Rose's Garden (23 page)

May nodded. She understood this, too. She looked around the room, turning her hands before the candles, toasting them. “Isn't it funny,” she said slowly after a minute, “how she still seems to be here.”

Conrad turned around from the stove. “Do you think so?” he said, staring at her.

May looked vaguely around her again.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, very much so.” Her eyes flew toward his face and then away. “Do you talk to her?”

Conrad thought about this question. “No,” he said at last, honestly. “I don't think so.”

“Paul talks to me,” May said then quietly. “Just the other day, I'd lost my keys. And while I was looking for them, all over the house I looked, I heard him say, right in my ear, ‘They're in the blue bowl, May.' And there they were. And that's not the first time,” she said, glancing up once, quickly, and then away again. “It's happened a lot. Oh, I can't say how many times. I thought he might say something to me tonight when the lights went out. But he didn't. I guess they don't know everything,” she finished.

Conrad laughed at that thought, that even the dead, with their heavenly perspective, couldn't see what lay around the next corner.

Steam twirled from the kettle spout. He brought the kettle to the table and filled the teapot. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down.

“So, here we are. Two widows. I mean, a widow and a widower,” May said, wrapping her hands around her cup.

Conrad said nothing, staring into his mug. Voices in your ear, apparitions at the sink. Angels in the garden. Maybe it was all part of it, he thought. Part of what came afterward. The mind protests
so mightily against the absence, that it creates these momentary restorations. But he hadn't created Lemuel, he thought. That was beyond him.

“I saw that girl Hero on your porch the other day,” May said then, and Conrad's head jerked up. He had forgotten she was there.

“I guess she misses her, too,” May went on. She took a sip from her cup. “I thought maybe she'd gotten friendly with you.”

“No,” Conrad said. “Actually, I've never been able to talk with her exactly.” He looked over at May. “What do you know about her?”

May shrugged a little. “Not very much. Not any more than you do, I suppose. I know she was out at that hospital for a while, poor thing. And I remember that she was a sickly child. Paul and Eddie were friendly, but Eddie never talked much about her. And I didn't know Kate well. I think it was difficult for all of them. She's never been—healthy.” She thought a moment. “But Rose said she'd been doing so well, out at the cemetery. Being out there, working in the gardens, had helped her. I imagine Rose did some intervening to see that Hero got the job out there. I thought it would be lonely and grim with all those—you know—” She looked back at Conrad shyly, apologetically, and then lifted her eyebrows in a sigh. “But Rose said Hero told her it was peaceful. She can't take people too much, I don't think. Too much hubbub for her. She has breakdowns, Rose said.”

Conrad looked down into his mug and frowned slightly. “But she could take Rose,” he said. “She talked to Rose.”

“Anybody could talk to Rose,” May said.

Conrad nodded. He knew that was true. Complete strangers used to take up with her, sharing confidences, bringing her gifts. It was just something about her. And Rose knew she'd helped Hero,
that her kindness had been appreciated. He could imagine their first meeting, he thought, how Rose would have walked right up to Hero with some wildflower in her hands and asked Hero about it. And that would have led them to walking over the gardens together, talking about flowers, puzzling over some odd specimen, an unusual trillium or an unknown narcissus. Hero could have talked about flowers, he sensed, more easily than about anything else. At least at first.

And later, after they'd become friends, when Rose knew she was dying—had she asked Hero to do this, to take care of him after she was gone? Had she written out the recipes? Or had it been Hero's idea? Were these anonymous baskets of food her way of thanking Rose, of continuing to love her?

Rose had always known how to approach people, how to make them comfortable. Conrad realized he wanted—though he understood that there was desperation in the wish—to help Hero now.

“Well, what was she doing on your porch then, I wonder?” May said suddenly, as if just remembering the thread of the conversation.

“She brings me food,” Conrad said after a pause. “She's been doing it all along. Ever since Rose died. I only just figured out who it was.”

May looked up at him, openmouthed. “Is that right?” she said. “She's been cooking for you?”

Conrad nodded.

May smiled at him. “Well, that's something. Isn't that something. The kindness of strangers. Although, I guess Hero isn't a stranger, is she?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Conrad said then, thinking. “I think she's the original stranger.”

May nodded wisely. And then, with a little gasp, she said,
“Wait. I almost forgot. I found something for you, speaking of strangers.”

She reached into her nightgown. “I've been clearing out things, the cupboards and so forth. I don't want to leave anybody a mess when I go.”

“Oh, May! You're still a young woman, for God's sake,” Conrad said then quickly, but as he spoke he saw how ridiculous that was. Of course, she was old. She was probably older than he, though maybe not by more than a few years. He and Rose used to make fun of Paul and May, quarreling and complaining at each other as they worked in their garden, May gesticulating here and there, Paul waving her off, moving stolidly from one task to the next. And yet they had been there every evening once Paul got home from work, moving together in a perpetual, companionable argument, building their garden. Paul raised gladioli, which May cut as fast as they bloomed, bearing armloads of them to Conrad and Rose. “Aren't they something?” she agreed proudly, as Rose exclaimed over them. “He has such a way with them. I don't know how he does it.”

But now May was an old woman, her gray hair cut short and curled tight to her head like a cap, not like Rose's, which she had always worn long, even when it turned gray, braiding it behind her head and winding it in two coils pinned at the nape of her neck. He saw that May's fingers, as she held her hand toward him, were knotted and bent, splattered with liver spots. Her wedding ring had bitten into her flesh; the skin bulged around it.

“Paul took this,” she said, handing him a photograph. “You know how he was with the cameras, always taking pictures. Such a mess in that darkroom. And of course I haven't any idea how to dispose of all those chemicals and things. I've just been putting it off. I expect they're pure poison.” She sniffed. “But I found this.
And considering who was in your garden the other night, I thought you'd like it.”

It was a picture of Lemuel and Rose, taken, Conrad judged, a few years before Lemuel's death. Rose must have been fifty or so, Lemuel nearing eighty. In the photograph, marked at the edges with Paul's blue pencil crop marks, Lemuel and Rose stood side by side in the tunnel of trees near Conrad's loft, the river a suggestion of black behind them, the trees in full leaf. Lined on Lemuel's and Rose's outspread arms were the pigeons, their wings raised, and on Lemuel's head perched one of the pouters. It was a trick Lemuel had perfected with his own flock, taught to Conrad and then to Rose, touching them lightly to adjust the position of their arms and then stepping back, putting his finger to his lips in a kiss. In the picture Rose's eyes were closed, her mouth smiling, but Lemuel's eyes were wide open, as if he knew that something was about to happen. The impression, if you just glanced quickly at the picture, was that Lemuel and Rose had sprouted feathers, were ready to lift from the ground. Conrad remembered the feeling, though he hadn't done it in years, the tickling of the pigeons' feet on his arms, the sensation of weightlessness, the sudden certainty that he could, on an act of faith, fly.

“Don't move,” Lemuel would always say, backing away from them in a crouch, his eyes holding the birds captive. “Don't even breathe.”

The first time Conrad had stood there in a kind of ecstasy, the grid of the city spread out beneath him, the wind in his ears, until Lemuel had clapped his hands and the birds had startled, released him, flown up into the sky.

“You don't want it to last too long,” Lemuel had said, striding back to him that first time, pumping his hand as if in congratulations. “Lasts too long, it starts to seem like everything else.” He'd pinched his fingers together. “Just for a moment. That's the trick.”

But in the picture, Paul's picture, how long had they stood like that, waiting for Paul, fussing with his camera, to take the shot? Lemuel was a man of infinite patience, Conrad knew, of mystical certainty. In a brief experiment with beekeeping, Lemuel had installed several hives on his rooftop one year, had enjoyed the elaborate garb required to tend to them, the veiled hat and white suit. But within a few weeks he had persuaded himself that the protections were unnecessary, and he liked to move quietly among his bees in just his shirtsleeves, claiming that the occasional sting was advantageous to his health. And after a while, grown bold, he had learned how to gather the bees around his head and face in a swarm—a bee beard, he had called it, delighted—without once being stung. Conrad, terrified, had marveled at Lemuel anew then, had imagined that not everyone could take such risks with the world. You had to believe, Conrad knew, but he thought he would never have so much faith.

And now, in the photograph May had passed to him, Conrad again saw Lemuel's insistence, his firm insistence on the world's own patience, its willingness to tolerate, even tenderly, a man so devoted to mystery that he dove into it again and again, foolishly and with pride, with a challenge in his eyes, with love. For Lemuel had stood there longer than a second for that picture, Conrad thought, as if, as you grow older, you can't get enough of the magic of being alive, the knack for it leaving you a little bit every day. So you start hunting it down, bearing down on the body you love as if each time will be the last, as if now you need to take risks to court it, lure it back to you, show you are still able, still willing. So Lemuel, too, had hung on, holding his breath while the pigeons gripped his arms. He had been unable, unwilling, to let go of that moment of transport, that moment when he might fly.

“Thank you,” Conrad said now to May. “It's a good picture.”

May bobbed her head, pleased. “I thought he must have looked just like that,” she said, leaning over and looking at the photograph. “In your garden.”

And then Conrad realized she meant the angel. He looked at the picture again and saw the difference. Because in the picture, you could see how it was still Lemuel, still just a man there, performing a trick, a sleight of hand, how he knew it was no mystery, not really. And in the garden that night his face had shown something else—had shown, in fact, the mystery itself, now a part of the man, now the substance of the man himself. And Rose, standing there beside her father, the man who had always dared her to fly, her eyes closed—well, she had flown now, hadn't she?

Conrad set the photograph down on the table and rubbed his eyes. And then he looked up and fixed May with his gaze, her cropped head, her old hands, her familiar face.

“May,” he said. “Can you dance?”

“Well, I—whatever do you mean?”

“You know,” he said, standing, taking her hands, raising her from her chair. “Dance. To music.”

And then he led her, rushed with her, to the living room, stopping in the center of the carpet, Rose's wildflower meadow. “Wait a minute. Don't move.” He bent before the cabinet, heaved out his old shortwave radio. He clicked it on, bent over the blue tube, and fumbled with the dial in the dark. A babble of voices, someone speaking German, foreign languages, surged into the room. At last he found music, Strauss, a waltz.

And then he returned to her, a tiny old woman standing alone in the center of the room, and he held out his arms to her, courtly and gallant, and swept her up. They passed the French doors, and he kicked them open with his foot. The sound of the rain barreled into the room, almost drowning the swinging chords. Conrad
reached up and pressed May's hand into his shoulder, caught her hard again around the waist, and stepped into the pattern of the waltz, his own cold hand holding hers, moving her in time—step, spin, step; step, spin, step—winding and winding around the room in the dark, making circles on the floor, trying to remember the steps, his own heart clenched in his chest against everything that was gone.

WHEN THE FIRST
crease of gray light appeared at the horizon, Conrad stood up from his chair at the window. Rain fell outside with the steady noise of a waterfall. May sat slumped on the blue sofa, her eyes closed, her thick ankles protruding from under her nightdress and Rose's gardening smock.

She opened her eyes in confusion when he touched her lightly on the shoulder. “I'll take you home,” he said gently. “It's almost light out now.”

He led her down the hall, opened the door. They stepped out onto the front porch. Conrad handed her down the steps, opening an umbrella over her head. They walked across the spongy grass, Conrad's hand under her elbow. At her door he waited while she fumbled with the latch and let herself in. She turned back to him.

He smiled up at her. “You'll be all right now?”

“Oh, yes. It's nearly day.”

Conrad tilted his umbrella, squinted up into the rain.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded. “You never forget how to dance.”

She smiled. Her hand rose briefly to her mouth.

“Sure you'll be all right?” he asked again.

“I'll be fine now,” she said, and smiled again, like a girl. “Thank you.”