Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch Read Free Book Online Page B

Lawn today is protected by a high fence that stretches around its entire perimeter. The few gates allowing entrance are closed on days when rain has left the ground wet and vulnerable, and on other days for seemingly no reason at all. But that fall, when Peter was a baby, the Great Lawn was a dusty, potholed round of patchy grass and dirt, ringed not by a prohibiting fence but by trees in full autumn blaze. The air was sharp and cold, and dusk was not far off. I sat down on a mound of dirt, took Peter onto my lap, and contemplated what this moment meant. Our trip across uneven ground, amid the bitten-off cold and the smell of pounded earth like leather, the last light of day exploding against fall’s leaves like rust on the circle of trees: I knew I would never forget this moment shared with my son. But would he remember? Years ahead, falls ahead, would his senses tense to the same pitch of cold, light, and smell, and would he know the same exhilaration of waiting for the end of day? I wanted him to feel me then as he did now in my lap, my love a flicker of recognition felt in a future where I might be far away, a bit of warmth against the cold falling fast.
    It is a gift we humans have, to hold on to beauty felt in a moment for a lifetime. Suddenly beauty comes to us, and gratefully we take it. We may not be able to recite time and place, but the memories can come flooding back, felt full force without warning or brought on purposefully by a triggering event. The smell of pinecones, the whiff of popcorn, the taste of a cold beer, or the bite of mint: a jumble of feelings, and then a sudden clarity of beauty or joy or sadness. Beauty is in the moments that endure, the moments that enliven us again and again. We stand on memory’s sturdy pilings. We thrive on the nourishment provided by the past.
    A few weeks before Anne-Marie died, she went for a walk in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park in New York City. The Conservatory Garden is an enclosed garden, the only enclosure in Central Park other than the fenced croquet course by Sheep Meadow, Sheep Meadow itself, and now the Great Lawn. But in contrast to the plain fences of the croquet course, meadow, and lawn, the Conservatory Garden is enclosed by beauty, by overgrown bushes and fawning trees and mossy stone walls and ornate iron gates. The garden is a three-part symphony of color and sculpture, of fountains and benches and shaded alleys and sunny corners. In the springtime ten thousand tulip bulbs bloom, and in the summer riots of every kind of flower, vine, bush, and grass flourish. In the fall, thousands of mums burst forth in shades of purple, cream, pink, and orange. Winter is marked by quiet, by stark branches of trees etched against the sky and stilled and emptied fountains.
    The day that Anne-Marie went out for a walk was a sunny day in April. Her last April. In the garden, the green foliage of the peonies and iris gave background to purple and white crocuses, yellow and cream and orange narcissus, and the blues of scilla and hyacinth. Anne-Marie walked leaning heavily on Marvin, but she was glad to be outside. That morning they had received a phone call. A colleague had committed suicide, a young man who had lost all hope and killed himself. Walking through the garden, Anne-Marie and Marvin talked about the death. Anne-Marie looked around her at the spring flowers and up at the blue sky shining through the flowering apple trees preening overhead. As ill as she was, and as certain as she was that her own death would come sooner rather than later, she turned to Marvin and said she could not understand the impulse to suicide, the complete enveloping of gloom that would allow someone to take his own life: “For who can end in despair when there is such beauty in the world?”
    She was right. There is always an answer to despair, and that is the promise of beauty waiting in the future. I know it is coming because I have seen and felt beauty in the past.