Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  He saw her leaning into the wind, coming toward him, her eyes lifted in recognition; and at that moment he remembered her—the smile of pleasure she’d given Rose in the hallway, her foolish dress, the way Rose had slipped an arm round the girl’s waist, steered her into the sunlight at the back of the house, and shown her the view.

  When his toes touched ground again, he felt his muscles weaken like water. Pearl was beating her wings steadily against the gusts, holding her own above Conrad’s head. Conrad came to his knees, dazed and light headed. He saw that the mourners at the graveside were separating, the women tucked under the men’s arms, teetering backward. The tent was plucked from its tethers, flew off at a tilt. Conrad saw Henri stagger away, her blue gray permanent ruffled up oddly in the back; Mignon French raced past him, taking little running steps, tears streaming down her pink cheeks. Everyone seemed to be calling to him, trying to say something. Conrad raised his arms to the wind, feeling his shirt flatten over his chest like a sail. The sky was sharp and blue, filled with the invisible landscape of the wind as it carved out canyons and valleys, angles of ascent.

  And then, as if she could hold on no longer against the steady assault, Pearl veered off and away, a white speck disappearing over the bowl of the hill, toward the river and home. The cemetery was empty except for Conrad and—standing a respectful distance away, clutching the pliable body of a Lombardy poplar, which the wind bent toward the ground—a girl who understood that she’d seen a man caught for one impossible moment between heaven and earth.

  IF HE CLOSED his eyes, Conrad could remember the sensation of that moment of weightlessness, and also the sight of Pearl vanishing over his head, the intimation he’d had at that instant that he might never see her again. Now, taking a seat on the bench in front of his loft, he turned away from the view of his garden and looked out over the river toward the mountains instead. Evita had vanished into the dark clouds.

  He could not see the sun, though he could sense its hot, distant presence above him, obscured behind the wall of damp clouds; he judged that it must be nearly noon. Conrad felt observed, underfoot; fetching Pearl from the loft, he brought her back outside with him and sat down again, his hand curled protectively over the pigeon’s back. He gazed up at the sky. The clouds seemed to have closed solidly overhead, a wall of rock. For a moment he imagined Evita breaking through them, emerging into a light so fierce and joyful that it would burn the eye, replace the gift of ordinary sight with vision, the mundane with the miraculous. As a child he had believed that if his pigeons could talk, they would tell him the truth about heaven, for he was certain they saw it each time they rose up out of the gritty, particled air of New York, disappearing over the skyline. He believed that they saw the globe of the earth rotating smoothly ahead of them, saw their own dovecotes blinking on the surface of the planet like lighthouses at the dark edge of the sea.

  How did they do it? His birds’ ability to navigate home, no matter how far they’d flown, no matter how disorienting the weather, provoked an amazement in Conrad that had grown over the years rather than diminished. In the late 1800s, a famous pigeon, a black hen from Philadelphia named Dinah, had been clocked at faster than a mile per minute, and Conrad’s own racing homers had once flown one hundred seventy miles in just under three hours during a bad storm. This was an impressive time, Conrad knew, one that didn’t allow for much correction or dilly dallying. Rose had believed romantically that it was simply the pigeon’s love of home that brought it back each time. But Conrad, unwilling to settle for that explanation, had been more persuaded by recent experiments with infrasound. A researcher at Cornell had discovered that pigeons were able to detect sound energy at eight octaves below the limits of normal human hearing; this, more than any other explanation he had ever heard for the homing pigeon’s navigational abilities, made sense to Conrad. He could easily imagine that his birds lived in a universe ringing with a complex musical score unheard by human ears, a concert of the noise of movement itself, its massive displacements and adjustments like icebergs shouldering through the Arctic Ocean. It all seemed infinitely reasonable to him. It seemed, in fact, the only possible explanation for his pigeon’s miraculous ability to avoid becoming lost.

  Conrad stroked Pearl’s feathers and looked up into the threatening sky, hunting for Evita: the clouds rolled from side to side above him as though he stood on a tilting deck, and there was no sign of the bird. He reached up and put Pearl on his shoulder. Not many of his pigeons were as easy to handle as this one. Rose used to tease him that Pearl was a little bit in love with him; and it was true that she billed and cooed at his approach, that she settled into his hands like a domesticated cat when he stroked her. She liked riding on his shoulder, too, nibbling at his ear. Rose, watching Pearl trail after Conrad one day in the garden as he worked his way down the boxwood bushes with the clippers, had put her hands on her hips and said, laughing, “That bird’s not a homing pigeon; she’s a bloodhound. I believe she would find you if you were lost in Manhattan.”

  Conrad had put down the clippers, wiped his forehead, looked up, and put out a hand to Pearl, who fluttered down and landed on his forearm. “She just knows a good thing when she sees it,” he’d said, pursing his lips in a kiss to Pearl. “Don’t you?”

  Pearl rode easily now on his shoulder, an acrobat on the high wire, adjusting her balance to Conrad’s stride. “Come on,” he said to her, getting up from the bench.

  Inside the loft, Conrad sat down in the cracked-leather swivel chair at his desk and began riffling through the stacks of journals and papers there, Turvey’s Dictionary and Guide for Pigeon Racing, Levi’s The Pigeon, years’ worth of back issues of the American Pigeon Journal and British Homing World. And then, under a pile of newsletters from the Pigeon Fanciers of America, he saw Rose’s notebook, the one she had written over her last few weeks, a guide to the garden, intended to help Conrad remember what tasks needed to be done throughout the year.

  How had it made its way here, to his desk? He did not remember bringing it down to the loft. A man from the funeral home had found it under the sheets when Rose’s body was lifted to the gurney, and he had handed it to Conrad, standing mutely at the bedside. Had he carried the notebook here that night? He couldn’t remember. But, then, he didn’t remember much of anything from the last four months.

  Now though, shifting Pearl to his lap, he found his glasses in his pocket and fitted them to his nose. He cracked the spine of the notebook and bent it open. Rose’s handwriting sloped downhill, threatening to spill off the page. It was, he realized as he turned the pages, a monumental labor for one whose strength had been so uncertain at the end that even lifting a spoon to her mouth had seemed to exhaust her.

  It was all very predictable, though. He riffled through the pages and read her instructions—when to feed the fruit trees and how much; when to prune which roses; what needed to be dug up and brought to the basement to overwinter; what needed to be divided and moved.

  But then, tucked into the back of the book like an afterthought, on a loose sheet, Conrad discovered a recipe for something called rose beads. He put his finger to the lines, read slowly.

  “Put red or pink rose petals through the finest cutter of food grinder,” she had written. “Put chopped petals in rusty iron kettle (back porch) and cover with water. Simmer until petals adhere when pressed. Form into beads.” The recipe went on, arcane and complicated, more of Rose’s necromantic art. Conrad squinted at her script. “Dry in the sun, pierced on hat pins,” she had written, and in the margin, crookedly, she had added, “Hat pins in top right dresser drawer, under necklace box.”

  Conrad closed the book. Had she meant for him to do this? All this? Press a clove into each of the still-soft beads, as she had written, to form a puckered indentation like a flower? Thread the beads on black twine? What for?

  He put his hand over the notebook to momentarily silence the voice within it, the expectation. And yet he could hear it, Rose’s wandering tone, meditative
, considering: “Beads will retain the faint attar of roses.”

  He sat back in his chair and thought. Well, it was as good as anything else, wasn’t it? It was, as Rose had said, something to do.

  Rising from his desk, Pearl stepping lightly on his shoulder, Conrad climbed the stone steps up to the rose garden and filled his hat with petals, more than he could carry. They gave easily to his grasp, falling and scattering in a path at his feet as he walked between the beds. He heard music then, like wind chimes, tinkling notes. And in the kitchen he filled the kettle, the splashing water an echo of voices—his voice, Rose’s, their conversations back and forth among the rooms, up and down the stairs, calling and answering. He poured the petals into the kettle, lit the flame on the burner, stood by as the mass swirled into black.

  Dust to dust, he thought, pressing the mixture between his fingers when it had cooled. And finally, squinting, he pierced the beads on the hat pins, which were just where Rose had said they would be, laid them on a tea towel, and sat down on the terrace wall, staring, the clouds gathering overhead, gaining speed. Then, clumsily, the unfamiliar needle in his fingers, he laced each rosy bead, now dried hard as a cherry stone, onto a length of black thread. And at last he held the necklace in his hands. He brought it to his nose, sniffed, detected the faint smell of roses.

  He turned the necklace in his hands, marveling at Rose’s strange body of knowledge, the uncertain embodiment of her here now, out of sight yet close by. Where had she come across this recipe? He closed the lid of her sewing basket slowly over the flashing silver needles, the spools of colored thread, the tiny, velvet-covered cases of pins, her thimble with the grinning face of a monkey, the curling bias tape, and tiny scissors whose handles closed neatly over the blade, the wings of a stork. He thought then of Rose herself bent over the dining room table, her basket spilled beside her, the Singer whirring, her foot pumping the pedal, her furious pace.

  For several years she had sewn all the costumes for the Pleiades’ performances. Conrad remembered the women closeted in his dining room, the pocket doors pulled almost shut, Rose kneeling at her friends’ feet, her mouth full of pins. The sound of sporadic laughter came from the sunny room, glancing off the polished circle of the table, Adele’s silver service on the sideboard, the flowering sprays of Rose’s orchids nodding low on the radiator.

  One day, passing down the hall, Conrad had paused, glanced in through the crack of the doors. Mignon French, round and shapely, her hair combed into a thin knot on her head, stood in her brassiere and skirt, her arms outstretched. Rose knelt at her feet, her hands busy at the green velvet hem. Conrad had seen the white accordion folds of flesh at Mignon’s waist, the tumult of flesh contained in the brassiere, the wings of flesh beneath her arms—and the slim rounds of Rose’s calves as she knelt in her stocking feet on the rug, her toes curled, pulling the fabric taut, running it through her hands. The other women stood around the room in their underwear and skirts, shawls or sweaters draped over their soft, bare shoulders, holding up their costumes, exclaiming to one another, touching and caressing. He had seen Rose raise the hem of Mignon’s skirt, reach beneath it to tug the fabric, saw Mignon’s heavy thigh, the dimpled flesh, the heavy ankle, the lifted heel. And he had started guiltily when Henri Ellis, coming downstairs from the bedroom with her arms full of folded costumes, had stepped to the landing, the floorboards creaking beneath her weight.

  A long stare passed between them. And then Henri had brushed past him into the dining room, pulling the doors closed behind her.

  “Cover up, girls,” he heard her say. “There’s a Peeping Tom in the house.”

  Conrad heard shuffling, what sounded like laughter. And then Rose’s voice.

  “What do you mean?” He winced at the tone, aggrieved, alert.

  “Your husband,” Henri said, her voice muffled, “is standing in the hall, feasting his eyes on all these half-naked American beauties.” More giggles.

  “What do you mean?” Rose asked again. And now her voice was sharp, clear. Conrad drew back, moved down the hall, his heart in his throat. But in a moment, Rose had slipped through the doors, closing them with a whisper behind her.

  “Conrad,” she said, low.

  He turned, saw her strained face.

  “I was just—passing through,” he said.

  Rose said nothing. He saw her wind the fabric in her hands.

  “It was nothing, Rose,” he said, trying to keep his voice low.

  But after a second she had turned and gone back inside. Conrad fled out the back door.

  That afternoon, after the Pleiades had left, waving gaily as they walked down the front path, he had wandered the garden, moving in a desultory way from one task to another. He had been afraid to go back inside. Finally, as dusk began to fall, he had approached the house. It had been quiet except for the cuckoo clock ticking in the hall; long, dim shadows fell over the floors. At the kitchen sink he rinsed his hands of dirt, cleaned carefully and slowly beneath his fingernails with the tines of a fork.

  “Rose?”

  He spoke her name into the empty kitchen, the shadowy dining room with its litter of costumes, the sewing machine black and silent. He stood at the bottom of the stairs. Listened. No sound. He climbed quietly then, the treads creaking. The door to their bedroom was slightly ajar. He stepped to it, pushed it open.

  “Rose?”

  She was seated at her dressing table, the two lamps with their silk-tasseled shades lit, soft and yellow. She was undressed to the waist. Her hair, loose, was brushed over her shoulders. She wore a necklace of dull beads at her throat.

  “Rose?”

  He stepped into the room. She did not move, nor did she take her eyes from her own face, staring back at her in the mirror. He moved closer, stood reflected like a ghost in the dark glass. Rose’s eyes were black, the pupils large. Her shoulders and collarbone glowed white, sharp.

  “I’m very thin, aren’t I?” she asked quietly.

  “Thin, yes,” he said. “Not too thin, though.”

  Her hands floated up, cupped her tiny breasts for a moment, then dropped again to her lap.

  “If I’d had children, I wouldn’t be so thin.”

  Conrad, his heart clenching, touched her shoulders then, moved to stand square behind her.

  “I like you the way you are,” he said.

  He felt her shoulders lift, a sigh, saw the necklace at her throat rise and fall with the breath. She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “What time is it?”

  “I’m—I don’t know,” he said, and he felt then that everything was slipping away from him—some moment when he might have explained himself, might have prevented this, fixed it. She stood, moving away from his hands toward the door.

  He looked at the bed, her shirt tossed there. “Do you want your shirt?” he said.

  She turned to him briefly before walking out the door.

  “I think I’ll just stay like this,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”

  And in the kitchen she had made a salad, sliced the bread, turned fish in the pan, the harsh, penetrating scent of garlic making his eyes smart. She had said nothing, moving between table and stove, her bare back glowing, the beads of her spine shifting like the locked skeleton of a fish. When she sat at the table and pulled up her chair, he looked at her face, saw the tears there.

  “Rose,” he said, protesting. “Come on. Come on now. Put your shirt on.”

  “Isn’t this what you like?” she said, weeping openly now. And he had pushed back his chair roughly then, raised her in his arms, held her tight against him. How could it matter so much? But he kissed her forehead, her ear, the smooth fall of her hair, over and over, and as he felt the narrow rib cage relax between his hands, he thought how easily everything could be lost—how, in a single second, everything you were sure of could disappear when you weren’t looking.

  CONRAD RAISED HIS eyes from the necklace he held in his hands, s
aw Pearl flutter down from the terrace wall and hop along the ground, pecking at the thyme that grew between the flagstones. Following her with his gaze, Conrad saw that the thin fingers of a trumpet vine had crept over his boot while he had been sitting there stringing the beads, thinking. The miniature orange horn of its blossom, a speechless mouth, curled around his ankle. Delicately he shook his leg free.

  Pearl, advancing over the flagstones, vanished into the low fog that rolled gently toward them, and Conrad realized that the afternoon had slipped away while he had been making the rose beads. The silence of the garden rested heavily around him, though behind it he heard the occasional distinct click of an insect’s voice, as if occurring behind a curtain, or the sudden ruffle of leaves as a bird rose from the undergrowth in alarm. He looked out over the garden, which appeared and disappeared through the mist. The distant mountains were shrouded, invisible, but he could feel their heft leaning toward him, the paper-thin layers of compressed mica and settling shale. How different was this silence from the quiet years of his retirement, he thought, when he and Rose had worked in the garden together, tying and cutting, pruning and weeding, planting and mulching. They had sat together, resting, watching the monarchs drift over the borders. They had wiped the sweat from each other’s brow. He had felt sometimes, on those long, uninterrupted days, that they were the last people on earth, the last of their kind. He had wondered how different it might have been if they’d had children. And he thought now that one could feel triumphant as the last of two, a matched pair of animals entering the ark, or the mirror images of a butterfly’s wings, things that belonged together, that were not whole unless joined; but it was another thing entirely to be simply the last—to be the one left behind.