Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  And he had led them all up to the roof, Adele Sparks drawing a shawl around her shoulders, Rose wrapped in a corner of that shawl as if for that last time she could be safely contained within her mother’s arms. Lemuel fired one champagne cork after another into the sky over the lights of Brooklyn, the pigeons setting up a rustling and warbling alarm in their loft.

  Afterward, in the kitchen again, Rose had leaned toward Conrad and kissed his cheek. “I’m going to take a bath,” she’d said, and slipped from the room. Lemuel refilled his own glass and Conrad’s and then canted back in his chair. His wife came to stand behind him, her hands upon her husband’s shoulders, smiling at Conrad.

  “We’re very happy,” she said to him. She bent quickly and kissed the top of Lemuel’s head, his thick hair, already growing white. “Lemuel and I met as children as well, you know,” she said. “There’s something perfect about it, isn’t there?”

  Conrad had felt at a loss for words, though by then he knew the Sparkses well—they had watched him graduate from high school and, on the strength of his excellent average, win an engineering scholarship to Cornell. They had included him in their own family, almost as if he were a son, since that first winter he had looked after Lemuel’s birds. But he knew that there was something they had never talked about, despite their easy acceptance of his and Rose’s relations. Tonight he felt he wanted to ask about it, about the spells that Rose sometimes drifted into. Months would go by, sometimes a year or more, and she would show no sign of ever returning to that state that Conrad came to associate with the saddest music—the fugues Lemuel played sometimes on the organ in the Sparkses’ front parlor, shaking his head—or, more often, with silence, in which Conrad would sit miserably in the kitchen, Adele offering finally to make him comfortable on the settee in the parlor for the night. But then it would happen again, and by now he had learned to recognize the look of it, how her appetite would wane and her face acquire a dull, secretive look. Within a few days, she would have vanished entirely, locking herself in her room, sometimes for days at a stretch, her door closed to everybody except, sometimes, her mother, and less often, Lemuel.

  After Lemuel’s visits to Rose’s room, after he had stormed down the stairs and out of the house, there would be the sound of crashing furniture and glass coming from Rose’s room. Conrad, sitting in the kitchen, would wince at each report. John and James would roll their eyes at the ceiling, and Adele would move quietly about the kitchen, white around the lips. Because they never told him what happened then, because Rose herself would not speak of it afterward, pressing a finger to his lips, or kissing his mouth to quiet his careful questions when she finally emerged, looking thin but with bright spots of color in her cheeks, he had never been able to ask. He would be so happy it was over that he would not press her, though he sensed that there had been more spells than he’d had opportunity to witness. But now, having taken the formal step to make Rose his wife, he felt he deserved to know. What happens to her? he wanted to ask. She won’t tell me. I’m afraid of what it is.

  Now he looked at Lemuel and Adele, their beaming faces, and felt speechless. Lemuel cleared his throat, set his glass down on the table, and leaned forward to take Conrad’s hand between his own. “Still mad at me?” he said.

  Conrad looked back at him, surprised. “For what?”

  “Poaching your pigeons!” Lemuel said, laughing, and he reached into his breast pocket and retrieved an envelope. “You know what I have in here?”

  Conrad shook his head.

  “Look.” Lemuel put the envelope on the table between them, patted it, and pushed it toward Conrad. Conrad reached for it slowly and opened the envelope, tearing the paper. He unfolded the sheet inside, a certificate for one hundred shares of stock in a railroad company, the paper edged in gold.

  “What’s this?” he said, looking from Lemuel to Adele and back to Lemuel.

  “Your gambling debt,” Lemuel said. And when Conrad looked confused, he continued, “From your pigeons! The ones I caught.”

  Conrad looked mystified. “But that was only a quarter a pop,” he said slowly.

  “Ah, yes,” said Lemuel. “But if you plant an apple seed, what happens to it?” He slapped the table with his fist. “I planted your losses, and look! A miracle! They grew into winnings! Not a fortune, I admit. But over a decade, with some intelligent and, here and there, adventurous investing, they have made a respectable journey into the land of profit.”

  Conrad stared at him.

  “Go on,” said Lemuel. “Take it, it’s yours. It’s a nest egg.” He smiled, satisfied. “It’ll get you and Rose started.”

  Conrad knew how happy it made Lemuel to make a gift of something, particularly if he could surprise someone, particularly if the gift was valuable but had been acquired without the usual costs. He was forever winning things in poker games—fur coats, which he would heap into Adele’s protesting arms, shares in a boat owned by the father of one of James’s classmates. Though his own parents had been poor, Lemuel believed in both his own cleverness and his luck, and his faith seemed to reward him continually with success. Lemuel found twenty-dollar bills where other people found nickels. But some things, he knew, take time. He’d never minded, for instance, staying up all night with an ailing pigeon in his arms.

  “How did you know?” Conrad asked him now. “How did you know I would still be here?”

  Lemuel looked up at his wife.

  “We just knew,” she said to Conrad, smiling. “We knew from the beginning. We’ve seen how you are together, how you feel about each other.”

  Conrad saw her eyes glistening. He looked down at the stock certificate in his hand. “I will be good to her,” he said. “As good as I can.”

  “Of course,” Adele said, nodding.

  “But—” Conrad stopped. “Can I ask you something? About Rose?” He looked at Lemuel, saw the older man’s eyes shift away from him. He turned instead to Adele, her sympathetic gaze. “When Rose gets—you know. When she locks herself in her room. What should I do?”

  It wasn’t what he meant to say, he thought. What he meant was, Why does she do that? What’s wrong with her?

  Adele sighed, pressing her hands to Lemuel’s shoulders as if to stay him. “Ever since Rose was a little girl,” she said carefully, “she has been troubled by—things her father and I do not understand. She has always been—sensitive.”

  Conrad glanced at Lemuel, could see his eyes riveting a hole in the tabletop, as if something that disgusted him had formed a stain there.

  “There’s no medical reason for it,” Adele continued. “We did investigate that once, many years ago. I thought there might be something that could—”

  “It does not give me pleasure to say this,” Lemuel said then, interrupting his wife savagely, “especially not tonight, but there is something in Rose that is cowardly. She’s beautiful, a beautiful girl. She’s talented. She’s had all the advantages in the world. And yet she wants to attach to herself all manner of miserable thoughts, wants to indulge in a morbid bloodletting. You can’t do anything about it. It’s high drama, all right. I thought it would go away as she grew up. But it didn’t.” He spat out the last words.

  “Lemuel and I don’t see it exactly the same way,” Adele said then softly, rubbing her hands on Lemuel’s shoulders. “He thinks she does it on purpose. He thinks she does it to—challenge him.” She shrugged lightly, looking at Conrad and tapping her heart. “Be careful,” she said. “It’s fragile.”

  Years later, at Adele Sparks’s funeral, Conrad would see Lemuel—so tall and strong, so assured—falter for the first time, his long stride down the aisle of the church staggering and then breaking as he came to his knees at the casket, his arms thrown wide over the polished wood. Lemuel had wept as if there were no one else present, though every pew was full.

  After Adele’s death, a death they had all felt acutely, Conrad knew Lemuel had never again approached Rose in her room when she retreated there, never again ber
ated her, as if his own taste of sorrow—could it have been his first?—had made him fearful. Instead, he had, alongside Conrad, simply waited anxiously for Rose to reappear, counting the hours or the days. And each time she did, he would cry the way he had cried at his wife’s funeral, understanding at last that grief is not accountable, that it lives wherever it chooses, and that the worst thing is this: after the first time, one always has the memory of it.

  That night, the night of his formal engagement to Rose, Conrad kissed Adele and Lemuel, the embrace with Lemuel one that cracked his spine, and climbed the stairs in the Sparkses’ house. He quietly opened the door to Rose’s room. It was completely dark—the interior of a heart, he thought. The heavy drapes at the windows closed out even the low gleam from the streetlights and the pale moon. His steps fell muffled on the carpet as he crossed to the bed, undressed quietly, and slipped under the sheets and quilts. Rose was naked, asleep, warm, her thin body and damp hair smelling of bath salts, lavender and chamomile. When he took her in his arms, she did not wake, and he lay there until he fell asleep, his hand over her rib cage, amazed each time it rose and fell under his hand. Lying awake next to someone sleeping, next to Rose sleeping, he thought, was the most frightening thing of all. Each time you close your eyes on that precious form, it might be the last. And each time, you do it anyway. You take that risk. You have no choice.

  ROSE AND LEMUEL had fought about the wedding, of course. Lemuel, a fallen Catholic and pronounced atheist—despite his career as a church architect—wanted it held in a cathedral. Not for sacramental reasons, he explained, but for the pomp: the choir, the swinging incense, the stained glass. “We pagans like a good party,” he said.

  Adele, who managed to be devout without tangling herself up in arguments with Lemuel, agreed with his choice. Through Lemuel’s work, he had many friends in New York’s religious hierarchy—friends who seemed completely prepared to overlook his beliefs, or lack of them, for the recompense of Lemuel’s intellect and high spirits and Adele’s generous supply of coffee and wine and good food.

  “Lemuel is the original prodigal son,” the parish priest told Conrad on one of his visits to the house to help plan the wedding. “He has spent his whole life in service to God’s house, all the while arguing that there is nobody home. Now would you trust a man like that when he says he doesn’t believe? Lemuel believes. He just doesn’t like to admit it.”

  But Rose wanted the wedding on the rooftop, and because she would not be swayed, that was where it took place, the priest sighing and crossing himself, knowing he owed Lemuel more than one favor. His stipulation was that there were to be no guests.

  “You want me to perform the holy sacrament on the roof of your house—all right,” he said to Lemuel. “But you can’t make me do it in front of my congregation. You want guests, they’ll have to come to the reception. Downstairs.”

  So Rose and Conrad were married on the roof, with the entire Sparks family, Conrad’s baffled parents, and the idiot monkey, a white lace ruff around his neck, looking on. And when Conrad leaned down to kiss Rose, who wore a white dress of her own making that reminded Conrad, when he saw her step out onto the rooftop at last, of the toga she had been swathed in the evening they met, Lemuel marched briskly to his loft and released his pigeons en masse, shooing them up into the sky with whirling arms. They rose into the blue, a cloud of virginal white, with Rose and Adele clapping, and James and John, conscripted by Lemuel, crashing their cymbals together. Surrounded by a storm of white feathers, Conrad had grabbed Rose, lifted her off the ground, and pulled her to him as if she, too, in her dress of shifting white, threatened to rise from the roof, float away like Chagall’s airborne bride. And she had held his face in her hands, rubbing her nose across his, and said, over and over, “My friend, my bird boy, my friend.”

  DRIVING TO HARRY’S in the early dawn, his pigeons behind him in their carrying crates in the bed of the truck, Conrad passed through the low, rock-strewn fields, ticking off the miles to Harry’s. He did not really see the landscape around him, though, for he was traveling in a different way back through his own memories: his afternoons with Rose on the rooftop with Lemuel’s pigeons, Rose kissing their beaks and passing them grain from between her own lips; their long walks hand in hand through Brooklyn and over the bridge to the city; their Sundays in the salty-smelling movie house, watching Gene Kelly dance, Rose’s head on his shoulder; their evenings at the Museum of Natural History, where they passed silently down the shadowy aisles between scenes from the beginning of time, frozen tundras and shade-soaked forests, a blue light surrounding the whale suspended from the black and invisible ceiling.

  He remembered Rose’s graduation from high school, when she had walked to the podium again and again for one academic prize after another, proud yet embarrassed, wearing another of her homemade dresses, dresses that always made her look faintly out of place.

  Conrad had seen then, though he had sensed it already, how she was set apart from her peers, how her strange intellect and unpredictable nature had distanced her from other people her age. Her closest friend was, like Rose herself, an oddity—a musical prodigy with thick glasses and a severe limp brought on by a childhood attack of polio.

  And yet Rose had guided him through so much, Conrad knew, from their hours in bed, where she arched to his tentative touch, to the abstract subjects of his college studies, which often felt impossible to him. She had shown him—her hands darting with a compass or slide rule—the dancing figures of geometry, their ballet, shapes twisting in air; made him see the beauty of it.

  As they grew older together, her spells, as he began to call them, came less often, though still he winced at the memory of them.

  Once, just two years after they were married, when the early heat and unrelenting blackflies of June had oppressed them both, he had seen one of Rose’s spells coming, had dogged her anxiously, hoping, perhaps, to ward it off by his own vigilance. “I am no good, no good,” Rose had said, furiously tearing up weeds in the garden; she had seemed somebody he did not know speaking then. “Look at me, Conrad,” she’d said, raking her fingers over her face, drawing down the skin below her eyes. “I’m a failure. I’m afraid of everything. My father knows it. And he hates me for it. Why don’t you?” And she had shut him out of their bedroom.

  From behind the closed door he had heard the sound of drawers being yanked open, of Rose muttering to herself, angry. And Conrad had himself been angry then. Sitting on the floor outside the door, he had called in to her. “What are you doing, Rose?” His tone, he knew, had been that of a parent—threatening, warning a child about to misstep. But she had not answered him, and when a silence finally fell in the room, he had assumed she was asleep.

  He had gone then to his workshop on the lowest level of the loft, where he had been working for some months on developing the anode-and-liquid-gold technique that would eventually make him his career as a gilder. Working quietly, his pigeons rustling above, trying to rid his head of Rose and what she might do, he had touched the anode to a pebble, flooding it with gold, and then, catching a feather from the floor, to one feather after another, webbing the barbules and barbicels of each exquisite construction until he held a nosegay in his hands, a fan of gold. It wasn’t perfect, not yet—the mixture was too slippery and failed to adhere properly—but he was pleased nonetheless. He had held it to the window, watched how it caught the light. Marveling, he wanted to make a gift of it. And so he returned to the house and climbed the stairs. But the door to their bedroom was open, and Rose was gone.

  Lemuel had called him that night. “She’s here,” he said, when Conrad answered the phone. “She’s all right. She’s been talking with Adele.”

  And Conrad had exploded then, cursing Rose. “God damn it,” he’d shouted. “What is the matter with her?”

  Lemuel had put down the phone; Conrad heard the sound of voices in the background, held the receiver with fingers clenched white.

  “Conrad?” Her voice on th
e phone was so small and faint that Conrad was transported for a moment back to his childhood, Rose’s childhood. He had seen Adele take Rose in her arms once, though she had been eleven or twelve at the time, and smooth her hair from her forehead, folding the child’s legs over her lap. Rose had wept about a schoolgirl cruelty, a ball thrown with a vengeance at her defending hands, knocking her to the floor of the gymnasium. In her voice now, so remote and tiny, he heard her tears; yet he also heard her laughter when, blindfolded, he had been led to the rooftop and presented, on his departure for college, with a quilt Rose had sewn. Suspended from Lemuel’s loft, its rich tapestry of velvet and silk had glowed in the sunlight, each square stitched with his name in gold thread.

  “What?” he whispered now into the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, whispering, too. And then, after a pause, “I have a present for you.”

  I don’t want a present, he thought, recoiling. I want you to come home. I want you not to have left me.

  “Conrad,” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.” And Conrad had reeled as though struck.

  “You are?” he managed at last. “You are?” Joy had flooded him; though following close behind it, so close that later he wondered whether he had experienced one of Rose’s spells of prescience, was something else. Fear. What was she doing in New York then? Why had she left?

  Rose had come home the next morning, disembarking from the train with a smile so blinding Conrad had felt his heart swell to unimaginable proportions within him. He reached for her small hand to help her alight from the train, felt her impossible fragility, her bravado, her intelligence, her soft heart. But twenty-four hours later, in a spill of blood, the child, not six weeks in Rose’s womb, had left her. And no others were ever to follow.

  WHEN CONRAD ARRIVED at Harry’s shortly after nine, the old man was waiting at his doorstep, scanning the sky. “Looks like a storm,” he called as Conrad parked the truck. “Forecast is nasty.”

  Conrad looked up. The sky was indeed darker, but a low light still lay beneath it. He didn’t think it would rain. Not yet.