Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  But Lemuel, his bearing offended and erect, had shaken his head, harrumphed like a man who has failed to impress some obtuse student and so packs up his compass and calipers, his tools and instruments of exact science, and gives up. “You’re going to have rats, Connie,” he said. “That’s where romance will get you with pigeons. Nothing but rats.”

  But these two birds, rock doves, had already successfully raised a dozen or more broods, proof of the utilitarian virtue of love, generations ensuing from a spark. Conrad, who had witnessed their original mating ritual early one spring morning several years before, had been charmed by them: the male bird had put on an impressive performance, strutting and pacing around the female, his greenish purple crop swelling. The female, her eyes at half-mast, had opened her beak for the male to dip his own into hers—kissing, Rose had called it. And afterward Conrad had been touched by the birds’ fastidious attention to each other, their joint efforts to feed the young peepers after birth. He referred to them as Pasquale and Evita, Rose’s suggestions, after her fondness for a couple who operated a truck garden near the highway and who each summer produced mountains of chili peppers, their fantastically spirited flavors somehow disguised by their colors, disarmingly innocent, like boiled sweets. The pigeons’ original names, though marked carefully in Conrad’s ledger, had long since been lost to him.

  “Well, well, Pasquale,” he said now, looking in on the bird. “Congratulations.”

  Evita stood at the corner of the coop, bobbing her head against the wire mesh. Conrad reached inside and raised the door. She waited hardly a moment before taking off into the air, as if her cramped condition on the nest had made her itchy, restless to get away. Pasquale opened one eye to watch his mate leave, and then closed it again.

  “Oh, it’s hard work, I know,” Conrad said, wiping the floor of the coop with a rag, scrubbing at a stain.

  Stepping back outside the loft, Conrad walked slowly to the bench on the grass. The purple heads of late summer clover floated at his feet. Evita flew around high in the sky with the dipping flight characteristic of pouters, her wings held breathlessly wide. Conrad sighed, leaned back against the bench, and closed his eyes.

  And then it occurred to him that the eggs, which hadn’t been there a day or so ago, must have been conceived not long after Rose’s death. He tried to count back, twenty days, twenty-one, but found he couldn’t; he didn’t even know what day it was. The time seemed lost to him, as though he had slept through it. And then he had to squeeze his eyes shut against the realization that the two things were so closely related—these baby peepers, now circling and circling inside the soft, damp orb of their eggs, and Rose’s death.

  He had been inattentive to the birds over Rose’s last days. He remembered that much. At night, with the hospice volunteer seated on the slipper chair by Rose’s bed, inclined toward the whispering voice, Conrad had left to hurry down to the loft, taking deep draughts of air as he descended the steps down toward the stony smell of the river. He had filled the pigeons’ pans with grain and then rushed back up to the house, not bothering to sweep out the mess that had accumulated in the coops.

  In their shadowy bedroom, Rose had lain in bed, her seed and flower catalogs spread out over the quilt. Her voice had been a whisper, but night after night that last week she had made him sit beside her, paper and pencil at his knee, and take down all the names of the things she wished ordered and planted after her death.

  “These anemones,” she said. “These lilies, ‘Enchantment’”—her finger grazed the page—“for by the front fence. To the left of the beech. Don’t plant them too deep. Little bleach mark on the foliage. No deeper.” She tapped at the paper. “These daffodils. One hundred. For the lower terrace, by the loft. Aconitum, larkspur. You know. Fifty. Always needed blue in the border by the kitchen. Glows in the dark. Pretty.”

  It was, he had begun to realize, an endless list. He could have sat there for days, and she would never have run out of things she wished done, wished to do, her garden endlessly in need of dividing, rearranging, pruning, sifting; she liked that the garden often surprised her, surprised them both, some flowers migrating of their own accord to spots more suitable for them.

  Once, stopping, dropping the pencil on the carpet by the bed, where it fell soundlessly, he had just watched Rose, her voice droning on quietly, whispering flower names. “Montbretia. Nice. Pretty beside the white lupines. Upper terrace. Might have to overwinter in the basement, though.”

  She was talking, he realized, as though she was just going away on a short trip.

  “Conrad,” she said at last, breathless, glancing over at him. “You’re not taking it down.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He stared at her, but she looked away, picked up where she had left off, her finger trailing over the pages. He retrieved the pencil from the floor but did not write.

  Rose looked sidelong at him, then closed her eyes. “Conrad,” she said. “Please.”

  “You want to work me to death?” he said, trying to laugh, but his voice cracked. “Is that it?”

  And she had wept then, that soundless weeping that seemed to belong to her last days, the terrible pause between each breath, so long that Conrad sometimes held his own, waiting and willing her chest to rise convulsively again. The tears spilled out from under her eyelashes, their sparse fringe.

  “I just—” she said, “I just want you to have something to do.”

  And Conrad had stopped at that, had looked over the slight rise under the blankets that was Rose’s wasting body. To do? he thought. And suddenly the prospect of life without her beside him became horrifyingly real, as if he had been so concentrated on her illness, on fending off her pain, that he had forgotten what came next, what came afterward. He saw himself surrounded by a dizzying array of bulbs, corms, roots, tubers, and plants, vines growing over his feet, thorny tendrils creeping around his ankles, Rose’s instructions swirling in his mind, the spade heavy in his hand.

  EVITA HAD DISAPPEARED into the milky sky. Conrad gazed up the hillside at his garden, its tumbling, frothing mass of leaf and blossom. It seemed to sway there, a cataract of green falling from the sky itself, a voluptuary draped in silken vines and flowers. He could not see the house at all, obscured behind this rising cloud bank of green. Rose had never gone anywhere in the garden without her clippers; she was always pinching things back, ripping out woody undergrowth, pruning the shrubs and trees. But without her attentions, the garden seemed to be subduing the earth itself, wild creepers running over the paths, burrs and brambles over taking Rose’s clean squares of grass. Trumpet vines crawled up the trunks of the dwarf pear trees; purple thistles sprouted in the wildflower meadow. Conrad felt, looking up at it, that the garden was moving toward him, engulfing him. Not burying him exactly, but winding him all around in a cocoon of fragrant green, the arms of vines coiling up his legs and trunk, laying little leaf hands over his mouth, silencing him. A fog rose—columns of vapor, the wavering architecture of air. Thunderheads gathered in the sky.

  A man could lose himself here, Conrad thought, and realized it was true. He could enter the overgrown bowers of his garden and never appear again, hemmed in by thorns and vines, impeded by an army of flowers, an ocean of green. At any moment he could take one step from which there would be no turning back. He could be lost, even in his own place.

  Five

  THE DAY AFTER Rose died, Henrietta Ellis came to the door early in the morning, knocked, and let herself in without waiting for Conrad to answer.

  Behind her in single file were the other members of the Pleiades. A brood of rock doves, they were dressed alike in suits of varying shades of pale gray, their hair degrees of white tending to blue. Each bore in her hands a twinkly, foil-covered platter. These women had been Rose’s closest friends.

  Conrad had been standing in the kitchen, holding on to the sink and looking out the window after having forced himself to drink a glass of milk. He had been trying, in the face of the t
errible constriction that had seized his lungs after Rose’s body was borne away, to draw a deep breath. He did not seem able to breathe properly. The sensation frightened him, and he wanted to tell someone, report it, but could not think whom to call.

  Henri, tall as a ship, sailed up behind him, turned him to face her, and enfolded him in a wordless embrace. Then she pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. Each of the Pleiades came in their turn, put their casseroles and cakes upon the counter, and held Conrad close for a moment. They all smelled the same to him, of powder and lotion and something dusty—a moth wing. Their cheeks were soft, their hands gentle and trembling. The little jet buttons on their suit jackets, carved with tiny anchors or fleur-de-lis, pressed into his chest. The short stiff bangs of black netting that jutted over their hats tickled his nose. Conrad allowed them to hold him. Sighing, he drew a deep breath at last and leaned into them, into their familiar female smell and fluttering hands.

  Henri pulled out the remaining chair for Conrad, patted it, and set her enormous pocketbook on the table. Conrad sat down and looked around him. He realized he looked filthy, sleepless. A derelict. He would have broken Rose’s heart, looking like that. He saw Nora Johnson glance at her friends and then stand up to fill the kettle. “Tea,” she said firmly.

  Conrad made as if to rise, thinking to be helpful, but she put a soft, dry little palm on his shoulder. “I know where the cups are,” she said. “I know it as well as in my own house.”

  “I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten, either,” Henri said, looking up from a paper that she had withdrawn from her pocketbook.

  “Toast then,” Nora said. “And some of Rose’s apricot jam.”

  Conrad looked up at her, saw her face wither and fall and then, with effort, right itself. She smiled at him. “Nothing but the best,” she said, but her mouth wobbled, and tears slipped over her eyes and down her cheeks. Conrad felt his own jaw start to tremble. Nora turned away.

  “Conrad,” Henri said after a second, leaning forward and laying a hand on his arm. She sat back then and took off her hat, extracting the pins and laying them side by side on the table. She patted her hair, took a breath. “Conrad, you know we wouldn’t intrude, but I think it’s fair to say that Rose would wish us—to help you. With the arrangements. You just tell us if there’s anything special you want, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

  She reached for her pocketbook, extracted her glasses, and shook out the sheet of lilac paper before her. “We did have some—ideas,” she said, looking out at Conrad from over her glasses. “Rose did.”

  Conrad looked at her. “We never talked about it,” he said after a minute.

  There was a silence at the table. Conrad looked down at his hands and then up at the ring of faces around him. He realized that they already knew that. That Rose had, in her final conversations with her friends, told them everything they needed to know, understanding that Conrad was incapable both of talking about her death beforehand and of executing anything afterward. What had she wanted? Flowers? Music?

  What did he want? What was fitting? What would ever be fitting enough?

  And then, as if in a contraction of time, he saw Rose on their wedding day, up on the roof of her parents’ brownstone, Lemuel’s pigeons loosened to the skies as Conrad bent Rose back to kiss her, her spine the stem of a flower in his hands, the birds flying up and away, streamers of white.

  “I’d like to bring the pigeons,” he said abruptly, looking around at the Pleiades. “I’d like to send the birds up.”

  There was another silence. Mignon French, a transplanted Southerner, round and gentle as a fantail pigeon herself, who was always given the role of the victim in the Pleiades’ performances, leaned over the table and touched Conrad’s arm. Her nails were pink, like little shells. “What a lovely notion—” she started to say.

  But Henri interrupted her. “At what point—” she said, looking down through her glasses at the paper in her hand, “at what point would that be done?”

  “At the end, of course,” Nora said, putting a plate of toast and a glass jar of apricot jam down in front of Conrad. She handed him a napkin. “Eat,” she said, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She waved her hand in the air with a vague motion. “It would be at the very end.”

  Henri took a fountain pen from her pocketbook, wrote something in slow, tiny script at the bottom of the paper. “Very well,” she said. She screwed the top back on her pen, set it down carefully beside her, looked at none of them in particular. “At the end.”

  Nora sat down again beside Conrad, folded her hands in her lap. After a minute she leaned over, put her head against his shoulder. On his other side, Grace Cobbs leaned in, too, the blue sheen of their twin permanents glowing against Conrad’s white shirt. They both must have been at the hairdresser’s already that morning, Conrad thought, sniffing, the two women’s heads resting lightly against his arms; they smelled the same, like setting lotion. Across from him, Adele Simms and Helen Osborne and Mignon stretched out their hands for Conrad’s, and Henri, too, put hers across the patchwork of laced fingers, so that for one blessed moment, as Conrad sat there, he could feel nothing but the clasp of familiar flesh, the singular sensation of being touched by a multitude of hands, that infinitely reassuring embrace by a constellation of Rose’s dearest friends.

  “‘So part we sadly in this troublous world, To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.’” Henri looked up as she spoke. She was clear-eyed and strong and held Conrad’s eyes in her own.

  “Queen Margaret,” Nora said, lifting her head, smiling. “Wasn’t Rose a marvelous Margaret?”

  AND SO CONRAD had brought the pigeons, keeping them in their cages in the back of his pickup truck until toward the end of the graveside service at the cemetery. He stood surrounded by the Pleiades, a dark pool of mourners casting a shadow over the tender spring grass. Escorted to the graveside, Conrad searched the crowd. He could not understand, briefly, why he did not see Rose when so much else seemed familiar.

  And then, during the readings offered by each of the Pleiades, who wore a uniform shade of blue black and had feathers—the quills of blue jays and the brown spears of hawks’ tails—in their hats, their lapels bursting with clusters of Rose’s favorite anemone, the exquisite white ‘Honorine Jobert’, Conrad had simply wandered away from the gathering at the graveside.

  The Pleiades had watched him go, but Henri was reading, and none of them liked to interrupt her. Conrad just walked away; he had no particular relation to this ceremony. He was just a spectator. He glanced up once at the sky, a solemn and perfect blue, and reached to loosen the knot of his tie at his neck. He felt light headed, almost disembodied, as though his hands were not attached to his wrists. He took off his suit coat, laid it on the front seat of the truck.

  In the cages he’d assembled twenty of his whitest pigeons, the fantails and the ice pigeons, the Silesian croppers and the white kings, the frillbacks and the Antwerp smerles. Trying to rid his head of the cottony sensation of dullness, he slid the cages around noisily on the bed of the pickup until they were all facing the open tailgate, and then he bent over to look in at his birds. Something like sand shifted inside his head when he leaned over. But he put his finger to the cage that held Pearl. She held his eye a moment; the world, contained in her black iris, was reduced to a wavering parallelogram. And then, as Henri closed her book and Father Mortimer stepped forward to begin the prayers, Conrad opened the cages.

  The pigeons flew out in a shuddering of wings, taking off toward the light, toward the high, etherizing reaches of the sky, just as the Pleiades stepped forward to link hands and bow their silver heads over the dark mouth of the grave. The birds circled up and away, aiming at some invisible passage.

  All but one.

  Pearl, her wings held wide in a stately attitude, drifted just above Conrad’s head, caught in a perfect updraft. Conrad craned back painfully, put his hands up—did she want to come back to him? But as he did so, he felt a capful of wind
strike him gently around the head, cuffing his ears. And then he heard it, a sudden, low whine, as a long, dark current of warm air leaned in across the cemetery from over the mountains. The air smelled of faraway places, of sandbars and the ocean, a foreign scent laden with spice, the smell of places Conrad knew he’d never been and would never go. He turned to face it, saw the trees turn in the powerful gust, the canopy over the grave flap. Nosegays laid to rest here and there at the heads of the departed came loose, ran across the grass, bright spots of false color. Gyres of tiny new leaves circled and spun. The hats on the heads of the Pleiades tore loose, blew away; those gathered at the graveside clutched at their lapels, at one another, afraid they would be torn apart forever and yet exhilarated, too, by the sensation of abandon the wind created in their hearts.

  Conrad staggered in the sweeping, salty respirations of the wind but managed to stand his ground, his white shirt flapping. He saw his pigeons scatter as if they had been shaken from a tablecloth, their primary and secondary feathers spread wide. They were trying to find a grasp on the slippery air, the fields of their feathers separating against the fierce draft, their bodies vertical for a moment before they were blown back and away. He saw Pearl above him, braced impossibly against the wind. He put up his arms again to catch her back, show her where he was. But as he did so, he felt himself leave the ground for an instant, not flight nor falling but an instant of perfect weightlessness, as if the wind were testing its grip on him, too, testing gravity’s strength, testing the intention in Conrad’s heart. It was only an instant, and yet in that moment a wondrous relief came over him.

  And as he held there in an inhalation of indecision, his shirt filling with the wind’s powerful breath, he saw a young woman he did not immediately recognize step away from the edge of the huddled collection of mourners, their dark coats shiny as crows’ oily feathers. She was small and thin, dressed in a drab overcoat; her narrow wrists emerged from the cuffs, fragile and stiff. Her light-colored hair was so pale it was nearly white. Delicate strands whipped across her face. All around her blew a brilliant confetti of leaves torn loose, the shorn red foliage of the Japanese maples and the crimped, green paper fans of the ginkgoes, the purple leaves of the copper beech and the notched feathers of the honey locust, pale and buttery.