moments at once.”
    Stella sighs. “Yes, I suppose so.”
    “When you and I first walked in the garden, a nanny and three children entered. You were remarkably calm.”
    “Was I?”
    “What struck me most was your aura of complete serenity. It was in your face, in the relaxation of your body.”
    She thinks a long moment.
    “Try and see the nanny and children now,” he directs.
    Again, she shuts her eyes to do so. After a while, she begins to shake her head. “I can see them as a memory, but I can’t re-create the feelings I had then.”
    Dr. Bridge stands and waits for her to join him. When they resume their walk, Stella glances back at the roses, hoping her garden will come alive again. She is reluctant to leave the area.
    “The last drawing you showed me,” he says. “Did that man in the bed hurt you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “But the drawing made you extremely uncomfortable.”
    “Yes,” she admits.
    “Did you hurt him?”
    “What an extraordinary question.”
    “Yes, it is. But you mentioned earlier that you felt a great guilt, that maybe you had done something terribly wrong. I wondered if the drawing came to you because it was a clue to that experience.”
    Stella