The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

Just as her contract with the town had stated, she’d never had children of her own, though anyone could see she was partial to me.

I was the girl who had nearly drowned, but had managed to save myself instead, in the year I turned ten.

even though Sara had fallen ill after visiting her son.

Sara had told me that a woman who could rescue herself was a woman who would never be

in need.

When I looked at that painting, I imagined I was Sara, and that for once I could see through her eyes.

wanted to say a man is not a rock. I myself would have preferred a man who was like a river, changing and quick, always a surprise.

Topsy leapt to bite me. There were two drops of blood on my wrist.

I was reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which thrilled me, not only the story but the fact that a woman had been daring enough to write it.

A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart.

The fisherman’s wife wasn’t much more than twenty—on that everyone agreed—while the fisherman, Horace Kelly, was seventy at least, a man so cantankerous he’d fallen out with his own family and kept to himself.

She had rested her hand on the eel’s back, in a motion so intimate it startled both young women, who glanced away.

AT THE END of the summer another group of outsiders arrived in the Berkshires, sent by the WPA. They were five men in all—a children’s book author, two professors, and two newspapermen.

“It’s called a mitzvah,” Ben explained. “It’s a person’s responsibility to help those around him.”

“Whatever good you do comes back to you in some way.”

A rumor began that if Hannah Partridge came to your door with her wicker basket, your wish would be granted.

Eric had always wanted a pet rabbit and was overjoyed to find one beside the back door. His father built a hutch in the yard the next day, and maybe that was what Eric had wanted most of all but hadn’t

known it: to spend the day with his father learning how to use a hammer and saw.

the history museum, which had been closed since the war had begun.

In every mention of the museum it’s closed.

He was exceedingly ugly, so ugly he couldn’t look at himself.

They said he was a mountain. They beat him. He stayed still and let them. He could have easily crushed his attackers, but it wasn’t in his nature to do so. He felt like a mountain, alone, far away.

He studied the skills he might someday need in another time and place: how to make a fire, how to gauge which plants were poisonous and which were edible, how to build a house out of sticks and stones. All the while he was getting ready for the life he yearned for, though it was so distant.

“There’s no such thing as a monster,” Kate told him. Cal shook his head, stubborn. “He was.” “No. That’s not what he was.” “Okay,” Cal said. He had the jitters and was tapping his foot. Anyone could tell he wasn’t convinced. Kate put her hands on his shoulders. “Listen to me,” she said. “He was just a man.”

“Matthew James,” he said. Matthew was the name his aunt called him. James he plucked out of the air. He had passed a town called Jamestown; maybe that’s why it came to mind. He’d never known his surname. He’d never even wondered until now.

Slow, and I would be a bear forever. Fast, and I was yours. I nearly died from a single wound. That was what it meant to be human.

The cottage had been occupied by the groundskeeper until the museum’s funding dried up. Now it was rented out, and the new people were set to arrive.

She made a vow that if she did happen to survive, if some miracle occurred even though she hardly deserved such good fortune, she would never again complain about Blackwell. When she opened her eyes, the bear was gone, but there was his footprint, huge as could be.

Every time the Mott boys got into trouble, people said the twins’ fearless nature had been formed during that ill-fated meeting.

There was an awful lot they didn’t teach you in school, important things like how to survive.

Whenever Louise got flustered or felt insecure, her demeanor became haughty. Anyone might suppose she thought she was better than they were just because she lived in that big, falling-down house.

She had a shivery feeling, as if they’d perhaps discovered something that was meant to be left alone.

She dreamed about her mother’s last day on earth. She was small as a bird in her hospital bed, shivering, waiting patiently for the end. She said, “Maybe he’ll still be waiting for me.” Louise had no idea whom she was referring to; her husband, gone so many years, or God, or perhaps an angel.

It was August first, the day many people in town say that Louise Partridge went crazy and others say she came to her senses.

Time was trickier than he’d imagined it to be. Now when he looked at his dog, he realized that Cody was suddenly old. James’s mother had come to New York several times, but his father didn’t like cities, or perhaps he was still unable to say good-bye.

“Often the people who succeed, in spite of the difficulties they may face, have one thing in common. They read…. They have hope because they know that once upon a time there was a boy or a girl, a woman or a man, who managed to survive.”

For me literature is magic, and magic is part of the original literary tradition, whether it be mythology, folk tales, fairy tales, ghost stories, the stories of Kafka or Washington Irving—all of it can be found in the greatest literature. I think of “realism” asbeing “imposed” on fiction—after all, this is not real life, it is art, and art consists of imagination and experience—the recipe for magic. “Magical realism” is a new term for an ancient tradition.