Mystical Rose

by Richard Scrimger

  She’s in the little sitting room. Don’t leave your cloth lying on the table, you useless girl.

  Yes, Miss Parker.

  The sun shone outside. I know because it made the motes I released, in dusting, dance in the light. Morning sunlight, not afternoon. I don’t know what day of the week it was. Not a Thursday. I had a half-day off on Thursday.

  Where are you going now? The sitting room is that way.

  To the pantry, to put away my cloth, I said.

  Didn’t you hear me? She wants to see you right now.

  Turning me around and pushing me at the stairs. She liked putting her hands on me, Parky. She was bigger than I.

  Will you hold my dustcloth for me? I asked.

  Do I look like a housemaid? Of course not.

  The uniform had no pockets. What should I do with my cloth then? I asked.

  Parker got even angrier. Can’t you solve even the simplest problems for yourself, you piece of Canuck farm trash? she asked contemptuously.

  Who’s Canuck? I asked indignantly.

  Funny to think of now, but not then. I’d never have thought of myself as anything but English. Don’t ever forget that you were born in Gloucestershire, my mama told me. Canada was a stepmother, cruel and unfeeling. I lived like Snow White, dreaming of a jewelled birthright across the sea. I hung onto a mother country with all an orphan’s strength. A funny thing.

  Parker walked to the sitting room with me, a lot of exercise for her. She was all flushed and red in the face. Passion and a bad heart. She knocked on the door and then stood back as I entered alone. Lady Margaret didn’t get up from behind the desk. Just sat there, controlled, playing with the small gold cufflink.

  You sent for me, milady? I said.

  And now You’ve sent for me. And I’m scared, and guilty, the way I was with milady.

  If I were You, I’d resent all the years that Rose Rolyoke spent serving others instead of You. Serving Mama, and the Rolyokes, and Robbie, and Harriet, and all my customers.

  A life of service. Sounds good, doesn’t it. But I’m not good. Not really. I’m not anything, really, not right now, small and struggling with the alarms going off outside and people running.

  Mama, Mama.

  Above my head, swaying back and forth, the bars of the birdcage flash. Pretty birds. Pretty pretty. And they sound so soft and quiet.

  All the noise outside.

  “There there,” says Mama. “There there, my pretty.” That’s me. And the lights go out.

  A second of silence, and then everybody starts hurrying around again in the dark.

  Where are the birds, I wonder. I can’t see them any more.

  I’m not too worried. I am a little hungry, though. I start to cry.

  “There there,” says Mama. Holding me tight.

  The house was small and insecure, sagging between its two neighbours in the row like a tired toddler between two parents. So small it didn’t have a full second storey, just a staircase up to a single room. Are you sure you wouldn’t want anything grander? said the real estate agent with the big ears.

  Robbie looked at me.

  We have five thousand dollars, I said.

  More money than I’d ever handled before, and I wasn’t going to waste any of it. I’d found the bank draught in the pocket of my going-away dress. Light blue, with buttons going down the front and a high neck. I’d picked it out at Macilheeny’s on Market Street in Philadelphia, on a sunny afternoon in early autumn, flies buzzing against the big west windows with their dark wood mullions. Macilheeny himself waited on us, a smirking sharp-eyed pleaser with a deep bow for Mr. Rolyoke.

  Do you like it, Rose? he asked me, while Macilheeny pulled my sleeve straight.

  It’s beautiful, I said.

  Fine, then. We’ll take it.

  Mr. Rolyoke drew out his wallet. Macilheeny fawned.

  That morning — no, it would have been the morning before — the morning before we bought the dress I was standing in front of Lady Margaret in the small library, listening to things I didn’t understand.

  You’ll have to go, she said.

  I nodded but wondered why.

  You will never see him again, she said.

  Why not? Is he dead? I said, aghast.

  She didn’t reply. I asked again, feeling quite upset. If he was dead I wanted to know it. Has there been some kind of accident? I began.

  There has been a grave miscalculation, my good slattern — and you have made it. Get out of my house this instant!

  I’d have been — just — nineteen? No idea what she was talking about. I felt odd inside, had felt odd all day, wondered if maybe I was coming down with influenza. The new girl’s sister was recovering from it; she’d been pretty bad, said the new girl.

  Yes, milady, I said, remembering her title now that it wouldn’t do me any good. Now that I didn’t need it.

  From behind me, a welcome voice.

  Excuse me, said Mr. Rolyoke, entering the room in a cloud of pipe smoke, with a smile for me and for his wife, and a dismissive wave for Miss Parker, whom he had discovered listening outside the door.

  Why can I not remember more of the night we had together? The night that made the child. A whispered greeting I recall, but the love and tenderness and leaving are gone. Next morning I woke from a dream of fulfilment with a heaviness on me, a sense of dread and unremembered loss. And it was my birthday.

  What was he like? I don’t know. What was Robbie like? Good and kind, fond of a laugh, and of me, not a thinker or a doer, nor yet a dreamer, which doesn’t leave much, does it? He was nice and, before I married him, rich. Is that why I married him? Because he was nice? Because he was rich? Because I was pregnant and he was there? All good reasons. No. I married for no good reason. All part of the service.

  Dr. Sylvester wore a concerned look. Harriet’s hand was on my arm. I smiled at the doctor. How many genuinely handsome men do you meet?

  Mrs. Rolyoke, are you paying attention?

  Yes, doctor, I said.

  Mother, are you all right?

  I’m fine, I told my daughter, more harshly than I meant to. Why are we so often harsh to those who love us? Is it because we can’t stand pity, or to disappoint them? Because they care too much, or not enough? I was just thinking, I told Harriet.

  Yes, Mother.

  She was mad at me. Maybe that’s why I spoke so harshly — there’s a coat of frustration underneath the caring, and frustration is a darker colour, hard to paint over.

  Go on, doctor, I said. I’m listening.

  He pointed his face at me but I could tell he was speaking to Harriet.

  The medical tests are all negative, he said. Bloodwork, urinalysis, electrolytes — everything is normal. No diabetes or thyroid abnormality, no kidney or liver disease.

  He consulted some notes here, nodding his head.

  The ESR rate is negative, he went on, which means there’s nothing blocking blood flow to the brain. There’s no vitamin deficiency, blood and urine and CSF screens are all clean. No endocrine abnormality.

  He looked up at me. I guess I’m pretty healthy then, I said.

  You are a fine physical specimen, he said.

  Well well. I smiled. You’re not so bad yourself, I told him, but he didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile. Not used to taking compliments. Harriet looked pained.

  What’s wrong? I said.

  How long ago would this have been, now — not too long. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. These days time collapses like a folding chair. Or a road map — if you don’t fold it up right you end with a pleated mess. That’s the way time works for me right now.

  Robbie didn’t know about the bank draught. The old man likes you, he said when I showed it to him, in our Niagara Falls hotel room.

  Why can’t I remember Robbie better? A restless man who looked younger than he was. Kind, distracted, surprisingly good at managing Accounts Receivable. Curling ruddy hair like so many of his mother’s family: I’ve seen photogravures of
an Ainslie great aunt who looked exactly like Robbie from the neck up.

  I liked the cosy house on Waverley Street, but I said no to the real estate agent. Too much, I said. He asked what we would be able to pay. I told him.

  But that’s a lot less, he said.

  Robbie climbed up the stairs. Pretty dim it looked up there, from the sunny living room. The faint rumble of the streetcars two blocks to the north sounded like far-off thunder. From the front window I could see down to the foot of the street, where the pavement ended and the sand began. Lake Ontario, the water I’d always known, it seemed. I was ready to call this place home. Would you reconsider your first offer, ma’am? said the estate agent. I know the vendors are anxious to sell. Won’t you make another offer?

  Look, Rose, said Robbie, craning down from the upstairs, his face poking through the turned wooden bars of the railing. He made a face like a little child or a gargoyle, sticking out his tongue and glaring. I smiled up at him.

  Just a few hundred dollars more, said the estate agent. Please, ma’am.

  No, I said.

  Please, Mrs. Rolyoke.

  No.

  A sigh from beyond the veil that falls over me now and then. I can’t seem to push the veil aside, but sometimes I can hear the world through it.

  If you don’t eat you’ll feel really sick, and we wouldn’t want that.

  Now there’s a gap in the darkness, like a policeman with a flashlight looming out of the night. I can see my favourite nurse, the one with the tight grey hair and nobby nose, holding out a spoon full of whatever it is I’m supposed to be eating.

  Oh, hello, I say.

  Hello, Mrs. Rolyoke.

  What is that? I ask.

  Rice pudding.

  She’s kidding. I know what rice pudding looks like, and it isn’t that. Actually, there are two kinds of rice pudding and neither one of them is that. My mama used to make rice pudding on top of the stove, thin gruel with milk and sugar and sometimes an egg for thickening. It tasted good, after cabbage — well, what wouldn’t? My daddy used to go off to the barn without finishing his pudding. Mama and I would huddle together over the table to share the rest of his bowl, a spoon for me and a spoon for her. Hers was bigger than mine.

  And there’s another way to make rice pudding, a grand and elegant one in the oven with raisins and currants and extra eggs and cinnamon on top. Sometimes Parker made it for Mr. Davey, the chauffeur, if he’d run an errand for her. I wonder if she’d have made it for him if he hadn’t run the errand. He shared with me, and I remember the feeling of wonder I had, all that cooked rich goodness. I tried to compliment Parker but she snorted and turned away.

  No, I say to my nurse. I turn away my head. Just like Parky, only my face isn’t red and I’m not filled with self-disgust. I like rice pudding, I say.

  Then try some.

  She doesn’t understand. What I mean is I like rice pudding and this isn’t rice pudding.

  Please, she says.

  I hate it when they beg. I make a no no motion with my head, back and forth, tick tock like a clock, back and forth.

  Robbie loved the house. He liked the neighbourhood, with all the houses close and friendly, and the front porches with people sitting out in the cool of the summer evening. He liked the smell of the lake and the hot pavement, and summer strangers walking by with picnics and beach umbrellas. In the winter he liked the quiet, the empty cold, the walls of ice piled up around the edge of the lake. But mostly he liked to walk around the block, smoking that ridiculous pipe he never got to draw properly, maybe pushing Harriet in her pram, smiling at the people he recognized, and then come home. His face would light up when he rounded any of the corners from which he could catch a glimpse of our house. Rosie’s house, he insisted on calling it. But he liked it too. Maybe he hadn’t ever had anything of his own either.

  Yes, the eaves hung unevenly, and the trough we put in didn’t attach properly, so that in a rainstorm you could look out on a solid wall of water rolling down off the sagging roof and into the shaded climbing garden at the back.

  Not much scope for flowers: a few yards of lawn in the back, even less in the front. I dug out the beds and planted — this was new for me — seeds and bulbs I’d bought. Cleaning out the basement I’d come across the book of Victorian flower language, Love Letters from a Victorian Garden, a thin foxed volume smelling of brickdust and rot, with a picture of motherwort on the cover. I found out that motherwort means concealed love — a powerful idea. I read the book over and over again, the only book in my whole life I have read more than once, surprising in myself a silent but unmistakable thrill at an instinctive understanding of a strict, arbitrary, and severely limited form of communication. Flowers are silent too, and patient, and impossible to deflect from their appointed purpose. Easy to harm but hard to kill off entirely. I sympathized with flowers. Nursing Harriet may have had something to do with my mood. Lots of time awake, with nothing to do except be there. Love. I remember thinking about love flowing out of me with my milk, filling my baby up so that she rolled over and went to sleep stuffed with love. She burped love and cried love, and threw love up all over her new nursery clock, a birthday present from Mama and Bill. Robbie, just home from work, looked pleased at the mess. He hated that clock, which chimed out the first notes of a Silly Symphony every hour. When Harriet smiled up at her daddy, standing in the nursery doorway in his last year’s suit and tie, he began to chuckle.

  I miss that chuckle of Robbie’s. I’ve lived more without him than with him, but I still miss him. Whenever I think about it it makes me feel guilty. I could have loved him better.

  Why are You shaking your head? What do You know about it?

  Ice on my lips. Now there’s a memory. Ice chips. I remember following the cart down the Dale Road to the McAllisters, who had an icebox. Wood shavings and a smell of dampness and horse. Bix was the horse’s name; I can’t remember the man’s. He would saw a big block of ice and carry it with tongs, or else in his apron with his arms wrapped around it like a baby, a little ice baby. And when he was gone we’d — Gert and Jack and I would — steal ice chips from the cart. Well, they were going to melt anyway, weren’t they?

  My family didn’t have an icebox. We used the back pantry as a root cellar. I remember Jack and I — wait a minute, where are these memories coming from? I haven’t thought about Jack Dupree in a very long time. He was a strong healthy boy, wiry muscles and thick dark hair, shoulders that tanned to the colour of cherrywood every summer, but that would have been a lot of summers ago. Seventy-five summers ago. He’s got to be dead. Not that I’m doing so much better.

  Oh, Jack. The times we never had. I remember a note he sent, spring of eighth grade. Behind the barn. And that was all. As if there weren’t thirty barns in the vicinity. But I knew which one he meant, as he knew I would. Thirteen years old, studying provinces and capitals and Christopher Columbus. And a note, slipped into an atlas — Behind the barn. Without a time. But I knew which time he meant, and which barn, and I guessed what he wanted to do. And do you know what? I wanted to go. I never told him. I’d like to have been able to tell him, I wanted to. To go to the barn and be with him. But I knew I couldn’t. Nothing to do with being a nice girl, I just knew I couldn’t. It didn’t make me feel any better about it. I was still sorry. Knowledge isn’t easy.

  You know that, don’t you? You know everything. Maybe You could try to explain it to Jack. I’m not going to get it right.

  Are we going to see Dr. Sylvester again soon? I ask Harriet.

  I cough. My side hurts. Harriet wipes my mouth. The bells are still ringing.

  Dr. Berman is here now, she says. Don’t worry, Mother.

  I miss Dr. Sylvester. He’s such a handsome man. Don’t you think so, dear?

  I know you do, Mother.

  And his voice, I say. With that voice he could have been on radio. I loved the stories he used to tell me. Do you remember the stories he used to tell me, Harriet?

  My daughter
looks at me with that mixture of affection and anger that we reserve for the beloved ill. Do you really remember them, Mother?

  Oh yes, I say. There was one about an airline. And another about a hockey rink. I think it was a hockey rink. And another one about a man with a pet who got lost. Or a car that broke. Something he had, and then he didn’t have it. Very good stories, the way the doctor used to tell them. Do you remember them, Harriet?

  She sighs, shakes her head at me. A tough time of life for her, the sixties. You don’t feel old, but everyone is treating you that way, and you start to wonder if maybe they’re right. I remember talking about young Jimmy Carter, and everyone laughing at me.

  Who do you think is young, Harriet? I ask her. She stares at me. Doesn’t understand the question. Pierre Trudeau? I ask. That Russian with the eyebrows — not Nikita Khrushchev, the other one. Oh dear. First the hockey players look young, then the policemen, then the men in the newspapers. Then it’s time to pick another planet.

  Mother, Dr. Sylvester wasn’t telling you stories for entertainment. They were part of the memory test.

  I nod my head. Yes, sometimes my memory does seem to have holes in it. Like the bucket in the song. Do you —

  I remember the song, Mother.

  She looks away. I’ve probably mentioned the song before. We used to sing it all the time. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole. I can’t remember what comes next, but the song ends the way it begins, with the hole. Like everything else I know — me too, I guess. I feel like there’s a hole in my bucket, and dear Liza isn’t able to do anything about it.

  The bells keep ringing.

  Selfish. That’s what it is to be old. All you’re interested in is your feelings, your pain, your memories. And how lonely you are. And what a pain the other old people are. You’re sick of old people, sick of sick people, sick of sympathy. Unfortunately, you need every bit of help you can get. You can’t look after yourself. Not even getting to the toilet. You’re a baby again, a mewling puking whatever it is.