Perhaps the nagging sense that her parents had somehow done her wrong explained why she ended up sticking out the summer in Princeton instead of returning to the home in the Philadelphia Main Line that the Mandelbaums had bought from the estate of the late Eugene Ormandy the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. That summer made her hate New Jersey so much that she wondered how she could have lasted in Princeton for the three years she’d been there. Nevertheless, she stayed the summer, though there was no place she would rather have placed herself than supine on a chaise lounge, Tanqueray and tonic in hand, in the middle of the rose garden that lay just outside the french doors of the room that the Mandelbaums called “the conservatory.” Philippa, her mother, had planted the rose garden herself and did much of the tending with her own delicate hands, although Hy Hua, their Vietnamese gardener of twenty years (he’d been a boat person), did the heavy lifting.
Philippa had once used the beloved rose garden as the setting to try to draw her little daughter into a fantasy of the sort that Philippa herself had loved when she was a child of seven. Standing under a folly smothered with Rambling Rector, Paprika, and a few other climbers, she had smiled at her little towheaded daughter in her corduroy Oshkosh and said:
“Someday, you’re going to stand here in your flowing white dress and your white tulle veil, with some strong, good, handsome man beside you, and he’ll be thinking that, of all the beautiful roses in this garden, he has picked the loveliest one of all.”
“Which one did he pick? The Alchymist?”
This was their favorite rose, not only because of its beauty-it changes shade day by day, deepening from cream into orange-but also because Philippa had been able to grow it herself from division, a fascinating process which little Lucinda had avidly followed.
“No, you silly! You! You’ll be the rose he picks.”
“I’m not a flower. And, anyway, picking flowers only makes them wilt, even if you put sugar in the water to give them energy. Don’t let that man pick me, Mommy.”
But here was a complication: If her father adored her mother so much, as he self-evidently did, then why had he wanted Lucinda to be so different from Philippa? Why had he so extravagantly cultivated Lucinda’s intellectual pride and derived such pleasure from his little baby’s taking on everyone and whupping them upside the head? Why did he continue to tell that punch line, “Don’t let that man pick me, Mommy,” with undiminished relish?
