The Rose Thieves (20 page)

The champagne cork shot off into a night of high, luminous clouds. We had damask on the table, Verdicchio in the ice bucket, Abe's crystal, and Vinnie's sweetest rose.

“I don't know,” Ma said. “Why should it have been such a hard life?”

She seemed to ask in the name of science, but not even Vinnie could answer.

“They never loved me,” she said. Grandma's resurrection had thrown things into sorry focus for her; she'd begun tabulating her troubles as if about to present a bill.

“They loved Cap,” she said. “He was the son. I was the slave.”

She deserved sympathy—her sorrows threatened at any moment to swallow her—but it was hard to weep for one who could call herself a slave in such round and ringing tones. We had finished the Verdicchio and opened a Côtes du Rhône; when no one answered her, Ma yanked the bottle from the bucket to pour another round. I winced as she plunged it back into the ice, remembering Rolf's hand.

“I thought my father loved me, but clearly I was wrong,” Ma said. “I thought if I was patient, my husband … I thought if I gave him time…” She stopped. She had opened too deep a wound.

Vinnie commenced disputation: “But I'm sure your mother loves you.”

“Unwittingly,” Ma said. “Only because she's my mother. Not in any real way.”

“You must feel loved here?” Vinnie tried again.

She looked straight into Abe's eyes. “Must I?” she asked, from a bibulous mist. “Must I really?” He said nothing, holding her gaze.

“Forgive her,” I said to Vinnie. I was mortified.

“Nothing to forgive,” he said stoutly.

Abe continued intent on Ma, like a man staring into a flame. Drink made him stiffer and more formal as it unloosed the last of her stays. Meditatively, never taking his eyes from Ma, he held a cork in the candle flame and began, with slow, meticulous strokes, to black her face.

She kept perfectly still, lifting her chin, watching his eyes.

“Now I'll be beautiful,” she said. “I've always wanted to be beautiful. Don't I look beautiful, Katie?”

She looked like a panther in the woods, her eyes burning.

“Fit to kill,” I said.

“Go to hell.” She tipped backward over the bench so that the soles of her feet showed where her face had been. Abe put the cork to the candle again and started to black them, toe by toe. Suppose his wife got home early? She might decide they needed a chauffeur after all. Ma couldn't afford to pay rent—where would she go?

“So,” I said, hoping to rescue her, “who's the arsonist?”

They would know, even if the police didn't—the town was too small for a mystery. Already I'd heard how he did it: he opened electric meters and crossed wires, or yanked the propane lines, freeing the captive forces to wreak their natural havoc. Vinnie named as the culprit a big kid from the valley who'd been at school with me. It was rumored he'd singed his hair in the Town Hall fire. His girlfriend had trimmed it but then discovered he was unfaithful, and was showing the clippings around.

“Unfaithful,” came Ma's wondering voice from below. “Maybe he loved them both. Maybe his heart is broken.”

“Ma,” I said, but Abe only smiled. Finishing her feet, he joined her upside down.

“I've blackened your soles,” he said.

“Forgive them,” I said to Vinnie, but he was paying them no attention. He'd been watching the gold beads flash at my throat, and when I spoke he looked guiltily away. We'd discussed celestial navigation, and I asked if he wanted to go look at the stars. No, he said, scandalized—it was getting late. Abe stood up at this and dusted himself, saying he couldn't think where the time had gone.

Ma spent the night passed out on the bathroom floor. She was against the door, so I went around to the window to check on her. She mastered a giggle and, with the most solemn sincerity, apologized.

“Don't be silly,” I said. “You didn't seem foolish at all. Good night, I love you.”

“No,” she said, with deep satisfaction. “Nobody loves me.” Then, all sleepy sweetness, by motherly rote: “I love you, sweetheart. Sleep tight.”

I squatted in back of the arbor to pee. The night was awash with stars. I fell asleep inventing harangues for Lawrence, lectures on the small acts of courage and generosity, the everyday absolution of love. I dreamed of Vinnie Duff, with his plain surprised face, his straw curls crazily bobbing. When he moved to kiss me, I fell back into space, but fear flashed to awe and as I woke with the dreamer's start I knew it was glory, to be falling.

*   *   *

In the morning I brought Ma her breakfast in bed: two aspirins and a cup of tea. She lifted her head just enough to swallow and sank back against the pillow with a weak moan. We heard the front door open, then the back. Abe had gone through to the garden with a bucket of mulch. In the center of the living room table he'd left a tiny vase of love-in-a-mist.

“No,” Ma said, when I said I'd bring it into her. “Leave it where he put it. I can get up.”

One hand to her forehead, the other at the neck of her dressing gown, she leaned in the doorway and smiled until I thought she'd cry.

“Don't you see?” she said. “It's his way of saying he loves me.”

“Why doesn't he just tell you?” I asked.

“He doesn't have to,” she said, as if I were terribly obtuse. “Let's boil some eggs. I'm starving.”

While the eggs bumped and knocked in a pot on the stove, she traced a looping “I Love You” in the film of grease on the cabinet door. She washed it with ammonia and scrubbed it with bleach, trying to erase it, but the words kept shining.

“Katie,” she said. “He'll see it. He'll
know.
”

“Believe me,” I said, “no one ever knows what anyone else means by that.”

She wasn't attending. “I suppose it's a sign,” she said, sighing prettily. “You can't undo love.”

Her hangover cured, she strode up Grandma's walk that afternoon like a banker, still in her black silk suit from work, her jug of scotch like a briefcase at her side.

Grandma wore an electric-blue silk suit with gold scarf.

“Saks Fifth Avenue,” she said with a coy blink. “Two-fifty at The Bargain Box.” She was triumphant now, gazing beatifically over her family, immortal at seventy-nine. She sighed over the handsome surgeon, contriving ways to see him again, but when Audie, who was still suffering, asked if she'd forgiven them for taking her to the hospital, she returned a final and capricious “No.”

“In retrospect we just should have strangled you,” Ma said.

We were all in the grandest high spirits. We had faced death; death couldn't face us. Lizzie, still in her tutu from ballet, circled the room in lopsided pirouettes, nearly toppling Uncle Arvid, who tapped his hearing aid and steadied himself on his cane. Driving down the night before, he had turned off the road into the woods and broken an axle on a stone wall.

“There used to be a road there,” he kept explaining.

“You're getting senile, Arvid,” Ma said sadly.

“What, Lila Ann?” He had picked up a silver-framed photograph of her as a child, alone in a rowboat like a tiny refugee.

“Nice,” he said. “Sterling.”

“The picture of a little girl who wasn't loved,” said Ma. Her voice had a reckless edge, suddenly, and I braced myself. Seeing Grandma about to slip away, she had wanted to yank her back, to demand an apology. Now she had her wish, and I wasn't sure what she would say. Arvid looked up at her in surprise.

“We all loved you, Lila Ann,” he said.

“You're getting senile,” Ma snapped. “It was Cap you all loved. The son.” Arvid was six inches shorter than she, a poor adversary. She leaned down and shouted into his ear. “Remember?”

He reeled backward.

“And don't fall,” she said, as if he had stumbled to provoke her. She seized his elbow.

“Now, Lila,” Grandma said, but she was too pleased with life to be truly grieved. “Don't be silly. I loved you both. And where
is
Cap? He was so good to me when I was in the hospital.”

Her voice was foolish with fondness. Cap, we told her, was at an IRS hearing. Ma drew herself up with a delicate harumph, and when Audie and I returned little harumphing smiles, she was content.

“Katie,” Ma said, “will you promise to shoot me if I start to act like her?”

I promised, and with a glance Audie promised me that she'd shoot me if I ever got like Ma, who, mollified, was pouring juice for the children, scotch for us.

“Just a thimbleful,” said Grandma.

“You don't get any!” Ma said. “A gallon of blood they took out of you, Mother, a gallon.”

But weights and measures had no place here. It was becoming a story. Even Lizzie, who sat in Audie's lap straight as a music box figurine, had been hoarding details.

“A whole gallon!” she said, her eyes alight. “And we ate supper in the emergency room. And Aunt Katie called the priest.”

“I blame you, Kate, for saving her,” Ma said. “You got her pulse going.”

I was becoming a heroine. How large our lives looked, with the ambulance screaming, the priest's flying robes!

“Kate, I suppose you know I'm president of the Episcopal Churchwomen,” Grandma said, rearranging her skirt.

“That election was rigged,” said Ma. “And we have to go.”

“No, Lila, when your poor mother just got out of the hospital?” Grandma said. “I need you to stay, at least until Cap comes.”

“Why should I?” Ma said. “Would you have stayed for me?”

The truth was, we had to get home before Abe's stopping-by time, and I wanted to see Vinnie too. Ma drove like mad, and we sprang out of the car to range ourselves nonchalantly in the yard, Audie hiking her skirt to take the last sun while the children played a game of feints and whispers in the long grass. Who could resist having a drink with us? But Abe only passed through, on his way to the garden. His wife was bringing some of the nuclear ladies to tea. He cut a sheaf of zinnias and cosmos, limping more heavily than usual, looking sheepish, as if he ought to give the flowers to Ma.

“That was a lovely dinner,” he said, with a slight bow.

“Come back tonight,” said my wicked mother. Shrewd and wistful, mostly amused, he declined.

Ma watched his back in fond disappointment as he headed under the arbor, back to his wife.

“No love-in-a-mist for the nuclear ladies,” she said, gloating, turning her glass as if she might read her fortune in the scotch.

And, as if she had seen a happy fate there, she looked up smiling.

“Life is so wonderful,” she said. All the world's insults were forgotten at the sight of Abe's crooked gait, even if he was walking away.

“Imagine Grandma asking for a thimbleful of scotch,” Ma said. “When last week all she wanted was to die in peace. You were right, Kate, I would have been sad if she'd died. I suppose it's always sad.”

Even this comforted her. “We lead a charmed life!” she went on. “Look at this…” She spread an arm across the sweep of our borrowed abundance: a golden twilit haze hung over the orchard, which seemed to be our own orchard, we loved it so. Vinnie came whistling up the path, arms full of gigantic zucchini.

“You don't want to overfertilize,” he instructed. I smiled up into his eyes, holding out my arms as if these were holy vegetables, but the phone started ringing and I had to run inside.

“Kate?” Lawrence's voice cracked. It might not have been used for days.

“How are you?” I spoke carefully, afraid my heart would fly out of my mouth. “What's happening there?” Vinnie had followed me in with the zucchini but, hearing my tone, went back outside.

“Nothing.” There was a long pause while Lawrence tried to think of some news. “
The Ottoman Centuries
came in,” he said. He'd been waiting for this, on interlibrary loan. Then, as if he hoped I wouldn't hear him: “I miss you.”

“I miss you too.” This was the incorrect answer, but his voice sounded like home to me. I'd have held the phone in silence all day if he was on the other end.

“How's the weather?” I asked.

“Hot. When you come home, we'll go for a swim, eh?”

“We will?” He knew I wasn't coming home.

“If you like,” he said. I heard volumes of tender apology. Imagine Lawrence swimming! Tears pricked at my throat, my eyes. He was all talk now, bubbling over with relief, since I hadn't said I wasn't coming home. He told me how Byzantium crumbled, how the sultans charged the gates of Vienna …

“If they'd won, you'd be wearing a chador!” he said.

He knows so many perils! And he's entrusted himself to me. I felt I had gifts to bring home to him, jewels of vanity and self-pity and overweening pride. I wanted to tell him how we had faced death with linked arms. On the cabinet, Ma's indelible valentine shone.

In the garden she was screaming. I ran out to find her sprawled among the eggplants, gasping with laughter. Everyone was bent around her, inspecting the three drops of blood welling from her evenly punctured foot. She had stepped on Abe's rake, and the handle had come up and broken her glasses in two.

“These things only happen to us!” she said, as if this were a blessing.

“I know,” I said. If it pleases us to imagine ourselves remarkable, why should we not? Even I felt exemplary all of a sudden, just to be standing on top of that hill.

“We'd better get you to a doctor,” Audie said, returned to herself and ready for a new saga. “A puncture wound's the worst kind.” She turned to me with an enormous, apologetic sigh. “I'm sorry, Katie, it's been crazy all year.”

“Did you say the doctor?” Lizzie stopped still, hands on tutu'd hips. “Is this an emergency?”

“No,” began judicious Vinnie, for whom I felt a sweet nostalgia already, but Ma interrupted.