Rose's Garden (13 page)

It became his habit over the years to send a message to her via one of the pigeons, usually the archangel, a small, compact bird with lustrous, dark bronze plumage. Rose particularly admired this pigeon, with its shining blue wings and copper breast. It had been an expensive gift, from Lemuel, of course. And Conrad liked the idea of sending her love letters through his pigeons, liked the idea that his words, though he always felt they fell short of what he meant to say, spent some time in the high altitudes, acquiring a particular dash and romance.

As a boy he had dreamed of racing his birds in a war, over the rippling white sea of the Sahara, or swift and silent through the spray of rocket fire raining from enemy guns poised above a rocky escarpment. Gentle with his hands and tending to clumsiness, disinclined by nature to hunt or play sports, the young Conrad appreciated his pigeons' stealth, their disguise of innocence, the intellectual victory they made possible.

He understood that his pigeons gave him a certain edge over other boys and, later, over men who might best him in a different sort of contest. That he could stand on Lemuel's rooftop and collect his birds on his outstretched arms made him feel that he had entered into a pact with nature's most mysterious forces. He liked that his pigeons traveled by mystical relation to the world's most powerful and invisible forces—the shifting arc of the sun, rainbows of polarized and ultraviolet light, the heaving ballast of atmospheric pressure, and the body of sound itself, its whine or bellow up through air as its source approached or receded. Welcoming home his returning flock, he imagined that he, too, possessed through some grant of nature a precious modicum of the world's powers. Each time he witnessed his birds returning—as he
stood on Lemuel's rooftop or, later, on the grassy swale before his own loft—he wanted to drop to his knees as they fell fluttering from the sky, their wings holding air. And he felt both grateful and afraid at once, as though it were not his birds that had been released in unfamiliar territory but he himself, now discovered again, now found, now saved.

He had called Harry to make their assignation the night before, after a sad supper of tinned lima beans heated up over the blue gas flame and doused with ketchup.

Returning to the house from the loft when the true darkness of night had begun to fall, he had hoped that a basket might have been left for him, and he'd stepped outside to the front porch. The street was empty, though a flock of crows blew out violently from the black green yew by the gate when he opened the door. Conrad had gazed down the street, had seen the lights wink on at May Brown's, one after another, the widow looking for someone, moving quickly from room to room in a game of hide-and-seek. A pair of io moths, the black eyespots on their reddish hind wings opening and closing as the moths hovered near the porch light, rose and fluttered away in tandem into the twilight. Conrad was surprised to catch sight of that unfamiliar little white terrier again, the same dog he'd seen the first time he'd found a basket on his steps. The dog jumped up from the far side of the gate and streaked away down the road when Conrad stepped onto the porch.

This had been a day of nothing but disappointments, he thought—first Nolan Peak dismissing him and his letter; then that owl taking Evita; and now, no dinner. He sat down on the top step. Reaching into his pocket for his handkerchief, his fingers found the necklace of beads. Pulling it from his pocket, he lifted it to his nose. And then, after a minute, he laid it on the step beside him.

What he wanted, at that moment, was to be done with the encumbrances
of his life. He wanted to lay all his belongings down in a circle around himself—all his worldly goods. He wanted to see the material evidence of his life scavenged by the crows and the woodpeckers, the foxes and the narrow, bald-faced possum—his watch jerked across the ground by a phalanx of field mice, its gold face disappearing, winking, into the shadowy ferns; his money clip grasped by a darting mockingbird, who would fly away with it to a distant tree, screaming in pleasure. He wanted to see the buttons plucked from his shirts, the threads unwound from his jacket. He wanted to be unraveled, to do away with what felt like the poisoned substance of himself, the burden of his own oppression since Rose's death. He put his hand over the beads a moment, then lifted it away, leaving the necklace curved over the stair, abandoned.

Sitting in the dark later that evening, listening to Schumann's Opus 73, the composer's Fantasiestücke, Conrad had called Harry, who had seemed genuinely glad to hear from him. And then he had stepped outside, into the garden. He sat down on the grass by the reflecting pool, a dark aperture in the earth. All around him, by infinitesimal degrees, the moonflowers opened their white faces and turned toward the sour scent of his misery, fanning their perfume into the breeze. The cry and answer of the tiny tree frogs hidden in the branches of the low shrubs resounded in a throbbing volley over Conrad's head, the heartbeat of the garden itself, rhythmic and consoling. He had lain down, his head cradled on his elbow, and shut his eyes. The sweeping wands of the spirea, Rose's beloved bridal wreath with its down of white flowers, fell gently over him.

An elephant stag beetle, its forked, antlered jaws studded with a serrated ridge of teeth, crept forward from the undergrowth. Conrad had opened one eye to see the insect's shiny prothorax and formidable
weaponry; it settled itself with its back to Conrad, its jaws trembling at the night air, a distant dripping. Conrad inched out a finger—these beetles, despite their elaborate defenses, could never right themselves if flipped to their backs. He touched the hard shell, hinged like armor, and the beetle stayed still, alert and vigilant, praying under his hand.

When he woke it was almost dawn. He was damp and chilled, and his hands were stiff, but he had slept the quietest, most dreamless sleep of his life. Gathering his pigeons that morning for the drive, he understood that he had been given a gift, but he did not know whom to thank.

CONRAD DROVE THROUGH
town on the way to Harry's, stopping for the light at the corner of Main and Green Streets on the square. By habit he glanced up to the granite wall of the bank beside him on his left. A plaque had been installed there just below the second-story windows, following a flood that had submerged the town in water for two terrible days in 1942. A brass hand, one finger extended, pointed to a line marked by the numeral 12 in ornate letters. Below the hand was an inscription: september 18, 1942: the day the waters rose.

Conrad had seen photographs of the flood in the Aegis's office. He and Toronto had found them a few years before while planning for Laurel's bicentennial celebration; Harrison Supplee had thought that selected old photographs (framed by Toronto, who was handy with tools, and gilded by Conrad) might be sold to raise money for the town. One Sunday afternoon, Conrad and Toronto had let themselves into the office, made coffee in the pot, and sat down under the browning arms of Betty Barteleme's philodendron in the front room to look through boxes.

Toronto had read to Conrad from brittle clippings as they sat on
the floor, sorting through stacks of old prints. According to the first stories, printed a week after the flood, a week of steady rains, the legacy of a dying hurricane, had burst the series of stone-and-earth dams along the Mad River at Lake Arthur. Millions of gallons of water had sped down Mt. Abraham at speeds of twenty-five miles per hour, forcing the river over its banks and into the streets, businesses, and homes of Laurel. Property losses had been estimated at $11 million. “But a week later,” Toronto said, reading aloud, “Laurel's residents are mourning most acutely the lives of two youngsters taken by this dreadful natural disaster.”

Toronto frowned at the paper in his hand. “It must have been terrible,” he said, putting the newsprint aside and passing a photograph to Conrad. “Look.”

The photos showed a landscape almost unreal in its alteration. The river had flooded streets and fields, surging through businesses and homes, carrying off livestock and automobiles, furniture and pianos, whole trees and front porches. Dead animals trapped in aggrieved postures in the forked branches of felled trees; an isolated chair caught spinning lazily in a whirlpool; walls of debris fifteen feet high buttressing storefronts—the pictures were shocking, sad, frightening. Conrad could look at them only briefly. And that the waters had receded in less than two days, a breathtaking reversal, leaving the town choked with rust and mud, seemed to him a perfect demonstration of the brutality of destruction—it can all happen in a second, he had thought; they might not even have known it was coming.

He was so preoccupied with these thoughts while waiting at the intersection that he did not notice the light changing. When the car behind him honked, Conrad startled, jolting the truck forward against the crosswalk. But as he did so, he saw in horror the terrified face of the pedestrian in front of him—her arms flung out
against the advancing hood of his truck, a blue vein like a ribbon at her neck, the black windows of the bank reflected in her eyes.

A flash of light hit the street before him—a trick, the sun emerging for one blinding instant from behind the clouds; sparks flew as if from an anvil. It was too late to stop: Conrad felt the truck move forward beneath him like a ship proceeding into the lock of a canal, into some temporary hold in space and time, a false level. And yet, the collision he expected did not occur; instead he felt himself pass through the girl's body; he felt a coolness, like walking through damp sheets hung on the line to dry.

When he pulled over to the curb, he was shaking. After a long moment, in which his head filled with a maddening prickling sensation, he finally raised his eyes, looked into the silver rectangle of the rearview mirror.

The girl was on the far side of the street, walking away from him down the sidewalk. She wore a white dress, long and unevenly hemmed. She carried in her arms a large bouquet of cream-colored flowers. Conrad stared at her a moment, then rolled down his window. He could not hear the sound of her footsteps, but the scent of the flowers was strong and unmistakable, the musky spice of hothouse roses. When she reached the far corner of the street, she turned slightly, and Conrad saw the smooth profile, shallow as the head on a coin, and serious as a queen. It was Hero.

WHEN CONRAD AND
Rose had decided to marry, after over a decade of friendship through their late childhood and adolescence, Lemuel had wanted to make all the arrangements, of course. Such a spectacle was what he lived for. Like Rose, he thought life ought to be lived with a theatrical flourish, that certain events called for drama, for costume and music, for a careful adjustment of the lights, a pregnant pause.

Leaning against Conrad's arm in the Sparkses' kitchen one night, Rose had made the announcement with uncharacteristic simplicity, and Lemuel had leapt up from the table to embrace them, catching them both in a great hug, squeezing hard to rouse some more lively display from them. Conrad, holding Rose's waist, had felt anxious for a moment. It was one thing for him and Rose to have made the decision—lying quietly face-to-face and smiling foolishly at each other in Rose's wide bed in her childhood bedroom—and another to hand the news of it over to Lemuel, for whatever production he would make of it. By nature a private man, even in his youth, Conrad felt both thrilled and uneasy when involved in the sort of high jinks Lemuel liked to mix up.

Lemuel liked to surprise people with gifts and pronouncements. On the morning of Conrad's eighteenth birthday, Lemuel had flung open the door to Rose's bedroom just before dawn, handed Conrad his clothes, and, hurrying him along, taken him to the river. From the deck of a friend's sailboat, they had watched the sun rise over the city, a bottle of vodka and a loaf of black bread between them.

“The world is yours, Conrad,” Lemuel had said, throwing his arms wide, vodka splashing from the bottle, as the light of the sun crept up over the buildings, gilding them with gold. “It's a wondrous thing to be eighteen.”

And Conrad had tried to feel that sense of power. He had, for a moment, enjoyed the thrill of the morning, he and Lemuel hoisting the sun themselves.

Lemuel liked all matters celestial. He kept an almanac in the kitchen and made sure his family was apprised of the momentous matters of the heavens—eclipses of the sun and moon, the Leonid meteor shower, rings around Saturn glowing for a moment, visible through an amateur's telescope for the first time in a millennium.
More than once Conrad had found himself conscripted to tote a hamper to the park or the rooftop, young James and John half-asleep at his shoulder, to watch the terrifying and marvelous movement of the planets, Lemuel narrating sonorously from some book—Byron, or Wordsworth, usually one of the Romantics.

“Swiftly walk over the western wave, Spirit of Night!” Lemuel would raise his voice, nearly shouting Shelley's lines, invoking some answer from the heavens. “Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear,—Swift be thy flight!”

And each time, watching Lemuel stand in the fading starlight among the chimney pots, a book in his hand, glasses on his nose, a finger raised, Conrad had felt awed not just by what he witnessed—the moon turning black before his eyes, a giddy shower of shooting stars—but by Lemuel's knowledge of what was going to happen. His father-in-law, Conrad knew, held his ear to some language only he—and sometimes Rose, too—could hear.

THE SPARKSES, WITH
a liberality that at first made Conrad uncomfortable, had never seemed to mind that Conrad slept in Rose's room on his visits back to New York from college in Ithaca.

“Good night, you two,” Adele Sparks had said casually, smiling and glancing up from her embroidery the first night Rose took Conrad's hand and announced they were going to sleep.