That night I go out for a beer and meet up with a friend, a Brooklyn native and contractor. He tells me that in Brooklyn, as late as the 1950s, Italian and Irish Catholic families buried their dead in their yards if they were too poor to afford a grave site. The houses often had a room used only for wakes, a dead room, which are now used as the small bedroom in apartments shared by roommates. “You’re lucky it was just a cat,” my friend says, and he puts his beer down.
“It was just a cat, right?”
I think of the fangs staring up at me, and nod.
4
THE MORE I THINK ABOUT THE word “rosary,” the more I understand it must be related to “aviary,” “topiary,” and so on. When I check the definition, I see the first meaning is for the prayer and then, in italics, that it once meant “rose garden” in Middle English.
How did a word for a rose garden come to mean a prayer? “Bimbo,” for example, used to refer to a man. The French word rien, which means “nothing” now, in ancient French meant “something.” But the story of this word is not a journey from one meaning to its opposite.
“Rosary” was once a term for rose garden, until it was not.
The cultivation of the rose in gardens, as we know it now, was firmly established in Europe by Empress Josephine of France in the eighteenth century, and was further refined in the nineteenth century, until we arrived at the tea rose type we all know today from all of those Valentine’s bouquets. Rose tea is not derived from this rose, though, and predates it considerably. The rose’s flower is the blossom of the rose hip fruit, a relative of the blackberry and the raspberry, and is likewise edible. There are recipes for cooking with roses, using chicken or chocolate. Tea can be made from the fruit as well as from the petals, and rose tea is used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine to calm the drinker’s constitution. But it was never grown primarily for these uses.
The meaning of “rosary,” as we know it now, comes to us from the thirteenth century. As the story goes, Saint Dominic, greatly concerned for the future of the Roman Catholic Church in France, prayed at Notre-Dame in Prouille for guidance. At the time, the Albigensian dissidents were teaching an interesting heresy: that the body belonged to the devil, and the soul to God. So there was no need to worry about the body’s sins, as they belonged, with it, to the devil. The Albigensian heresy quickly spread, and thirteenth-century France was soon in moral turmoil.
When Dominic prayed to the Virgin Mary, she appeared to him and instructed him on what was first called the Angelic Psalter, and told him he was to use this weapon against the heresy. At the time, a rosary was only a rose garden, though in England, “rosary” was also the name for the equivalent of a penny.
The turmoil of the Albigensian heresy was rivaled only by the demand from the thousands of believers returning to the Church for the Angelic Psalter, a popular spiritual practice, and Dominic, who had been a studious young man given to ostentatious penances that made the older members of his order nervous, was now a hero and eventually made a saint. The young man who had once tried to sell all his books for money to feed the poor had invented—or, say, was given, by the Virgin Mary—a system of memorized and recited prayer, useful to a young man who’d sold all his books to feed the poor.
It was Thomas of Cantimpré, a Dominican scholar in Flanders and a contemporary of Dominic’s, best known for his multivolume work Opus de natura rerum, who, in a book he wrote on the lives of bees, was moved to consider the Angelic Psalter within it, and described it as being like a circlet of roses to be offered up to the Virgin Mary. Shortly after the publication of Thomas’s book on bees, “rosary” earned and kept its current meaning. So the story of the word “rosary,” coming to mean prayer, is, in the end, a story of the power of metaphor.
Mary and roses have been linked since her death. On the third day after her burial, mourners who went to her tomb were said to have found her body gone and her shroud full of roses. The scent of a rose where none should be is now formally one of the signs of Mary’s presence—in one of her twentieth-century appearances, for example, the visitant’s mother said she believed her daughter’s vision of Mary was manifest because of the scent of roses in the surrounding air. One result of this connection is that contemporary rose culture was for some time dominated by Catholics, who tried to keep the number of varieties limited to 150, the number of beads on a rosary and the number of psalms in the prayer.
I like the story of Mary’s tomb and think of it sometimes in graveyards. I’m not a Catholic, but I like to imagine a God moved to grief by her death, taking her from the tomb and filling her shroud with roses as He left. In any case, the dead are often honored with roses, either left at their graves or planted there, and the result is that cemeteries are often home to some of the best of the heirloom varieties. It’s an old rose gardener’s trick, one I haven’t tried yet, of taking cuttings from these graveyard roses, but I still can’t allow myself to leave a cemetery with anything I didn’t bring in.
5
DURING THE FIRST WINTER, at night, I sometimes feel as I imagine they do, as if the part of me that is exposed is plain, stripped of all ornament, and the part that isn’t seen is growing, spreading. Roots cast like a net through an ocean of silt.
I now know this is also what it feels like to write a novel. Which is exactly what I was doing.
“Your grandmother grew roses,” my mother tells me. “Do you remember that?”
I don’t. I recall walking with her through her canning garden in Maine, her pulling a potato out of the ground for me to eat. She would rub off the dirt on her apron and bite hers like an apple as we entered the house. If I flinched at the dirt on the potato, she’d say, “You’ll eat a peck of dirt before you die.” We spoke very little, she and I, but we loved each other.
My grandfather showing me the garden in my dreams now seems more like someone welcoming me to a place I could have found only by searching, as in that test of virtue in every legend.
THE ROSE I PLANTED in the spot where I dug up the cat bones gives me no flowers for the first two years. In the catalog it was listed only as “special climber,” and so I wonder if it is a mutant dud sold on the cheap, but I do not pull it up. I rename it, jokingly, the Voodoo rose, after its first mute year. For two years it only grows stalky and huge, until it seems almost demonic, whipping the wind with seven- and eight-foot canes. The absence of blossoms feels like a sulk at the garden’s corner.
In the third year, when it finally buds, I feel forgiven. Thick clouds of teacup-sized pink blossoms appear. My neighbor stares. “They’re so beautiful,” she says. “What did you do?”
I shrug. I do not feel at all responsible.
The Voodoo rose soon becomes the garden’s bully, beauty, alluring and cruel, often looking as if it is reaching for the Climbing Blaze I planted at the garden’s center, or whipping at the Thérèse Bugnet next to it. Its thorns are especially long, and sometimes I find clots of cat fur on it. Occasionally, working in the garden, it smacks my head lightly like it is mocking me, and sometimes draws blood.
THE RELATIVELY MATURE GARDEN, then, at age three years: When I stand on the deck, the Voodoo rose is on my near left, and on my right, two Rosa rugosas, the sea roses I grew up with in Maine, their canes furred with thorns. A Thérèse Bugnet is in the near center. In the middle, the Fairy is on the left and the Climbing Blaze at the center. Behind the Climbing Blaze is the Joseph’s Coat, and behind that, another Thérèse Bugnet. A Golden Showers climbs the far back left.
Together they are a slow concert. Each year, the twin Thérèse Bugnets, planted at the back and front of the yard, push up first, and though they are also delicate, the blossoms softer than eyelids and poor for cutting—they belong in the garden, that is to say—these dress themselves before the rest, like haughty sisters, head to toe in crisp green and, when the blossoms come, pretty-girl pink, flashing at the top of new dark maroon canes. The far one, at the center of the back wall, grows tallest first, and every year offers a single
pink blossom at the top, like the opening note of a song. From there, the other blossoms open and spread down, like the slowest possible flamenco dance, extending over several weeks. Her sister follows suit a few days after that first blossom. Then the Joseph’s Coat lights up from behind the far Thérèse, with golden blossoms tinged by red stains, as if someone has touched them all with a brush. These blooms change color as they open.
In the center, the Climbing Blaze is a little fire pit of red blooms, and if I prune regularly, I have roses until December. In the winter, it often has frozen buds, as if surprised every year that there is a winter. The Golden Showers never does very well, more like a well-meaning trickle, though the blooms are nice when they arrive, a perfect bright yellow. I think it needs a longer, hotter season—years later, I will see the variety in Texas during the spring, massive yellow clouds everywhere I look. The Fairy rose, the one I thought would be so delicate, blooms through the summer and into the fall and winter, keeping the Blaze company, blithely tossing out a froth of pink blossoms and shrugging off any mildew or fungus, heavy rain or cat landings. The two Rosa rugosas seem to have perpetual indigestion on the rich diet I feed them in my yard, perhaps more accustomed to the briny stones of any beach in Maine: they have long, woody, spiny stems, with a kind of hat of blossoms at the top. They always seem to want to leave.
They are on my mind when I head to Maine by car at the beginning of my first summer. I go back for a week with my brother and sister and her husband, and they laugh when I poke the window, asking to stop at plant nurseries. We are going to celebrate our cousin’s wedding and visit my aunt, a lifelong gardener who has become a florist and landscaper in Rangeley, near the border of Canada. My aunt’s yard is full of plantings, many vigorous roses among them.
I explain to her what I’m doing in my garden and ask for her help. She offers me a ten-pound bag of manure to take back with me. “Roses love manure more than just about anything,” she says. My siblings refuse to allow it in the car. “I’ll mail it,” she says to me, and laughs, and then sends me home instead with something called seaweed tea, a noxious brew of seaweed and what I grew up calling “gurry,” down on the Portland waterfront: the remains of gutted fish.
“It has a smell too,” she says, “but not until you put it in the pail. And this might be the one thing roses love more than manure.”
We stop at the beach on our way back to New York, near our mother’s new place in Biddeford. I stroll the boardwalk of Kennebunkport, the beach lined with sea rose hedges. These are the sea roses of my childhood, the ancient variety that seems to me the hardiest of them all. I follow a line of greenery out along a spit of sand and rock to a sandbar, where I come across a sea rose perched on, or really around, a granite boulder. The roots wrap the boulder like the ribbon on a present and probe for chinks. Erosion has taken away the ground around it and the rock has tumbled into the beach, so the rose is growing at an angle, reaching for the sun, new buds flourishing. They lift along the side of the rock and over it, as big as a single bed. The ocean and the rose compete in a slow race to break the boulder apart, though it looks as if the rose flew down to grab the boulder, and having caught it, won’t fly off and won’t let go.
You might think a rose was something delicate, but you’d be looking in the wrong place.
When I return from Maine, home again, I open the door to my apartment, afraid my roses will be withered, fainting, dead. No rain for four days. I rush to the back, where I find them giddy, hurling color up from the ground like children with streamers at a parade.
I TRY THE SEAWEED tea my aunt gave me. It has the rank, terrible smell of a fish left out in the sun not quite long enough to dry, but for months. Not even the feral cats come to the yard while the scent is in the air.
I test everything I hear about a rose. I plant garlic and onions at the feet of two bushes to try and make the roses too bitter for aphids, and when the hot summer arrives they smell hotly of garlic and onions, and the aphids continue eating them all the same. I use soda water for some of the feedings, to aid the greening, and it seems to work. I take a pitchfork and stab at the earth to aerate the roots. Every so often I pee into a pint glass and take it outside to shake it along the garden’s perimeter, to keep the worst of the cats at bay. Or at night, alone, or seemingly alone, I leave it there myself.
The cats do seem to come less, as if this is a fence they understand.
I pull weeds from the ground that grow a yard in a single week. How did I not hear them pushing their way up? Afterward the earth looks stark and bare. When I am done cleaning up, I walk around the corner and come to a full stop in front of a white tea rose in front of a flower shop. It is called Great Century and seems exactly right for the bare spot in my yard. I had decided against tea roses, thinking them hard to grow. Tea roses are the reason the rose has a reputation among nongardeners as being too difficult to raise. But the bloom there on the bush is a pretty one, and the florist selling it has no idea what it is worth, so the price is very low. The rose is too large for the pot it sits in, and so this, in the end, this elegant creature’s pinched feet, is the reason it comes home with me.
Come, I tell it as I carry it. Soon you’ll have a place where you can stretch your feet.
At home, I pull and cut at the balled gnarl of its roots. When, in late summer, it offers me roses, despite being planted so late, it feels like a cat laying a catch by its owner’s door.
6
MY NEIGHBOR PEERS OVER my yard to check my progress. “Gorgeous,” she says. I wonder if she really means it. Her yard is impeccably neat, whereas the kindest thing you can say of mine is that it is an untidy cottage garden, a mix of what I meant to plant and what was left behind by others. But she is really amazed, like a child at the fair. Sunflowers have come up, also apparently hard to grow, uninvited guests from the previous tenants, along with a miraculously large phlox and peppermint flowers, pearly tines at the end of the hearty, fragrant spirals of green I still have to pull from the ground every week. At the back of the garden in midsummer, I smell what I think is cinnamon or clove, and find lavender, roasting in the late July sun. There’s marjoram hanging down, funny round flowers, a sort of ocher, that crumble to my touch, and summer savory and hyssop, the savory blue, the hyssop blue-white. The hyssop is strangely vigorous, and the rosemary planted near it shies away, as if afraid. I planted a “wildflower” mix compulsively, scattering the seeds haphazardly, and snapdragons, cosmos, and poppies grow from that, red, white, and pink.
From where I stand on the deck in the morning, I admire the blossoms’ whirl. It is not yet as high as I’d like. I want to feel surrounded by them, to feel that someone left me a hundred bouquets in my yard while I slept. Still, I’m gratified by the second round of blooms appearing, the summer blossoms after I deadheaded the spring ones—cutting off the fading blossoms makes the rose grow more of them. I notice the Joseph’s Coat roses at the back of the garden and decide it is time to see those new blossoms up close. As I get near, the largest bloom quivers and the shiny backs of nine Japanese beetles emerge, combing the petals with their horned mandibles, oil black and oil green, chomping hard. I run to the house and return with my pyrethrin spray, foaming the rose until the beetles slide to the ground. Pyrethrin is my favorite bug killer. Nontoxic to humans, it is a paralytic agent. The bug cannot move and dies as its metabolism burns its very spare stores of energy, starving it to death.
I never had the urge to kill a thing, it occurs to me as I sweep the beetles up from the ground, until I started growing roses.
AFTER THE ATTACK OF the Japanese beetles, I am protective of the garden in a whole new way. I take out my copy of A Year of Roses, by Stephen Scanniello, and read about all the terrible things there are that seem to live just to eat a rose. Aphids, sure, and Japanese beetles, but also rose mites and, worse, the cane borer.
The cane borer drills down into the cane to plant its larvae, hollowing it as they emulsify the cane’s center and killing the rose as th
ey go. The borer leaves a tiny hollow tunnel behind, as if someone had taken the lead out of a pencil.
I put the book down and with a growing sense of alarm rush to the garden and begin inspecting it for borers. I check the far Thérèse Bugnet first.
The hole is there.
I go to the hardware store and buy lop-handled shears and then, at the pharmacy, nail polish, per Scanniello’s instructions. I am to cut the stems back until the cane is smooth again and cauterize the wound with the lacquer. I buy a pale, frosted green color, so it blends in with the foliage.
Much of what I must cut off are the second-round blooms this rose has given me, and what is left looks like the bush was prepped for surgery. I walk inside to let the canes dry a little and then come out again, painting each cut stem.
AT THE BEGINNING OF the second spring, as I prepare to leave for a month at a writers’ colony in Virginia during the month of March, when I would do much of the gardening preparation for the season, I go to wake the roses from their winter sleep by pruning them. I have the proportions wrong in my head, however, and I cut them back by two thirds instead of one third. When I finish, I am startled at the sight of all the sticks, a picture of pain, the cut stems wet with fresh sap. After I take the trimmings to the curb, I lie down on my bed, horrified.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Page 15