Rose's Garden (9 page)

Putting on his hat now, mindful of the sky, which stretched tight and gray above him, he went back outside, brushing away the astral heads of the cleome and the clouds of sweet autumn clematis that crowded the path. Rose would have been amazed at all this, he thought. Even Rose, who was always prepared to be delighted by her garden, would have been amazed—and something cut at his heart then, a little blade like the sharp knife Rose used for grafting. She's missing all this, he thought.

But as he passed the vegetable garden, he saw a shape flutter there behind the fence. He stopped, his heart seizing as though a finger had reached in and touched the rictus of the chambers. Again, something caught his eye, a white shape, like a hand raised at a distant window.

But when he approached the garden, he saw that it was only the
bows of sheeting used for the peas, some strands unwound now and lifting in the wind. Rose had sat in a chair carried out to the garden to do this, one of her last tasks, and Conrad had stood beside her, tearing an old sheet into narrow strips, cutting the lengths for her.

He paused now to close the gate, stood beneath the wrought iron letters that curved in an arc above his head: so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee
.
Shakespeare, Lemuel's choice; he had thought it would please Rose. Lemuel himself had performed the ironwork, and Conrad had gilded the arched filaments, entwined with curling stem and heavy fruit, which were mounted atop the gateposts.

It had been a gift to her, this addition to the garden, meant to make her happy, meant to rouse her. The whole of that summer, the first after Adele Sparks's death, Rose had seemed unnaturally exhausted. One Saturday afternoon, when he happened to glance from an upstairs window, Conrad had seen Rose trundling the wheelbarrow over the grass; and he had cried out her name when suddenly, with no warning, she had simply dropped to her knees, brought her forehead to her hands, still gripping the handles. He had not moved from the window, though. Frozen there, his fingertips against the glass, Conrad had willed her to rise, to move, to pick up where she had left off. And after a minute she had, leaning into the weight of the wheelbarrow and disappearing behind her toolshed. Later, finding her sitting quietly on the grass in the shade of the oak tree, her eyes closed, he had stopped at her feet. He wanted to say something to her, wanted to know that she was all right. But he could not admit to her that he had seen her from the window and had failed to come to her. By various evasions he was able to pretend to himself that it had never happened, her moment of collapse. But the truth of it—that Rose could sometimes
fail, did fail, and that he did not want to know why—never really left him.

He had feared all through that June that she was veering toward one of her spells, the profound shifts in mood that forced her to her bedroom, where she might remain for days behind its locked door. He had known with a terrible certainty that it would eventually come to that. And finally, one morning, Rose simply failed to get out of bed, rolling away from him, her fingers clenched around the sheets.

And so Conrad had called Lemuel. “It's starting again,” he said. “I don't know what to do.”

Lemuel had come, disembarking slowly from the train with his battered valise. Meeting him at the station, Conrad had been struck by how old and lonely Lemuel looked without Adele at his side. Back at the house, the two men had paced the kitchen and dining room for a day, leaving trays at Rose's door, listening to the terrible silence there. Once, sitting on the floor on the landing outside the door, Conrad had spoken aloud, as much to himself as to her: “I wish you wouldn't do this. I don't know why you have to do this.” And he had been surprised when he heard, from behind the door, Rose's voice.

“I'm sorry,” she said, close by as if she had been leaning against the door, waiting for him, listening. “I'm sorry.”

But she would not come out, and so Conrad and Lemuel had taken themselves to the garden, finished digging the vegetable beds and building the gate. They worked quietly, not talking very much, playing with the pigeons in the evenings, leaving trays, which went mostly untouched, at Rose's door. From time to time they glanced up to the house, to Rose's bedroom window, looking for her face behind the glass, some sign of life, some recovery of interest on her part.

At last, four days after Lemuel's arrival, Rose had come downstairs
in a fresh yellow dress, her hair clean and pulled back in a long braid. Like a child apologizing for a transgression, she had wept, embraced them both, and wept again when they led her outside and showed her the gate. Conrad had been almost afraid of her, had wanted to jump when she touched him. “I'll never be good enough for all this,” she'd said.

But she had always loved her gardens. On the rooftop of her family's home in Brooklyn, she had raised flowers and vegetables with a deft and gentle hand and a chemist's concern for the soil. Early on she became a purveyor of seed catalogs, and as a child she began a lively correspondence, which was to last until her death, with several nurseries, reporting on the success or failure of various plants. Once she and Conrad had married and moved to Laurel, where she could have her own real garden, not just boxes on the rooftop, she made a modest income by selling plants and dispensing advice to local gardeners, and she was often called upon by area garden clubs to deliver lectures on herbs, her specialty. The first time she'd been paid a fee for her services, she came home with a check made out in her name and handed it proudly to Conrad. “Fifteen dollars,” she said, “and it was easy as pie. Just telling what I know.”

The first winter Conrad had spent at the Sparkses' tending Lemuel's flock, he had helped Rose build a set of trellises along Lemuel's design, a Chinese construction of cleverly interlocking shapes that the following spring bore vines full of sweet peas and moonflowers, their white blossoms fingered with mauve and yellow. Working in coats and hats, scarves knotted around their necks, he and Rose had knelt on the rooftop. Lemuel had posted his drawings to them from Belgium, where his services as a church architect were being employed on a decaying fifteenth-century chapel, and where he was enjoying the company of a Belgian senator
who kept a distinguished flock of pigeons at his country estate.

When the idea to construct the trellises had struck Rose, she had sent her father a letter requesting his assistance. And she appeared unfazed by Lemuel's meticulous instructions, which arrived a few weeks later by mail, and spread the drawings out on the rooftop, weighting them with heavy stones. An accompanying letter had given a precise list of the supplies they would need. Rose had already filled the order and carried the lathe herself to the rooftop one afternoon after school, along with a sack of three-penny nails, two small saws, and two hammers.

Conrad was up on the roof the afternoon she appeared with Lemuel's drawings rolled into a tight baton. “Here they are,” she said, waving the roll at him. “I have all the stuff already. Look.”

She was wearing a red boiled-wool coat, her hair braided and wound severely into two knots at the back of her head. Her eyes were very bright, but thin blue shadows ran down her temples and neck, as if she had not been eating or sleeping enough. She knelt on the rooftop and unrolled the papers, studying the lines.

“That looks complicated,” Conrad commented, looking over her shoulder.

“You'll help me?” Rose glanced up at him.

Conrad looked down at her. He frowned at the drawings. He could make no sense of Lemuel's intricate lines, the puzzling shapes.

“You don't need my help,” he said, surprised at the bitterness in his voice. He turned away with the push broom. “I have to do this, anyway. I have to get home.” He turned back to the loft, to the pigeons stepping lightly within their boxes.

Behind him, still kneeling on the stones of the roof, Rose was silent. Conrad pushed the broom roughly over the varnished landing
board, scattering feathers and seed. He stole a glance at Rose. He realized at that moment that he resented her place in that household, the privilege of her position there. He had met with Lemuel twice before his departure overseas, to learn how Lemuel ex pected his flock to be maintained. Lemuel had shown him how to mix and brew the herbal teas he prescribed as flight-conditioning agents, how to administer the drops. Conrad had been amazed at the refinement of Lemuel's routine with his pigeons. It made his own former system of crude crates on the fire escape look not only amateurish but cruel. Both times he had visited the Sparkses', he had passed through the house with its rich overflow of belongings, like a music box playing a tumbling waltz. He had envied the sense of enterprise there—the boys building a tower of shiny metal pieces hinged with paper clips, pots of herbs trained up coiling supports stationed on a long table before a window, Melchior busily wringing his hands and spying on him from some perch.

The first afternoon after Lemuel's departure, Conrad arrived to fulfill his duties. He sat on the roof in the chilly afternoon air, reading Lemuel's written instructions for the care of his pigeons. Finally, stiff with cold, he descended to the kitchen for boiled water for the tea. He hoped to see Rose.

Adele Sparks had set the kettle on the stove for him as he stood awkwardly beside the table, surveying the long kitchen with its battery of pots and pans suspended from a welded rack. A tank on a low bench was full of strange, undulating fish throwing a quicksilver light. A lamp was lit on the table, which was scattered with books and papers, the cutlery for the family's supper already laid out. Adele was cooking something that smelled so good it made the insides of Conrad's cheeks clench and water. She was trying to put him at ease, he knew, making conversation about the birds, asking questions about school. After a while, waiting for the water
to boil, he worked up enough nerve to ask casually, “Is Rose home?”

Adele had paused a moment at the stove, her back to him. “She's not feeling very well tonight,” she said quietly. And yet the way she said it made Conrad feel it was something else, something more complicated. On his way back upstairs he had passed Rose's room, the door shut, a faint light showing beneath.

Weeks later, when he glanced at Rose kneeling on the roof, her head dropped to her chest, he remembered that moment, his sense that what had been wrong with Rose that evening was something unlike the childhood illnesses he suffered through restlessly, the occasional fevers and suffocating colds, days when he would stay home from school, his mother returning to their apartment at lunchtime to check on him. Before too much more time was to pass, Conrad would begin to understand the nature of Rose's illness—if it could be called that, he thought—how it worked upon her like something clandestine, something furtive and mean, a colony of blind ants eating away at the scaffolding of her personality, rendering her mute and withdrawn, a child who lay upon her bed, her face turned to the wall, to the detailed drawing of the Acropolis pinned there, its yellowed edges curling.

Kneeling on the roof, Rose did not move, and Conrad felt suddenly alarmed, worried that his remark might have hurt her, that he might be blamed for having been unkind. What he'd said, his rebuff—“You don't need my help”—might have compounded whatever it was that troubled her, that thing that forced her to hide away sometimes for days at a stretch in her bedroom.

He returned to her side, touched Lemuel's drawings with his foot. “So. Where do you start?” he said.

Rose did not answer.

He knelt at her side. “Show me,” he said.

Rose dropped her head lower on her chest.

Conrad looked at her hands, clenched white at the knuckles, gripped together. He reached out, hesitating, then touched her hand. She flinched.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'll help you.”

And when she neither moved nor answered, he reached for her hands again, began to unlace her fingers one at a time, until he held one of her hands in his own.

They did not look at each other, the two children kneeling on the rooftop, bowed under the setting sun, but Conrad felt then, holding Rose's small, cold hand, that in prying apart her fingers, in releasing them, he had taken some liberty, some liberty that brought responsibility. He had not touched anyone before, not a girl. He had not expected it to be like that.

“Here,” she said then, pointing with her free hand to a line on one of the drawings. She picked up a saw, turned it so that the blade faced away from him—serious, civil, like a fencer observing the rules of the duel—and handed it to him. And when she ducked her head and lightly kissed his knuckle, releasing his hand then and turning her face aside, Conrad felt both desire and fear rising up into his mouth. It would always be hard, after that, for him to separate those feelings. It was as if the world made no allowance for a simple joy. Guarding every cave, he felt, is a serpent. For every bird I send aloft, he thought, there is the danger that it will not return.

He lifted the saw and cut where Rose told him to.

SO MANY YEARS
later, leaving the vegetable garden and his reverie beneath the golden gate that overcast morning, Conrad looked down at the curved-tile roof of his loft, glowing in the weak light. He never failed, looking at the small building, to appreciate Lemuel's gifts as an architect. Conrad had sometimes thought,
in fact, that he could under the right circumstances be perfectly happy living in the loft himself. Lemuel had sited Conrad's workshop area on the first story so that it overlooked the meadow and the river beyond. Conrad had furnished the room with a long table, on which he worked at his gilding equipment, and Rose had covered a small sofa and armchair for him, which he set at angles before the double doors. In a back room, where he stored grain and pigeon paraphernalia, were a camp stove and a sink.