She described the gardens. Acres of fern-carpeted forest (she knew he was a sucker for ferns). The fragrant salt-spray roses that blanketed the dunes of Singing Beach. It sure sounded like a fairy-tale castle, a make-believe island. Impossible to believe in, and yet he couldn’t stop hoping it was real and came to want it so bad that he’d shoved her away, begged her to quit, this Scheherazade scheming, luring him away from his city, his home, to an island rotten with white conservatives. Military born and bred. Shit, Leslie, he’d shouted once, waking Eva, they’re natural born killers!
He had wanted to hate Avalon, to feel the same disgust he’d reserved for her parents, who lived as if Jules were dead and his children never born. When Brooks began mentioning the island during family dinners, Jules had wanted to hate Leslie, who, as usual, had recruited their son to her agenda, the boy who wanted so badly to believe in something that he’d believe in anything. UFOs, God, world peace—it seemed like Brooks was obsessed with a new cause every week. Like mother, like son, Jules thought but didn’t dare say aloud. It seemed a challenge these days to go a week without Leslie or Brooks getting pissed at him. Their brooding combined, forget about it. Brooks, like Leslie, had a knack for holding grudges, and could go days without speaking to him. Making Jules feel invisible.
Then he visited the island for the first time, just he and Leslie—the kids left behind in the city under the care of Mrs. Umansky. Jules fell in love the moment their city-dinged station wagon rolled onto the causeway under clouds so thick they seemed painted. The white-capped waves rocked against the boulders lining the narrow road and he felt the trembling in his chest. They drove into a forest so dense the trees joined in a lush canopy overhead, and, on each side of the paved road, reached in for a verdant hug, making it hard to see where the asphalt ended and the woods began.
He’d let the car slow to a crawl, wanting to watch the sunlight flicker through the trees, catch the birdsong, to feel the ocean breeze sifting the leaves. It was just as Leslie had promised. Like America before the white man arrived. Virgin land. No stoplights, no stop signs. No telephone poles—the islanders had paid through the nose to have the wires buried so as not to spoil the view.
He had no language to describe the Castle then. It took a few days for the archaic terms he had studied in required architectural courses at Harvard to return to him. Turrets and finials and gables. But studying glossy photos in a textbook was nothing like the real thing. Of course Leslie’s parents had named it the Castle. It was the stuff of fairy tales, a white marble palace rising out of the trees, built to protect a royal clan from marauding villagers and pillaging hordes. From war. From the undesirables—what his pops had called the kids in their ’hood who spent their days slinging dope, lounging on stoops like the sun had melted them there.
It looked to Jules more like a fortress than a home with its four rounded spired towers, one at each corner of the three-story square-shaped main house. The front portico with its domed ceiling, and carriage porch (la porte-cochère, Jules remembered) reminded him of the White House.
The bronze French baroque front doors were as tall as the two-story city row house that had been Jules’s childhood home. Leslie claimed they weighed a ton each. An oval medallion with ornately wrought initials decorated each door. H. M. for Hieronymus Marshall. Admiral, former Grudder president, warmonger, bigot, father to Jules’s beloved.
Leslie had told him the story. The Castle was built after her father returned from a company golfing retreat to France, where he and a group of the higher-ups from the factory, most ex-military like Admiral Marshall, had stayed at a sixteenth-century castle turned luxury resort. At the souvenir shop, the admiral had bought a set of laminated place mats—the castle’s stony beauty depicted in watercolor. Once stateside, he’d hired an architect and had given him orders to copy every detail, stopping short of building the moat.
If there had been a chance left for him to hate the island, to refuse Leslie’s and Brooks’s demands that they move, it died when Jules entered the maze that led to the Castle’s gardens. Leslie, not one to keep anything under wraps, had managed to keep it a surprise, and as Jules ran into the maze, ignoring Leslie’s cries, “Wait, you’ll get lost! You need the directions!” there was nothing he wanted more than to lose himself in the tall (at least eight or nine feet, he guessed) fragrant corridors. It was his personal amusement park—the funny mirror glass replaced with living, breathing, oxygen-releasing walls.
He knew gardeners who hated boxwood, claimed it smelled like cat piss, but Jules inhaled deeply as he ran through the shaded lanes, reveling in the sour scent. He wished Leslie had followed him in—they could run together, until breathless, and he would tell her everything he knew about Buxus. Way back when, the ancient Egyptians were filling the gaps in their gardens with boxwood, just as the ladies of East Avalon did today. Pharaoh Kufu, that perfectionist, insisted the base of the Great Pyramid be lined with thousands of the trees. Imagine that—the audacity—planting hundreds of thousands of thirsty boxwoods and commanding them to rise in the desert!
He hit a dead end, almost ran face first into the evergreen. He retraced his steps, or at least he thought he had, but he ran into another dead end. He laughed aloud. Leslie’s birdlike voice sounded in the distance.
“I told you, you big fool. You’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to me!”
“I don’t care,” he shouted. “I’m never coming out!”
He lay on his back in the grass. The sun blocked by the tall hedges, the sweat on his face cooled, and he thought of the city and its steel and glass skyscrapers. He’d happily trade those man-made walls for this.
The sky above the labyrinth had turned a predusk apricot by the time he emerged. Not from the entrance he’d run into like an impatient child, but from the exit, and what he saw stopped him short so he skidded across the dew-damp lawn, landing flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him.
Leslie was there, waiting, and the sight of him prone kicked her into giggles. She’d always had the humor of a ten-year-old boy, Jules thought. A sucker for physical comedy, especially if it was Jules tripping, falling, walking straight-on into a screened door.
“Oh my,” Leslie gasped midlaugh, “it was just like in the cartoons! You know when they slip on the…”