Katherine Mansfield Would Approve

On Katherine Mansfield’s birthday, I walked up the edge of a long driveway in gale-force winds. I walked for a long time, with cars passing me. “The wind—the wind.” I was walking to Government House, which is at the top of a hill, where there would be a party. Katherine Mansfield was 125 years old today. The driveway to Government House has bushes and trees on either side, and these were beaten and pushed about by the wind. I thought about turning around and just going home, but that would mean walking past the guard at the entrance again. Every time someone drove past me, I felt more self-conscious. Finally, a hybrid car stopped, and a woman wound down the window. “Are you going to the Katherine Mansfield party?” I was. “That’s a long way, dear. Do you want to hop in?” As we zoomed up the hill between the trees, we should’ve talked about the end of Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party,” in which a big dog runs by like a shadow and Laura walks down that smoky dark lane, because that driveway recalled it to us. But instead, we talked about whether we’d been to Government House before. The woman had been many times. I hadn’t been. 

Government House, the governor-general’s official residence, is an enormous brown-and-cream building with dark jarrah weatherboards and a flag tower. A rectangular pond is feathered by the wind. Cars were still creeping over the pristine gravel or were parked nearby, and the new director of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace, a woman named Emma, was standing by the door with one of the board members and greeting people. I’d met Emma at the Birthplace that morning, my final morning as the acting director. I’d shown her through the house: the tiny office stacked high with filing boxes, where the new director would sit each day; the scullery with its steel pots hung on the