Mystical Rose

by Richard Scrimger

  Copyright © Richard Scrimger 2000

  Paperback edition 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher — or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Reprography Collective — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Scrimger, Richard, 1957–

  Mystical Rose

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67487-4

  I. Title.

  PS8587.C745M97 2000 C813’.54 C00-930183-6

  PR9199.3.S37M97 2000

  Published in Canada by

  Doubleday Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To You, with thanks for all Your help

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Finding

  Chapter 2: Christmas

  Chapter 3: Presentation

  Chapter 4: Annunciation

  Chapter 5: Assumption

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Cause of our joy, pray for us.

  Spiritual vessel, pray for us.

  Vessel of honour, pray for us.

  Vessel of singular devotion, pray for us.

  Mystical rose, pray for us.

  Tower of David, pray for us.

  Tower of ivory, pray for us.

  House of gold, pray for us.

  From the Litany of the Blessed Virgin

  1

  Finding

  Your eyes are very dark. And sad. They’re so sad. Why is that? What have You done that’s so terrible? You’re okay — what am I saying, of course You’re okay. You don’t have anything to be sad about. Cheer up. Dry those tears. Turn that frown upside down. You can do it. You can do anything.

  So why are You crying? There, now You’ve got me doing it too.

  Water. Tears are water. All around me is water, rising, slopping against everything. Rising inside of my lungs, choking me. Just like it was the last time. Oh, Mama. All that commotion, and I can’t breathe. Cold, so cold.

  A long time ago now.

  How much has happened, how many births and deaths and givings in marriage, heartaches and headaches, love and laughter, wars and breakfasts. How much life.

  Harriet’s always telling everyone how much I love life. My daughter, don’t blame me for the name; it was Robbie’s choice. He laughed when I suggested Gert, my best friend in grade school. No, I’m serious, I said, and he laughed some more. Mother loves life, says Harriet. A wonderful woman, my daughter. I hope I had as much energy when I was her age.

  Here she is now, standing beside You. Does she see You? Her mouth is open but she’s not talking to You. She reaches towards me, huge white hands — she got them from Robbie too, along with the name. My hands are fine and delicate, pretty hands, my mother used to say. How could anyone mistake you for a boy, with such pretty hands, my baby? Pretty hands grabbing her veil, her big hat, her cambric handkerchief. Oh dear, I’m drowning again.

  Harriet wipes my face. It feels nice. She says, There there, but I don’t know where she means. This is a hospital, there’s only here here.

  Her hands are as cold as grade school. I used to get there before the teacher, who came in a cart all the way from Cobourg, six miles each way, almost two hours in the winter. I had to walk a mile down the Harwood Road to Precious Corners, and by the time I got to the schoolhouse I’d be frozen. A beautiful time of day, the sun rising over snow-covered fields. But cold. First one to school had to light the stove. The kindling used to smell of mice and dust. The fire was friendly and warm. Sometimes the boys used to throw each other’s homework in.

  Four years old and no daddy. He’s off at The War, my mama told me. So was my friend Gert’s daddy. He was a farmer too, like my daddy. Mama cried. So did Gert’s mama. She had red hair and a face like a harvest moon. What’s The War? I asked, but Mama wouldn’t answer. What’s The War? I asked the teacher. A terrible thing.

  I stayed away from the school in the spring, to help Mama and Victor with the farm. Lettuces and cabbages and corn to plant and pigs to feed, until the pigs all got sick. Six years old and no school.

  The teacher would come by in the evenings, to tell me what I’d missed. She brought the newspaper with her. There’s been a terrible battle at a place called Loos, she’d say. Or Gallipoli. All the places were strange sounding. Mama cried. The newspaper smelled like the inside of the teacher’s coat pocket. Then the letter arrived from Ottawa, saying Daddy was coming home. He got sick just like the pigs, but they died and he didn’t. Mama and I met him at the station in town, with all the neighbours. He hugged us and then limped over to talk to Gert’s mama. She fainted.

  The leg wound got better, but Daddy was different inside. He didn’t care about anything any more, as if The War had taken out the part of him that minded. The seed corn came up too late, and the cabbages got holes in them, and he didn’t mind. Something broke into the barnyard in the middle of the night, maybe a coyote, and took our chickens, and he didn’t mind. My teacher died of the flu, and they closed the school until they could find someone else, and he didn’t mind. For days and days he wouldn’t get out of bed. Mama did her best with the harvest, and neighbours gave us help and meat, but the snow lasted a long time that year, and some days we had nothing to eat but cabbages and stale bread. We needed new furniture, Mama said so, and I needed new clothes, but Daddy said he didn’t mind the table and chairs we had. And Rose looks fine, he said. He sat by himself at the dinner table, close to the bottle of poison. That’s what Mama called it. His hair was grey.

  I would have been ten when Victor broke his leg and couldn’t get up. I saw him first and ran to the house for help. Daddy came with me to the barn, stood outside the stall while Victor flopped around in his stall. I was crying. Daddy watched for a long time, then went to the house for his gun. I stayed in my room, and Daddy fired four shots at Victor’s head. I heard them. Horses have hard heads, you have to hit them just right. Victor would have told me that, later. Or do I mean Uncle Brian?

  Is Dr. Berman in Your way? He’s new. He has an odd first name — Sunday, would it be — and he introduces himself by it. You could ask him to move, You know. Or You could blast him with the power of the worm that dieth not. I wonder what he’s saying to my daughter. His teeth are very expressive.

  Harriet is my daughter, Harriet Rolyoke. Not Zimmerman, as it could have been — poor Geoff, I can still see him on his knee in our front room, with his manicure and the tufts of hair poking out of his nose when he smiled. Not Bluestone, though she did seem to like him, and he had every reason to be grateful to her. Harriet Rolyoke. The name she was born with. I tried and tried, but there’s no pleasing some people. You can’t afford to pick and choose, I told her, not meaning to make her feel bad, but facts are facts and no boys fought over her the way they used to fight over me. Every day I see plain women with husbands, I told her. D’you want to end up all alone? She’d laugh and pat my arm. Even when she was young, she always seemed to be laughing at me. I may have a better sense of humour than I know.

  Uncle Brian was the family black sheep and Daddy’s big brother. His commercial success in Belleville and then Toronto, and the opportunities he talked about in the letters home to Gloucestershire, convinced my
daddy to come to Ontario with his bride. Uncle Brian bought two second-class passages as a wedding present, and drove all the way to New York to meet us. He was a banker; all I’d have seen of him when we arrived was his lavender spats. The sound of his motor car — the first I’d ever heard — buzzed in my ears like the dying summer. I listened for it each time he came to Precious Corners to visit. I loved to ride in it, feeling the wind on my face, watching the world spin past faster than thought.

  He visited less often after the bank took away his car and his salary and moved him to northern Ontario, but he was with us at the Port Hope station when Daddy came home from The War. The spats were grey by this time, and stained. Like Uncle Brian’s success, I guess. By then I could see above his knees, to the lean hams and bony brisket beneath the threadbare woollen suit that no longer had a pocket watch to complete it, nor a diamond stickpin, nor a dangling white scarf, cashmere coat, or stiff Homburg hat. The War had been hard on him too. Welcome back, he said to Daddy, shaking hands on the doorstep. His hands were bigger than Daddy’s, and his nose was longer. He wouldn’t stay to dinner.

  I’m dying, aren’t I. That’s why You’re here. That’s why You look so sad — I guess mine isn’t a beautiful death. That’s what Mrs. McAllister used to say, Didn’t so-and-so make a beautiful death. A sour long-faced lady, her husband George owned the mill in Harwood. She wore hats with flowers — carnations and purple larkspur, I think, unless I’m getting confused with what the flowers mean: pride and haughtiness. She used to ask Mama and me into her parlour for tea and little cakes while our corn was being ground. She didn’t invite everyone, but Mama was English English, and that mattered in Ontario in the twenties. I don’t know what I would have been. A polite little girl, I guess, and as clean as lye soap and scrubbing could make me, for all I was dressed poor. Was Mrs. McAllister’s father really a concert pianist? She’d tell us that, pointing to the piano as a kind of proof, but I never heard it from anyone else. I asked Mama once and she said she wasn’t sure, meaning she doubted it. You know the truth, of course. Maybe I will too, soon. A vicious lady, Mrs. McAllister, but kind enough to me. I wonder, was her death beautiful? I can’t see it, somehow.

  Uncle Brian had arranged a mortgage on the farm when he worked at the bank. Mama wrote to him for help the spring after Victor died and we couldn’t put any crop in the field, but the letter came back inside another envelope. It was a surprise to see his gaunt, spare figure in the kitchen a few months later, to hear his voice, so like Daddy’s, ask Mama if we could put him up for a while since he was out of a job, and maybe he could help out around the farm for a bit. Hello, Rose, he said to me, twisting his knuckles together. Mama didn’t say anything.

  Have a drink, said Daddy, pushing the bottle forward.

  And so Uncle Brian came to live with us. A broken man, life trickling out of him like sawdust. Daddy didn’t mind. He was a burnt-out shell himself, with gypsies camping inside his mind. My mother and I toiled with our heads down, fearful of what today would bring.

  Lady Margaret Rolyoke was a thin dry woman, beautiful from a distance. A white orchid of a woman: exotic, colourless, odorless. The sort of woman men don’t need. She was Lady Margaret because she was the daughter of a duke. Her husband was plain Mr. Rolyoke, Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the winter, Cobourg Ontario in the summer. You know, I still think about them. All the chances missed. Needless pain, prolonged until it ceases to matter, like a stone in your shoe that you get used to walking with, until you take it out and then you think, How could I have gone on like that? He’s been dead for almost fifty years, and she for ten or more, and I’m still limping.

  I knew the Rolyoke place before I went there to work. Everyone in Cobourg and Hamilton township knew the huge log palace, one of dozens of stately homes just a ferry ride away from Rochester, New York. The best air in North America, pure ozone, they said, optimal climatic conditions — I wonder if they really were. Cottesmore Hall, Hamilton House, Strathmore, Bagnall Hall, Heathcote, Sidbrook. Oh my. The names bring back a hint of vanished glory, like a whiff of old perfume clinging to a fur coat at the back of a closet. And all the grand homes needed seasonal attention from local plumbers and glaziers, butchers and fruiterers, gardeners and house servants.

  I met Lady Margaret by accident. Mama would have spoken to her about me, but I’d never seen her. Early in the morning on my first day and I was trying to find the servants’ entrance so I asked the first person I saw. Herself as it happened, taking a walk in the garden. I’m lost, I said, and she took me by the elbow — a curious gesture, more like a police officer than a friend — and led me around the far side to the very door. You must be the flower girl, she said. I was still in mourning for Daddy. When she saw the band she expressed very civil condolences. I hope you’ll be happy here, she said. I ducked my head and she walked me into the back kitchen and told that bitch Parker to call Adam, and meanwhile to be especially nice to me. I was sixteen. Parker smiled and said, Certainly my lady, and the minute we were alone she slapped me spinning against the far wall.

  Black boots with buttons, cotton stockings, and two petticoats, even in the middle of the hottest summer in years, long loose housedress the colour of pale coffee, with a white apron and cap. Everything from the skin out starched until it stood by itself, and God forbid — well, You know what I mean — that you should have to scratch. No wonder Parky was always in a bad temper, she sweated so. The uniform was the Duchess of Ainslie’s design, Robbie told me later. Lady Margaret’s mother. I would have met her at the wedding if she’d been there.

  My first garden party. Admiral Byrd had just flown over the North Pole and everyone was talking about it. Only he wasn’t an admiral yet, was he? When they weren’t talking about him they were talking about the Sesquicentennial Exposition; my, I got sick of that. The Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, I can hear Parky’s voice now. Such elegance, she said. You wouldn’t have understood it, Rose.

  The south lawn, also known as the lake lawn because it went right down to the pebbled shore of Lake Ontario, on a late afternoon in June. The sun burned a hole in the middle of an empty blue sky, the shadows were thick under the maples, and the wavetops glistened and sparkled. There was just enough of a breeze to ruffle skirts and keep away the flies. I was in charge of the muffins. Really, muffins. I was to go around with the covered tray, making sure that the ladies had an opportunity to partake. Would you care for a muffin, madam? This was my line — I only had to rehearse it a couple of times to get it right. Parker didn’t think I was refined enough. Mr. Rolyoke’s wrong about you, she said. You’re not ready for company. You’ve only been here a week. You’re an outdoor girl, she told me, withering. A gardener’s help. Can’t even hold a tray steady, can you?

  Try to walk across the kitchen, Miss Rose, suggested Mr. Davey gently. He was the one who drove the cars — kindling, that’s not the word. Why can’t I think of the word? A fat man, not too old, with a kind word for everyone, he’d been badly burnt in The War. We were all a little afraid of his appearance. He and Parker were the only servants who went south with the Rolyokes in September. I walked across the kitchen towards him, offering the tray and saying my line, only I hesitated when I was about to call him madam. I felt myself blushing and he smiled — that is, his mouth twisted sideways. Looked hideous, but I knew it was a smile. Walking back across the kitchen I tripped over Parker’s outstuck foot, made quite a din. She sniffed when Mr. Davey helped me up. Thanks, I told him. He shook his head. Not at all, Miss Rose, you don’t weigh more than a feather.

  The ladies at the party were nice to me too. So young, they said, which I didn’t feel. So tiny, they said, which I wasn’t, not really, just undernourished. So pretty — well, I suppose I was pretty. I’m sorry, Harriet, but I was, with my dark hair (though it wouldn’t curl no matter how hard I tried), dark eyes, straight teeth that gave me no pain, eyebrows that curved naturally. Ah, but it’s a long time since I looked like that. The boys at school thought me a
beauty. I remember very well the day one of them brought the family cart to take me home. The harness was decked out in ribbons, and the old Clydesdale’s coat and mane were combed until they shone like gold. The looks the other boys gave — now what was the Clydesdale boy’s name?

  My uncle suggested the hunting trip. He and Daddy were sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine they’d made in an old swill tub out of cabbage hearts and sugar, and Mama and I were arguing about whether I could go to the Park Theatre with Gert to see The Big Parade. David — I mean John Gilbert — was in it. Mama was saying it was too expensive and I was saying, Oh please. Uncle Brian finished his glass and banged it down on the table.

  Moose, he said. The only animal worth shooting. He blinked. The end of his nose twitched. He didn’t look like a hunter.

  Daddy stared at him. Said nothing.

  I’ve shot many a moose, said Uncle Brian. The woods around Kirkland Lake are full of them. You want to aim just behind the foreleg, he said, sighting along his outstretched hands as if, trembling from the wine, they cradled a gun.

  The single oil lamp, hung on a nail from a low beam, flickered and died, leaving the kitchen in smoky firelight. Romantic but chilly. I could feel the wind blowing through an assortment of cracks in the walls and windows.

  I was sick of the place, sick of the constant tension of uncertainty, not knowing how much there’d be to eat or what quiet horror Daddy and Uncle Brian would get up to — one night one of them found a rabbit cowering under a corner of the outhouse and brought it to the cleared table. They wouldn’t let it go and they wouldn’t kill it, but let it hop uncertainly up and down the bare wood, laughing every time it relieved itself. After an hour the thing just lay down, it was so tired, and Uncle Brian bashed it with a brick.

  Why can’t I go to the movies? I said loudly to Mama. Gert’s going. Everyone else is going. Why can’t I do anything except sit here in the dark? It’s not right, I said. Fifteen years old and telling my Mama right and wrong. But I knew, and so did she.