The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes Page B

the party outdoors, apart from the stream of spilled gin and watery boot prints up and down the stairs and out to the back patio.
    Though she couldn’t see his face from this distance, she watched the gardener, a sturdy Breton in a straw hat, move deftly among the geometric maze of shrubs like the ones they’d toured at Versailles, only smaller, and then down to the briars along the edge of the old wall bordering the wood and avenue. She had seen him before, and he seemed to radiate easy purpose and competence. He was older than Daddy, say late fifties, with youthful, squinting eyes in a leathery face like the fishermen in postcards she’d bought while they were touring Lorient — when Daddy, intent on helping her forget Stan, had even spared a few days away from his accounts.
    Those eyes were experienced in a way the same-faced people indoors were not — of earth and the wild sea and babies. She absently caressed her belly, thinking that his sun-lined brown hands would have dirt under the nails. They would be as at ease gutting a goat or seasoning a bouillabaisse or bouncing a
grand-bébé
on his knee as they were coaxing things to grow. Emily would accuse her of romanticizing the poor out of guilt. But it was one of the things Suze loved about Stan; despite his breeding, people were people to him, plain and simple.
Real.
He made friends wherever he went, with busboys and sailors, cigarette girls and nurses, and she knew Stan would like this old gardener, too.
    One drunken night of late, she’d even had a funny urge to sneak up behind the old guy, turn him her way, and kiss him square on the lips just to see those crinkly, kind eyes light up. She liked him. A man like that had something to teach her, she imagined, unlike Daddy, who kept the better part of his wisdom to himself.
    She primped her bob and crossed the moat, then sashayed down the vast hedge garden toward the exit and the radiating avenues, where he had disappeared, assuming it was him. She hadn’t had a good look at him this go, after all, but the straw hat was a giveaway.
    The music grew dim and distant the farther she got from the house, and she had the unreal feeling she often had at parties, that she was an invisible specter passing among the living. She half-believed she could pass through them sometimes — the girls with their bare heads still wet from the ride in on a running board, frenetic, dancing in beads and flapping galoshes. The boys with oiled hair and baggy pants and
love me
looks.
    Sometimes she wandered through a whole party without speaking to a soul, apart from squeezing someone’s elbow in greeting or feeling a light ginny kiss on the back of her neck, some furtive flirt wanting to take Stan’s place. But who would take Stan’s place? Who could? Especially now.
Now,
she thought, over and over, an incantation. But that was as far as she got. Thinking was overrated. Without Emily on hand to scold her, she would just rest in how unreal it all seemed. Ever. Always.
Now.
    O let us be married! Too long have we tarried:
    But what shall we do for a ring?
    She would lose herself among shadowy laughers and dancers and lovers leaning close to whisper and tease, blowing smoke into the air like the stranded at sea sending up rescue flares. Bumped by the frenzied dancers, her world went fuzzy, and ironically, she drank to bring the edges back. Drinking did that, briefly — she had once tried to explain this to Emily (of all people) — and then things went all fuzzy again, worse than before. But for a moment, in between, there was clarity. This was that moment.
    As the earth leveled out and the gardener came into view, she half imagined he might save her. She could befriend him as Stan might do, and he would advise her. At the least, like some fortune-teller, he could look once into her eyes and read her shallow future. “Beware of water,” he might say, “or strangers with dark eyes.” She heard the under-music of the bees, saw the covert