The Rose Thieves (2 page)

Mrs. Twilling, unsure whether she was meant to offer sympathy or admiration, edged closer to her husband.

“I suppose the town takes care of the roads,” he said.

“I suppose,” said Ma vaguely. Then, full of energy, remembering her role: “Sit! Sit down! What can I get you? We have sherry, port…”

“Tea would be nice, I think,” said the Reverend, sitting, hitching his corduroy pants at the knee. His wife sat too, smoothing her skirt, her hair, then, by rote, the baby's downy skull. Her face was still and pleasant. She measured out a decorous smile. The ordinary being almost unknown to me, she seemed exotic as a gazelle. I fell in love with her.

“Katie, you make conversation,” Ma said, escaping into the kitchen. “I'll make the tea.”

Side by side on the sofa, our guests looked like runaways in a bus station, lost and small. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet before them, I could have reached out to trace the curve of Mrs. Twilling's ankle as it disappeared into her modest shoe. She glanced at her husband, who glanced at his watch. In the kitchen my mother, who had studied the Great Works only to be faced with guests out of—well, no author would have them!—dropped something and swore a quiet oath.

Mrs. Twilling bent toward me. Her pallor, her pointed chin and nose, her round eyes which expressed almost nothing, mesmerized me. What was she thinking? Her small, precise lips parted. I saw her small, even teeth.

“Do you go to nursery school?”

I shook my head. Ma didn't believe in nursery school and made an awful mimicry of the teacher who thought reading bad for the eyes. Now I imagined children eating cupcakes, playing croquet (with mallets, not flamingos), or making conversation, something I had just discovered myself unable to do. The phrases, even the tones we had rehearsed were wrong, too sharp, too emphatic. Nothing I could think of was polite enough anymore.

“Well,” said Mrs. Twilling, whose smile had tightened somewhat at the news of my truancy. “You might like to come to Sunday school one week.”

I knew this was an offer of expiation. “I'm sure that would be lovely” might have been the thing to say. I nodded.
Where
was my mother? As the silence lengthened, I felt I must repay it with something proportionately philosophical, funny, or wise, but I was mute, perhaps even invisible, and Mrs. Twilling lifted her eyes from me.

“What does
he
do?” she asked the Reverend in undertone.

He glanced toward the kitchen, but there was no sign of Ma.

“Trust fund,” he said. “Invests in … this and that.”

She nodded with the disdain I was sure she must be right to feel. It was we, I now realized, who were the strange ones, the ones always in the wrong. I racked my brain for a topic that would prove I was one of them. I decided to ask the baby's name. I would speak clearly, as Ma had taught me, and look my listener straight in the eye.

I did. His name was Adam. His mother lifted him so I could adore him more completely. His head lolled from his soft neck (a dead sunflower). His lashless, browless lids unscrewed. Tiny, intent eyes, red-rimmed like a piglet's. I blinked. The nostrils yawned in the upturned nose …

“He looks just like a pig!” I said. It came as a proud revelation. It was true and it was fascinating, and I had longed to fascinate.

“What, dear?” Mrs. Twilling asked, though I was sure my voice had been admirably clear. Ma was at the door with the silver tray, the pale teacups above it, the silver bowl with its hill of sugar and filigree spoon. Instead of cake, there was a plate of store cookies.

“I said,” I said proudly—all eyes were on me now—“that the baby looks just like a pig. Look…”

“Katie,”
Ma said, grave, so beautifully grave that I knew that, though I had betrayed her in my heart a moment ago, I was delighting her now.

She blamed
Alice in Wonderland.
She never blamed me. The Twillings, not having expected my comment, could not quite take it in, so we didn't even have to apologize. Ma asked about the new parish hall and the Aid to Africa, but really she was only waiting until they left and it would be just the two of us again.

“He
did
look like a pig,” she said. “
Exactly.
In fact, she looked a little like a pig herself, just around the eyes.”

I felt a terrible pang then, as if the door to a whole world had been shut against me. I would never see Mrs. Twilling again, never learn anything more about her, how she might receive her guests (there must be many), or what books she might read to her son. Strange and wonderful as common life would always seem, my love for it was doomed. I had come to it too late, from too far, and I would never quite speak its language—I was bound to be Ma's ally now.

She was laughing and laughing, helplessly, rocking me against her with titanic pride.
“You,”
she said, “are the most dreadful child I have ever, ever known.” The cake lay where she had dropped it, in a billow of whipped cream on the floor. I pressed my face into the soft wool of her shoulder, smelled her sweet perfume.

“Wicked, wicked, wicked,” she said. “Wicked to the bone.”

The Honored Guest

He was one of the great character actors of the forties—played in all the big hits, brought down the house at the Belasco opening night of …

“You don't know the Belasco?” my mother said, seeing me foggy. “And you call yourself a theatrical publicist?”

I didn't call myself anything. I was fifteen, she was paying me ten dollars a press release, and I tried to cause her no shame. I was a fascinated fly on the wall at the theater, watching, watching, surprised now to find they could see me too.

“He went to Hollywood and was nominated for an Academy Award for the role of … for his performance in
Sword of Honor
” (I took an obedient note), “but didn't
win
until…”

“Cameron Spencer won an Oscar? Are you sure?”

She shot me that furious, wounded look: Why does no one ever believe her? “Yes, I am sure.”

Al Davis, the theater's owner, shook his head. Al was a dry, wary man, celebrated in our group for the very mystery of his reserve. He played the piano at cast parties, plunging heart and both elbows into his rendition of “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” grinning around his cigar. He was otherwise impervious to our enthusiasms. Our principal actress, his wife, was goaded to ever greater heights of hyperbole, hoping to engage him: no sorrow of Maura's might remain less than tragic; all her pleasures were sublime. She and my mother were much alike, so naturally suspicious: Maura took my part now and suggested Ma call the library.

Ma looked daggers at me. Here she was, finally in charge, and in front of her new employers I undermined her. “Just write,” she said. “This is publicity, not private investigation.”

“I want to be accurate,” I said, from spite.

“Accurate!” said my mother. “This is the theater!” She spread her arms to encompass our enterprise, represented by the four of us in the one-window cabin we used as an office, our desk covered with photos of glossy ingénues, our framed playbills, our gallon of gin. We were no two-bit summer stock company, we were a two-bit
Equity
summer stock company. As we rushed to mount a new play each week, the blondes murmuring their lines to themselves over dinner as the costumer fitted a final sleeve, all of us up painting plywood for marble at dawn, it was hard to remember that the affairs of the Brimfield Playhouse were not crucial, that we were not the most important people in the world.

“He really was superb in
Sword of Honor,
” Maura mused, exactly as if directed to muse, so that we could all feel how very superb he had been, how deeply he had affected her. Her voice was trained in this husky resonance, her laugh to its ascending chimes. Maura's husband, who had built the theater to woo her up from New York, no longer suffered her gladly.

“A hack,” he said, “but a hack resplendent.” He cut a wedge from his cigar tip and smiled a small, confidential smile at me. Only he and I dared call things by their right names. Cameron Spencer was a distant acquaintance of his, but it was Ma who had persuaded him to do us this favor, put us on the map.

“He
deserved
an Academy Award,” Maura said, “whether or not he got one.”

“There,” said my mother. “Write it down.”

“
I'll
call the library,” Maura said. Handsome and dauntless as a figurehead, she lifted her hair back and smiled into the phone.

“Hello, this is Maura Fairchild Davis, at the Playhouse? Our guest star, Cameron Spencer, arrives this next week, and we were wondering if you could check for us, on what year he won the Oscar.” The librarian, mundane creature, would be grateful for even this small brush with the glittering world we touched every day.

“He was
the
great character actor of the forties, you know,” Maura confided. “Do you remember
Sword of Honor?
” She sighed. “He really was superb…”

Her smile faded, and a fine blush spread over her throat, into her cheeks. “I see,” she said. “I beg your pardon. Please excuse us. Oh, dear.”

“Mopping her floor,” Maura said to us, in bright bewilderment. “A wrong number. She said she'd like to be of service, but she was mopping her floor.”

My mother laughed herself to tears, taking us all down with her. “These things don't happen to other people, I'm sure,” she said. “Why,
why
is it always us?” Even Al smiled, just to be among us. Pleasure was cheap for me then: the sound of ice rattling in a glass promised the subtlest terrors, to laugh with Al was like laughing with the gods. Cameron Spencer was coming! Outside our cavern, the theater, a rebuilt barn, stood amid thick hayfields. Hammers rang. The air was fresh with the smell of paint.

“Should I try again?” Maura asked.

“No! Nineteen forty-eight, just write it down,” Ma said. “
Go ahead,
Katerina, write it down and then run up to the corner and get us a couple of limes.”

Katerina. A queen's name. I'd never lived up to it, shrank beneath, in fact, the name my mother had given me during one of her many excursions into excess, the moment of triumph when I, her first child, was born. Triumph had not come often enough to her: awaiting it she had raised us good and thoughtful among the treacherous rose trellises of Republican Brimfield, had organized first the Congregational Churchwomen, then the PTA, then the tiny, furious Democratic Committee and the vigil against the war—all the while concealing my father's financial reverses and suffering, in the privacy of our sunny farmhouse, the alternate agonies of migraine and inchoate, despairing rage. She wanted to stand like the Statue of Liberty over some great harbor, but she was stuck in Brimfield, washing my father's shirts, rinsing them, wringing them, closing the faucet so hard the handle came off in her hand.

Now that Al had asked her to manage the theater, she would succeed at last, if only I would stop doubting and love her as she loved me, if I would step into the place my name had reserved for me, and shine. It was because of me, she said, that Al wanted her: his son was in my class at school, so Al had seen my honors speech and called Ma the next week. I was her talisman, the proof of her powers, and I must always stand at her side.

On the opening night of
Bring Down the Moon,
written by Arthur Winograd and starring Cameron Spencer, I wore a black dress chosen by the costumer to set my skin “Grecian white.” He wrapped my shawl to show a shoulder and tucked, as I twirled for him, a silk rose into my hair. I seemed quite nearly my proper self, for the first time.

“You look magnificent,”
Ma said, emphasizing each word, as if she were sending me into battle. She lifted her white silk skirt to step onto the front terrace, her nearsighted squint making her seem languorous, half-intoxicated with the evening, the laughter of her guests, the name Cameron Spencer on her marquee.

“Is the tape showing?” she whispered. (Her dress was backless and she'd had to use masking tape in place of a bra.) I shook my head. So she tossed her head in the joy of conspiracy and went among the townswomen she despised, smiling, shaking every hand. This was hers, all hers, who had been cutting my dresses down for my sister while these ladies partook of their mountains of little sandwiches, their oceans of tea.

I, Katerina, let myself out of the box office and went around to the deck, where the last scraps of wood and muslin lay, abandoned in the haste to finish the final preparations inside. The sun burned low in a hazy sky. A dog barked, and from the dressing rooms came loud laughter, the affected jocularity of actors wound tight, ready to go on. Then an ominous rumble: someone was testing the thundersheet. The sacraments of evening. Safe above the fray, alone for a last moment, I stood as open and grateful as in a cathedral: in this green world, already blessed, we had made another of colored light and papier-mâché. It seemed as if my knowing this, my solitary contemplation, put me deeper at the center than Ma with her guests, or even Maura on stage.

“Fifteen minutes,” the stage manager said, knocking at each door, purposeful and nonchalant. “Fifteen minutes, Miss Fairchild. Fifteen minutes, Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spencer? Damn, where is the old boy?”

Cameron Spencer had seemed, disappointingly, to be a perfectly ordinary aging gentleman, distant, retiring early to the special room we had reserved for him at the Brimfield Inn, never really a part of the group. He had absorbed from his various roles the manner of a lord, as lords are depicted in theater: he was courteous and aloof and one always expected to hear he was out with the hounds. Now, as my mother in her silver sandals ran along the torchlit path to find me, I realized that I had lost him, that just before she said I looked magnificent she had sent me up to bring him down from the Inn.