by Carrie Brown
It still seemed impossible to him that just two days before she died he had helped her to the bath, folded her limbs into the warmth. She had looked up at him with grateful eyes, her white shape underwater shattered like something seen through wet glass, through ice.
“You want to come in?” she had asked, smiling at him, breathing hard, and reached out to touch his knee as he sat beside her. “Remember?”
And he had remembered, of course, the baths they had taken together at her parents’ house, the two of them locked together in the big, claw-footed tub, the ferns that hung at the window shaking dry bits of brown leaf to the floor, the stained glass transom over the door throwing colored light across the tiles. Rose had loved the bath, had filled the water with salts and powders, had soaped away at his back as he sat hunched awkwardly in front of her, scratching the stubble of his hairline at the back of his neck.
And sometimes, afterward, they had lain together on the thick rug, Rose so hot, furiously hot, Conrad’s shaking hands clamping her hips to his own. They would climb back in the water afterward, limp and giggling. Rose would lift one leg, hook it over the rim of the tub, inspect her foot. “Don’t you think a foot is a strange thing?” she’d say. And Conrad didn’t know how to tell her that he found her foot, all of her, impossibly beautiful, the high arch and knob of her heel, the neat toes, the pink flesh.
He had always felt that way about her—that something in her left him speechless, without the words for what he felt. He could see her even with his eyes closed. Even now he could still touch his tongue to the cleft of her collarbone, the shape of something designed to fly, could still feel the soft pillow of her thighs beneath him. That her body, that warm, lively body, had been veering infinitesimally toward this, toward this disappearance, troubled him. He worried that he had not been careful enough, not certain enough of what he had possessed.
He remembered seeing a play with her in Manhattan once, when the old male actor who played the lead had collapsed upon the stage. The audience had been confused for a moment, not knowing whether this was a true catastrophe or part of the performance. And so they had all sat there, sat for too long, waiting, their collective breath held, until the stage had exploded, the other actors shedding the skins of their roles, surrounding and then raising the fallen man in their arms, calling out to the audience, “Is there a doctor in the house? A doctor?” The curtains to the stage had jerked closed partway and then opened again, closing, opening, as if no one could decide whether this was the beginning or the end. And yet they had all been unsure, hadn’t they? Had wavered uncomfortably in their seats? What was this? Truth or fiction? Rose had gripped his arm, her hand over her mouth. And afterward he, too, had felt sickened. This failure to tell the difference between death and a pantomime of it—it cheapened them, made them all small and unworthy.
What is this place I am in? he wondered now, lying on the bed, looking into the dark. He reached out his hand; the sheet beside him was cold.
Rose had moved through the world as if riding a wave, watching her garden flower and die back, tearing up the ribbons of spent leaves and digging them back into the earth again, dust to dust. But he had been fighting simply to stand up in the current. He had been layering the world, each moment, with gold leaf, willing it to stay just as it was. The whole idea of the future, with its promise of eventual loss, had scared him too much. He turned his face to the pillow, curled his knees to his chest.
At last he slept again, the house creaking beneath him in the wind. It was the wind before a storm, a storm that would prove to be, in the end, as mighty as any since the great hurricane of nearly a half century before. His garden tore at its roots, the great trees groaning, the arbor keeling. In their loft his pigeons stepped restlessly side to side. And next door, May Brown moved from room to room like a somnambulist, empty eyed, polishing the surfaces of her tables with a white cloth that carried no trace of dust, her house ablaze against the night and the approaching rain.
CONRAD WAS WOKEN by a sound like a bird colliding with the windowpane—the newspaper’s dull thud against the porch floor. He sat up in bed, reached to the floor, and rummaged there for a pair of trousers. The wind outside seethed and moaned. Distant doors and shutters banged as if a family of strangers had moved in below, were busy taking occupation of his house.
He retrieved the paper from outside, carried it to the kitchen, set it on the table, and sat down. He turned the pages slowly, looked up once, and reached to the sugar bowl, extracting a lump of stale sugar, which he tucked into a corner of his mouth.
He began reading through the letters to the editor, blinking against the diminished vision in his left eye.
At first what he felt was a certain mild surprise, as the familiarity of the words began to wash over him. And then, realizing what was before him, he gave a snort of astonishment, pushed his chair back from the table a measure, and picked up the paper before him.
He couldn’t even for an instant imagine what had come over Nolan Peak to print his letter. But before he had time to consider what could have happened, the bell at his front door rang.
The Pleiades were gathered on his front porch, Henri in front with a copy of the paper folded under her arm, her hand clamped to her head to hold her hat, a brilliant yellow fedora, in place against the tug of the wind.
“We realize you said the afternoons,” she announced, “but we have a commitment at four, and besides, we wanted to talk to you right away.”
Conrad backed into his hall to let them in, felt them blow past him on a cool tide of air. He pushed the door closed.
“The dining room,” Henri said, ushering the other Pleiades past her.
Conrad followed them hurriedly, tried to sweep away the piles of papers and dishes on the table.
Henri looked at the disarray with a sigh. “Oh, Conrad,” she said. “We’ve failed you, I’m afraid.”
She took off her hat and, after brushing vaguely at the table’s surface with the back of her hand, set down the paper. “Never mind,” she said. “Rose wasn’t much of a housekeeper herself.” She adjusted her glasses and shook out the pages.
“Now,” she began, but before she could continue, Mignon French leaned impulsively over the table toward Conrad, her soft, creased hands clasped before her, and said in a breathless voice, “Was it just the most amazing thing you ever saw?”
Conrad opened his mouth, but Grace Cobbs jumped in. “Rose would have been so happy. I’m sure she is so happy, even right now. We’re just absolutely thrilled for you. We just know she’s—”
“Was it really Lemuel?”
“The old goat! I always knew he—”
“Why, it gives me chills, just—”
They were all talking at once. Conrad looked from side to side at them, the six women chattering away, laying their hands lightly on one another’s forearms. How did they manage to settle anything between themselves? He’d noticed, watching Rose and her friends over the years, that they all seemed to talk at the same time. But at last Henri’s clear voice reached him through all the others.
“You realize, don’t you,” she said, “that some people will think you’re crazy?”
Conrad turned to her.
“I saw Harrison Supplee this morning,” she went on, nodding, “and he said today marked a new low point in the history of the Aegis, a day when Nolan Peak would print such foolishness as this.”
“Oh, Harrison’s such an old stick,” said Mignon, pursing her lips in a tart fashion. “He could do with an angel himself. Shake up his stuffing a little.”
“In any case,” Henri said, “we just wanted you to know that we’re all for it.”
Conrad looked at her blankly. “All for what?” he said.
“Your proposal. The garden.” Henri looked at him over her glasses. “Rose’s garden.”
Conrad stared at her. He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re—I’m—”
“Well, Conrad! It’s all right here,” Henri said, and
she gave him a disapproving look, as though he were a schoolboy, baiting her. “Heavens,” she said. “You ought to know what you yourself have written.” And she pushed the paper over the table toward him.
Conrad patted his pockets for his glasses. They weren’t there, of course. Nora Johnson stood to survey the room and, after a second, spying them on the sideboard, handed them to him. “Here you are, dear,” she said.
“Thank you,” Conrad said distractedly. And then he started to read. His letter was just as he remembered it.
Except at the end there was a PS.
Whoever heard of a PS in a letter to the editor?
But there it was. “In light of this angel’s appearance in my garden, those wishing to honor his arrival and the memory of my wife, Rose Morrisey, may do so by donating plants, bulbs, and trees or the funds to purchase them to Mt. Olive Cemetery, care of Hero Vaughan.”
Conrad sat back in his chair.
“Conrad! What is it?” Mignon cried. “Get him a glass of water, girls. He looks faint.”
But Conrad waved his hand. “No,” he said. “No, I’m all right, it’s just—”
“What?” said the Pleiades all at once.
There was a momentary hush. “I didn’t write that,” he said at last, and looked up, his eyes traveling over their faces.
There was an appalled silence. “Not any of it?” Nora said at last. She looked shocked, near tears.
“No, no,” Conrad hurried to correct her. “The first part, about the angel—I wrote that. That’s all mine. That’s all true. But the—PS part. I’m afraid I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
There was a silence round the table. Helen Osborne put her hands flat on the shining wood, as if conducting a séance, and closed her eyes. “A mystery,” she said.
“How very—strange,” Henri said slowly. “Very strange.”
“You know, though,” Mignon said after a moment. “It’s still a good idea. We all felt that, didn’t we?” She looked at her friends. “It’s exactly what Rose would have wanted. She loved her gardens, and that poor, strange young woman adored her. We all know Rose would have loved the idea. That’s what we said.” She turned to Conrad. “I think, my dear,” she said seriously, “that you might just want to consider it an act of divine intervention.”
“Exactly,” Henri said. “Who cares where it came from? We don’t. Am I right?”
There was a chorus of agreement from the Pleiades.
“And in any case,” Henri said with a certain amount of evident relief, “that is what brought us here. We’d like to be the first to contribute.” She looked around. “We’d like to set in a rose garden,” she said, nodding. “All the ones Rose liked best. Some hybrid teas—we don’t mind having to fuss with them—and some floribundas. ‘Wendy Cussons’, and ‘Sutter’s Gold’, and ‘Silver Lining’, and—what was the other she liked?”
“‘Arthur Bell’,” Conrad said softly. He remembered that one because he’d given it to Rose for her fiftieth birthday, the year it was developed. A yellow rose with a powerful, sweet scent. He looked around at the Pleiades.
They rose together then, on cue but off center somehow, a familiar constellation missing a single star, lurching crookedly in the night sky.
He did not know what to say. He lifted his hands in a gesture of speechlessness and saw that they were shaking.
“Don’t,” Mignon said softly, reaching toward him. “Don’t say a thing. We know just how you feel.”
And for the first time since Rose’s death, Conrad believed it was true.
HE HARDLY HAD time to recover from the Pleiades’ visit, though, before the bell rang again.
It would ring all day as a procession of people—folded copies of the Aegis under their arms, which they would present like tickets—came to his door and asked to see the garden, see the place where the angel had stood. They paused on the paths between the beds, shifting back and forth on their feet, glancing at the sky, the wind snatching at their hats and hems, setting up a din in the trees.
Lenore Wyatt, with her daughter and infant granddaughter, came and held her hand a moment to Conrad’s cheek, the baby staring up at him with serious gray eyes. When Lenore’s hat, a cherry-colored beret, was blown from her head and sailed down the terraces toward the river, Lenore looked after it in surprise and then laughed.
Kenny Toronto’s wife, Stella, came, her hair in one gorgeously thick, long plait down her back, a white tennis hat on her head. She kissed Conrad on both cheeks. “I can’t stay,” she said. “The kids are in the car. But Kenny wanted me to tell you—we’re happy for you.” She smiled at him.
“Did Kenny—?” Conrad didn’t know exactly how to phrase the question.
“Oh, it wasn’t Kenny’s doing,” she said, laughing. “Only the devil and Betty Barteleme have any influence with Nolan.” She winked at him, kissing her fingertips as she turned to leave. “Come by and see us. We’ve got a bald eagle. Looks exactly like a mutual friend of ours.”
Mignon returned by herself in the early afternoon and held Conrad’s arm as he walked her down the steps to the garden. Of all the Pleiades, Conrad thought Rose and Mignon had been closest. They had an eagerness behind their good manners, an impetuousness easily aroused by pity or humor.
“I just wanted to come once by myself,” she confided. “Can’t hear myself think with the others sometimes, though you know I love them.”
Leaning against the gate, pulling her light coat around her, she shut her eyes briefly. “I miss her,” she whispered. And then, opening her eyes again, eyes so blue they always made Conrad think of babies, she looked at him and said, “I wish I could have been of more help to her—as much help as she was to me.”
She turned her head, looked down over the gardens. “You know, I told her once that they have pills for people who suffer the way she did. I tried to be lighthearted about it. You know, encouraging her. Perhaps that was wrong. But she just shook her head. She said she’d learned that it had a cycle, that she could tell it was coming and just had to wait it out. But it frightened her, didn’t it?”
Mignon looked seriously at Conrad. After a moment, when he said nothing, she went on. “I think she was afraid that one time she wouldn’t be able to last it out. That it would get the better of her. And do you know what she told me? ‘I’m not as bad as many, Mignon,’ she said. ‘I’ve learned that.’ We used to joke that maybe she could take up drinking in secret, like Henri. That might make it more bearable.”
Conrad opened his eyes wide. “Henri?” A drunk?
Mignon looked at him a moment, surprised, and then laughed. “Oh, we all pretend not to know,” she said. “She’d be mortified.” She reached to adjust the scarf over her hair. “You know, Rose always said you were wonderful about it.”
Conrad felt the hair at the back of his neck prickle.
But Mignon went on. “She said you just mostly pretended it didn’t exist. ‘That’s just about right,’ she told me. ‘I’ve got my community of fellow sufferers. I don’t want Conrad belonging to that club. He has to be the one I come home to.’”
Mignon smiled up at him. “So that’s all right then, isn’t it?” she said. “If you can’t go there with them, the best you can do is to be there when they get back.”
She reached over and touched his cheek. “We all suffer something, don’t we?” she said. “Some of us just go down harder than others.”
MIGNON’S HUSBAND, LOUIS, who came by with the car to fetch his wife after half an hour, had been decidedly unpleasant.
Conrad had escorted Mignon back up the hill and to the front door in time to see a car race past the house, a beer bottle flung to the lawn, a teenager’s trail of mocking laughter hovering over the plumed stink of exhaust. Louis, who had come around the car to open the door for Mignon, stared at the bottle, fallen harmlessly to the soft earth, and then frowned at Conrad. Conrad lifted his arm in a tentative wave, but Louis turned his head aside, taking his wife’s limp arm as she ca
me slowly down the path.
“Come on now,” he said to her, low and impatient. “Just get in the car.”
He glanced up at Conrad. “You’re working them up all over again, Morrisey. You’re getting the girls all worked up.” And then, after a heartbeat, he added, “Isn’t one funeral enough?”
Mignon stopped then, as she was getting into the car. “Louis,” she said reproachfully. “There’s no need of that.”
“Horseshit,” Louis said, hurrying around to the driver’s seat. “It’s just a lot of horseshit.”
But Conrad could see that he was embarrassed. Louis didn’t look up at Conrad as the car pulled away from the curb, though Mignon ducked her head toward him and gave him a little wave with her fingers.
CONRAD WAS AMAZED at the number of people who came through his garden that afternoon, the number who confessed their own angel sightings or, more often, the sightings of their parents or grandparents, as if it were a phenomenon that was dying out in the modern age, the times too crowded with earthly miracles, with events more transparent but equally strange.
One girl, a young woman he did not recognize, had stopped him. She drew an old photograph, wrapped carefully in tissue, from her purse. It was a portrait of a mature woman, in her forties perhaps, her black gown severe, her hair brushed into a high, tight knot atop her head, her lips barely parted in a smile.
“This was my great-grandmother Marianna. She was Russian,” the girl said to him, showing him the picture. Conrad nodded, smiled politely, but the girl went on. “She saw angels every day of her life. They kept her company wherever she went.” The girl took a deep breath. “The men angels wore bearskin coats, and their faces were so bright you could hardly look at them. And the lady angels, they wore dresses of braided golden rope.”
She shivered slightly as the wind picked up around them, blowing her hair across her face. “Isn’t that something?” she asked Conrad, who suddenly had to suppress the urge to reach out and brush the girl’s hair from her cheeks, away from her eyes.