Rose's Garden (12 page)

“Put red or pink rose petals through the finest cutter of food grinder,” she had written. “Put chopped petals in rusty iron kettle (back porch) and cover with water. Simmer until petals adhere when pressed. Form into beads.” The recipe went on, arcane and complicated, more of Rose's necromantic art. Conrad squinted at her script. “Dry in the sun, pierced on hat pins,” she had written, and in the margin, crookedly, she had added, “Hat pins in top right dresser drawer, under necklace box.”

Conrad closed the book. Had she meant for him to do this? All this? Press a clove into each of the still-soft beads, as she had written, to form a puckered indentation like a flower? Thread the beads on black twine? What for?

He put his hand over the notebook to momentarily silence the voice within it, the expectation. And yet he could hear it, Rose's wandering tone, meditative, considering: “Beads will retain the faint attar of roses.”

He sat back in his chair and thought. Well, it was as good as anything else, wasn't it? It was, as Rose had said, something to do.

Rising from his desk, Pearl stepping lightly on his shoulder, Conrad climbed the stone steps up to the rose garden and filled his hat with petals, more than he could carry. They gave easily to his grasp, falling and scattering in a path at his feet as he walked between the beds. He heard music then, like wind chimes, tinkling notes. And in the kitchen he filled the kettle, the splashing water an echo of voices—his voice, Rose's, their conversations back and forth among the rooms, up and down the stairs, calling and answering. He poured the petals into the kettle, lit the flame on the burner, stood by as the mass swirled into black.

Dust to dust, he thought, pressing the mixture between his fingers when it had cooled. And finally, squinting, he pierced the beads on the hat pins, which were just where Rose had said they would be, laid them on a tea towel, and sat down on the terrace wall, staring, the clouds gathering overhead, gaining speed. Then, clumsily, the unfamiliar needle in his fingers, he laced each rosy bead, now dried hard as a cherry stone, onto a length of black thread. And at last he held the necklace in his hands. He brought it to his nose, sniffed, detected the faint smell of roses.

He turned the necklace in his hands, marveling at Rose's strange body of knowledge, the uncertain embodiment of her here now, out of sight yet close by. Where had she come across this recipe? He closed the lid of her sewing basket slowly over the flashing silver needles, the spools of colored thread, the tiny, velvet-covered cases of pins, her thimble with the grinning face of a monkey, the curling bias tape, and tiny scissors whose handles closed neatly over the blade, the wings of a stork. He thought then of Rose herself bent over the dining room table, her basket spilled beside her, the Singer whirring, her foot pumping the pedal, her furious pace.

For several years she had sewn all the costumes for the Pleiades' performances. Conrad remembered the women closeted in his
dining room, the pocket doors pulled almost shut, Rose kneeling at her friends' feet, her mouth full of pins. The sound of sporadic laughter came from the sunny room, glancing off the polished circle of the table, Adele's silver service on the sideboard, the flowering sprays of Rose's orchids nodding low on the radiator.

One day, passing down the hall, Conrad had paused, glanced in through the crack of the doors. Mignon French, round and shapely, her hair combed into a thin knot on her head, stood in her brassiere and skirt, her arms outstretched. Rose knelt at her feet, her hands busy at the green velvet hem. Conrad had seen the white accordion folds of flesh at Mignon's waist, the tumult of flesh contained in the brassiere, the wings of flesh beneath her arms—and the slim rounds of Rose's calves as she knelt in her stocking feet on the rug, her toes curled, pulling the fabric taut, running it through her hands. The other women stood around the room in their underwear and skirts, shawls or sweaters draped over their soft, bare shoulders, holding up their costumes, exclaiming to one another, touching and caressing. He had seen Rose raise the hem of Mignon's skirt, reach beneath it to tug the fabric, saw Mignon's heavy thigh, the dimpled flesh, the heavy ankle, the lifted heel. And he had started guiltily when Henri Ellis, coming downstairs from the bedroom with her arms full of folded costumes, had stepped to the landing, the floorboards creaking beneath her weight.

A long stare passed between them. And then Henri had brushed past him into the dining room, pulling the doors closed behind her.

“Cover up, girls,” he heard her say. “There's a Peeping Tom in the house.”

Conrad heard shuffling, what sounded like laughter. And then Rose's voice.

“What do you mean?” He winced at the tone, aggrieved, alert.

“Your husband,” Henri said, her voice muffled, “is standing in the hall, feasting his eyes on all these half-naked American beauties.” More giggles.

“What do you mean?” Rose asked again. And now her voice was sharp, clear. Conrad drew back, moved down the hall, his heart in his throat. But in a moment, Rose had slipped through the doors, closing them with a whisper behind her.

“Conrad,” she said, low.

He turned, saw her strained face.

“I was just—passing through,” he said.

Rose said nothing. He saw her wind the fabric in her hands.

“It was nothing, Rose,” he said, trying to keep his voice low.

But after a second she had turned and gone back inside. Conrad fled out the back door.

That afternoon, after the Pleiades had left, waving gaily as they walked down the front path, he had wandered the garden, moving in a desultory way from one task to another. He had been afraid to go back inside. Finally, as dusk began to fall, he had approached the house. It had been quiet except for the cuckoo clock ticking in the hall; long, dim shadows fell over the floors. At the kitchen sink he rinsed his hands of dirt, cleaned carefully and slowly beneath his fingernails with the tines of a fork.

“Rose?”

He spoke her name into the empty kitchen, the shadowy dining room with its litter of costumes, the sewing machine black and silent. He stood at the bottom of the stairs. Listened. No sound. He climbed quietly then, the treads creaking. The door to their bedroom was slightly ajar. He stepped to it, pushed it open.

“Rose?”

She was seated at her dressing table, the two lamps with their silk-tasseled shades lit, soft and yellow. She was undressed to the
waist. Her hair, loose, was brushed over her shoulders. She wore a necklace of dull beads at her throat.

“Rose?”

He stepped into the room. She did not move, nor did she take her eyes from her own face, staring back at her in the mirror. He moved closer, stood reflected like a ghost in the dark glass. Rose's eyes were black, the pupils large. Her shoulders and collarbone glowed white, sharp.

“I'm very thin, aren't I?” she asked quietly.

“Thin, yes,” he said. “Not too thin, though.”

Her hands floated up, cupped her tiny breasts for a moment, then dropped again to her lap.

“If I'd had children, I wouldn't be so thin.”

Conrad, his heart clenching, touched her shoulders then, moved to stand square behind her.

“I like you the way you are,” he said.

He felt her shoulders lift, a sigh, saw the necklace at her throat rise and fall with the breath. She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “What time is it?”

“I'm—I don't know,” he said, and he felt then that everything was slipping away from him—some moment when he might have explained himself, might have prevented this, fixed it. She stood, moving away from his hands toward the door.

He looked at the bed, her shirt tossed there. “Do you want your shirt?” he said.

She turned to him briefly before walking out the door.

“I think I'll just stay like this,” she said. “If you don't mind.”

And in the kitchen she had made a salad, sliced the bread, turned fish in the pan, the harsh, penetrating scent of garlic making his eyes smart. She had said nothing, moving between table
and stove, her bare back glowing, the beads of her spine shifting like the locked skeleton of a fish. When she sat at the table and pulled up her chair, he looked at her face, saw the tears there.

“Rose,” he said, protesting. “Come on. Come on now. Put your shirt on.”

“Isn't this what you like?” she said, weeping openly now. And he had pushed back his chair roughly then, raised her in his arms, held her tight against him. How could it matter so much? But he kissed her forehead, her ear, the smooth fall of her hair, over and over, and as he felt the narrow rib cage relax between his hands, he thought how easily everything could be lost—how, in a single second, everything you were sure of could disappear when you weren't looking.

CONRAD RAISED HIS
eyes from the necklace he held in his hands, saw Pearl flutter down from the terrace wall and hop along the ground, pecking at the thyme that grew between the flagstones. Following her with his gaze, Conrad saw that the thin fingers of a trumpet vine had crept over his boot while he had been sitting there stringing the beads, thinking. The miniature orange horn of its blossom, a speechless mouth, curled around his ankle. Delicately he shook his leg free.

Pearl, advancing over the flagstones, vanished into the low fog that rolled gently toward them, and Conrad realized that the afternoon had slipped away while he had been making the rose beads. The silence of the garden rested heavily around him, though behind it he heard the occasional distinct click of an insect's voice, as if occurring behind a curtain, or the sudden ruffle of leaves as a bird rose from the undergrowth in alarm. He looked out over the garden, which appeared and disappeared through the mist. The distant mountains were shrouded, invisible, but he
could feel their heft leaning toward him, the paper-thin layers of compressed mica and settling shale. How different was this silence from the quiet years of his retirement, he thought, when he and Rose had worked in the garden together, tying and cutting, pruning and weeding, planting and mulching. They had sat together, resting, watching the monarchs drift over the borders. They had wiped the sweat from each other's brow. He had felt sometimes, on those long, uninterrupted days, that they were the last people on earth, the last of their kind. He had wondered how different it might have been if they'd had children. And he thought now that one could feel triumphant as the last of two, a matched pair of animals entering the ark, or the mirror images of a butterfly's wings, things that belonged together, that were not whole unless joined; but it was another thing entirely to be simply the last—to be the one left behind.

He felt cold now; he stood and whistled for Pearl. She flew suddenly at him out of the mist, veered around his head. He put up his hand for her, welcomed the damp and chilled weight of her. And then he remembered Evita, the mother bird. He put Pearl on his shoulder, stepped into the fog, and headed down toward the loft to let Evita back in. As he reached the lower terrace, the mist parted for a moment and he saw Evita circle the roof of the loft and then alight there, her head turned, listening.

And then it seemed as if he could not move fast enough, had not ever been quick enough, for he felt the disturbance in the air above his head, felt the mammoth webbed shadow of the owl as it flew over him, saw the blanket of its wings shaken out like a cloak, heard the impact as the great bird's talons clasped the pigeon and bore the body away over the river toward the
dark wood. It was, after the short scream as the owl's talons bit into Evita's breast, quiet. Conrad was dazed. He lifted his hand a moment toward the sky, then turned slowly to regard the black spaces in the woods on the far side of the river, their baffling silence, the mist closing in. He opened his mouth, but there was nothing to say. On his shoulder, Pearl hunched into his neck. What had that scream sounded like to her, a creature tuned to the aperture of sound itself, the pinprick on the scale, the passage from one world to the next?

Pasquale was still sitting on the nest. Conrad stooped to peer in at him but turned away after a moment, frowning at the floor. He heard the bird rustle his feathers, shifting position. Conrad was not sentimental; he had seen pigeons killed before, though usually it was hawks who took them, a battle of feathers and spurs in air. But he did not want to look at Pasquale now. He passed on down the aisle, sifting grain into each pan.

And then, because he could not think what else to do, he took down the broom and began to sweep, raising clouds of dirt and feathers, the empty hulls of seed, everything that was left. Pearl, offended by the rising dust, left his shoulder and flew to the landing board. But Conrad leaned hard on the broom, felt the fragile stick bend beneath his weight, felt how close he was, just at that moment, to falling.

EARLY THE NEXT
morning, an hour before dawn, Conrad began boxing his pigeons, shuffling in the dark, taking one after another gently between his hands and feeling the heartbeat beneath the warm feathers in his palm. He loaded twenty of his highest fliers, birds who required a good stretch to stay healthy, into crates, and made several trips carrying them up the hill to his truck.

Standing on the gravel driveway, he looked up at the sky. Despite the dense clouds, which had lingered since the day before, since the storm that had ushered in Lemuel, there was an empty feeling to the morning. As he stood there looking up, he had the odd sensation that all the constellations and near planets had vanished, that the earth itself had been blown off course into some vacant orbit. The sky was velvety and dark. Conrad shivered a little. It would rain again before the day's end, he guessed.

He planned to drive his pigeons up toward Lake Champlain, a distance of some one hundred miles, where his friend Harry LeMoyne, also a fancier, would hold them for an hour or two and then release them to fly home, giving Conrad time to beat them back. Conrad was not much interested any longer in flying competitively, but he liked to give his homers some distance flights from time to time. He had often taken them to Harry's over the years. The two men, chatting companionably, would release the birds together, watching them circle upward and acquire their bearings in the breeze. Sometimes Conrad would linger through the morning to drink a cognac or two at the twig table outside
Harry's front door. At home, Rose would have clocked the pigeons, eager to report their times to Conrad when he returned.