The Rose Thieves (6 page)

Bobby. His family was on vacation. Now that she thought of him, Kate remembered that he never washed his hair and didn't dare say he loved her, though he went for her blouse like a nursing infant every time they were alone. Nothing she did with Bobby was worthy of a report.

“He's in Hyannis,” she said.

“Boy, you're tough,” Ma said. “You must get it from your father.”

Audie flashed a quick warning, and they waited to see if the cloud would pass.

Chucky wasn't attending. “May I have the milk,
pleeze?
” he asked. Ma turned the pitcher so he could reach the handle.

“And I'll come pick raspberries with you, okay?” Audie said, finding the thread, about to mend the conversation, but Chucky was pouring the milk over his chop.

“Chucky!”

“Oh,” he said, and put the pitcher down, still in his trance, watching as a couple of peas swirled to the center of the plate. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I was thinking of…”

“You
never
think,” Ma said. “Look at that. What's the matter with you? Now you'll be hungry all night.”

“I won't, Ma,” he said sorrowfully. “I'll eat raspberries.”

“Get up,” she said. “Get out of here. We're all alone in the woods here, don't you understand? We can't just run out for a sandwich.” Ma had arrived from Manhattan full of pastoral romance, but the woods loomed too dark for her, with Pop always away. She took up Chucky's plate so fast, the milk splashed over the table, onto the floor.

“Now see what you made me do?” she said.

“You rest, Ma,” Audie said. “We'll do the dishes.”

“GO!” Ma roared, and they faded out the back door.

Down by the brook Chuck spread skunk cabbage leaves with mud and rolled them. “These are fish,” he said. “Want a bite?”

Kate put her feet in the water, and real fish darted between her ankles. Amir had kept trying her name, as he tried all English words. He could stretch the plain “Katie” until it sounded narcotic. She fell asleep that night rehearsing the memory, while Ma and Chucky laughed in the kitchen, eating peanut butter out of the jar.

*   *   *

Mrs. Schnippers played the double bass, and looked like a double bass, but taught the piano, which was more in demand.

“Well,” she said, “I've never heard anyone play with more expression.” A smile tempered her enormous face.

“And that's the hard part, really. Later you'll learn the notes. Here…” She slid over and went through the first few measures, then threw caution to the winds and played the whole piece.

“I see,” Kate said, “I
do.
” But Mrs. Schnippers was too involved to stop.

“I was careening where Haydn meant to spin,” Kate said, and Mrs. Schnippers nodded emphatically, while the music went round. Kate was sure now that she could do it too.

When she couldn't, her fingers stumbling and colliding over the keys, Mrs. Schnippers promised that practice would help. Her Saint Bernard, on the rag rug, shuddered in his sleep. Mrs. Schnippers had left the conservatory to marry Mr. Schnippers, who was out with the cows.

It was milking time, and time for the 5:35 from New York, which, after Pop got off at Wassaic, would retreat as neatly as if reversed on film, leaving him silhouetted, briefcase in hand and coattails flying, against the pasture that sloped up behind the track. Ma, in her best white dress and her pearls (descended through Pop's family to settle around her neck), had dropped Kate at the lesson and gone to the station with Audie and Chuck. She loved to laugh in lipstick, holding Chucky transfixed, but as Pop approached, the mouth went straight. He kissed the cheek and turned to the children. “Lucky Chucky! Auderino!” Ma, who said love made him speak nonsense, would turn away. When Pop got in the driver's seat, he'd start to sneeze. Hay fever. They'd picked buckets of bee balm and loosestrife in his honor that morning, and Chuck's hands were yellow with pollen.

“Do you get any chance to play the bass now?” Pop asked Mrs. Schnippers while Kate gathered her music. The double bass leaned beside the empty music stand, which cast a scrollwork shadow on the wall.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We have our Wednesday quintet.”

Pop smiled to show Kate might learn renunciation here, but he lost his easy demeanor as soon as they left the house.

“It's high summer,” he said, to break the silence as they walked back to the car, looking over Don Schnippers' fields. Kate scrunched into the back seat with Audie and Chuck.

“How was the lesson?” Ma asked. Did she know? Last week, Pop had stayed in New York, so Kate had driven home from her lesson the long way, past Elayne's. Amir had been sitting on the front step alone. He looked so dangerous, with those quick eyes and long fingers! She had only sat with him an hour, trying to answer his questions about American girls while he watched her mouth form the words.

She had told Ma she was late because Mrs. Schnippers got carried away. Kate had reported wishes as horses, and molehills as the mountains of pain they caused, but she had never truly built a lie before. As soon as she had spoken, she believed herself, and Ma's suspicion seemed unfair.

“She said she'd never heard anyone play with more expression,” Kate said.

“Expression,” said Pop, who could launch a great distance from such a word. “That's emotion, I suppose. The emotional force. That's what music is, basically, wouldn't you say? It's true in the market too. Everyone gets the same information—it's instinct that sets one apart.”

He was off, explaining how a drought might inflate corn prices while beef would plummet, or how it might work the other way around. Finance was a heady geometry to him, but Ma had had to sell their living room furniture, through a newspaper ad. She reached back over the seat and squeezed Chucky's hand.

Her doubts had poisoned the atmosphere at home, Pop said, and now he often spent weekends with his mother in New Rochelle.

Marry an orphan, Ma told them.

“I,”
she said, “do not need the recommendation of some teacher to be proud of my children.”

Pop had lost track of the subject. “A recommendation
can
be the worst indicator,” he said. “It's usually best to move against the crowd…”

They turned up the dirt road over Kepple Hill, where boulders tilted like ruins in the fields, with cornrows rippling outward. Everything was the dusty green-gold of August. But Kate would go to live in Amir's barren country and bend herself to his ways. And no oil-lit tents either, she admonished herself, no Arabian Nights. They'd live in a tiny apartment over an asphalt bazaar. Passion would have to suffice.

“I see what you mean, Pop,” Audie said, staring out the window.

“I don't,” Ma said. “I'd say expression was the force of the will,
if
I was asked. I'd say Kate should write symphonies of her own.”

Operas, Kate thought, everything. What a lush world! When a flock of blackbirds scattered and regrouped overhead, she felt sure they were hearing Haydn too.

*   *   *

Without furniture the living room had a brute, medieval look: the beams were tree trunks again, and the fireplace was big enough to roast a foe. The piano, a concert grand that had materialized after Pop made a killing in July wheat and Ma made a breakfast of Moët & Chandon, stood alone on the blue rug as if it had set off to sea. Kate started the sonata again. Then again. And another time. This was dedication, a rational art and a noble one. She sat back to think
how
noble, and pictured a conservatory: the slim, pointed window of the practice room, the weary delirium after hours of work, toast and tea and
Lives of the Composers
back at the dorm.
This
was expression: playing the music, you could
feel
the life of the composer. You saw the women walking under his window, heard their laughter and guessed their hearts, too.

Ma had shooed them all out of the kitchen so she could talk to Pop. They had so many catastrophes! Last week the washing machine had overflowed:
back
they had stumbled as the sudsy flood advanced, bearing brassieres like bloated corpses on its crest. There had been no clean clothes, not a rag, until the girls, wrapped in tablecloths like saris, had waded into the brook and pounded the laundry on stones. They were equal to any disaster, Ma told them. She told Pop he had left them at the mercy of the tides.

“Gasket must have gone,” Pop said. “I didn't realize it was that old.”

“Of
course
not,” Ma said. Her voice was turning, and Kate at the piano girded herself as a passenger will press an imaginary brake. “You weren't
here.
”

“I can't be two places at once,” he said, petulant as Chucky.

“So hide your head in mommy's apron,” Ma said, “or under it.”

“Don't be vulgar, Lila.”

“Vulgar?”
She sounded as if he'd named her place of birth. “
Why not?
Vulgar, that's what I am, vile and stinking with no clean clothes, unlike the Great Mother Vanderwald, Our Lady of the Suburbs with her ice-blue eyes and her crystal cunt.”

Here was a word Kate had never heard her mother speak, and she closed the piano lid and escaped upstairs. If she were braver, she knew, she would have gone to her parents' aid. “Now you've lost track of the problem,” she'd say, pulling out chairs so they could sit and listen. “The problem is she misses you, Pop. She's afraid you don't love her.” She'd be very stern with him: “You cannot substitute facts for truths,” she'd tell Pop. “Nobody's asking you to be in two places at once.” And she would remind Ma that Pop was afraid of her and she ought to be nicer to him.

“'Tis I,” she said, vamping in the doorway of her parents' bedroom, where Audie and Chuck were watching TV, “the lovely one.” She plunked herself down with them on the quilt.

“Having a little talk down there, are they?” Audie said, but as they turned their smiles together, they heard Ma coming up.

“You were delivered with ice tongs! The world's first test-tube baby, bloodless product of Vanderwald Laboratories…” She went past them to the mirror and tore the pins from her hair while Pop stayed at the door. “The vulgar Lila Corrigan, not worthy of the likes of you, you self-righteous-petit-bourgeois-son-of-a-bitch, with your ancestors and your—”

“Shut up,” Pop said, as if desperate to stop a leak. “Just shut up,” he said again, although she was silent. “It's a wonder I come here at all.” The same rage that freed Ma's tongue bound his; he stood still for a moment in confusion and went back down the stairs.

“—and your pearls,” she yelled after him. The diva had reached her great moment, her audience rapt, in pajamas. With one wrenching twist the pearls were everywhere, skittering along the floor, hopping in the rug.

“They're secretions, vulgar secretions, you know,” she called down the stairs, and sank sobbing on the bed.

“Do you think I'm vulgar?” she asked Audie, who was hugging her, rocking her by the shoulders back and forth.

“No, Ma, I think you're beautiful” (and I think she's bananas, she'd tell Kate tomorrow).

“Me too,” Chucky said, and she drew him in.

Kate rolled a pearl between her fingers. “He only said it,” she said, “because you made that … crack … about Grandma.” Dear God, she hadn't meant to, but she was speaking with cold rage. Ma looked up incredulous from Audie's shoulder.

“Who do you think you are?” she said. “Get out of here. You're just like the rest of them.”

Kate stood, dumb, defiant.

“Get out!” Ma said. Kate went.

The keys to the VW were on a hook by the front door. On the porch swing, in the dark, Pop sat with bent head. He didn't look up when she passed.

*   *   *

Other times she had gone to Bobby's, to tremble in his kitchen while his hearty mother fried a steak for her cats. But seeing the lamp in his window, lit against thieves, while the family was away, she felt lonely only for a minute. Then it seemed just another slash against whatever ropes held her down on the earth, as an angry new confidence tugged her away. When you had expression, you were safe at any speed, anywhere; you could turn pain to understanding like straw into gold.

Knowing this, and Elayne's schedule at the hospital, she went to see Amir. He was standing in the lighted doorway when she drove up. Listening to the katydids, she supposed. He had an eager, child's heart, she could see.

“Hi,” she said. “My parents had a fight.”

“A fi-ight?” Amir found the English language infinitely amusing. He made a boxing feint and planted his hand on the door frame over her shoulder, smiling.

“I think they're crazy,” she said, looking down.

He lifted her chin with a finger. “Cray-zee,” he said, rolling his eyes. She didn't like his closeness so much now, but went in with him anyway, not wanting to be timid. The house was all pink and ruffles, and she had to push some pillows off the couch just to sit down. Amir set his beer on the television, where Joan Crawford, without volume, was adjusting her hat.

“It's so sad,” Kate said. “They do love each other, you know, but they…”

He kissed her, interrupting. He would be hurt if she went on talking about herself and didn't respond. And his country was nearly at war. She put her arms around his neck. He turned the light off with one hand and reached under her sweatshirt with the other.

“Pillows,” he said, “too much pillows.”

She twisted to pull the heart-shaped one out from underneath. Amir's face in the TV light had lost all its warm color, but she tried to smile.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Thinking?” He was struggling with her belt buckle, and she reached to help. She
believed
in passion.