by Carrie Brown
“Your wife always had a bunch of those pink roses for Mother, who loved them so. She used to come and read sometimes to her, too, after Mother lost her eyes. Poetry. That’s what Mother liked.”
Betty clasped her hands before her stomach, as if it hurt her. “But you already know that,” she said. “You know all about that.”
But Conrad hadn’t known. Betty Barteleme’s mother? He didn’t think he’d ever seen her, ever even known her mother was here in Laurel. Or had Rose mentioned it to him, choosing something from the bookshelf to read to her before she went off, and he’d just forgotten? He shook his head. And the notion of Rose and Hero, wandering the cemetery together, like a mother and daughter.
He’d known Rose worked there sometimes. The Friends of Mt. Olive maintained an heirloom rose collection on the grounds; he remembered Rose corresponding with various growers about it from time to time. People used to send her canes through the mails, wrapped up in plastic bags. There was a whole group devoted to it, preserving the old varieties. He’d once said to her that he thought it sort of a waste, having it out there at the cemetery.
“Why not have it someplace where people can enjoy it?” he’d said.
And Rose, putting on her straw hat, ready to go, had stopped for a moment in the hall and thought.
“Who says no one enjoys it?” she’d said after a minute.
Like a mother and daughter. After that one miscarriage of Rose’s, early on, they hadn’t ever really talked about having children. That it might have been his fault, their lack of progeny—he’d hated the disappointment of that, imagining that he might have failed her in that essential way. And he never wanted her to feel that it was her fault, either. He had assumed that, like himself, she didn’t talk about it out of respect for his feelings. But perhaps it had always been there for her, he thought now. He had mostly forgotten about it, except for moments now and then when he found himself imagining what Rose’s child would have looked like, a replica of her, her childhood all over again, replayed for him like a favorite piece of music.
But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Hadn’t he thought, too, that they didn’t need a child? Hadn’t he thought there might be less of Rose for him if there were a baby, someone who could possess Rose in ways Conrad himself would never know? The sheer ugliness of that thought made him feel shrunken now, cut down.
In Hero, in that lost girl, what had Rose found?
Had he not known half of it? What had he missed?
He returned his eyes to Betty’s face and saw instead back into his life, to a bridge there that collapsed into rushing waters, no passage across.
“Well,” Betty said quietly after a minute, seeing his expression. “We always find out too late, don’t we?”
CONRAD BACKED AWAY, let her stand there, her head bowed. He closed the gate quietly behind him, walked carefully to his loft. A handful of his pigeons were there, waiting on the landing board in the chalky light of early dusk, looking at him. “I forgot all about you,” he said aloud, startled. How could he have done that?
He put the lost pigeon in one of the open roost compartments, where it could leave if it had a mind to, though he didn’t think it could fly very far—if at all now—with that wing. He moved to fetch grain, fed his own pigeons as they came in now, perhaps seeing him there below. They dropped one by one to the landing board after circling the roof. He began to shut them in, counting them in his head. “I’m sorry,” he said to them. “I’ve never done that before. Forgotten you.”
And then he realized finally, as he counted, who was missing—one missing. The archangel. He stopped, breathing hard. Where was the archangel? He stepped backward over the grass before the loft, scanned the sky, the dark clouds. Nothing.
Conrad waited a long time, standing in the growing cool of the early evening. Betty Barteleme vanished from his garden as though she, too, like Lemuel, like the angel, had been only a spirit. He waited awhile and then, fearful of climbing back up to the house as it grew dark, began to hurry up the hill.
The bird never appeared, never came home. Not that afternoon, nor that night, nor the next day, nor any day after that. There was a one-eyed jack now in Conrad’s roost, a pigeon that had become lost en route, had felt itself caught up and run off course by the sloping currents that crossed the country in a parabola of aching wind, and had fallen at last at Conrad’s feet, a survivor whose passage had cost him an eye and a wing, part of the precious instruments that steered him home. This survivor found himself in new country now but was already assimilating the telltale signs of this new place, the angle of the terra-cotta roof, the arm of the silver river curled around something precious, the precise geology of this changed world.
But the archangel was gone, and with him, Conrad’s last letter to his wife.
THERE WAS ONE lamp left on in the living room, a faint beacon that led Conrad up through the growing twilight, through the garden terraces to the house. He closed the French doors behind him, sighed at the mess, stooped wearily to pick up the litter of his picnic, still on the floor.
As he rose, the dishes in his hands, he caught sight of himself across the room in the gilt-framed oval mirror that hung there. The sight halted him; he did not know this apparition in the glass. And he realized at that moment that since Rose’s death he had created in himself a second presence, a corresponding figure that replaced him, accompanied him now like a shadow. Seeing himself for so many years in Rose’s eyes or at least in relation to her, he had never felt himself divided in this way. Now, though, he imagined that the self that had been married to Rose had been sealed off, silenced, with her death, though it lay harbored within him still like a mute or an amnesiac.
It was seeing himself like that, looming in the mirror, that stopped him, his eyes with that sunken, gaunt look, his white hair standing on end in wild tufts. This was who had replaced him. This—abnormality.
He put the dishes down on the desk, moved closer to the mirror, raised his hand to the glass. I don’t know you, he wanted to say to the stranger there. Who are you?
He put his hand over his bad eye, and realized that his depth perception was being affected more than he had thought by the condition, for the figure in the mirror failed to jump to the left, the usual result of his good eye’s adjustment to the deficit of the weak one. The image remained there, staring back at him; he wasn’t sure whether he would strike it if he swung at it, or merely strike thin air, the impossible boundary between them either inches deep, or miles.
Why did he call her name then? Why did he say it aloud—“Rose!”—with such urgency, as if he’d stepped to the edge of a cliff and, turning around to ask her to come forward and share the view, found her gone, missing, a tuft of grass where she had been, a sparrow hopping away.
“Rose!”
He called to her into the mirror, as if the silent self there would, hearing her name, awaken, restore him to himself, produce Rose as if leading someone forward onstage: See? Here she is. And it occurred to him then that this state, in which the parts of himself—past and present—could no longer be reconciled, was perhaps something like what Rose herself had experienced from time to time, this feeling that she was lost to herself.
It was grief that did it, he thought. It was grief that stole the soul, taped over its mouth, wound it in cotton batting, and locked it in a trunk. You had to be Houdini to escape it, running through the mazelike prison of your own injured mind like a trapped rat, aiming at the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel.
But he did not think it could be done. Whoever this stranger was, looking back at him, he seemed here to stay.
THE VIEWS FROM the road to the cemetery were lovely, especially at sunset, even on an evening when the sky was filled with clouds; a lingering glow lay across the humped shoulders of the mountains like the thin slice of light showing beneath a door. Conrad had not been to Mt. Olive since Rose’s funeral. Now, a mile or so from the gates, he pulled the truck over to the side of the road, got out,
and stood on the sandy shoulder by the stone wall.
After a minute he returned to the truck and took his binoculars from under the seat. When he raised them to his eyes and aimed down at the scene beneath him, he was immediately struck by the sensation of weightlessness that overcame him, as though his bearings, his place in the world, had become suddenly uncertain. Within the lenses a small view of Laurel emerged, partially eclipsed by trees and the sloping shoulders of the mountain beneath him. He thought, as he often did when considering the mountains, how once, despite its formidable heft, this whole region had boiled with geology’s terrifying capacity for conversion, perfect matter transformed into something airy and rippling, the schist melting into a flow like water itself, the entire face of the earth shaping itself into a new place. Sometimes, lying on the ground, watching the clouds’ slow and elephantine progress in the sky, he had tried to feel his way down to the core of the planet itself, its fierce and bitter center. The sensation had almost frightened him, as if some cord connected him to the center of the earth, a tug deep within his spine.
Now, moving the binoculars slowly over the view beneath him, he took in Laurel’s town square, the golden, Oriental roof of the bandstand glowing in the falling dusk. To the west he saw the black curls of roads climbing up toward the high point of town; a few roofs, small and square, lay like scraps of paper among the trees. The natatorium at the hill’s crest, built by Havelock Eddison, who had in his younger days swum competitively at college and believed still in the healthful regime of daily laps for all his neighbors, shone strangely, its glass roof flowing with pale green light.
He lowered the binoculars for a moment and stared. The view, contained within the overlapping arms of the mountain, reminded him at that moment of the snow globe that Rose had kept on her dresser. It was an inexpensive one, the kind sold all over New En gland to tourists who came for the fall foliage and the skiing. The glass bell jar contained a tiny scene, a village nestled in a bowl of miniature snowcapped mountains, the tiny windows of the houses iced with yellow, the roofs brown and black, unevenly painted. Minute fir trees, green and dusted with white, grew close by the houses. When you raised the toy and shook it, the scene was suddenly clouded in a swirl of false snowflakes, which would settle gently on the tiny town, burying it in white.
Rose, whose tastes were usually informed by Lemuel and Adele’s exquisite appreciation for the finer things in life, had had an inexplicable fondness for this snow globe.
“Look,” she had said, finding it in a store one afternoon while they were shopping. And she had shaken it, causing a mighty storm within the glass, the snow shifting like sand. Conrad had glanced over, unimpressed. But Rose had remained standing there, watching the mighty storm whirl within her cupped hands. She had bought it that afternoon, brought it home, and placed it on her dresser.
Once, Conrad had come into their empty bedroom and had been startled to find the snow falling gently, silently, from the globe’s glass ceiling. He had stopped, transfixed; and then Rose had opened the door from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her. She had smiled at him.
“What did you think?” she had said, laughing, reaching for the globe and shaking it again, raising the strange wind within it. “An immaculate snowstorm?”
But there was indeed something immaculate about this view, Conrad thought. In the sky above him the clouds formed their massive figures, hourglass shapes bending and twisting at the waist. He thought of his angel, of Lemuel’s wings fanning a wind that bowed the trees, flickered the lights, a door in the sky swinging open.
Nothing moved in the view beneath him. It was still and silent as the world within that snow globe, a paradise in which nothing had yet happened, no error had been committed.
He passed through the gates to the cemetery. The grass there was a vibrant green, the trees taller and more noble. In the sky the clouds had parted slightly in a crease, and the long rays of the setting sun fell across the hillside, through the leaves of the trees. Flowering vines curled over the mausoleums, buried them in blossoms, the white star shapes of the clematis, the orange horns of the trumpet vine. Blankets of dense green ivy lay draped at the feet of statuary, angels with their calm, upturned faces. Little lambs, their stone legs folded beneath them, lay shadowed among the late lilies.
Conrad drove along the main road between flower borders wild and exuberant with color—yellow and pink and smoky blue, pale orange like the translucent bodies of the carp in his reflecting pool. Purple martins crossed in the evening air on their bladelike wings.
Rose’s stone was set off by itself, just beyond the broad circle of shade thrown down by an old copper beech. He parked the truck by the side of the road, got out, and then could go no farther. He did not look directly at her stone, though he was aware of it, as if someone he knew had entered the room behind his back and was standing there, waiting for him to turn around. He looked out across the bowl of the hill, the varying markers set like prehistoric relics on the grass, some, substantial shelves of granite, others small and lime white, tilting and crumbling. In the urns and bowls set before the stones rested bunches of cut roses, masses of yellow lilies and black-eyed Susans, fistfuls of loose purple phlox.
He closed the door to the truck, stepped away from it. The grass was soft beneath his feet. A distance away, through the trees, he saw the yellow lights of the caretaker’s stone cottage. He began walking in that direction, passed into the darkness of a nearby grove of oaks.
He startled at the shrill baying of a dog, the sound veering toward him. From over the hill a small white terrier came, speeding across the grass, which was now almost black in the departing light. The screen door to the cottage swung open; Conrad heard it bang shut again and saw the girl step out into the last of the day’s light, her hair falling over her face. Conrad put out his hand, touched the rough bark of a tree, moved close to its wide trunk.
The dog drew near her, circled her legs twice at a mad run. Conrad saw her put out her hand, graze the air above the dog’s compact, leaping body. She walked out across the clipped lawn, which merged gradually with the unmown meadow. She stepped forward, parting the high grasses fringed with light. And then she stopped, her silhouette dark against the emptiness before her, the chasm that separated the cultivated acres of the cemetery’s lawns behind her from the steady rise of the mountains beyond, a torrent of blue.
And when she put her hands to her mouth, called out into the air, Conrad heard first her voice and then its echo, a volley of endless questions disappearing into the distance.
What had she said? Whom had she called?
Conrad stepped forward, away from the tree, strained to hear. She lifted her hands, called again, her voice resounding in the emptiness, the same note repeating like a skipping stone over the still air, no one there to answer. “Hello,” she called. Hello . . . hello . . . And then she dropped her head, as the last echo of her voice faded away.
BEFORE HE DROVE away, Conrad approached Rose’s stone, stood at a slight distance from it, attending to the absolute silence there. He looked around him at the soft folds of the darkened hills, the wavering lines of markers running down and away over the grass, disappearing. And then he stepped forward, meaning to touch his hand to the stone itself, a gesture he thought he could manage but found he could not. He stood there, staring at the inscription, just Rose’s name and her dates, rose sparks morrisey, 1915–1985. And then he noticed what he had not seen before: looped over a corner of the stone, dropped casually as if by a bird that had flown over the green grass, its tiny shadow skating rapidly over the graves, was a string of rose beads, its faint scent sweet and light and everlasting.
Eight
CONRAD RETURNED HOME from Mt. Olive and pulled Sleepy Hollow close to the French doors. He leaned forward, staring out into the darkness. He wondered if Lemuel would ever appear again. He rubbed his eyes, tried to fashion from the melting darkness the semblance of Rose herself moving toward him. Maybe the whole garden, the house cli
nging to it by a trailing root, would be lifted from its place on the ground, swung skyward like a floating island. He remembered Rose, her hands brimming with pebbles, clearing the ground for the first small plot they had tilled. “Lightening the soil,” she had said. She never visited the garden without filling the pockets of her apron with stones.
Despite his desire to be vigilant, he fell asleep at last. Hero’s voice lingered in his ears, a sound from a dream that one struggles to answer, fighting the paralysis of the body and the clamped jaw.
He woke sometime in the middle of the night, chilled and mournful. He sat upright and looked out the window. Next door, May Brown’s lights were ablaze, though it must have been two or three in the morning. Ever since her husband had died, peacefully in his sleep at her side a few years before, May had been afraid of the dark.
Conrad had come across Rose and May sitting in the garden one morning shortly after Paul’s death.
“I’m so afraid, Rose,” May had been saying, her hands gripped around a teacup, her back bent, her head dropped toward her lap. “I’m so afraid.”
Rose had leaned toward her friend, touched her gently on the shoulder. “Why not leave the lights on?” she suggested. “There’s no law says you have to turn the lights out, is there?”
And May had glanced up at her. “No,” she’d said. “No, I suppose there’s not.”
Conrad looked out at May’s bright windows a moment, then climbed the stairs and lay down on the bed. He wasn’t afraid of the dark. That wasn’t it. He remembered Rose’s body beside him, his arm draped over her hip, his hand under the pillow holding her wrist. They had always slept like that, even at the end, when her body had become so light, so insubstantial, that Conrad had been terrified to lie down beside her. She was disappearing, molecule by molecule, under his hands. One day, he imagined, he would wake and simply find her gone, the bed empty, a death so thorough that not a trace of her would be left.