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Steve’s first thought when he and Tony locked eyes by the entrance gate at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens was Are you kidding me?And judging from the annoyed look Tony shot him before marching toward him, it seemed like Tony’s first thought had been the same.
“Did you follow me?” Tony asked angrily after he pulled Steve by the sleeve away from the short line in front of the ticket booth.
Steve bristled, crossed his arms and replied, “I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
“JARVIS?” Tony said to the air around him, and at first Steve assumed it was just a habit from the tower carrying over to everyday life, but then Tony’s ridiculous sunglasses lit up, and Steve’s enhanced hearing made out the tiny speaker by his ear saying, “Captain Rogers has been planning this excursion for some time, sir.”
Tony furrowed his brow, then turned away from Steve and said in a tone that would be inaudible to anyone else, “You couldn’t have nudged him to pick a different day?”
“No sir, he was very insistent on today.”
“Why?”
“You could ask me,” said Steve a little irritably.
Tony blinked and the holograms that had taken up the panes of the glasses disappeared as he turned back toward Steve.
“What?”
“I said, you could ask me why I’m here today.”
Tony muttered again, “Goddamn super-hearing,” before he added, “Figured you’d’ve told me if it wasn’t private.”
“Personal, not private,” said Steve, before dropping his arms to his side and relaxing his stance somewhat. “Today’s the day my Ma died. And this place was important to her.”
Tony’s eyes went wide with shock.
“No goddamn way,” he said. “I can’t— JARVIS, I am going to kill you.”
“Look, Tony, obviously you don’t—”
“It’s my mom’s birthday today,” said Tony quickly as if he was trying to get it out there before he thought better of it. Then he added, “It’s… I’m here for that too, today.”
There was nothing but shocked silence and the low murmur of other guests milling around here and there. Steve took a moment to thank his stars that he was wearing that doohickey Tony had invented to make them harder to recognize out in public, or else they’d both be getting mobbed for photographs while they just gawped at each other, stunned at the sheer coincidence of it.
“Of all the gin joints, huh?” Tony said finally with a bemused smile.
“I understood that reference,” said Steve, letting his own small smile quirk the corner of his lip.
“Yeah, well, sounds like we’ve both got private dates with our moms today.”
“I uh,” said Steve, shuffling his feet uncomfortably, “I wouldn’t mind the company, actually.”
“Really?” said Tony.
Steve shrugged noncommittally, almost wishing for a moment that he could take it back. But now that he was past the surprised annoyance of seeing Tony here too, he realized he would like a friend with him today. It’d be nice to have someone he could share Ma’s memory with, even for a little while.
“Sure,” said Tony. “Yeah. I just— I need to stop by the Rose Garden before they close. Not that they wouldn’t keep it open for me with a big enough donation, but—”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Steve, “That’s pretty close to where I’m going, anyway.”
“Where’s that?” said Tony.
“Come and see,” said Steve, nodding his head in the direction of the entrance.
Tony paused for a moment before joining him at the ticket counter. Five minutes later Steve was leading Tony over a small wooden bridge arched over a tiny stream.
“This is my favorite part,” said Steve as they turned a corner and the magnificent Japanese Hill-and-Pond garden came into view. Autumn was in full swing and the trees were a riot of bright oranges and reds, as if trying to one-up the crimson of the torii standing in the lake like a fiery beacon. Coupled with reflection of it all in the placid surface of the pond and the clear blue October sky, it was enough to make Steve’s fingers itch for a paintbrush.
“This was Ma’s favorite walk in Brooklyn,” said Steve as they ambled along the path circumnavigating the pond. “The first time she came here was with someone really important to her.”
“Who’s that?” said Tony.
Steve shot Tony a sideways glance, debating internally whether to trust him with what he knew. You did want to talk about Ma, he thought to himself, so he shrugged and said, “Ma came to Brooklyn when she was seventeen. Her parents had a few connections here and there from the old country, but she had nobody. Didn’t even know the language at first. And she probably would’ve kept speaking Gaelic for a lot longer if she hadn’t met Chiyo.”
“Very traditional Irish name, Chiyo,” said Tony wryly.
“Might as well be for how often Ma talked about her,” said Steve with a smirk. “Chiyo’s family had come over a few years before from Osaka. They lived in the same apartment building as Ma’s family. Chiyo knew what it was like to struggle with English, so she taught herself enough Gaelic to say hello to Ma and just like that, you couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar. Ma said when Chiyo took her here for the first time she knew what it was like walking through Eden with Eve.”
“I’m sensing a sad ending to this story,” said Tony. “And I’m guessing it might have something to do with your mother being Adam in that metaphor.”
Steve shook his head and said, “You really don’t miss a beat, do you?”
“You should see me at DDR.”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind. Go on, what happened,” said Tony as they passed under a dormant cherry blossom tree (Steve made a mental note to come back in the spring when it'd be in bloom).
Steve kept his eyes fixed ahead and continued, “We uh... we didn't really have the kinds of words back then that we do now, for what Ma and Chiyo were to each other. Or if we did, they weren’t around in our tenement. The ones we did have came from church, and they were ‘sodomite’ and ‘abomination.’ One day Chiyo’s Dad caught her and Ma kissing on the fire escape and not long after that, Chiyo was gone; married off to some upstanding Japanese-American fella in California. No forwarding address, no goodbye. Ma didn’t even have her new last name to look her up.”
“JARVIS could help with that, if you want to know now,” said Tony.
“He already did,” said Steve as they completed the circuit around the pond. “Chiyo Suzuki lived in San Diego with her husband and two children. Then they ended up getting sent to Manzanar during the war and lost everything. If I’d known—”
“A lot of people didn’t,” said Tony. “And they kept you busy in the USO.”
“I could’ve paid more attention. We all could’ve,” said Steve, before sitting down at one of the benches with a view of the full garden. The ground was still damp with last night’s rain, and the petrichor mixed with the autumn chill gave the scene a mournful air. Even the riot of color in the leaves spoke to a certain air of dying.
“They burned it down, y’know,” said Steve, nodding in the direction of the small Shinto shrine next to the pond. “Once the war started everyone decided the Emperor of Japan’s choices were their Japanese neighbors’ fault. Some assholes broke into the garden and burned down the original shrine, just because they knew that’d be what hurt the worst. It was the one time since Ma died that I was glad she wasn’t around, so she didn’t have to see what had happened.”
“You picked a hell of a place to relive memories of your mom,” said Tony from where he was seated on the bench next to him.
“Yeah, you’re right. I asked you to come with me so I could talk about her, and here I am telling you about racist and homophobic forties bullshit instead.”
“If your Ma’s half the woman I expect her to be from what I’ve read about her, I think she’d kick your ass if you didn’t remember all of that with her,” said Tony.
“You’ve read up on my Ma?” said Steve, turning to look at him.
“Told you I had a Captain America fixation when I was a kid,” said Tony with a shrug. He had his arm stretched out over the back of the bench, feet planted apart in a manner that spoke to years of practicing casual nonchalance. “That meant reading up on your family too. Your Ma sounded like kind of a hardass, honestly.”
“She was,” said Steve with a chuckle. “She hated bullies more than I did. When I was seven I came back from school crying one day because Sister Beatrice said Bucky was going to Hell for being Protestant and I couldn’t be friends with him anymore. She organized a boycott on the church offertory until Sister Beatrice was miraculously called to cloister herself in a convent upstate.”
Tony snorted and said, “Wish I could’ve met her.”
“Wish you could’ve too,” said Steve, before he turned back toward the garden and added, “She used to say that my Da taught her how to be strong, but Chiyo taught her how to be kind. And she used to take my Da for walks around this same pond as well, and me later. I figure,” Steve cleared his throat and blinked hard to banish his tears. “I figure she wouldn’t mind if in remembering her I’m remembering them too, and what they passed on to me through her. In fact, I don’t know any other way to remember her.”
They sat there in silence for a minute or two as Steve recalled all the times his Ma had taken him down the same path they’d just walked, her yelling at him not to run too far ahead and him looking for frogs to catch by the side of the pond. He remembered the fond, distant look in her eye as she looked around, and her sad expression when she saw the Japanese maple tree by the shrine. He could only guess which of the two great loves of her life had inspired that look, but what really mattered to Steve in the end was that his mother had brought a lot of love with her to that tree and to this place. That particular tree may have burned with the shrine, but Steve was glad to see there were at least a dozen fiery Japanese maples still standing around the pond. And where before he’d seen a mournful dirge in the crimson of their foliage, now he wondered if it didn’t look more like the scarlet plumage of a phoenix rising from the ashes of the past, reminding him that some things never truly die, and the love his mother had brought to this place was among them.
“Love you, Ma,” said Steve under his breath, before he stood up, turned to Tony and said, “Thanks for coming with me. I’ll let you get to your own thing now.”
“You’re not getting rid of me that easy, Rogers,” said Tony as he stood up and straightened his ten dollar tee shirt underneath his several thousand dollar jacket. “C’mon, your turn to take a feels trip.”
“I don’t want to impose,” Steve demurred.
“Believe me, Steve. If you’re imposing, I’ll let you know.”
Steve could smell the rose garden even as he’d been walking around the pond before. By the time they got inside the white picket enclosure with hundreds of rose bushes in various states of bloom and dormancy, neatly arranged around a gravel path and a white gazebo, the syrupy sweet fragrance was almost overwhelming.
“Here,” said Tony, passing Steve a small tin box. “Pop one of these in your mouth.”
Steve did as he was told and the peppermint kick of a very strong mint was enough to dial back the heavy perfume of blooming roses to a tolerable level.
“How the hell do you manage to live in a place like New York City with a super-sniffer like that?” asked Tony as they began their stroll past the dark green bushes dappled with little bursts of red, pink, yellow, and white, like delicate little fireworks exploding in a verdant sky.
“The city I’m used to, the roses I’m not,” said Steve. “And you might’ve noticed I keep to the tower on garbage day.”
“JARVIS, you can strike ‘Why does Steve hide in the gym on Tuesdays,’ from the team mystery list,” said Tony.
“You have a team mystery list?”
“You don’t?”
Steve chuckled then replied, “That’s fair. Right now I’m wondering why my teammate Tony came to this place to think of his mom.”
Tony quirked the corner of his mouth into a smile, then said, “C’mere, I’ll show you.”
They walked on until they came to one particular rose bush in the back corner of the garden. Its flowers were an exquisite blush of red and gold, vibrant to the point of being over-the-top next to the delicate pinks and whites of the roses around them.
“Iron-lion roses,” said Tony with a grin. “Specially cultivated by Maria Stark, then donated to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.”
Steve raised his eyebrows, before reading the small placard in front of the bush that confirmed what Tony said.
“Mom’s main interest was orchids, actually,” said Tony. “She had a whole greenhouse full of rare ones from all over the world. The Botanical Gardens up in the Bronx have her collection now, and I try to stop by at least once a winter when most of them are blooming in their greenhouse. But one time Maria went to a gala and got mansplained by some idiot about how anyone can do orchids,” Tony said in a mock, snooty British accent, “But roses were an ahhht-form, which is why no one could beat him in the International New Rose competition. So she went and cultivated that just so she could stand next to him on the stage and watch him take second place next to her.”
Steve threw back his head and laughed, and it wasn’t long until Tony joined him. And when Steve looked again at the roses, they really did somehow look almost spiteful with their rich golden hearts and flashy scarlet tips. They seemed to assert themselves and demand attention and respect in a way the other roses didn’t, and in a manner Steve recognized in someone he knew when dressed in a similar flashy getup of red and gold.
“Here I was thinking you got your ego from your dad,” said Steve finally, wiping a tear of mirth from the corner of his eye.
“Nope, double dose on both sides,” said Tony. “Brains too. A florist told me once that half of what they know today about raising orchids can be traced back to things she figured out in her greenhouse and shared with the New York Horticultural Society.”
“Wish I could’ve met her,” said Steve.
“I don’t,” said Tony, and whatever mirth was left from their shared laugh turned to sorrow in an instant. “She spent her life being sad and alone, Steve. Turns out when your husband won’t come out of the workshop and neither will your son, and everyone else around you only cares about your money, it leaves you lonely and depressed with only parasitic flowers for company. She needed a human connection, and I was too smart and too busy for her and her ‘stupid old flowers.’ I’d like to say she bore it all with a gentle and forgiving heart, but she was human like the rest of us, and some humans turn bitter and angry in an environment like that. Not all the time, but enough for me to put even more distance between us. Which of course made the problem worse, because teenage Tony Stark couldn’t look past all the shouting and disappointment to see that Maria Stark was as lonely as he was.”
“You were a kid,” said Steve.
“I was an asshole,” said Tony bitterly. “And she was too, in her worst moments, but I had a lot more worst moments than she did. And she never did stop trying to reach out, which is something I wish I could say. We did start to reconcile when I went to MIT and a combination of age, perspective, and Rhodey’s intolerance for my bullshit began to excavate my head from my ass. And for her part, I think me going away helped her figure out the difference between distance brought on by moody adolescence vs. not caring about her, and which one was coming from me compared to which one was coming from Dad. But before she and I could get very far…”
Tony trailed off and looked away, and Steve didn’t have to ask what had stopped them.
“Anyway, for the competition, she picked a cultivar that would always be in full bloom on her birthday,” Tony said. “So happy birthday, Mom. I didn't bring flowers, but I see you’ve brought your own. Just had to make me look bad in front of Steve, huh?” Then in an undertone that Steve pretended he didn’t hear, Tony added, “I miss you. I’m sorry.”
For a while there was only the sound of the wind rustling the leaves and a low hum of honeybees collecting the last nectar of the year. There might have been other people in the garden milling about, but Steve’s attention was focused on Tony and his particular kind of barbed affection that he brought to this place. They match, Steve thought briefly as he noticed the sharp purple thorns in the rose bush, and Steve felt his heart ache a little at the complicated love he saw between two complicated people.
“You’re wrong, by the way,” Steve said finally after a minute or two.
“About what?” said Tony, looking up at Steve for the first time since they’d gotten there.
“Your mother. I’d still like to have met her.”
“I just told you she was kind of an asshole,” said Tony dubiously.
“You did. But the last time I made friends with someone like that, it turned out to be one of the most rewarding and important friendships I’ve made in this century.”
Tony pressed his lips in a thin line and narrowed his eyes.
“I’m gonna pretend you’re talking about Clint right now, because if that was about me I’m gonna have to shove you into these bushes, and these little fuckers have thorns.”
“Good thing I was talking about DUM-E,” said Steve.
Tony snorted and rolled his eyes, then said, “C’mon, I know a good Thai place nearby.”
“Never had Thai before,” said Steve thoughtfully.
“Never had— JARVIS, what have we been feeding this poor boy?” said Tony.
As they walked amiably back to the entrance of the garden, Steve didn’t notice he’d left behind a bright red Japanese maple leaf that had stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Before they’d gotten very far, a small breeze caught it, and it landed inside Maria’s rose bush. That same breeze made the bush and the leaf sway gently, as if waving goodbye.