The Garden: A Novel

by Clare Beams

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LA TMES AND LIT HUB

The discovery of a secret garden with unknown powers fuels this page-turning and psychologically thrilling tale of women yearning to become mothers and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated, from the award-winning author of The Illness Lesson (“A masterpiece” – Elizabeth Gilbert)

In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires and is now pregnant again, comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife team of doctors who are pioneering a cure for her condition. Warily, she enlists herself in the efforts of the Doctors Hall to “rectify the maternal environment,” both physical and psychological. In the meantime, she also discovers a long-forgotten walled garden on the spacious grounds, a place imbued with its own powers and pulls. As the doctors’ plans begin to crumble, Irene and her fellow patients make a desperate bid to harness the power of the garden for themselves—and must face the incalculable risks associated with such incalculable rewards.

With shades of Shirley Jackson and Rosemary's Baby, The Garden delves into the territory of motherhood, childbirth, the mysteries of the female body, and the ways it has always been controlled and corralled.

 

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Release date: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Doubleday

Print pages: 282

Sample

Chapter 1

 

The house held still, and behind it the garden rested, brown turning green.

---

*

Doctor and doctor, Mr. and Mrs., came out onto the steps to watch the approach. They did this when they could. Welcome made a difference.

Without turning to him she said, “Remember not to talk too much.”

As if he ever did or could or wanted to when she was there.

---

*

George and Irene drove toward the house that held their future and saw the doctor and doctor standing at the top of the main stair, right in the maw of the gaping door. That was the way things looked to Irene: the steps the tongue, the portico the brow, the facade the wide marble face.

George slowed the car, just enough, Irene feared, to be noticed. “Jesus,” he said. “What is this place? Why are they watching us like that?”

“Speed up. They’ll think we’re afraid of them.”

“Reny, we are.”

Fear wasn’t the feeling Irene had been aware of before this moment. But as the car neared and Irene kept an eye on the doctors, waiting for them to move, she understood that all along she’d been imagining a hospital, like the one where they’d met these doctors the first time. Instead it seemed she had to face the mammoth, patient creature of this house, which was stationary, yes, but stationary like a living thing holding still on purpose only until it could take her inside. Look, even its arms were extended—two long wings, angled in, ready to close.

And she had to face these complementary doctors too, fixed as the statues that flank entries. If it were Irene standing there with the woman doctor, the match would be nearer. “You look alike, a little, did you notice?” George had said to her after their first appointment. Irene had noticed only that feeling of hard-to-place familiarity that makes a person ask, Do I know you from somewhere?

The doctors’ eyes weighed, and Irene wondered how clearly they could see her and George through the windshield and if the doctors could read lips. “You’re really going to leave me here?” she said to George, trying

 not to move her mouth much.

She meant it to sound playful, but to be here they had both peddled themselves. George’s forehead gathered.

“No, it’s all right,” Irene said.

They were close enough now to see smiles rising to the doctors’ faces.

George stopped the car and came around to Irene’s door with the rollicking gait she loved. She put her hand in his so he could help her out. Every time he stewarded her lately, he seemed to be rubbing her face in his stupid hope, when she had enough of her own. She climbed forth. She touched the slippery rose-colored fabric of her new maternity suit. This was the color she’d wanted right away from the catalog’s many choices, warm and bloomy.

“Good morning!” the woman doctor called, and descended the stairs to press George and Irene’s joined hands.

George broke his grip then to reach up the stairs and greet the man doctor, still a few steps up, as if sealing some bargain.

“How was the drive?” asked the woman doctor.

“I tried to take the corners slow. For her stomach,” said George.

“What a good sign,” the woman doctor said.

Irene peered into her face. Not a perfect mirror, no: something similar about their chins and the hard set of their mouths, the lift of their eyebrows, but this woman’s eyes were blue where Irene’s were wheat-colored, and Irene’s hair was darker. And, of course, the doctor was older too. How old? Older than Irene’s own age, twenty-eight, but much younger, she thought, than her mother. In that middle territory, what happened to a childless woman? Irene had begun finding out for herself. Kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms full of screaming quiet. Sun on carpets, rain on doorsteps. Quiet so loud she could hear nothing else. But she wondered if for this woman doctor it might be different.

“Very promising,” said the man doctor. He had charm, but there wasn’t much to wonder about him.

The doctors led the Willards up. Stairs brought out the sluggish drag of the weight at Irene’s center, and even here she didn’t like this awareness, which had never led anywhere good before. Her body had over and over proven itself a liar. She’d started to suspect this might just be a new uncovering of a trait it had always had.

As they fed themselves in, one by one, Irene had time to notice that up close the marble of the house was in fact veined like skin.

Twin mahogany desks stood within the doctors’ study, a line in two segments whose edges did not quite meet. The doctors bulwarked behind and left George and Irene to chairs in front, as if they were disobedient

students. Only Irene had been such a student. She and George had been in school together, and though she knew he loved her already, he’d never understood why she had to say just one word too much, why she had to twist her mouth, raise her eyebrow, poison the milk of someone else’s dumb joy. It makes me feel delicious, she’d said to him, back when she could say to him anything she wanted. She’d faced many people across many desks and each time thought, Well? Talk, talk, talk, talk. What can you do to me? You can’t touch me.

Except the doctors could—she’d begged them to. The only other time they’d all met, when Irene had been a robed patient on their examination table, he and she had lifted her arms at the same moment to take her pulse, neither of them noticing the duplication because each was talking to George. In these cases…Her body at that moment occupied the physical space of the doctors’ marriage. As an omen, how could that be bad? She’d felt suddenly able to meet George’s eyes with ease: here she was, winning fallow ground, so ready, once they chose her and set about solving whatever her trouble was, to produce every baby he’d come back from overseas wanting. These doctors had solved this trouble with other women. They were the only ones solving it. All she had to do was make them choose her.

Then they’d tipped her back on the table and put a cold, slick metal instrument inside her and peered with a light at some sore region deep within, and she’d felt the ache like a name that she’d been trying to remember. Oh, there it is.

In spite of herself, though, Irene was starting to feel less sure now. No person she’d faced across a desk had ever in the end succeeded in shaping her in any corrective fashion. George reached across the space between their chairs to take her hand again, and she let him—poor, sweet, wondrous George, who had also failed in so many ways.

“Are there any questions Dr. Bishop and I can answer before your examination?” the man doctor asked softly, considerately, as if they were fragile, or maybe his voice was just soft. Irene watched George noticing. George still had ideas about men left over from football. She hoped the man doctor’s handshake had been firm.

“Aren’t you married?” Irene said. “Aren’t you both Dr. Hall, then?”

The woman doctor spoke. “Technically, but it got confusing for everyone. So here, I use my maiden name. We find it’s easier for the patients.”

Irene wondered if this woman had wanted the feeling of having created herself out of

the soil of her own life only, of having let nothing stick to her since.

“How many other patients do you have here?” George asked.

“Eighteen, at the moment,” said Dr. Hall.

“They’re all…?” Irene said.

“They all have much your history.”

Irene didn’t like the word’s turning of her into a set of occurrences. She hadn’t considered the other patients much. “They’re all just like me? All at the same point?”

Dr. Bishop gave a bright laugh. “That would be a real miracle of timing, wouldn’t it? No, they’re at various stages now, but everyone joins us right around where you are now, Mrs. Willard, just about fourteen weeks.”

“Is there something special about that time?”

“All the times are special.”

Irene smiled. She’d only ever made it this far.

“But it’s the optimal time for beginning our treatment, yes. A time when the healthy fetus is growing rapidly and we can intervene to the best effect. You’re entering the stage when you’ll even begin to feel movements. You haven’t felt any movements yet, have you, Mrs. Willard?”

Irene sat up straighter. Instantly she seemed to grow a new sense there at her middle, waiting for—what? “Should I have?”

“No, no, not necessarily. It would be quite early.”

So again, already, there was a bar Irene was failing to clear, and now they would ask and check until her failure was unmissable. Irene wasn’t sure she could bear this after all, being here, herding herself with these like-circumstanced women, making those circumstances the only part of her that counted for anything. Giving up her whole life to steep here in failures, comparisons, and other women’s sounds and smells.

Panic rose and she stood—the panic climbing her throat, the weight, that central weight, pulling, stretching her between. “George—” she said.

Right away he stood too. He would take her from this room if that was what she wanted, and they could go home and wait to see what happened this sixth time, wait for what she knew was coming. A disaster, but at least a familiar one.

Dr. Bishop’s eyes were on her again. Irene could see that this woman knew what Irene was remembering; she felt the doctor’s gaze on all of it. The fourth time and the blood on her mother’s couch, a stain the shape of a bell, ringing iron all through her. Her trembling hands, her mother’s mouth drooping at the corners, and the sound her mother made then, low, urgent, indecent, Irene had thought distantly—this wasn’t happening to her mother, who did her mother think she was? The first time, when Irene had thought maybe this was only some part of the process no one spoke of—her family doctor hadn’t spoken much at all when she’d gone to her appointment the week before, had just beamed at her as if she’d turned out to be very pleasing when Irene had never been pleasing in all her life—so it might be normal, this small smear of red brown on her underclothes

marking where the crease of her had been. A decorous sign of itself sent forth by the thing growing inside. The third time as slight to begin with, the blood more red than brown but no more of it, but by then she’d known better than to read decorousness there. She’d run her finger down and down that sticky red line, that awful error, trying to wick it away. The second time, the worst. Late enough that her outlines had begun to yield to a firm paunch she’d patted before her mirror in the evenings, so hard under palms—as if her inner self, hard, always, was being revealed, and this was what people meant by showing. Then sudden waking to blood, blood, blood in a pool in the bed, George screaming, and in the washroom a hot ripping wave and beneath her the sound of something wet dropping, and she knew, she knew before she looked what she would see, but still she looked: the lump of skin and two small dots—were they eyes? Why is such a terrible thing allowed to happen? she’d thought, with no clear idea of what should have intervened on her behalf. She’d had a senseless fear of touching the thing in case touching might hurt it.

That wasn’t true, though—that the second was the worst. The fifth was the worst, though it had been another so early she’d passed only a little more blood than it was usual for her to pass every month, with only one big clot, half-dollar-sized, that she could pretend was just more blood. The fifth was the worst because the most recent always was. This one, then, would be worst of all.

Irene watched Dr. Bishop see this with her. She couldn’t do a thing to prevent Dr. Bishop from seeing.

When Dr. Bishop spoke, leaning forward with her elbows in lovely angles on the desk, it was straight to Irene. “Mrs. Willard, of course you can leave if you wish.” She paused and let the pause linger.

Dr. Hall filled it. “But really, you should understand that this is your best option.”

“Yes,” Dr. Bishop said. “That’s what I was going to say. Our results are quite something. Of the women who’ve gone through the program so far—”

“How many is that? You haven’t said,” George interrupted.

“Forty have completed their time with us. Thirty-four have had healthy babies.”

“So six…”

“Six is a lot, isn’t it?” Irene said. “One or two, you might think it was a fluke—they had

worse problems than the rest, or they did something wrong. But six, doesn’t six mean you aren’t fixing something?”

“Remember, these are patients who, like you, Mrs. Willard, have experienced repeated fetal loss. For inclusion in our program, at least three losses prior to the current pregnancy. So having produced from their ranks so many healthy babies—it’s a real success.”

George looked at her. “Irene?” As ever, he would do anything she wanted.

Dr. Bishop waited patiently. This woman knew Irene would never choose the familiar thing if there was any other option, no matter what the other option was; would never go home by choice to wait for the wave, the streak, the clot, the pool, the groan, the clench, the seep, the first slight cramp, each moment a terrible balance of hoping and dreading, listening and trying not to listen, feeling and trying not to feel. The waiting, Irene had come to think, was worse than what had come eventually every time.

No, that was a lie too.

Irene took in a breath. In breathing at all, she was feeding the weight, her body making that choice again and again. She couldn’t get away if she wanted to.

“Yes, all right,” she said.

So the doctors led them to the second floor, up a wide, curving staircase made of a pale white stone that looked as if it would feel soft if Irene touched it. These steps were so shallow that going up them hardly jostled the weight at all—they’d been measured out for taking time and turning the climber or descender into a spectacle for people below. No one below now, though Irene could hear other people, these other women with their histories, moving around in unseen rooms.

The examination room itself also owned its purpose only halfway. The sheeted table and the gown Irene would wear were white, but the rest had been left jewel-toned: the deep blue drapes covering the high arched windows and the rich, thick carpet, which was patterned like stained glass. A beautiful room, she tried to notice that it was a very beautiful room, even if its beauty was of a kind that suggested enchanted sleeps.

Irene hesitated on the threshold. “This isn’t much like most hospitals,” she said.

“It used to be my family home,” said Dr. Bishop. She didn’t mean a present-tense family, Irene understood, but one that stretched back in time like a line of cemetery stones. Feet upon feet upon these same

floors. Neither Irene nor George had any such family, just middle-class parents bluntly proud of what they’d made.

Dr. Bishop took Irene by the elbow to get her moving again, steered her into a corner, and pulled a curtain shut between them. She produced a light chatter while Irene took off her clothes and put on the starchy white gown. “We only spent the odd weekend here before this all began, but it turns out to be the perfect place. Fortuitous!” Fortuitous, yes, the inheriting of ancestral estates. Irene could see the tips of Dr. Bishop’s fingers, wrapping around the cloth and shifting as she held it shut: she was so close. The curtain didn’t do much to relieve the strangeness of taking off clothes in a room that held these other people, and Irene sat to be sure she wouldn’t fall and embarrass herself while removing her boots. The gown pulled and scratched against her breasts, which, as happened every time, had become foreign to her, so large and so tender that a stray bump could bring her to tears. She watched George’s feet beneath the curtain, moving. Dancing, if she’d been judging by ankles.

She closed the gown and shifted the curtain aside, pulling it from Dr. Bishop’s grasp. Without looking at any of them, she hefted herself onto the table and put her heels in the chill metal stirrups, like mounting a horse, maybe, a thing she’d never done. Dr. Bishop must have. Already the gown was parting enough that it might as well not have been there.

They flanked her again, the doctors; they seemed to settle naturally into the flanking of things. They paused, and she saw that they were coming to a decision about who would take the lead: a glance, something (what?) exchanged, then Dr. Hall stepped to the center. “Slide forward, please,” he said. Maybe they wanted to communicate that while this was Dr. Bishop’s house, while she had mostly talked to them today, there was a man here too in charge of all of it, a doctor as she and George were used to seeing a doctor.

Irene slid her bottom to the base of the table, so far she seemed about to fall off, though surely he’d tell her? No one could want that. To herself, looking down, she appeared to be covered by the gown that spanned her knees, but she could feel small drafts below. She was two pictures that didn’t belong together: a chimera of a naked woman and a clothed one, joined at the middle. The weight lived somewhere right at that seam.

If it still lived.

“Hmm, yes,” Dr. Hall said pleasantly, with his hand deep inside her. There was a stiff, slightly painful resistance in its stretching. “Nice heavy uterus. That’s promising.”

“Mine, you mean?” Irene said, because it bothered her that he hadn’t said so. Then: “Heavier than when you checked last time?” She wished she could get her voice to sound less plaintive.

“Yes, I’d say there’s been continued growth.”

He pushed down on her abdomen from above, pinning something within her between that hand and the hand inside, finding that something’s perimeter the way he might have prodded the outlines of an object buried in a thick blanket. He withdrew. She hollowed.

“Good,” he said. Dr. Bishop gave a surprising relieved sigh. Irene felt its echo in her chest, but she had to look away from George’s face and its unbearable joy.

They sat her up then. Irene stuck moistly to the examination table, as if she’d been turned inside out. Dr. Hall tied a tourniquet around her arm and drew blood—a quick sting. She turned her head so she wouldn’t feel swimmy. My, how will you ever bear labor? the gleeful vicious nurse at the family doctor had asked in her very first pregnancy, when Irene had done the same thing. That nurse never said it again, not with any of the others, though Irene turned her head each time.

Dr. Hall finished and taped her arm up, and Irene saw the vials in his hands. They’d be warm there, against his palm. Hers and not hers; his and not his.

“What do you test it for?” she asked.

“Primarily the levels of hormones,” Dr. Bishop said. “That’s where our therapy takes aim: at stabilizing those levels, evening out the excess variability you’ve shown.”

Irene had been too preoccupied with the question of whether she’d be one of the handful selected to pay much attention to anything the doctors had said during their first meeting. She considered now. Stabilizing, excess variability. “That’s what’s wrong with me? That’s why this keeps happening, because things are unstable?”

George’s eyes flicked to hers.

“That’s the thinking,” said Dr. Hall.

“So how do you stabilize me?”

“Our approach is two-pronged,” Dr. Bishop said. She held up a young-looking finger—Irene noticed that her hands were much larger and thicker than her own. “First, we supplement and manage hormone levels through chemical means. Before fetal demise, hormone levels tend to swing, often quite dramatically. If we can monitor for and regulate these swings, the crisis seems in many cases to be preventable.”

Crisis. That was a good word, active and chaotic; better than loss, which had always made Irene think of demure weeping.

“What chemical means?"

George asked.

“We use a drug, a new drug from Europe, that we saw could simulate the particular combination of hormones that support optimal pregnancy. It’s been our breakthrough.” Dr. Bishop said this without a hint of modesty. “A simple injection.”

“That’s it? That will do it? Just some shots, that’s all I need?”

Dr. Bishop gave her graceful laugh again. “Not quite.” She held up a second finger and turned her eyes, blue like a wrong note, on Irene alone. ...