The Rose Thieves (18 page)

Ma gave him a moment's polite smile, but he was off the subject.

“What about me?” she asked, still vamping, looking for our sympathy, our interest, or at least a laugh. “What about when I was sick? Did you find Grandma at my bedside? But now of course she expects…” Recalling what was expected, she gave a daughterly sigh. “I'll come with you, Audie,” she said. “Kate, you and Grace meet us at the hospital.”

“I'm sorry,” Audie said to me over her shoulder. “It's been crazy all summer.”

I felt a firm hand on my arm, so familiar I half expected to find Lawrence behind me, but when I turned, there was Rolf.

“Don't forget,” he said, more threatening than kind. “You're in the palm of His hand.”

*   *   *

“No, Mother. You may not ‘die in peace,'” Ma said witheringly. She'd had to call the ambulance when Grandma refused to leave the house. Now Grandma lay before us on a gurney, in the corridor of the emergency room. They were pumping blood out of her stomach, dripping blood into her arm. Her face was thick and gray, her white hair stood on end, and all her softness, her sweet vagueness, was gone. Whether in peace or not, she was clearly dying. I told myself to look closely, to see what I could learn.

She tried to lift herself on an elbow, but failed, and gave me a rueful, cracking smile.

“Not a very good day for me,” she said. She was neither frightened nor serene. This might have been another household predicament, a flooded washing machine or blown fuse. “But, Katie,” she said, and her voice filled with grandmotherly fondness, “your mother tells me you're going to have a baby.”

Ma met my surprise with a whimsical shrug—no reason not to make promises now. I nodded to Grandma, smiling shyly, and reached for her hand, but there was a needle attached there.

“She'll name it for you,” Ma said.

Grandma turned obstinately away from her.

“Even my last wish you disobey,” she said, and the green masks came to wheel her away.

“It took three men to get her into the ambulance,” Ma told the nurse, less vexed than proud.

“Was she unconscious?” The nurse was a preternaturally neat and smiling woman, and ready with compassion, but Ma gave a laughing shout.

“She was thrashing! She wants to ‘die in peace'! Nothing less than death for her, no wretched little diseases.”

Grandma has been suspicious of medicine since she was eight years old and the doctor was the only man in town with a car. He loomed up beside her in this gleaming contrivance as she walked home from school, helped her into the high seat like a lady, let her squeeze the horn and wave to her friends the whole length of Main Street to his office, where he chloroformed her and tried out another up-to-the-minute idea: a tonsillectomy.

“You're not to take any extraordinary measures to save her life,” Audie said. “We promised.”

The nurse smiled inscrutably.

“‘Extraordinary measures' indeed,” said Ma. “She watches too much TV. Sit down, Audie, and stop worrying. I'll go hold her silly hand.” She thrust Grandma's purse, a red straw clutch that must have had espadrilles to match, on me, sending me to fill out the forms.

Age? Seventy-nine. Address? Main Street. I fished for her driver's license and found the picture was a true one: it caught her smile that wishes to please and mocks the wish at once. The others in my family, seeing the license, would have had to recount the time she got wedged in the drawbridge, or the time she sideswiped the mounted policeman's horse. I'm the only one of us who can fill out a simple form.

Next of kin? My mad mother. My grandfather fell in love with a Parisian woman and never came home from the war. When we heard last year he was dead, Grandma said with a wistful laugh that she supposed she could stop waiting for a letter now.

Religion? Irrelevant, I thought, but wrote
Catholic,
remembering Ma's tales of parochial school, though in fact there's no religion, no system for us at all. We're on the loosest of terms with God. We've been lucky all our lives, bobbed from mishap to mishap like a family of corks on a wild sea, so we trust of each accident the knowledge it will bring, the new vista it will spread before us. I looked up from the clipboard to see them consulting, comforting, tête-à-tête, relishing the adventure, but something of Lawrence's wintry spirit had settled into my bones, and I considered that our luck was only luck and would change.

“She's gonna be just fine!” Here was Ma's brother, Cap, in his big fur coat, just blown in with his equally fur-coated new wife, Rosetta. Cap believes in positive thinking, and it's his knack of making people think positively, about “no-risk bonds” and “guaranteed options,” that obliged him to spend most of the last decade in Brazil. Still, he's Grandma's favorite, according to Ma. His rough, spreading face was radiant with corruption. His thunderous humor made the party.

“Wish we had olives,” he said, unscrewing a small silver flask. “Doesn't seem like a real emergency, without an olive.”

He bent a monstrous smile on Lizzie, who had been stroking the hem of his coat. She fell back, giggling, half in terror, but when her brother started laughing too, she drew herself up.

“We have to be quiet,” she said, in a pious hush.

Yes, everything was to be savored: when the great automatic doors puffed open to admit a priest whose robes billowed around him, Ma said, “Someone's dying,” just as, when she closes the last window against a storm, she'll whistle softly and say, “Thar she blows.”

We watched the priest make his way down the corridor, until he turned into Grandma's room.

“My God!” Ma was after him in an instant, the nurse behind her trying to tell her that last rites were a formality before any surgery at all.

“But she's an Episcopalian!” Ma wailed. The priest stood, hand raised, in the open door. Grandma lay in the center of the high, bright room, wrapped in a sheet. She opened her eyes. She sat straight up.

“Get out,” she said. “Go.” She pointed to the door with a hand that trailed a long tube.

The priest turned to us for an answer, but when he saw our faces, his fell.

“I'm sorry,” Ma said, very kindly. “She's an Episcopalian.”

“Katie, what did you tell them?” she asked me. “She only converted to please my father. She hasn't been Catholic for thirty years.”

“She's so fickle!” I said. I apologized to the priest, but really I was pleased; I had added my voice to the family clamor. For a moment I had stepped inside their circle and felt its narcotic comfort—I was glad, suddenly, to be home, to be sharing the glory of disaster.

As the hours of the operation passed, I heard Ma tell the story of the priest again and again, to the nurse, to the other meek emergency patients, until I knew it would take its place with Grandma's drawbridge escapade and the time Ma got hung by her thumbs.

The hospital began to seem like Ma's living room. Grace spread cancer pamphlets facedown on the floor and knelt to draw scenes for the children: red barns and sheep fluffy as the clouds above, all pierced by the sun's yellow spines. Ma and Cap bickered over his flask: he accused her of swilling; she swore to everyone present that ever since childhood he'd been stingy and cruel. Audie got her casserole out of the car, and we picnicked under the “No Food or Drink” sign with our usual insouciance—who can deny us, all of us together?

Vulgar, I thought, and ostentatious, and typically self-absorbed. Are we so clever or lovely or even so kind that even our vices are charming? Surely, we would be struck dead any minute, for hubris. I feigned an interest in the bulletin board, though I hadn't eaten all day. When I turned around, the nurse was handing out plastic spoons. Everyone wanted a bite. Audie wrote out the recipe for the woman with the lacerated hand and took calls on the desk phone, which rang constantly, always for us. All the relatives were calling from pay phones: Aunt Georgie from her Clam Shack, my brother from his corner bar, Grandma's brother Arvid from a Labor Day flea market in Vermont. They'd get cut off, call back again, and again. “Yes,” Ma kept saying, shouting to be heard over the surf, the ball game, the white-elephant hunting hordes. “Yes, a real priest!” A new batch of wounded—a whiplash and a broken toe—got to hear about the mounted police. By midnight everyone knew that Cap was Grandma's favorite, after Ma's father ran away.

“‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.'” Ma spoke with an awful solemnity, as if she were quoting Thomas Jefferson and not Oscar Wilde. She wanted another laugh, but she had touched Audie's fears.

“If it's cancer, she'll never forgive me,” Audie said. “I promised I wouldn't let them hurt her.” She was rocking Timmy asleep, and she settled him again, squaring her shoulders to summon her ire. “I won't let them keep her here. They have no right…”

“Don't be silly,” Ma said, still playing to the house. “Our family doesn't get cancer.”

“Your father just died of it,” I said.

“Well, you can hardly consider
him
one of the family.”

Audie was crying. “We should never have made her come here,” she sobbed. “All she wanted was to die in peace.”

Lizzie, who had been coloring quietly, jumped up and flung herself into her mother's arms. Ma encircled them with one arm, Grace with the other. I watched from infinitely far away.

“Give me the flask, Cap,” Ma said.

He held it away. “No, Lila Ann. It's my last sip.”

“To think,” Ma said. “She'll die loving you more than me.”

Grace looked up from her knitting, which had grown spectacularly. “Is she going to die?” she asked.

“No,” Cap said. “She's as tough as an old stewing chicken, and this is all the gin I have.”

But when the nurse went to pick up a biopsy in the operating room, he said, “I knew it, it's cancer.”

His new wife is Brazilian, wide and squat and generally eroded. She speaks very little English, so Cap feels free to call her “that toad I married,” even when she's in the room. Now he hid his face against her shoulder and shook in the circle of her heavy arms as if he were sobbing too.

It was not cancer, however, but a mechanical disorder so common it had no name: her intestine had gotten a crimp in it and burst. The surgeon in his gown looked ten feet tall, but we hardly listened to his warnings. No complication, no trauma for us—we were beyond such things.

“I told you she'd be fine,” Ma said.

“No, I told
you,
” said Cap.

Behind him the nurse was taking another call, a man choking. The ambulance couldn't find the house.

“Turn right,” the nurse repeated, but their radio wasn't working. Brimfield is all back roads winding up and down the hills. “Turn right, right!” she said, louder every time, but it seemed that only I could hear her.

By the exit, my family was at rest in the palm of His hand. Motley, disheveled, Audie and Grace each bearing a sleeping child, they willed the doors open and spilled out, all but singing, into the dark. I picked up the empty casserole and followed them. The summer air was back, soft and powerful.

“It'll be a tough recovery,” Cap said, taking off his coat. “You'll have to stay with her, Lila Ann.”

“You do it,” Ma said. “You're the one she loves.”

She was overcome with bitterness, now we were out of harm's way. “My little vacation with my daughters, completely spoiled,” she said in the car, as if Grandma had nastily planned the whole thing.

I drowsed in the back seat, lulled by the old, familiar angers. We were safe at last, almost home. At the crest of Withans Hill three deer turned to watch us; Ma stopped the car, and we watched them too, in thrall to their beauty and fear. The floodlit church spire shone in the valley, with all Connecticut unfurled beyond. The dark houses stood with their maples, the hedgerows continued their orderly advance over the hills. I was certain the choking man must have been saved. Surely, everyone in that quiet landscape was safely asleep, in the arms of his beloved and the sight of God.

*   *   *

A few hours later the church burned to the ground. I was sleeping in the living room, so I could have looked out to see the flames, but when I heard the sirens I turned over and pulled the sheet up over my head. I woke in the morning to the bump of Abe's wheelbarrow along the back drive, sat up to see him resting on his rake like a figure out of Breughel, dwarfed by the tasseling corn.

It was one of those late-summer days that seem to swell with abundance, so that all life promises to ripen as simply as the apples on the trees. It was luxurious to miss Lawrence with the sun streaming through the screen door and the hot smell of the fields rising. Damning him, I longed for him. I wanted to see him stand with his coffee at the window, looking into the tangle of brush behind our apartment like a sailor scanning the sea. He has a stern, pure gaze that seems to see beyond the ordinary turmoils and obligations into a world of light, and people sometimes take him for a minister, but he's a history professor, or was until he came into his inheritance and retired. He was forty-five and filed to his essence, a bare moral wire, when I seduced him. I wanted to lift my arms and be borne up out of the family morass, to marry above my station.

The gods must have sent me to him for a joke! He had lived so deep in the world of abstraction that he claimed never to have touched silk or tasted ginger. When I brought home a bunch of red tulips, he stepped back in awe; as they opened in their vase, he would approach them shyly, lifting his hand beside their loose heads like a conductor urging a crescendo. After his years of austerity I was a wild extravagance, and if at first I delighted him, I soon became an embarrassment. He returned to his contemplations, reading hour by hour in his favorite chair, looking up only to take a judicious note. Nothing came up to his standards, including his own works, which, beyond pronouncing them “mortal indeed,” he refused to mention. He did once compliment a phrase of mine, but in general he kept his face in his book as if he hated to look up and find me deviling the room. I tried to be braver, wiser, more grave, but nothing impressed him. Under his gloomy authority I felt I would wither away.