THE SMELL OF APPLES
Joanna Howard
I call your attention to the olive lapels of a hilltop dandy, Fennis, who stretches out his waterbird legs in the April grass of a ravine slope, the narrow back tires of his Hercules bicycle jammed, akimbo, between two rocks. The chain is broken. His cast-off raccoon coat has been carelessly lumped nearby in the grass and rests like a sleeping bear. His priggish ankles are sunlit and watery below pistachio hosiery. He rests, as he is easily taxed. Dashing! Look: a lavender sprig nosegay tucked in the mint-silk edge of his buttonhole.
An immense pinkish canine lolls his dripping tongue beside the Hercules and eyes the motionless dandy who sniffs the attenuated perfume of apple blossom wafting from the western slope. His orchard.
ar below him a silvery creek runs thinly through the ravine bottom, flashes over moss and rocks, and works its way into a tin race and up to the slow grinding shelves of a waterwheel. Here is the primary spectacle of an artificial ruin of a Renaissance cider mill commissioned by Fennis. Its imported, nonfunctioning apple presses have been sanded smooth as if by a history of nourishing friction, its thatched roof has been forced to an early rot, the west wall has been chemically scorched. Aspiral stairwell leads to a mill tower and a wrought-iron platform. From here, the countryside is shown to advantage. A lovely view from a lovely ruin.
Affixed to the pebbled drive of the artificial ruin is a genuine ruin. In this case, a trestle bridge, collapsed halfway, with dangling remnants. The remaining portion of bridge hangs like a pier over the ravine. In its incompletion, the half bridge leaves Fennis separated from his only neighbors: a decrepit gourd farmer and his orphan ward, Mimsy. This separation only increases the curiosity of Mimsy, who as a child, peeks at Fennis through her thin, cupped fingers, and who as a growing teen, even on tip-toes, can see only portions of his cider ruin and nothing of his home across the deep canyon, which lays at the top of a slender brick road. And Fennis’s home is worth seeing: an ostentatious Japanese-style edifice, in which, on winter days, Fennis, a passionate recluse, sequesters himself and wanders about, got up in a green silk kimono and gaiters. He stumbles through half-open paper screens, glancing at a variety of obscure reference books, thinking high-brow and inconsequential thoughts. He pours tea from a pumpkin-shaped teapot, bulbous and globed, with a stem-topped stopper. He is alone with only the sounds of himself and his dog, whose enormous velvety paws pad across tatami mats and Persian rugs. There are brocaded, fan-backed arm chairs, overstuffed chesterfield sofas, hand-carved banquettes, four poster beds with panel moldings, tambour roll-top desks, leather upholstered fainting couches, and other furnitures of an entirely non-eastern style which pack the house to its paper walls. In the largest screened studio, Fennis has rigged up an old-fashioned tripod-andbellows folding camera to catalog his reclusive decline in self-portraits for city bohemians who follow his eccentricities from afar with disgust and envy.
The gourd farmer’s ward is less estranged. Now a young lady, on damp summer evenings Mimsy slips down the ravine side and follows the creek to Fennis’s decorative cider press ruin. She sniffs at the presses and climbs up to the mill tower. From here she can see into Fennis’s home from her spyglass. She watches him creep about in Nile green crêpe-de-Chine robes. He spoons hollandaise from a pewter porringer and scans the spring catalogs, circling items with a charcoal marking pen. She sits through the night, well until the morning. At dawn, each day, Fennis emerges more worn and pale than the day before. He eats breakfast on the western rooftop deck, but as the toe of his gaiter steps into the morning light, Mimsy scrambles up the ravine, back to her guardian, afraid of being locked out.
Fennis, whose cordoned paper walls are lined with self-portraits, is a man who imagines he is in danger of being watched. He trusts the ominous aura of his half-bridge to protect his privacy from the neighboring hillside. He goes about his life without considering the gaze of a rapidly growing ward; rather, each year, he grows far more distracted, and submerges himself in botanical studies. His passion is apples. Their cultivation, their passage into the world in sharp, crisp greens, and the tenuous snap of their flesh wrenched from dripping cores.
On one particular April morning, he stretches out in an Adirondack lounger, wrapped in rugs and mufflers, turbaned in wool, mirrored in the dark pool of his breakfast cup. He catches the whiff of apple-sweet air for the first time in many months. He casts off a pile of grassy chenille, suits himself in outdoor garb and full furs, and dashes out onto the front-most porch of the japonica to the, until recently, snow-bound Hercules, and pedals, huffing along the western winding path, until a small accident leaves his Hercules wedged in the mud.
Spilt on the grass as he is now, he catches a shallow breath and slows himself down. In the air is the scent of apple-blossom perfume. He is nothing if not rakish, a sprawled vision of spring.
In the small orchard, on the western slope of Fennis’s hill, the pale early blossoms are peaking on the Mutsu Crispins. Fennis puffs into his orchard. His calves have atrophied from the long winter months, and his shoulders, humped over with mounds of raccoon, ache terribly. Yards ahead, the late fall Winesaps sit out the warmer climes; beyond them, the Cortlands have only just begun to leaf. The orchard is small but dense.
Fennis inspects his trees: leaves, blossoms, petals, pollination organs, trunks, bark, root knees. Most are well, with one exception: the base of the ninth Mutsu is scarred, gnawed and gashed as if by a giant bear. Abear in the Mutsus! Already the leaves of the lowest branches are speckled and translucent, their ruffled points curled in and slightly blackened. He puts a gloved finger in the flaking claw rut, and picks at the grain.
In a moment he has doffed his coat, his olive jacket, an embroidered waistcoat, a sparkling tourmaline watch fob, a long portion of muffler. He has hiked a significant cuff into his linen trousers and is showing a good segment of pasty shin below his sock garters; he has tucked in the olive tassels on his wingtip brogues, and unloosed a foulard necktie. In another minute he is prying loose the orchard shed’s door and foraging, then hauling, roughly, a laden wheelbarrow across the orchard. He tosses up, digs in, and pounds down a solid fencing of chicken wire and short posts around the ninth Mutsu. He casts an eye around, at the dozens of unprotected darlings, at the feeble wire and posts. His best labor is no match for a savage beast. He curses and stamps the mulch.
Even without his cast-off furs, the walk back to the wreck of the Hercules is a great deal for the waifish dandy, who has dined this winter on sauces and teas. The dragging of the defunct bicycle has nearly done him in by the time he hauls it up on the front-most porch of the japonica, and lays it to rest in its snowy crevice. Inside the house, he pulls himself through several paper screens to a room lined with books where a patinaed steamer trunk is draped with a verdigris tapestry: a Turkish swimming cat aswirl in sea foam. He pulls off the tapestry and pries open the trunk’s lock. In the search he discards a hatching doll, a set of wind chimes, an unfortunate batik, a stale box of chocolates, a basket of erotic novelty soaps, until with clumps and clangs he hauls out a battered black telephone and a length of clear, flat cord.
In the foyer he shoves aside an elephant foot umbrella stand to reveal a dusty phone jack where he plugs in the relic. Dials. Listens tentatively.
Today as the sun rises, the dandy lolls again in his Adirondack lounge, wheezing softly below lap rugs. He sips a vegetable broth. On the southern slope, on a hidden back road, a stream of puffing tailpipes edge up the mountain toward the western orchard. There they begin an orchard wall of unusual density and height. The small park is awash with mechanics: flatbeds and graders, mortar-mixing machines on dolly wheels, a dump truck, five trucks of paving and cobble stones in twelve tones of grey, and a six-by-six packed full of stupored masons of varying age and size, in coveralls and clodhoppers, their fingers already locked on trowels. As the sun creeps, they scrape and level the sloped meadow on the orchard’s edge. They lay out string runners around the parameter. They churn tanks of mortar; they set foundations, lay stones, generally make havoc.
It takes several days for the wall to finally begin to take shape, ankle high, then knee, another week, hip and shoulder and so on until the masons hang limply from tall yellow scaffolding, and balance their whiskey-soaked limbs on two-byfours.
Each day, from the ruin tower, Mimsy watches the orchard at dusk. So much activity is hardly imaginable.
The last breath of winter keeps Fennis from witnessing the progress of his orchard fortress. Elderly at forty-five, reclusive decline has left him hollowchested and pinchy. He is struck with an ague unlike any he recalls from youth. He recedes indoors, not even risking the dawn breezes to examine his continental tabloids in natural light. Instead he huddles in robes and furs beside an open wing of a western-facing window and sniffs the deepening musk of the apple blossoms. He is beside himself to get to his orchard. Still the cool air lingers. He waits for a full-bosomed sun to warm the deck chairs and fill his dusty and echoing lungs.
Three April nights Mimsy crawls into the tower and peeks into the windows of the japonica. She sees what she has always known to be a nervously ambulatory dandy reclined on a sofa, his teeth chattering. Or she sees him ghostly pale, and dozing beneath a dozen, hand-dyed peacock bed sheets. Three dawns pass without his movement toward the western deck for teas and sauces. On the fourth morning, she catches the flashing shine of a black car in the pebbled lot. The attending physician alights with a tray of elixirs in spectral array.
Another week passes, and Mimsy gives up the pretense of returning at dawn for breakfast with her guardian. Instead, she watches the rise and fall of the fitful snoozing chest of the bed-sick dandy, his lazing pooch drifting in and out between paper screens with his head tipped in confusion. Fennis, now, is so weakened he only gets up to warm a cream gravy, or sits all day in bed and dashes off watercolor sketches on long sheaves of rice paper, tossing them, meekly, to the floor.
The farmer’s ward returns to the long barren gourd farm where her senile guardian wanders the vegetable garden in pajamas shouting commands at an absent crew of workers. He has long since forgotten he has a ward, thinks instead of the gourd blight of ‘07 and the subsequent moonlit field fires of that year. He circles the cantaloupe patch with a palm pressed to his brow. In the garden, Mimsy picks the succulent leaves of purslane to prepare a nourishing soup.
In the farm kitchen, the kettles are full blaze as she prepares an enormous supper for the waning dandy. Purslane soup, potatoes and pickled nasturtium buds, sliced avocado with lemon, a Persian herb pie of butterhead lettuce and fresh coriander stems, and a giant cucumber misery salad.
Today, the sun has receded and the sky has opened up in an April torrent that fills the ravine’s creek. She is not daunted. The crossing is rough, but she manages. She carries the feast down into the ravine in a lavender-lined wicker basket, across the swelling creek, through the cider ruin, and up the brick path to Fennis’s porch. There, with the front screen half opened to permit the free travel of the pinkish hound, the ward wanders into the house and silently sets out the dinner, on the floor, on a long jade tablecloth, below the poking nose of the house mutt.
She stops only for a second to take in an interior she has watched so often from her pirate’s spyglass. By the door panel is a photographic self-portrait of Fennis in full dandy’s garb as he poses with an oversized banana plant. She stashes the framed photo in her basket and heads for the door. She tugs the beaded bell pull with great force before she dashes like mad through the rain.
When she reaches the farm, she finds the doors locked. Her guardian cannot even recognize her, he is so lost in another decade. He assumes her some enemy of the gourd. He threatens her with a wrinkled and spotted fist from behind the leaded panes.
However, in the Japanese house, Fennis alights at the sound of the bell to find the carefully laid meal only partially nibbled by his pink mutt. He peers down the drive, past the ravine, but can see little from his porch and certainly not a now homeless orphan dripping in her lavender silks. The rich smell of fine food implores him. He begins the purslane soup, tears through the nasturtium potatoes, sucks down the avocados.
He finishes the meal with the misery salad, and the tartness of the dressing, and the bitterness of the greens, all is felt doubly by Fennis who is not used to sharp flavors. The garden shallots are so hot in this salad that they sting his nostrils and burn his eyes. Before long he is soaking in a stream of salad tears, which mar his nightgown in milky splotches. Fennis ends the enormous salad with a sluice of tears pouring on the foyer’s tatami mats. He feels exhaustion and hauls himself back to his bed.
The misery salad has a cleansing effect on the dandy and for the first time in weeks he sleeps a sound sleep and his dreams are not plagued by visions of fire blight, red-banded leaf hoppers, or fanged vermin. He sleeps for days.
When he awakens, his chest feels something more like a chest should, and he ambles out onto the western deck. Such time has passed! He sniffs the sticky scent of the already mulching petals of apple blossom. Their tiny green bulbs must be peaking.
Still in his mind is the nourishing repast, and he feels he knows the culprit. He drags himself into a suit of olive linen and moves slowly down the bricked drive to the cider ruin. With deliberate steps, he climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the mill. Across the ravine is the farmhouse, and inside, so he would guess, the salad maker. However, he sees only the slovenly wreck of a decrepit man in tattered pajamas, a burnished gourd helmet perched on his head. Where is the salad maker? He gives up his search and slinks down the wrought iron stair well and back up the path, homeward.
Within the week, the elixir physician returns and examines Fennis. He finds him in suitable condition to return to the orchard but warns him that to tax himself again would be sure death. Fennis, in a fit of botanical joy, spends the evening at work on the spoke of the Hercules, replacing its shattered chain. In his bedroom, with full open windows, he lays out his garb and buffs his brogues to a high shine. He chooses a jacquard waistcoat with a holly print on ivory silk and hooks in the silvery watch and tourmaline fob.
Look at Fennis in his olive linen, rouge on his cheekbones, a fresh lavender sprig boutonniere, once again his rakish self. He jounces on the mended Hercules with his hound close behind. He takes it slow down the curving western path, through the meadow, to his freshly mortared orchard citadel. He is determined not to tax himself.
The masons however have been careless. The heavy iron gates have been left ajar. Muddy tracks lead into the orchard where Fennis creeps on new-buck soles, leery of the sharp claws which mauled the ninth Mutsu.
The Mutsu retains her boundary fence however, and the scene is just as he left it, though in the wheelbarrow, a furry mound is huddled, its back rising and falling slowly, its breathing labored and shallow. He approaches it, pokes it with a discarded post, notes the raccoon pelt, and watches as it curls over. She shows a lavender silk breast, an absinth pallor, a leafy, tangled coiffure. Her chest-plate is a photograph of a rakish dandy with a potted banana plant.
There is something to her, some rotting sweet perfume, some mealy softness, and before he has thought even to check the tiny spring fruits, their leaves, their hardening branches, he is dragging her barrow out the gate, eastward with a stumbling tread, huffing toward the Japanese house, even as the ague empties him again, and his body whistles like a cut flute. He stumbles and sniffs at her: throat, shoulders, muddy shoes. On her is the rotten scent of apple blossom. The smell and the flavor thicken in his mouth and throat.