Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  But the moment when he felt himself to have disappeared, and the unalterable descent of the coins, recalled to him another moment when he had hung above the world, terrified and uncertain.

  IT WAS THE largest, most ambitious gilding job Conrad had ever undertaken. Earlier that year he had gilded a set of enormous gates woven with prancing horses and wild sea froth and wheeling planets at a Du Pont estate in Pennsylvania; it was the first job on which he had tested his new technology: a carbon-core brush used to electronically deposit plating solutions—water-soluble mixtures of zinc, nickel, cadmium, lead, tin, and, of course, gold—on virtually any surface. His employer had been so pleased with Conrad’s meticulous results that he had recommended him for the bank job in Connecticut. After consulting with various engineers, Conrad had decided that the work was best done safely at ground level on thin shells, which could then be hoisted by helicopter and adhered to the original dome. And it would only take about thirty-eight ounces of gold.

  The day the shells were to be fitted in place, Conrad joined the contracting crew as they ascended through the building and swung in harnesses to the lip of the dome itself, where the men were to catch and steady the new pieces as they hovered above. Conrad himself was just along for the ride, as he put it.

  “I just want to see it all fall into place,” he explained as they attached the belt to him.

  But as Conrad and another man stepped to the trapeze and attached themselves to the safety cables, the harness at one end of the trapeze snapped, a noise like the report of a starter’s gun, hollow and pointless. Conrad clung to the cable, the breath itself shocked from him; his partner, suspended in his safety belt, dropped away and caught with a jerk, hanging against the edge of the building like a man pretending flight in a theater performance, strung up awkwardly on guylines.

  It was very quiet. Even the drone of the helicopters seemed to fade away in that moment. The sun, tilting toward noon, roared white and soundless above them. The city lay spread out below, its streets crawling with traffic. Conrad noticed, though he could not have said why, a woman in a lilac coat walking slowly around an empty fountain in the park, with an insect’s creeping pace.

  The dangling man hung perhaps twenty feet from Conrad. When the sound of the man’s weeping reached Conrad, he was surprised. The man’s grief sounded like a child’s, a fretful child shedding tears in some distant, private place where he did not expect to be discovered. Conrad looked down, caught his breath again, and noticed with a perverse clarity the action unfolding below, as the people gathered there became alerted to the men’s plight.

  They were rescued in short order, the other man hauled up and poured upon the floor, his bowels and stomach having released their contents. He could not be pried from the floor and made to stand. Conrad knelt beside him, the floor spinning under his knees, breathing hard, breathing in the stench. Afterward he had wanted only to get away, be alone, had excused himself with a vague wave and taken himself to the diner across the street from the bank, the bell jangling loudly above his head as he pushed open the door with a shaking hand. Seated in a booth, wedged into its corner, he had eaten and eaten—a roast beef sandwich with gravy and potatoes, and then another; two pieces of apple pie; and then a piece of Boston cream pie. He finally had to force himself to stop. He wiped his mouth shakily, then he reached for his wallet and, frightened, discovered it gone, as though everything that established him as a certain person had fled from him in that moment when he hung in the sky, as though he had been emptied, turned upside down and shaken, stripped of all possessions, identity, and substance.

  When he returned home two days later, the job having been completed without further incident, he let himself in through the front door. The radio in the kitchen was slightly mistuned, an unsettling static interrupting the voices. He felt a sudden alarm and called for Rose.

  But she was upstairs, seated at her dressing table, applying her makeup, the long blue bars of the afternoon light falling through the curtains and over the floor. Rose belonged to an amateur theater troupe, a group of seven women who called themselves the Pleiades. They performed publicly once a year, a charity event held in Conrad and Rose’s garden on the upper terrace, the tree branches hung with paper lanterns. But they met weekly for rehearsals, to sew their costumes, and to simply talk, these seven women who revolved around one another in perfect order, no need for a sun at their center. Their performances were, for their respective families and for the town itself, events of signal importance. Two Chinese screens from Rose’s childhood home in Brooklyn formed the wings of the stage, the women disrobing there between scenes, their white spreading backsides and heavy breasts briefly exposed to the chill as they shed gowns for togas, armor for pantaloons, hurriedly shaking their feet free of clothing. Rose always hired a band to play on the front steps—a tambourine player, a fiddler, two trumpeters, and a pianist, who sat down at the old black upright, which had been wheeled out to the porch. A cranberry goblet of champagne trembled on top of the piano; a bouquet of roses in a silver tumbler dropped petals on his hands.

  Sometimes before their weekly meeting Rose would sit at her dressing table, her hair brushed back from her face and caught in a net, and make up her face, just as an experiment. Conrad never failed to be startled by Rose in full costume, but the effect of her transformation into someone he did not know seemed even more complete when it was partial, just the woman herself, her dressing gown slipped to her shoulders, her bare feet hooked over the rung of her chair, her new face staring back at itself in the silvery mirror. This was how he came upon her that afternoon, her face flecked with green shadows, her mouth painted into a tiny bow.

  “Connie!” Rose spun in her seat, pleased, as Conrad entered the room. She turned her strange face to her husband. “You’re early!” She held out her arms. Conrad crossed the room, kissed her mouth delicately. He stood back and regarded her face.

  “Who are you?” he asked, taking a seat at the foot of the bed.

  “I thought maybe Lady Macbeth,” Rose said, turning back to the mirror. “The green is ominous, isn’t it?” She lifted one eyebrow with a finger, turned back to him. “I missed you,” she said. “It went all right?”

  Conrad looked at her through the gray cast of the mirror. He wished that she were not, at that moment, made up. He wanted to see her face as it was at night before they went to bed, freshly washed, a faint sheen of night cream glowing on her cheekbones, the satin ribbon of her nightgown tied in a loose bow.

  Rose stared at him when he failed to answer her. “What is it?”

  Conrad heard the alarm in her voice but could not think exactly what to tell her.

  “Rose,” he said finally, “I almost died.”

  “Oh, my dear!” She came and sat by him on the bed, her hand on his thigh, and listened quietly.

  When he finished, he raised his hands to her. “I couldn’t get enough to eat afterward,” he said helplessly. “I went to a diner and had lunch, a place nearby. And I’d lost my wallet somehow. I couldn’t even pay for it.”

  Rose put her arms around him. “It was a gift,” she said quietly at last. She caught his hands and held them to her cheek. “I’m so grateful.”

  A MOVEMENT ON the far side of the river recalled Conrad to where he was. He put his hands on the stone bulwark, felt its gritty surface. This close, the river smelled sour, and Conrad realized that he, too, reeked of neglect, abuse. He needed a hot shower, a haircut, a proper lunch with someone across the table for company. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any of those things. No wonder Peak had thrown him out. I need to make an effort, he thought. See someone I know.

  And suddenly the thought of the Smile Market, Lenore’s voluble presence behind the cash register, the delivery boy’s loose-lipped grin, made him hungry for company, for food. He had not eaten much lately. The last mysterious basket had been delivered to his front porch a week ago—a curry so spicy it had made his eyes water, rich with currants and almonds and c
rimped shavings of carrot. It had come with a wax paper packet of thin, crisp breads and a little tin of chocolate truffles. Conrad had eaten the truffles in the dark of the arbor that night, as if he couldn’t wait, couldn’t get enough; he’d eaten all of them in a single sitting, a pair of Rose’s shoes in his lap, one hand fitted inside, nestled against the sole. When he’d finished, he had set her shoes down on the soft floor of the arbor, pointed them toward the horizon, the mountains now framed by the broad palms of the grape leaves. He had sat in the twilight, watching the shoes, until a rabbit had crept from the underbrush, inched forward, and touched its nose to the empty toe of Rose’s shoe. Conrad had held his breath against the grief.

  WHEN HE STEPPED up to the cash register at the Smile Market, carrying eggs and a box of cinnamon rolls, a net bag of oranges under his arm, Lenore snapped open the cash drawer, sized him up, and said, “Well, you don’t look any different.”

  Conrad startled, imagined May Brown on the phone to Lenore, hooding her eyes, looking out her kitchen window through the small dangling parachutists of her spider plant. “Lenore?” she must have said. “It’s me. May. You’ll never guess. Conrad Morrisey saw an angel last night. He showed me the exact place.”

  Conrad looked at Lenore suspiciously. Just what, exactly, had May Brown told her?

  “Heard you had a visitation,” Lenore said, lowering her voice.

  Conrad nodded at her, mute. His appetite for telling his story had waned in the face of this other, more urgent appetite, forkful upon forkful. He saw, for a moment, Nolan’s dismissive expression, Toronto’s careful silence. And May Brown’s closed-up face, her eyes darting away. I should have kept it to myself, he thought.

  But Lenore continued, quietly. “My aunt saw them, too,” she said, packing Conrad’s eggs sideways in his bag. Conrad glanced at her face, was distracted by the bracelets on her arm, the charms dancing there, her freckled skin like a pigeon’s breast, mottled beneath the secondary feathers. One of the charms, a little pair of pewter shoes laced with a ribbon, held his eye.

  “Ever since she was a little girl,” Lenore went on. Conrad looked up at her. “Said she always saw them in the fig tree, talking and laughing and eating figs. They told her she would die painlessly and so she never had to worry. And she never did, after that.” Lenore took Conrad’s bills, smoothed them in her hands, turned them faceup. “And do you know what?”

  “What?” Conrad asked, leaning toward her.

  “She did die painlessly. Fell asleep at eighty-five years old in the waiting room, waiting on the dentist, and never woke up. Never had to have her tooth pulled, either.” Lenore handed him his bag.

  Conrad felt disappointed. He had thought Lenore would tell him something more persuasive, more—uplifting. Something about how the woman’s life had been changed.

  “What was it like?” Lenore asked. “May Brown said you showed her the place where it landed.”

  “It wasn’t like martians,” Conrad said, offended suddenly. “It didn’t land. He didn’t land.”

  “It was a he,” Lenore said, nodding, as though that confirmed it. “It always is.”

  “It is?”

  “Seems like it. My aunt’s always were. You know—” She paused to inspect her hands, her white fingers splayed, her many rings bunched nearly to her knuckles. “I used to go out to that tree sometimes, stand underneath the branches. I’d had a little brother who’d died. I used to stand there, thinking about him and missing him. I thought maybe the angels, my aunt’s angels would, you know, sense me there, and come down and give me some comfort. Show me my brother again.” She stopped and looked at Conrad. He was startled to see tears in her eyes. “He was just a little boy,” she said, staring at him as though she were seeing not Conrad but the child, a boy in a white nightgown sweating under a fan that revolved slowly in a darkened room, insects gathering thick at the window screen.

  “You’re lucky,” Lenore whispered. “Very lucky.” She straightened her back, looked hard at Conrad. “Rose would be happy,” she said.

  Just then, another customer stepped up behind Conrad, a young man with a ponytail, a bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses in his arms. Lenore glanced at him, smiled.

  “Have a good day,” she said then to Conrad. “And don’t be a stranger.”

  Four

  AT HOME, CONRAD tied Rose’s apron around his waist and fried himself three eggs, prodding them with a spatula and listening to the snap and spark of butter in the pan. He considered Lenore’s surprising confession, the image of angels in a fig tree, fitted in among the crooks of the branches, passing the soft fruit from hand to hand, their robes tucked up around their knees. Her story had seemed so unextraordinary, he thought—as though angels were perhaps always present, and it was all a question of looking up at the right moment and seeing them picking their teeth, spitting out skins.

  His eggs set, he put the plate on a tray, along with the box of cinnamon rolls and two oranges, and went outside to the garden. He pulled a chair over to the stone wall at the edge of the highest terrace and set the tray down. As he ate he looked out over the gardens. The perennial borders, which Rose had orchestrated for a long season of bloom, had seemed to pause earlier that summer at five feet. Now, though, they were heaving themselves upward, seven feet, eight in places, the lilies blown open, the hardy amaryllis strong as Doric columns, the heads of the alliums persevering into August, as enormous and round as moons.

  Everything that summer was, in fact, twice, three times its usual size. Though the season was sloping toward September, the garden still seemed to be horned everywhere with new buds, overlaid with yellow pollen, vines laying a multitude of tiny forked feet along the tree trunks and up over the eaves of the house, exploding into blossom. Conrad reached for an orange, held it in his hand. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he gazed around him. Even when Rose was alive, he thought, the garden had never seemed so lush. In a way, it seemed to be thriving because of his neglect. As he stood up now and looked down the hillside, he felt that he was witnessing an incantation, a strange magic in the milky sap that ran through the leaves, some advance work taking place in the very cells of the trees and flowers, their membranes swelling with bubbles of water, with sweet air, with lively anticipation.

  Swarms of bees, wide as the wingspans of planes, tilted back and forth in the indistinct light that fell from the overcast sky. Agitated flocks of birds disturbed the lindens, shaking loose fistfuls of leaves and clouds of the trees’ winged pellets, which spun to earth. The garden seemed to be burning with a green fire, with a spongy, condensing verdancy.

  Yet when he left the highest terrace and began descending the steps, a conjurer’s quiet fell over the grass. The crowds of flowers, blossoms that had multiplied that summer by tens and hundreds, slowly folded their petal hands over their bristling black eyes, a thousand averted gazes.

  Full of the hush of bewilderment, in grief over Rose’s death and his own inconceivable lingering on without her, Conrad walked across the soft grass. At his approach the swallows fell silent in the trees. His face was brushed by the thousands of tiny new leaves, pale as moonlight, that overran the paths. Pollen rained upon his shoulders, a shower of gold.

  Beneath his feet new shoots were coming up everywhere, even raising the flagstones of the terraces. He stood beneath the impossible hollyhocks, giants towering dreamily over his head. He reached toward the sunflowers, which wagged their heads high above him, wide and darkly yellow, crowded against the gray sky. He stood beside the treillage for the wisteria, tangled with explosions of curling vine, beryl green as Fourth of July Catherine wheels. The sky seemed to darken even further, as though the rain would begin at any moment, and the ground—the boiling, violent, joyful, terrifying ground of Rose’s garden—faded into dimness. The preposterous activity at his feet, new growth shouldering up through the dirt, green and yellow and white and furled tight, lost its clarity. The surface of the earth fell into shadow deep as a pool of water.

  Conra
d walked among the pear trees, his shirt unbuttoned now against a strange heat that had risen into his cheeks. His old man’s soft belly lay draped over his belt, a low breeze brushing the fine white hair there. He stepped carefully, laying his hands, which were mapped with an unfamiliar continent of age spots, on the golden fruits. This was to be an endless summer, he felt, pausing in the Concord grape arbor, the dusky fruits there grown so thick and heavy they rested on his head and shoulders like a dripping bishop’s wig. This was a summer that reached its high bright equinox and then, with a heroic thrust, drove on, drove up and over the tight white glass ceiling of the August sky.

  This was the most painful season of his life, he thought, coming to his knees in the fragrant beds, cupping the flowers in his hands. It was the most beautiful and the most painful. And it seemed that it would never end.

  BACK INSIDE THE house, Conrad surveyed the mess he had been living in, the litter of clothing, the pile of unwashed dishes. It was as if the garden itself, in its long, exhausting season of bloom, had issued an opiate that filtered into the rooms of the house, made him feel sluggish and drugged. Cleaning wasn’t his strong suit, but it hadn’t really been Rose’s either; she had liked a sense of industry about her. Conrad had thought it a trait inherited from Lemuel, who always seemed to be trailing things untidily from his pockets, paper scraps and lengths of twine. There was something faintly necromantic about Lemuel’s disorder—Rose’s, too. It was as if in their various experiments with plants or instruments they were always on the addictive brink of discovery. Lemuel had once invented an electrical contraption for altering the angle of the interior shutters’ slats so as to provide Rose’s night-blooming cereus with a perpetual, false darkness, day shortened to an arctic winter, brief and bright. Adele, though, had asked him to take it down after Melchior, the monkey, had become entangled in the pulleys and nearly hanged himself in the mechanism’s ropes.