Rose's Garden

a novel by
CARRIE BROWN

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill   1998

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

©1998 by Carrie Brown.
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either 
are 
products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

ISBN 978-1-56512-823-1

For John
and in memory of
Arthur Milne McCully,
G. Gernon Brown Jr., and
Carrie Frances Brown

Why do you make me leave the house
And think for a breath it is you I see
At the end of the alley of bending boughs
Where so often at dusk you used to be
—
THOMAS HARDY
, “The Going”

THE ANGEL APPEARED
on Paradise Hill the night of the fall equinox, light and dark dividing evenly over the world. As the sun set that September evening behind the horizon of Conrad Morrisey's garden, the moon rose over the far side of the hill, and a musical wind took up among the trees. The lindens' heart-shaped leaves spun, reversing to silver; the alders shivered. Next door, May Brown's washing stiffened and snapped on the line, a wild arcade of sheets and white gloves. The soft-feathered homing pigeons in Conrad's loft stepped side to side, testing their wings in the gathering wind.

It was the sound of the rain that woke Conrad, who had been asleep in his easy chair by the French doors.

The room was dark, warm, close, the seasonal air of slow twilights draining quietly over fields of tall grass heavy with seed. Conrad felt the weight of the water, the weight of the mountains, the weight of the clouds themselves, pressing close. He looked out the window into the dark rain and then, turning slowly, crossed the soft carpet, a meadow of wildflowers sewn within a border of flaming euonymus, each leaf stitched by his wife, Rose, in the days when her hands had been young and strong and clever.

Switching on the brass-bracketed light above the case for his phonograph records, Conrad fumbled through them, selected one, and slipped it from its cardboard sheath, soft as cotton with use. He leaned over the phonograph, the needle poised above Schumann's “Vanitas Vanitatum,” the wind breathing deeply
around his house. But before the stylus could fall, releasing the cello's first note, Conrad was arrested by an owl's deadly, fluting cry.

He thought, of course, of his pigeons, their soft, black eyes, the gentle throbbing of their breasts in his hand, the silken feathers laid over the milky blue skin. Setting the needle down on its rest, he hesitated, and in the pause he heard the owl again.

It happened so quickly—this decision to step outside, into the rain, into the storm, to defend his flock. It happened quickly, but in that moment, everything about Conrad's life changed.

For he knew the angel standing there in his garden, its features running with rain, its sleeves outspread, its flexed wings rippling the air. And because he knew the angel, Conrad thought that now he would be escorted up to heaven, would be handed step-by-step through the storm clouds that twisted overhead like a hornet's nest. And he was glad.

BUT WHEN MORNING
came, with its baffling silence and smooth tide of gray mist falling over the grass gone wild and the late summer flowers, the garden was empty. Conrad had seen a miracle, and now it was gone. Or was it? The night before, a door had been flung open, and all the windows. Now papers lifted from the desk, sailed to the floor. The curtains filled with air. A set of wind chimes—blue-and-white china windmills that Rose had hung by the French doors—tinkled and shook. Conrad was surrounded by strange urgings, voiceless expectation, rivers of wind.

New grass grew over his wife's grave, and her silence in the house was immeasurable. But Conrad knew that something had changed. He had thought he was alone on Paradise Hill, alone as a man could be. But now, he could feel it—a change in the air. The wind was bringing something toward him, a gift or a burden. He wasn't sure which.

Rising from his chair by the window, Conrad was suddenly terrified; what he knew and what he thought he knew were all mixed up, everything strange and familiar at once. If Rose had been there, if Rose had been alive still, he would have rushed to her, would have buried his face in the shifting folds of her nightgown, would have whispered what he'd seen.

But he was by himself, seventy-five years old, a new widower in an untidy house on Paradise Hill, a low-lying, bowl-shaped ridge at the base of New England's greatest mountain range.

Standing outside in the diamond of grass on the highest terrace of his garden, Conrad considered himself, head to toe. He'd been tall once but was shrinking now from six feet. Awkwardly thin until he married Rose, he was burgeoning around the waist after a lifetime of helpless indulgence at her table. His hands dangled from his cuffs, two rough spades. His blue eyes were clouded. His hair, silky and white, lay childishly over his forehead and grew long over his collar.

He gazed out over the descending terraces before him, their lush folds and exuberant meadows freshened by the previous night's rain. Beyond and below the neglected acres of his garden lay the land through which the river ran. On the far side of the river, the mountains began their coiling ascent.

Though he'd let it go since Rose's death, the garden was lovely this morning; the flower heads glowed and sparkled, rain caught in their petals. And yet, since last night, since the angel, all the earth—even this familiar view—was unknown to him. He had wandered into foreign territory, a place where he could be taken by surprise.

He wanted—no, needed, he realized—to talk to someone. It had been too long, four months since Rose's death. And he wanted now to show someone where the angel had stood the night before, the place in the sky where it had vanished.

Standing there in his garden, the sun just rising, he saw May Brown next door, worrying over her late summer lilies, slapped down by the night's rain. She was holding her hat to her head against the wind, which toyed with it, tugging it and tipping the brim.

Conrad burst through the hedge that separated their gardens, took May around the waist, and ushered her along, his fingers pinching her elbow. He led her to the very spot and stopped, breathing hard. A fine sweat had broken out on his forehead. He pointed. “I saw an angel last night, May,” he told her. “Right here. In the storm.”

He saw May look him over, wary as a rabbit.

“Right there?” she asked, patting her ear as if she might have misunderstood, looking skyward and squinting, glancing back in the direction from which she had come, toward the bowed passage through the hedge. “In the rain?” she asked doubtfully.

“Yes!” he said, dropping her arm.

But it was all over her face. Disbelief. Fear. Even sympathy. He cast around on the ground for something the angel might have left behind, some evidence—a curved feather big as a ship's hull, a burning footprint, still smoldering. But there was nothing. Just the splintered stalks and clotted beds of the vegetable garden, an overturned bushel basket, fallen fruit. It didn't look like much, especially after the storm, he acknowledged, though in general the garden had astonished him that summer: pumpkins the size of boulders, the tomatoes garnet red and surprisingly heavy, crooked squash and striped gourds dense as stones.

May brushed delicately at her sleeve as though something had landed there. Conrad stared at her, saw her face fall softly. She lifted her hand as if she might press his arm, but then withdrew it and looked away, knotting her hands together beneath her apron.

“Well. That's something,” she said. “Always something, I suppose. Must be going.” And she left him.

Conrad stared after her a moment and then turned away, running his hands through his hair. He looked out over the terraces of his garden, down Paradise Hill to the silver arch of the river and, beyond, the rising mountains.

He and Rose had taken advantage of the intrinsic sense of expectation that clung to their house, with its high dormers like surprised eyes, by planting rows of Japanese maples across the lowest terrace, the grassy paths between them ending in a hazy vanishing point. Low-lying fingers of mist rose now from the ground on these ghost roads, snaking between banks of shrubs and conifers. Spiderwebs descended like sets on a stage, hung in the tree branches, threaded with drops of water. The bright, wavering air gave the impression of something drawing near, proceeding down the avenues of maples, emerging from between the fine curtain of the willows' leaves.

Rose had designed each of the four terraces below the house: one for the herbs and roses, another for the perennials, another for the vegetables, and a fourth, closest to the house, with a grape arbor, a ring of fruit trees, and a quiet diamond of grass, a circular pool like a blind eye at its center. Conrad remembered Rose as she had been her final fall—a frail, gray-haired old woman in a chair in the middle of the garden, a scarf around her head, a notebook on her lap, paper bags of bulbs arrayed at her feet. He had buried each bulb according to her plan.

In the field beneath the lowest terrace was Conrad's pigeon loft, a miniaturized two-story affair designed for him by his father-in-law, Lemuel Sparks, and modeled after a Belgian senator's loft that Lemuel had admired. Painted white, with louvered sliding doors opening to the roost compartments and a wide landing board running
between the stories, it had an orderly, European appearance. Lemuel had roofed it in curved terra-cotta tiles, though they had cost him a fortune, and Rose had surrounded the loft with dwarf fig trees and plantings of shrubs that in the summer attracted migrating swarms of monarch butterflies.

Conrad glanced toward May's house now, saw she had abandoned the bundle of stakes for her sodden lilies. He imagined her standing behind her window curtain, watching him. Sighing, he headed over the grass toward the stone steps that led down to the pigeon loft.

Pearl, his rare frillback, was standing by the door to the first compartment. He reached in and took her in his hands, put his cheek to the whorl of white feathers at her crest, ran his finger over the curling dorsal coverts, which lay over her back in an elaborate cape. She dipped her head, rubbed it against his chin.

The other pigeons, alert at his presence, had gathered at the screens that separated them from the landing board. They fixed their round eyes on him. Conrad regarded his birds, their speechless expectation. If he opened their cages now, he knew, they would step to the lip of the landing board and spread their wings. In less than a minute they would be tuning their bodies to all the mysterious emanations of home, the signals that distinguished this place from any other. They might go near or far, down Paradise Hill to follow the serpentine curls of the river and through the orchard rows that flowed down to its banks. They might climb through the laurel and dogwood into fragrant pine woods, might fly in a banner over the lowest of the mountains' foothills. But they would, Conrad knew, no matter how far they went, find their way back by memory, remembrance itself distilled into a hundred different essences—sight, sound, smell—a penumbra of the familiar, all the resonances of the heart.

Conrad put Pearl back into her roost compartment, stood before her, and watched her neat motions. He did not consider himself a hysterical man, a man inclined to delusions or hallucinations. He understood that at seventy-five, and without Rose to take care of him, he wasn't likely to live so very much longer, a truth that, in his grief, he found comforting. And he believed it best to walk into whatever future he had left with his eyes wide open, gathering to him what he knew of himself and his life. But now an angel had chosen to make itself part of that life, had chosen to touch down like a spark at the end of a wire. What did it mean? And what would Rose have done?

She would have told anyone who'd listen. She would have celebrated. She would have told her friends.

But Conrad didn't really have any friends, he realized, not more than a couple anyway. He'd always just had Rose. That had seemed enough.

He returned to the house now, climbing the steps from one terrace to the next. Inside, he sat down at the dining room table, its lacquered surface holding the indistinct shape of his own reflection. He considered his story. Something unlikely, something unbelievable, something wonderful or terrible or even some mixed-up combination of the two—something he hadn't ever thought of, couldn't have imagined—had happened to him. He had become a stranger visiting his own life, and the sensation made him want to put himself at the heart of this mystery, claim it before it claimed him.