Sow the Field with Roses

By Margery S. Stewart

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Chapter 6

It was on the third day of October that Tomas Novarro came for his son. It was a bright and brittle morning, with the desert winds blowing hot down the hills, and the sea taking on the deep vital blue that was a sign of autumn as plain as maple leaves on fire.

This was the last time Nina would take down small Joseph’s special bowl, or spoon into it the hot, nourishing cereal. This was the last of the brilliant mornings rich with plans for the day. There would be no more Disneyland expeditions or deep sea fishing with Tomas to show her how to reel in her line. He was taking his son to Europe to show him the world and to have him entirely to himself. He had talked about it, planned for it, writing for brochures, bringing them over in the evenings to see what she thought of the side trips he had planned.

Nina made herself very busy. Today she would houseclean the kitchen cupboards, put down new paper, and tomorrow she would go to the Children’s Hospital and apply for a job. She needed a new car, and now she could afford one. By all these thoughts, like actors on a stage, she fought to keep back the one tall and spectral figure – loneliness.

Joseph was beside himself with delight. “Big plane! Zoom!”

“Big plane,” Nina agreed.

Small Joseph ran to the door. “Daddy’s coming.” He was impatient to be gone.

There was an impatient knocking on the back door. Nina hurried to open it.

Tommy grinned at her with bright impudence. “I got a present for Joseph.”

Joseph rushed forward to claim it, and Tommy brought it around from where he had been hiding it, a small red truck. “Kids like things they can hold.”

“I know.”

He sniffed the air. “Good.”

“Popovers … almost ready.”

She had to invite him for breakfast, but for the first time she found herself wishing he hadn’t come. She had wanted to be alone with Tomas, be sure he was planning to stop off in New York and buy the heavier clothes that Joseph would need. She worried about this part of it. Sometimes Tomas seemed to forget his son entirely and wanted to talk about everything else under the sun. He had a trick of waiting for her to speak, as if he found something fascinating in the way her words came that was infinitely flattering.

People had smiled at them, moving together through the days, the three of them, the great, dark Tomas, herself, and the child. Once a woman had paused to compliment her on her “lovely child.” Tomas had thought that hilariously funny.

In the weeks they had been together it had been toward Tomas that she and Joseph had leaned. It had been luxury to be cared for, to be driven about, to be thought of and considered. Sometimes she had to pull herself up sharply and remind herself that it was only the bridge before the end of the line. Joseph turned more and more to his father, less and less to the comfort of her arms.

She was aware that Tommy was talking, “… but the bad part is leaving you, Miss Karsh, that’s what I hate about it … and leaving Dominick.”

She looked at him. “Leaving? Where are you going?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been telling you for ten minutes. We’re going to move to Frisco, Mom and my brother and me, real soon.”

Nina would not let him see the bleakness of her eyes. “We’ll miss you … Dominick and I … but you can come back and visit?”

“Sure I will.”

She bent her head over the opened oven door. It was in little idle promises like this that the pangs of separation were lessened.

Tommy cleared his throat. “Another thing I wanted to tell you, Miss Karsh, is that I did some knocking and now I know.”

She straightened, the pan of popovers in her hand. “You knocked where?”

He looked ceilingward. “On that door. So now I know. He does come, only you sure must knock a long time. Anyway I did, but all of a sudden I knew, just like you did. He’s there all right.” He licked his lips. “Maybe I could just have a popover now before we sit down?”

The knocker sounded on the front door. Tommy ran to answer.

Nina, putting plates on the table, paused to listen to the sound of footsteps. It was Tomas who had come. She made herself very busy.

“Well, this is a delicious welcome.”

Tomas stood in the doorway. Nina looked at him quickly and looked away. It’s because he is taking Joseph away that it hurts me to look at him, she thought. Tomas looked different this morning, like a stranger in his beautiful gray suit, immaculate white shirt, blue tie, like a man ready to step into his own familiar world after a season in an alien land. “Doctor Jonathan show up yet?”

“Doctor Jonathan? No. Did he plan to come?”

“Said he would, wanted to see you for a minute, and to say goodbye to Joseph.”

“He’s driving in now,” Tommy said and was off like a shot to lead the doctor in.

Tomas gave Nina narrow, laughing glance. “It seems you have given my friend a great deal of trouble,” he said. “You make him think … of things … you make him uneasy.”

Nina laughed. “I like him very much. He’s a wonderful doctor. I remember at the hospital how everyone stood aside for him.”

“So?” Tomas lifted his brown. He looked distressed suddenly, and then he said, “I hate goodbyes. Let me take Joseph and go now, quickly. Do you mind?”

“Why … no … not if that’s the way you want it.”

Nina wiped her hands on her apron and ran to get Joseph’s clean shirt, which she had been saving until the last minute so he would be clean for the journey. The bags were packed and ready.

Tomas was suddenly in a fever to be gone. He carried the bags out. Joseph would have tumbled after him, but Nina caught him and carried him to the rocker. She hugged him, and Joseph wriggled impatiently. “I must go now …”

Nina let him go. She did not kiss him nor cling. She followed him out to the car. Tomas was talking to Manuel, who was at the wheel, and to Doctor Jonathan. He took Joseph’s hand and opened the car door.

“I hate goodbyes,” he said again, “and I will write of course, Nina. You must take care of yourself.”

It was all so fast. Joseph waved to her from his place beside his father. Manuel started the car.

Tomas leaned out to her. “You will write,” he said earnestly. “I must hear from you very often.”

“Yes … yes, of course.”

“I’ll see that she does,” Doctor Jonathan said.

The car rolled away down the hill. Nina stood irresolute, torn between wanting to watch it until it was out of sight and of preserving from the doctor this feminine weakness of tears at a farewell.

Tommy burst out of the house with a hot popover in his hand. “I gotta go, Miss Karsh. I’ll come up after school. Bye now.”

Doctor Jonathan followed her into the house. “I came,” he said, “because I had something to talk to you about. It’s a girl … a girl in trouble. She needs help.”

Nina began to set the kitchen to rights. “You must tell me about her,” she said, but she was still straining to hear the sound of the car receding down the hill.

“A very young girl, from out of state …” He stopped abruptly and was silent.

Nina looked at him inquiringly. “You were saying?” she pressed him politely.

“Nothing.” He pushed the chair savagely under the table. “I said forget it! Forget the girl!”

“No … no … I want to hear … perhaps I can help.”

“Sure you can help. There’s no doubt of it, and what is there in it for you, Nina Karsh? What do you get out of this giving of yourself?”

He leaned against the door, folding his arms. “We’re a greedy bunch, this modern race of men. We’ll take the juice out of a person like you and then quote some bearded authority on how stupid it was of you to give it, call it a sublimation, a fixation, a compulsion …”

Nina laughed. “I don’t care what you call it. I think it is absurd, all this preoccupation for reasons for helping people.”

He said, “I will not ask you to go through this again.” He gestured in agitation about the room. “It is too painful to watch, the process of love and struggle and the inevitable conclusion of surrender and pain. I will find another way.”

Nina rubbed her hands along her skirt. “Don’t rob me …”

“Rob you?”

“Loneliness is a field,” Nina said gently. “Who could know that better than I?”

He lifted his head. His profile was sharpened and alert as it was in the operating room. “An empty field,” he said tentatively, probing the idea, “and you have sown yours with roses.” He came to her. “It is no wonder that your fields are constantly being seized and taken … sow a field with nettles … and it will be left to you … forever.”

They were very close together now. When Nina looked into his face she saw the black, circling the gray iris, and the lines that weariness had made, and the recurring tenderness she had known for him deepened inside her. They stood in silence. But the silence was like the silence she had known that day with the small Joseph. In the silence the heavy sadness ran thin like a great fog lessening, and in the silence the first sun shot forth a blinding brightness, so that they caught their breaths and came closer, hand reaching to hand.

“I am not afraid to love now,” he said. “Isn’t that strange? I didn’t even know before that I was afraid of love.”

Nina could not speak for the tumultuous joy of her being. Sow a field with roses, and though the blooms be torn away, the roots and the earth remain, preparing themselves in the mysterious quiet for a new and lovelier spring.

She heard Dr. Jonathan speaking slowly. “In this time, now with you, they have all been returned to me, the things I was so sure I had irrevocably lost.”

Nina looked at him in perplexity. “Lost?”

“Yes,” he said. “When I lost love, I lost faith with it, and now I have them again, all the bright lost dreams, the temple dreams, and the family dream, and the slow, beloved years together.”

(The End)