Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  Though he loved his mother’s touch, Conrad fancied himself a daring flight guy. That’s what they called themselves, Conrad knew, those pigeon fanciers willing to take risks with their birds, willing to let them duel in the air. But Conrad was, in truth, cautious, even as a child. The only risk he took was stealing grain—a handful at a time, sifted into his pocket from the sagging bags on the floor of the Marion Street Pigeon Exchange. The stolen grain on his palm, he taught his pigeons to loft up into the late afternoon sky and then butterfly down for their meal. He would sit cross-legged on his fire escape, looking out over the low roofs and chimney pots of Brooklyn, the fading sun and black funeral wreaths of smoke hanging low over the city. And he imagined himself a magician, drawing doves from his hat, the ladies in the audience exclaiming at the beautiful sight, at his most marvelous gifts. Sending his pigeons wheeling up into the sky, he imagined he could make a lightning bolt spear from his fingertips, make the thunder crash with a clap of his hands. He thought he could darken the sun itself.

  And how he hated that man, that man stealing his birds.

  “Ad ultimo sangue, ad ultimo sangue,” Mr. Pittilio would say, backing off, laughing and waving his hands at Conrad’s furious assault as he rushed into the exchange after school, ignoring the men at the stoop smirking at him and drinking their coffee. “It’s a caution, Conrad! Remember! He could be stringing them up by the neck. I happen to know he’s taking good care of them. He pities you, poor boy.”

  At last, though, it was too much for Conrad. It was autumn. The high and gusty winds were playing roulette with his pigeons. Sitting on the fire escape after school one afternoon, he looked up and confused his few remaining pigeons with the falling leaves blown topsy-turvy over the rooftops and through the streets. The strange, indirect light of approaching weather gave everything a sad and sinister veneer. The world was lost to him that day, and he felt sentimental about his defeat. He knew he was a child, just eleven years old, and he knew he was being bested by a wiser and more experienced flight guy, a man who was enjoying the terrible game of bleeding him dry, one bird at a time. His nameless enemy had won his birds, fair and square. Conrad had paid him the money, a quarter for every one he’d lost—child’s wages. His enemy had Conrad’s pigeons and his money. Sooner or later, if he was a gentleman, he’d give the birds back. But meanwhile, Conrad had nothing.

  He had not a cent to his name that particular day. He kicked through the gutters for a penny or a glinting nickel, to no avail. He lifted his mother’s pocketbook from the hook in the hall, took it to the bathroom, and locked the door. He unfolded the faded bills from her little change purse but couldn’t bring himself to steal from her. He importuned Mrs. Findley, his neighbor, for an odd job, with no luck. And il nemico, his nameless enemy, had added another pigeon to his roost.

  “I want to meet him,” Conrad told Mr. Pittilio, banging his fist at last upon the counter at the Marion Street Pigeon Exchange, tears in his eyes. “I want to meet this man who is ruining me.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Pittilio, softening. “Such dramatic words for such a small boy.” And he came out from behind the counter to kneel in front of Conrad, cuff his shoulder, take his chin in his hand. “It’s only di buona guerra. It’s just a game,” he said gently.

  But Conrad burst into tears then, for all his birds now lost, for all the feed he’d held out hopefully in the palm of his hand for a pigeon who would never return, for all the ways in which he felt he would never grow up, never become a man, never take something for himself and fight to the death to keep it. Mr. Pittilio knelt, put his arms around the boy. Conrad smelled the cigar smoke in his hair, in his collar with its frayed edge. Conrad felt him tremble.

  “Come on,” Mr. Pittilio said, rising painfully, his knees cracking. “Can you be a little late for supper? It’s time we went to shake down Mr. Lemuel Sparks. It’s time he gave you your birds back.”

  Mr. Lemuel Sparks. That’s his name, Conrad thought as he wiped his hands across his face, across his pants. He combed his fingers through his hair, tucked in his shirt, sucked air into his cheeks. He trotted along beside Mr. Pittilio, who, after locking the door to the pigeon exchange, cocking his head at the birds, lit himself a cigar and clapped his hat on his head. He nodded good evening to the proprietors of stores they passed, men in aprons leaning in door frames with their arms crossed over their chest. Conrad imagined them whispering, laughing; he imagined they knew where he and Mr. Pittilio were headed, were relishing the scene they could see pictured in their mind: little one tilting at Goliath, little one come to beg his birds back. Mr. Lemuel Sparks. Conrad thought he could see him, looming from his rooftop among the chimney pots belching devil’s fire. He was afraid.

  Mr. Pittilio walked fast, like a tree blown over in the wind. Conrad hurried to keep up as they raced down one street after another, leaves blowing at their feet, thronging the gutters and toppling over one another in haste.

  “Ever seen a really big loft?” Mr. Pittilio asked, the cigar clenched between his teeth, smoke and his own words trailing behind him in an acid wind.

  “Just Mr. Polanski’s,” Conrad said, panting with his effort to keep up. “He took me up there once.”

  Mr. Pittilio laughed. “Well, get ready,” he said. “This one will take your breath away. It’s a whole Holy Roman city up there. Another world altogether.”

  At Modena Street Mr. Pittilio turned, and they walked to the last house. A huge barbed wire fence threaded with vines stood at the dead end before a scrub line of ailanthus and maple trees and the deep gully in which the train tracks ran. The house was a wide, four-story brownstone, with a short flight of concrete stairs leading to the second story. At the bottom of the pitted steps Mr. Pittilio paused, neatly clipped off the lit end of his cigar with the toe of his shoe, and folded the sodden remainder into a piece of stained newspaper, returning the whole mess to his pocket. He squinted up toward the roof.

  “Look up there,” he said, stepping backward and putting a hand to Conrad’s shoulder to draw him back. Conrad craned his neck and looked. On the roof behind a brick balustrade he could see the jagged roofline of a pigeon loft, its peaks and dormers jutting up into the purpling evening sky.

  “Listen,” Mr. Pittilio said.

  As they stood there, the sound of Lemuel’s pigeons became audible, a distant cooing. The sun was sinking directly behind the brownstone. Conrad squinted into the sun, wondering over the proportions of what he judged must have been an enormous loft, a veritable empire. And then the tall, dark silhouette of a man in a hat and jacket passed slowly into the sun’s glowing circle. Conrad looked up at Mr. Pittilio, who glanced down at Conrad and nodded. And then they heard the sound of the train, its warning whistle. The ground shook under their feet. And as its siren split the air, Conrad saw his enemy’s pigeons rise from the roof in a cloud of white, a twister rotating furiously into the mouth of the sky, a hurricane that unraveled at its spire and opened like a white flower, sparks shooting into the dark. And then they were gone.

  Mr. Pittilio craned back, nearly fell trying to follow the ascent of the birds. He gave a low whistle. “‘Their faces were all living flame;’” he intoned soberly; “‘their wings were gold; and for the rest—’” Mr. Pittilio shut his eyes, “‘—and for the rest, their white was so intense, no snow can match the white they showed.’” He looked down at Conrad and smiled. “Dante,” he said reverently. “The Paradiso. My father knew the whole thing. You know it?”

  “No,” Conrad said humbly, though he saw what Mr. Pittilio meant, the poetry of it all.

  “Here’s the rest,” Mr. Pittilio said. “‘When they climbed down into that flowering Rose, from rank to rank, they shared that peace and ardor which they had gained, with wings that fanned their sides.’” He paused, sighing.

  Conrad looked up at the sky. The pigeons were gone.

  “Come on,” Mr. Pittilio said, and knocked at the door.

  And that was Conrad’s first look at her. At Rose. She ope
ned the door, and for a moment Conrad thought he was seeing things. She looked to be his own age, but somehow older. Hers was a face he thought he’d seen in his art book at school—the same long nose and high, sad forehead he’d seen in that portrait, the perfectly shaped eye and pursed mouth. She was wearing, incongruously, a makeshift toga, with a headband of scarlet leaves threaded with ivy wreathing her long, yellow hair.

  “Yes?” she said, drawing out the syllable. And then she swept into a low, formal bow. “Enter,” she said.

  They stepped into the hall, and Mr. Pittilio stifled a chuckle. Conrad stole a glance at him.

  “Miss Rose Sparks,” Mr. Pittilio said. “This is Conrad Morrisey. Conrad, meet Rose, leading lady.”

  And Conrad was smitten. There, at that very moment, the reed-like Rose in a toga of sheets, the leaves askew upon her head, he fell in love. Yet it was not just desire, its first vague and alarming stirrings, that he felt. It was something else, too, some feeling of stewardship, as though from that point forward things would be more complicated than he could ever have imagined. From that point forward, he understood, poised between disbelief and faith, he would have some role to play in determining whether Rose had a happy life.

  When she died, so many years later, Conrad saw that her eyes remained open, staring just past his shoulder. As had been the case their whole lives, she saw something there that he could not see, saw the miraculous and the ordinary all mixed up together, some space populated by strangers in conversation, their heads close together, their words intimate and knowing. A moment before her death, as he’d held her hands, she’d said something, and he’d put his ear to her mouth, trying—and failing—to catch the whispered voice.

  But that evening so long ago, when they were both just children: Rose, the young Rose. She smiled at Conrad, and he thought he might faint, for the overpowering recognition was so strong he could practically reach out his hand and touch it, touch the shape of what stood between them.

  “I’m a priestess,” she said, as if that explained her ridiculous costume. “Hello, Mr. Pittilio.”

  “And where’s the high priest himself?” Mr. Pittilio asked, laughing.

  Rose stopped, struck a pose of infinite patience. “Up there,” she said, wagging a shoulder toward the ceiling. “Performing his errands of mercy. And now—” She began to drift archly down the hall, her arms floating, toward a lighted room at the end, from which came the aroma of supper being cooked. Suddenly she turned.

  “You’re the bird boy?” she asked.

  Conrad nodded.

  She smiled again, and a blush rose through her whole face. She drew nearer and peered at Conrad as if there were something under his skin that would explain his presence there. “He’s got a surprise for you,” she said, poking a finger at Conrad’s chest where his heart thudded. “Wait a minute.”

  She ran down the hall and disappeared, returning a moment later, followed by a tall woman wearing a pale pink duster and wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her face was Rose’s face, Conrad saw, matured into adulthood, but with the same classical shape. Her body carried the same long, tapered waist, the same swaying hips.

  “Frank,” she said warmly, extending her hand. “Lemuel’s up on the roof.” She turned to Conrad. “You’ll forgive him, won’t you? We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Conrad did not understand what she meant, nor their mutual tone of conspiracy, but he sensed there in that household an agreement that life was meant to be lived in search of miraculousness, in service to a human effort to contrive wonder and delight among the unforgiving surfaces of daily living. While his own household lived within the modest confines of a certain unavoidable drudgery, with a resolution to stand fast against occasional hunger, against certain disappointment, the parties of Mr. Lemuel Sparks’s household were trained on a different sort of existence, one in which the whole matter of being was an exercise in determined joyousness. It took only one evening, that first evening, for Conrad to know that he wanted, though it felt disloyal, to stay there forever, exploring the darkened rooms that opened off the hallway, tasting the supper laid upon the table. He wanted to be initiated into Mr. Lemuel Sparks’s fantastic world of wings and light up on the roof. As much as he was afraid of this man, he wanted to belong there.

  “I’m just finishing supper,” the woman said, and Conrad judged her at that moment to be Mrs. Sparks. “We’ll join you up there in a minute.” She smiled, glancing from one to the other. “Go on, go on up. He’ll be delighted.”

  Rose hopped on one foot, her toga slipping off her shoulder.

  “Get your coat, Rose,” her mother said, shooing Mr. Pittilio and Conrad with her hands toward the staircase, its heavy newel carved with a globe of the earth balanced in the arching tails of three fish.

  They climbed the stairs. Above them Conrad could see the doors of four rooms opening to a center hall, and within those rooms, an occasional fire burning against the chill of early fall, the tassled sleeve of a canopy over a bed, a slipper chair with articles of clothing strewn across it. At the first landing, two small boys a few years younger than Conrad lay on the floor, shooting marbles across a richly colored rug. A tattered toy lion mounted on wheels, its lead dangling, carried a rider in the form of a small monkey with a wizened face and clasped hands. The three—boys and monkey—looked up as Conrad and Mr. Pittilio passed. The boys smiled. “Gotcha,” said one.

  “Good evening, John, James,” Mr. Pittilio said. “Melchior,” he added, nodding to the monkey. And to Conrad, to his astonished gaze, he remarked, “Strange little creature, that one.” The boys waved, flicking their hair out of their eyes. Conrad stared at the monkey, who stared back with black, iridescent eyes.

  Conrad followed Mr. Pittilio up to the next landing, each step more and more crowded with teetering stacks of books, and then at last through a door on the top floor, which led to a narrow staircase.

  A cold wind filtered down through that stairwell. The stairs rose into a small glass house with a steeply pitched roof, more ornate than an ordinary street vestibule and opening to the sky instead of the sidewalk, its faceted glass obscuring the pearly light. Conrad breathed in the cool air, with its aftertaste of cinder and wood smoke, its underlying flavor of the East River, rushing darkly between its banks a few blocks away.

  When they stood in the glass house at last, Conrad looked out onto the roof, trying to see through the bevels. Everything was muted, softened. He seemed to be looking through a thick mist, the blue and purple shades of evening chalky behind the thick glass.

  “Ready?” Mr. Pittilio asked, standing aside, looking down at Conrad.

  Conrad nodded.

  “Close your eyes, then,” Mr. Pittilio said. And he placed his hands upon Conrad’s shoulders and turned him toward the door. Conrad felt the fresh air from the opened door, heard the sounds of the rooftop come into sudden, sharp focus. Mr. Pittilio steered him a few paces onto the roof. Conrad could feel the gravel beneath his shoes. He could feel someone looking at him.

  “Lemuel Sparks,” Mr. Pittilio said then. “Mr. Conrad Morrisey.” And he gave Conrad a push.

  CONRAD HAD MADE it his business in life to transform the ordinary object into something treasured, something beautiful. He was, though he came to it accidentally, a gilder, a person who layers the blemished surfaces of the world with gold, a veneer fragile and vulnerable as a decomposing leaf.

  Educated as an engineer, Conrad had made his home in northern New Hampshire, where his first job—blasting a tunnel through a mountain called the Sleeping Giant—had brought him. But early in his career, early enough to make an abrupt about-face, he had been fortunate to discover a method and formula for gilding that had placed him far and away above other craftsmen of the same pursuit.

  The magic of alchemy. It had started with their house, his and Rose’s house, which, with its gingerbread trim, called for embellishment, Rose had said, flinging her arms wide the first day they saw it. It called for gold, like Hansel and Grete
l’s sugar house in the wood. And so, experimenting during those first few years in their house, Conrad had stumbled across the technique that would eventually allow him to earn a living for the rest of his life.

  He could, through his craft, make time stop, or at least delay its passage. For though gold is a soft alloy in general, it is, he knew, a mighty metal in all other ways, the path of entire civilizations diverting to its source. And he had in his time gilded some strange things, things that made him wonder about their owners—the unembarrassed man with the collection of plaster phalluses, or the woman with her dead dog’s collar and tags. But there had been plenty of common objects, too—baby booties and golf balls. He had gilded capitol domes and church spires, weather vanes and the masts of boats. Sealing the plain old world in shimmering layers of gold, he had paused, from time to time, in satisfaction and amazement.

  And sometimes he thought that it was at that moment, that first moment on Lemuel Sparks’s roof, that he was given his calling.

  For when he first opened his eyes on that rooftop, Mr. Pittilio’s fingers trailing from his shoulder, it was to an assault of light: broad trapezoids and bars of it, the planes of space become mirrored surfaces, hard, reflective plates that caught and refracted light in a mighty sport. And so when he first saw Lemuel Sparks and raised his arm to shield his eyes from the light, it was because he meant to protect himself. He could not be equal to the gift Lemuel was about to make.

  He had known then, though he knew it more now, that this was an extraordinary moment in his life. Now, considering the angel in his garden, he thought that perhaps he had been too aware of the plain and humble matter of the world, the imperfect form that lay beneath the gold veneer. After all, he thought, if you flood something with gold, with light, perhaps it really is different. It isn’t anymore the dull, humble thing it once was. It is transformed, something sacred, something beautiful.