Improbable as it became, in two more days the old woman’s appetite for chocolate and red wine returned. And her husband knew she was truly well when she asked for a pot of coffee and a bundt cake. As he ventured to the bakery, he caught himself whistling—it was a brilliant spring morning, after all, and he breathed in the cool air and stopped to look out over the hills in the distance, clouds driven across the sky by the blue clear winds, all the trees in leaf and flower, and the traffic of people out walking and working, the report of hammers and whine of saws, the spring birds on the grass, the grass in the sun the color of old yellowed silver—and on he went walking for her cake, the thought dawning on him that soon she would be up and off to the market herself, lunching with friends, shopping for groceries, everything just like usual. Her Tuesday bridge ladies, her Thursday museum committee, her Friday reading to the blind.
The old man’s heart became divided after his wife’s had almost been carried off. On the one side, all his prayers had been answered: his wife alive, their world restored, and the warm sun of another spring upon them both. What more could he ask for? And yet, in ways he couldn’t help, her confession about her thief lay heavy on the other side of his heart. And this half of him grew heavier as the days passed. He began to fancy that he had somehow been tricked by life, a thing he had never before thought possible.
Perhaps as a consequence of this division in his heart, or as a result of the wear of his wife’s illness upon him, or even the peculiar strain of her growing wellness upon him, or perhaps the gout in his ankles when it rained, or the ceaseless passing of friends and family and whole ways of life, or perhaps just the troubled rags of feeling old and dull to the world. Whatever the reason, all the things in his life grew increasingly strange to the old man. He would glimpse—or would think he had glimpsed—fruit bats hanging folded with the coats in the closet, turtles in place of pillows on the couch. A pair of boots became muskrats under the bench in the hall, and then they were dachshunds, and then, a step closer, they were boots again.
As the days passed, the old man went around braced against the world. He didn’t know if he believed what he saw or saw what he believed. Was it what you saw or what you thought you saw? Did you only see what you expected to see? Didn’t know anything the way he used to know—or didn’t know anything the way he thought he’d known—and it exhausted him to chase his tail like this. He often went to lie down on the day bed and close his eyes for fear that the truth would be revealed to him. He didn’t trust his heart could take it.
On the face of it, the man and his wife seemed the darlings of destiny, not so much the envy of the little valley town as its collective hope. You’d have to be blind not to see the care and craft of the old man’s silver shop, just as you’d have to be heartless not to find the woman’s reprieve from death to be nothing short of miraculous, not to assume it meant she had purposes unfinished in the town, not to be moved when you saw her approach with a bundle of flowers in her arms. Despite her years and her children all far-flung, who wouldn’t stop her in the street and say—among the many things people said—that the old woman appeared more radiant and unshakable than ever? Who wouldn’t hold the woman at arm’s length and tell her how glad they were to hear there’d be no funeral?
Truth is, she’d say, I never felt better, never felt more—dare I even say it?—more sprightly.
Yes, they’d say, wasn’t sprightly exactly how she looked? And they’d hold her hands and tell how they wept for joy to learn of her recovering, the old woman smiling and throwing back her head, brimming with all the giddy pleasure of a schoolgirl.
Oh, I feel I’ve been gone so long, she’d say. Come sit and tell me how you’ve been all this time.
They’d sit to tea in the sleepy shade of the market trees, she and her friends, that drift of carnival music from the organ grinder, to whom she read on Fridays, that swift little squirrel monkey of his tumbling through the square with the jangling pouch of dimes and nickels. Everything was just like usual—nearly everything restored—the pranks of the monkey, the storm crabs in cages for sale, the ice and fish and roasting nuts and seeds, the smell of burnt sugar and salt, the warm coins in her one hand ready to give to the laughing monkey, her wallet clutched tight in the other, because she knew how the monkey too was a thief.
Home from the market she walked with her basket of greens and bread and cheese, a newspaper packet of sunflower seeds and a bottle of red wine, as well as the notion to tell her husband all the household scandals she’d heard, all the antics of the monkey she’d watched, how the animal would sneak his tail around a little boy and tip the boy’s cap over his eyes. And as she went toward home she watched the sky for stray birds, hoped for him to return, the old woman always hoping for her old lost-to-the-world Romeo.
The sun settled behind the trees, and she stopped in a small garden park and set down her basket and rubbed the aches out of her hands. In the fountain a copper goose spit water up over its head onto its back. She waited and watched the sunlit fingers of the highest tree branches. And softly she whistled and said his name, rustled the seeds against the newspaper, and again more boldly she called to him.
The air went powdery toward dusk, and she heard the slow ring of the vesper bell, and still no Romeo. She knew better than to hope, but each stir of shadow in the damp air made her turn and call his name and see and know, despite her best hopes, that her thief was not there.
If it came back at all, the old couple’s history came back to them like a story they’d heard about or read about somewhere long ago, their memories scarcely their own anymore, their life like a nursery rhyme. Once upon a time and the old man—a young man then, of course, still sticky with the things he touched in life—stumbled upon a bird’s nest in the woods near his home. In the leaves nearby lay a crow, black and folded closed, its feet cut off.
These days were days of great superstition, days when farmers poisoned cribs of corn to feed migrating birds, birds thought to bring disease and other sorrows, birds believed to be omens of famine and death, birds always associated with misfortune. For many years one could pay one’s taxes with salted owl’s eyes and crow’s feet. Springtime brought festivals to little towns in the valley. Cannons shot nets over fields of birds, the birds lured with corn seed, the children running to club the struggling creatures with broom handles. Many birds grew skittish over the years and learned not to sing. Fewer and fewer returned each season, until fowling parties combed the woods to shake and chop a final nest or two from the trees. All that remained of some species—the scarlet hurry hawk, the tiny skittlelink—were a few sun-faded specimens under the smudged glass of museum cabinets, a bronze nameplate, a detail about habitat or mating.
And once upon a time, the old man—still a young man then—he came across that crow lying broken like an umbrella in the woods, that perfect circle of twigs and sticks a few yards away, that glint of tinsel in the cup of grass. And whenever he thought back to this moment, he’d see himself staring at the egg in the hold of the nest, the surface of this egg as smooth and perfect as a moon opal.
He’d remember not a speck of sound disturbing the woods, the quiet columns of trees, the pools of light on the path, the light falling as snow falls when there is no wind, everything hushed. And when, as from a dream, the man stepped forward and removed his sweater and stooped to wrap the nest, he heard leaves rustle above him. As he carried the nest back through the woods, carried it like a boy carries a bowl full of soup, he hoped to high heaven that his young bride at home would know what to do with a miracle such as this.
Hatch and raise him—was it ever really a question?—a silk-black crow toddling about the rooms of their house. They fed him and kept him safe—the bird so perfectly black he moved like oil—taught him to speak and fly, showed him how to eat at the dinner table. He learned to waltz, their orphan Romeo, learned to purr and bark and howl to the moon. In the parlor at night the man showed their crow how to sing like the nightingale, like the chaffin
ch, like the sparrow, like the gentle playing of the late-night radio, the piano and soprano so like birds themselves. And with her knitting halted in her lap, the old woman—a young woman then, of course, still undisappointed by life—she’d watch the crow on her husband’s knee, watch Romeo singing so eager to the man, watch the bird’s feet grabbing at the man’s trousers, her husband’s eyes closed and head tilted, the bird like a violin, the bird like a cello, the bird like a piano again, its eyes shining like onyx under the light, the crow turning back and forth from him to her, her to him, as if they were tossing something across the room between them.
And in the mornings, the man arose and readied himself for the silver shop—where day after day he hammered the town hallmark into piles of knives and forks and spoons, so many clattering spoons, you’d have never imagined enough mouths for all of them—Romeo flying alongside as he walked the road to work. After the bird hurried home to the woman, she would tidy the house and chatter on to her Romeo in what would start as gladness and would amount, in the end, to a steady slow pour of loneliness.
By the time their children arrived—two boys, two girls, each a year apart—and by the time the children were half grown and half out the door and married and moved away, many things had come to pass in the couple’s life together, many things in what had seemed to the woman just a heap of idle days, days scarcely strung along together, not a thing appearing to happen or change or move. Time felt like the thinnest of strings, no end to hold, the beads of days sliding clean off as if they had never been. Or as if they had always been, days both fleeting and eternal at the same time, this paradox nearly impossible for her, time being something entirely different from her experience of it.
Just as sure as the sun crossed the day, the old man wet his head every morning and walked to his work, the sterling bowls and pitchers and loud piles of endless cutlery. And each morning Romeo flew along with him and perched from tree to tree and sang the songs of the whippoorwill, the bullfinch, the yellow forktail, the bluebird, the naked-throated robbybell, the songs of the whiskey-jack, and the waxwing, the waxbill, and as the man unlocked the door of his shop, Romeo perched atop the roof’s peak and sang his catalogue of night lieder from the radio, the bird hollering out like a ringing telephone and a lawn-mower engine to make the man laugh.
He waited for the first sweet whiffs of coal smoke from the chimney, and then the crow started home over the town, flew with an eye for things to steal as he returned to the woman, who sat watching for him on the porch, the children off to school, her coffee and cake nearly finished.
She scanned the horizon of trees for his wind-tossed silhouette flying safely home—the bird like a shadow—his eyes shining for that glint of gold to bring home to her, the woman waiting to hear those wings hissing as he flew close, the woman eager to catch that gold chain dangling in his beak, the woman hoping for another of the many gifts he carried home to her out of love. Always he would come to the porch and walk his nodding walk, his toes clicking on the wood. He would bow for her to scratch the nape of his neck and rub his feathers against the grain, as he so loved her to do. And when she reached out her hand to him, palm up, Romeo would open his beak and place into the cup of her hand a child’s jack, or a bullet shell, or a long necklace of pearls with a gold hasp, a heavy brass plumb bob, a pair of golden mustache scissors . . .
Each became a gift picked special for her, the best of these objects setting into motion whole machines of scandal and gossip, the old woman carrying home the stories to her husband from the market each week. Such as the rumor of the missing gypsy pendant, said to be a nail from the True Cross, the gypsies leaving a curse that would scatter all the town’s children far from home. The story of the careless heart locket, its loss undoing two young lovers, their families feuding over the millpond, the pond soon to be poisoned by the tannery. And there was the pair of platinum-rimmed eyeglasses, stolen from the jeweler, the man stumbling to his death out the open window of his studio, that scatter of uncut diamonds cast around his body in such a way that people said the jeweler had become, through long practice and labor, the very stuff of his art. In the weeks that followed the jeweler’s demise, children would throw stones at the glass blower to see if he shattered, the banker would snip off his little finger with a cigar cutter, and the old goldsmith in a neighboring village would be found bound to a tree in the woods, his veins opened and his blood supposedly cast into coins. The town never did rise above its shame to breathe a word about the fate of the quiet vintner, Lord rest his soul.
Many years passed this way—the town secrets tied to a crow and a thin old woman—and anonymously she parceled her hoard to the museum and library and church charities. She gave to the organ grinder and quietly stirred silver brooches and rings into her husband’s foundry pots, which cooked forever in the center chimney of his shop. And though she wanted only to tell her husband the real secrets beneath the secrets she brought home from the market, she didn’t know how to explain so he would understand.
And after all the years had passed, after Romeo’s feathers had gone lusterless and dusty gray, even after he hardly toddled out of his cage to her hand, she would reach to his perch and pet his face to say good night, Romeo purring to her in the voices of her children, in the sighs and coughs of her husband, in the familiar squawk of the kitchen door being opened and closed, her own voice coming out of his dry beak, the crow whispering her back to herself, Yes, pretty bird.
And she would smile and whisper to him, Yes.
And they would try to soothe each other, saying, Yes, yes, yes, yes.
When she’d first taken ill, the children came home with their spouses and children, but soon they begged off and returned to jobs in cities scattered far away. Their presence only served to remind the old man of their absence, and he thought it funny none of them had wondered about Romeo, the bird practically a brother to the children. The old man thought he heard the crow return to the window in the tapping of a branch. He thought how sad and alone he was, none of their children becoming a friend to them, he and his wife passing their years with apprentices, with bridge ladies, with nothing in the end but work and Romeo and each other.
He didn’t do anything with this sadness—unless allowing it to wash over him was doing something—unless wandering through the woods with packets of seeds counted for something. He feared the crow dead and whistled up to the trees and looked for Romeo’s crushed bones and feathers among the ferns and the wood-roses, the woods holding quiet around him, the clouds in the sky through the leaves far above like the breaking surface of the sea. Again that swell of sadness and sympathy—for the birds, for his wife, for Romeo, for his friend the vintner, for all the sufferings of the little town, and for his own self, the old man with his hunched-over life of silver and chasing tools—and he could almost feel the weight of the crow landing on him, that unmistakable weight of Romeo standing on his arm, the bird light in the way that a bird is light yet solid, the old man singing night songs to the trees until his throat was red, the old man trying to call the crow home for her.
No Romeo came to him, and with his boots wet through from pushing aside the morning ferns, the old man started home, and a flash caught his eye, a baby’s bracelet. He brushed the dirt from it and hurried home all full of pride—the man sticky as pine pitch again with life—smiling to hold the little prize out to his wife. She would fly to him, he thought, her eyes all alight for him. But instead she screamed so fiercely that he thought she was in pain and dying all over again. She clutched at the bracelet, and he tried to cover her with blankets, tried to calm her, the man patting the blankets as if putting out a fire. What have you done with him? she cried, her face tight and scoured-looking. What have you done? Where is he? Where is Romeo?
Her voice so hard, her words so angry, the realization falling on him like a mallet, and the old man stuttered that he didn’t do anything to him, didn’t touch the bird, didn’t even see him anywhere. The old man tried saying how, in the w
oods, by chance, he’d found the bracelet under a fern, with other ferns. He pointed to the toes of his boots, as if offering more proof, and took mushrooms from his coat pockets and cupped them in his hand to show her. He held out a tiny pinecone from his breast pocket, the man desperate as a crow to quiet and comfort her.
She looked at his feet, the brown boots dark with wet, and she lay back heavily and brought the gold metal to her face, touched it to her lips, touched it to her tongue, and tried to catch that humid smell of Romeo on the bracelet. She didn’t look to her husband, even when he sat down beside her on the bed and took her hand, and toward his weight she tipped slightly and poured out even more of her life’s confession to him, told of the thief, the locket, the jewelry maker’s glasses.
The old man would go to his grave wondering what more he could have asked for: his wife recovered, their world spared, spring upon them. And yet, as the days passed, he found himself unable to be roused from bed, unable to venture far from the house, and many mornings he would lie in bed, staring at the window, his mind flitting in and out of dreams and memories, the difference between the two no longer important for him.
What’s more, the old woman had become well with a vengeance. Her appetites restored and habits renewed, she went out each day and bounced as she stepped down the sidewalk into town. The old man watched her go, her white hair shining in the sun. And he watched, and kept watching, the empty street. A little breeze came in the window, and the curtains rose up and bowed down slow before him. And when the old man stepped outside into the light, he thought diamond necklaces hung on the wet grass. Or had the house windows shattered? Or could the dew be stars in the lawn?
The Architect of Flowers Page 10