The Garden Path Read Online Free PDF Page B

Penzance given by the Drama Club of the local high school, a treat Barney had bowed out of. “I decided I’d rather pull your knickers down,” he said, drinking Scotch and warming his feet at Rosie’s fire. The snow had ceased, but so had the sunshine, and the weather appeared to be settling in for a freeze.
    Barney was lovable the way Bertie Wooster would be lovable if he had a sex drive. He had a corny sense of humor, with a strong silly streak, and he had very strange tastes. He once gave Rosie a silver lamé hostess apron, and he steadily lavished on her a supply of filmy nightgowns so sexy they were comical. On the other hand, he always sent her a singing telegram on her birthday, and one February when she had the flu he brought over a huge bouquet of violets and a teddy bear. He had been born in Georgia and had a sweet Southern accent that was, probably, what had won Rosie when she first met him, four years before.
    She had needed some children for one of her programs, “A Child’s Garden,” and she made an appointment at the Helen Palmer Elementary School in Chiswick. When she arrived, Mr. Bernard Macrae, the principal, was playing chess in his office with a skinny black boy of about ten. He waited while the boy completed his move, looked at it a minute, and then introduced him to Rosie (as “Scott Garnett, the chess king of Palmer School”), sent him back to his classroom, and motioned her to a chair.
    â€œI’m glad you showed up,” he said. “That kid was killing me. This’ll give me until tomorrow to come up with a move.” He looked dubiously down at the pieces, and sighed. On his desk-top, besides the chess board, were a small, smooth white stone, a piece of a two-by-four, a photograph of what appeared to be a girls’ baseball team, and a miniature taxicab with one wheel gone. He toyed with one of the chess pieces, a knight—picked it up, put it down, tapped the board with it.
    â€œYou play every day?” Rosie asked, to remind him she was there.
    â€œIt depends.” He put down the knight and picked up the piece of wood. He balanced it between his palms, then twiddled it between his fingers. He always had to have something in his hands. If nothing else was around, he’d crack his knuckles. “The kid is flunking everything except gym,” he went on. “But you put him in front of a chessboard and he’s a genius. I’m trying to get him to transfer some of that concentration from chess to schoolwork.”
    â€œHow do you do that?”
    â€œI play him a game every time he passes a math test.”
    â€œBribery!”
    â€œSure—that’s what teaching kids is all about—didn’t you know?” He grinned, put down the piece of wood, and reached across the desk to shake her hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” he said. “I’m a real admirer of your show, but you look even better in person.”
    He was wearing rimless glasses and a denim shirt with a frayed collar. His frizzy brown hair was both graying and receding, and it stuck out in all directions as if he’d clutched at it in despair during the chess game. He was tall and relaxed, and as skinny as Scott Garnett, and quite obviously a true, unaware eccentric.
    For the show, Barney supplied Rosie with a boy named Jonathan, who brought a hockey stick to the taping and accidentally whacked Janice with it; another boy, named Arthur, who wore thick glasses, asked too many questions, and was generally a caricature of the Class Brain; and two giggly girls named Jennifer and Amanda, who squealed when they saw a worm and picked most of the early golden Dayspring lilies for their mothers. Nevertheless, the show was such a huge success it was repeated every year. After the first one, when they’d finished filming the kids pigging out on Rosie’s strawberries, and Janice and the film crew had gone back to New York, she and Barney