Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  And that was why, now, he had chosen to believe that his angel was in fact what it said it was: not a hallucination, not a grieving man’s worshipful vision, but a miracle. Conrad had never been a man who expected more in the face of life’s abundance. He had expected less, expected that what was good and satisfying would last a lucky moment and then drain away like water vanishing down a whirlpool. It wasn’t that he was unappreciative or morose. But low expectations were reasonable, he thought. Rose might have saved herself some pain, he’d always felt, if she’d just expected less. It’s wanting too much, he used to think, that leads a man to disappointment.

  But now Conrad felt he had no expectations left, small or large. His life had become, in the breathtaking instant between Rose’s life and death, in the terrible privilege of staying on behind her, a scale in which all things weighed equally, or weighed nothing at all, a solemn time in which he was simply waiting. So though he suspected that he might have failed in the past to appreciate the nature of what Rose would have called grace, or Lemuel, magic, he was willing, now, to believe. He had stepped, he decided, whether accidentally or not, into the path of a miracle.

  SO HE STOOD there that autumn evening on Mr. Lemuel Sparks’s roof, the setting sun firing up that miniature world in the sky. The tin chimney baffles, the many-angled copper roof of Lemuel’s pigeon loft, the carpet of glinting stone beneath his feet—all of it was aflame in the sun’s final frenzy of illumination, that last moment of day’s light. Lemuel stood before Conrad, his hat in his hands, his hair blowing over his eyes. “Mr. Pittilio,” he said, “you have an extraordinary sense of timing.”

  “My young friend,” he said, turning to Conrad, “I have a surprise for you.”

  Mr. Pittilio sat down on a battered wooden folding chair, withdrew his cigar from his pocket, relit the crushed end of it, and inhaled deeply, squinting. Lemuel turned and strode toward his loft, the hundred or so birds there stepping lightly back and forth at their gates. He motioned for Conrad to follow him to the far end, to a larger enclosure where a dozen homers, Conrad’s homers, jostled together.

  “Here are your birds,” he said. “I’ve kept them together. They fly well together now. The problem, of course, is that now they unfortunately believe this is their home.” He frowned, as if a solution to this problem had so far escaped him. He moved to the door and regarded the pigeons. They did not feel to Conrad as though they belonged to him anymore.

  “It isn’t your fault I was able to capture them so easily,” Lemuel said then gently, turning to Conrad and taking in his crestfallen face. “The first one was an accident, after all. Frank identified your band for me, told me of your circumstances. I didn’t understand at first, but after some thought I realized what a gift I had here, we have here. So I continued taking them, just to see if I could. And now it all seems clear.” He smiled broadly, delighted. “We have been brought together in a most auspicious way. I hope you will accept my offer.”

  Conrad tried to think. All he could understand of Lemuel’s words, however, was that Lemuel intended to keep Conrad’s birds on his own roof. Conrad could not imagine how this was to his own benefit in any way. But at that moment, Rose stepped out onto the roof under a Chinese parasol. She wore a coat over the toga, its white hem trailing beneath the coat like a nightgown.

  “Did the bird boy say yes?” she asked her father, coming to stand beside him and looking at Conrad’s birds, now Lemuel’s birds.

  “Well, the bird boy, as you call him”—Lemuel turned to smile at Rose—“has not said anything yet.” He replaced his hat on his head. “Perhaps I need to be plain, my friend, Mr. Conrad Bird Boy Morrisey. What I am proposing here is a quid pro quo. A fire escape and an uneven diet is no way to train a flock. I, on the other hand, have plenty of space and can provide an excellent diet. What I lack is sufficient time. My work now requires me to leave the country for some time, and there is no one to look after my birds. A boy like yourself has time in immoderate quantities.” He smiled indulgently. “If you’ll agree to help maintain my loft in my absence—this absence and others to come—I will lease to you, in exchange, sufficient roost space for as many birds as you can buy or breed yourself.” He waited a moment, then continued. “I’ll throw grain into the bargain, just to tempt you.”

  Conrad looked around and took in, for the first time, the extent of Lemuel’s creation. This loft was not the patched and cobbled affair of so many Brooklyn pigeon lofts, constructed from odds and ends, bits and pieces, salvaged lengths of chicken wire and boards hammered together. Lemuel’s loft was the work of a master architect, which Lemuel indeed was—a restorer of religious properties, in fact. The loft was a series of turrets perhaps ten feet high and capped in copper, each turret linked by a short hyphen. At a height of perhaps seven feet ran the landing board, to which each separate box had an entrance. The whole effect was a bit medieval, Conrad thought—like a walled city. And yet it was familiar in character, painted the same clean white of New England’s farm buildings, with their unornamented lines and breezy aspect. He had seen such things from the car window, when he and his parents would take a drive out beyond the city, the three of them sitting silently in the car, looking out over the calm and sunny landscape. And at the base of each turret of the loft, in hexagonal boxes, Lemuel had planted shrubs, their shapely spires fluting upward.

  Conrad imagined that seeing Lemuel’s loft from above, from a passing airplane, perhaps, or a dirigible, it would seem a chimera, something that bloomed in the mind’s eye as a fleeting vision, a trick of light, a small white town rising from the black and gaping spaces of the city, with its looming walls and shadowy crevices.

  “Oh, say yes, Conrad Morrisey,” Rose breathed in his ear, twirling her parasol.

  “Say yes!” Mr. Pittilio agreed, laughing, drawing on his cigar, wreathed in smoke.

  Conrad looked at Lemuel. At his brave confidence. And though something in him whispered then that it was not so easy as they imagined, could not be so effortlessly contrived, that something other than the simple contract they suggested awaited him up there on that rooftop, he understood that his choice had already been made.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “All right.” And then he laughed.

  Three

  NOLAN PEAK, EDITOR of the Laurel Aegis, his Adam’s apple juggling his bow tie, looked up at the battered tin ceiling in his office, looked down at Conrad’s wrinkled and splattered trousers. He was taking note, Conrad decided, standing there before Peak, his hat in his hand—of something. Of the troubling disarray of widowers, perhaps.

  But Conrad had always felt untidy around Peak, a result of the man’s own suspicious fastidiousness. A bachelor—in his early fifties now, Conrad guessed—Peak was encumbered with a terrifying mother. Bennett Peak, now folded over onto herself with crippling osteoporosis, could still be seen from time to time inching her way down Main Street toward her son’s office, an amphibian craning its short neck, preparing to berate Nolan for what she saw as his constitutional foolishness. Most people in town had seen her take Nolan apart publicly once or twice, and Conrad thought it excited in them a vague feeling of protectiveness—alongside their annoyance—over this beleaguered man.

  Bennett, who had run the paper herself for many years after her husband’s death, had made enemies of even the mildest of Laurel’s citizens, insulting them in her weekly editorials for crimes of mediocrity, sentimentality, triviality—anything that struck her as weak minded. She believed that the chief of police and at least one city council member at any given time were involved in some underhanded miscarriage of justice. It was no small irony, Conrad thought, that a woman who now endured a backbone twisted into a terrible question mark should have been so fixed on what she perceived as “spineless” behavior among her neighbors.

  But it was not Nolan’s way to court controversy. He was a me ticulous man, terrified of making an error. He believed secretly, Conrad suspected, that any public notice was an affront to individual privacy, that
the newspaper itself, ghosted over by his mother’s vengeful presence, was an invidious force, and that he needed to be careful indeed where he trained its feeble light. Consequently the Laurel Aegis was, under his guidance, the world’s dullest newspaper, weighted down with long columns of pointless and uninteresting information, bland and unappetizing recipes, the tedious minutes of various board and committee meetings, long strings of school sports scores, and police reports so scrupulously devoid of detail and fact—by the time Nolan was done with them—as to be almost uninterpretable and therefore strangely alarming. Rose, whose context for criminal behavior was New York City, enjoyed the police reports enormously. Rose’s favorite, which she mailed to Lemuel, had been an item that read, in its entirety, “Suspect discovered with evidence. Seized with difficulty.”

  “Makes it sound like a boa constrictor,” she’d said, cutting it out with her sewing scissors. “What sort of evidence do you suppose it was?”

  Conrad quite liked Nolan’s weekly column, though. There, a different man emerged than the thin and nattily attired Nolan, his wrist under his watch raw from eczema, his whole self reeking of some powerful antiseptic ointment. The writer of this column, called “From Peak’s Beak” and accompanied by a tiny, postage-stamp-sized photograph of Nolan in a Tyrolean hat, was instead a devout, gentle, and wonderfully observant chronicler of the area’s native birds, capable of a surprisingly lyrical bent. He kept track of annual migration patterns, published suet recipes and construction diagrams for bluebird nesting boxes, and shamelessly endorsed new bird-related products for sale at Supplee’s hardware store. And only in his column did Nolan voice an opinion that might be considered vaguely inflammatory. Once, he had taken the owner of Laurel’s seniors’ home sharply to task for forbidding tenants to install bird feeders, which were thought to encourage nests, a hindrance to the efficacy of the building’s gutters.

  “Imagine,” Nolan had implored, “a world without birds, their music silenced. Such a world might not be worth inhabiting.”

  Conrad, who felt sympathetic to this particular cause, had taken pains to ask Nolan about it when he saw him one day at Eddie’s, the local lunch spot on River Road. Nolan was sitting hunched over his meal, as usual, and Conrad had stopped at his table on his way out the door. “Peak,” he said. “Good column about those gutters. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing,” Nolan said, looking up, spoon in midair. And then he added ominously, “Yet.”

  Now, standing in Nolan’s office before the man himself, Conrad shifted uncomfortably on his feet and glanced around at the walls and the gallery of photographs hung there. There was Nolan, his hat tipped childishly to the back of his head, standing beside the colossal leg of an elephant, his hand tentatively on the great animal’s dusty, scabrous knee. That must have been taken at that circus that came to the fairgrounds one year; Conrad remembered that for an extra dollar, you could have your portrait taken with the elephant, or beside a clown who would pinch your cheek, or with your arm around the lady acrobat with the star-shaped spangles on her breasts. In the photograph, Nolan’s expression was faintly reverent, like a cleric on holiday in Athens, leaning against a wall of the Acropolis.

  In another picture, Nolan wielded an oversize pair of prop scissors, gesticulating with them toward the ribbon before the doors of the natatorium up on the hill. You could see two half-moons of dark stain beneath Nolan’s armpits. At the extreme edge of the gathering, which had been arranged in a semicircle for the photo, stood Bennett, all in black, with a faintly mocking expression on her face, her hands clenched on two metal crutches.

  There was also a picture of Nolan sitting obediently on Santa’s knee in the town bandstand, his legs thrust out before him, and another of Nolan in the uniform of the high school baseball team, surrounded by the team players, most of whom towered above him.

  There were plenty of photos, Conrad reflected, plenty of evidence that Nolan Peak had been in Laurel for a long time, doing his bit at charity affairs, serving in his role as one of the town’s few functionaries. But he looked so miserable in most of the pictures, Conrad thought—except for that one with the elephant.

  Conrad glanced down at Nolan’s desk. His eye fell on a tiny hour glass, its pale sand trickling downward in a needle-thin stream. He looked up, startled. Was his visit now being timed?

  All of a sudden, Conrad felt himself hugely annoyed. There was something about Nolan that made you want to lean over and shake the man by the shoulder, nudge him to sit upright, make him take a fresh look around.

  “He always looks as if he’s got an anvil on his back,” Conrad had told Rose once, after passing Nolan on the street one day. “I just wish he’d stand up straight, for God’s sake.”

  Rose, who had been in her greenhouse repotting her scented geraniums, had turned around to look at Conrad, lifting her eyebrows at him and suppressing a smile. “Is that right?” she said slowly.

  Conrad, who had been slouching against the soapstone sink, stared back at her. When she failed to turn away, looking at him with a funny expression as though she might laugh, he had grown uncomfortable. He straightened up suddenly, wiped his hand on his pants leg. “Well,” he said at last. He waved at her vaguely. “I’ll be with the birds.”

  After his retirement from the gilding business, Conrad had lunched more frequently at Eddie’s. Its stated name, on a sign above the door, was the Four Leaf Clover Cafe, but everyone knew it as Eddie’s. Eddie Vaughan, missing half a leg from a shrapnel injury in World War II, had returned from combat and taken his limping place at his wife’s side. After her death, he continued to man the small kitchen with no help whatsoever, and the quality of the food, which had been the stuff of legend in Kate’s time, seriously declined. The only things Eddie could prepare with any confidence were ice cream, turned the old-fashioned way in a hand crank on the back stoop, and soup, which appealed to his innate sense of frugality. Each day, Eddie posted on a board by the side of the road the day’s ice cream flavor and the soup, though after a while the soup was always posted as VEG BEEF, as its ingredients became less well defined, including in greater or lesser quantities some vegetables, some meat, and whatever else struck Eddie’s fancy.

  He had a regular group of devotees who took three meals a day there. Conrad liked the place, despite the food and the surroundings. The kitchen was grimy, and sitting at the counter, you could see into the back room, where a military cot with a rumple of blankets was pushed up next to the dishwasher with its comforting tumult of suds. Eddie concocted ice cream flavors that Rose said were the inspiration of a lunatic—pineapple, corn, and green onion—but Conrad had a secret taste for the black walnut, which Eddie served with a shot of rum.

  Sometimes Conrad took Rose along with him for lunch there. Eddie would always come out from behind the counter on these occasions, a soiled dishcloth folded over his arm. He would stop at their table, bow painfully from the waist, take Rose’s hand and bring it to his lips. “Give her anything she wants,” he would say to Conrad, staring at Rose’s face.

  Once, surprised at Eddie’s serious expression during this exchange, Conrad had waited until Eddie had left them before leaning over the table and saying to Rose, “He doesn’t just mean lunch. What does he mean?”

  Rose hadn’t looked up from her menu. “I think he’s just trying to show me his gratitude,” she said.

  “Gratitude? What for?”

  Rose sighed. Still without looking up, she said, “Conrad, I’ve told you. Their girl. The one who works out in the cemetery gardens now.”

  Conrad thought a moment. “The one who’s not quite right”—he knocked against his temple—“in the head. With a funny name.”

  “Hero,” said Rose, still looking at her menu. “From the myth, of Hero and Leander. It was Kate’s favorite name.”

  “That’s it.” Conrad looked down at his menu, too, but after a minute he raised his head and glanced at his wife again. “Why is he grateful to you?” he asked finally.

&nb
sp; Rose made a noise of impatience. “I help her in the gardens out there sometimes. I’ve told you that.” She hesitated, softened. “I feel sorry for her. Something about her—I don’t know—reminds me of myself when I was her age—”

  “Well, that’s good of you.” Conrad realized he’d interrupted her. But he remembered meeting this girl Hero now; it had been at one of Rose’s garden club meetings. Conrad had been carrying a tray of lemonade glasses down the hall when the bell had rung. He had turned—slowly, so as not to upset the tray—to answer the door, but Rose had come flying down the hall past him and admitted a young woman in an inappropriately formal lilac dress, with long gauzy panels like bats’ wings sewn into them; she had greeted Rose with a smile of immense shyness and beauty. But she was not what Conrad would have called a pretty girl. There was something too angular about her face, and her eyes and hair were strangely pale, he thought. She had the look—well, it was exactly the look of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, Conrad had thought at the time, startled by the realization that, as often as he’d heard the expression, he’d never actually seen anyone who fit the description quite as well as this girl. Hero had the look of something that has come to know the taste of its own wound.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Rose had said, looking into Hero’s face. She had taken her gently by the hand, stepping outside to the porch to draw her inside. They had passed down the hall together, Hero looking at the floor, a small smile still playing around her mouth. She had not looked at Conrad at all. But Rose, holding Hero gently by the arm, had glanced up at Conrad and given him a quick smile into which he thought he could read triumph.

  Later, helping Rose clear away the glasses and the tea things, he had listened to her babble on about the meeting.

  “And I was so pleased that Hero came,” she had exclaimed at last. “She didn’t say anything, just sat there with us, but I think she actually enjoyed it. She’s done the most amazing things with the cemetery gardens, Connie. You should see the white-and-silver garden she built by the fountain—white agapanthus and Michaelmas daisies, white honesty, white veronica—” Rose stopped, looked out over her own gardens. She and Conrad had just finished building the third terrace, and the first roses there, pink and richly yellow, were in bloom. “She has a strange feel for it, for knowing what will work,” Rose mused aloud. “I just wish I could get her to talk.”