The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “He really was superb in Sword of Honor,” Maura mused, exactly as if directed to muse, so that we could all feel how very superb he had been, how deeply he had affected her. Her voice was trained in this husky resonance, her laugh to its ascending chimes. Maura’s husband, who had built the theater to woo her up from New York, no longer suffered her gladly.

  “A hack,” he said, “but a hack resplendent.” He cut a wedge from his cigar tip and smiled a small, confidential smile at me. Only he and I dared call things by their right names. Cameron Spencer was a distant acquaintance of his, but it was Ma who had persuaded him to do us this favor, put us on the map.

  “He deserved an Academy Award,” Maura said, “whether or not he got one.”

  “There,” said my mother. “Write it down.”

  “I’ll call the library,” Maura said. Handsome and dauntless as a figurehead, she lifted her hair back and smiled into the phone.

  “Hello, this is Maura Fairchild Davis, at the Playhouse? Our guest star, Cameron Spencer, arrives this next week, and we were wondering if you could check for us, on what year he won the Oscar.” The librarian, mundane creature, would be grateful for even this small brush with the glittering world we touched every day.

  “He was the great character actor of the forties, you know,” Maura confided. “Do you remember Sword of Honor?” She sighed. “He really was superb…”

  Her smile faded, and a fine blush spread over her throat, into her cheeks. “I see,” she said. “I beg your pardon. Please excuse us. Oh, dear.”

  “Mopping her floor,” Maura said to us, in bright bewilderment. “A wrong number. She said she’d like to be of service, but she was mopping her floor.”

  My mother laughed herself to tears, taking us all down with her. “These things don’t happen to other people, I’m sure,” she said. “Why, why is it always us?” Even Al smiled, just to be among us. Pleasure was cheap for me then: the sound of ice rattling in a glass promised the subtlest terrors, to laugh with Al was like laughing with the gods. Cameron Spencer was coming! Outside our cavern, the theater, a rebuilt barn, stood amid thick hayfields. Hammers rang. The air was fresh with the smell of paint.

  “Should I try again?” Maura asked.

  “No! Nineteen forty-eight, just write it down,” Ma said. “Go ahead, Katerina, write it down and then run up to the corner and get us a couple of limes.”

  Katerina. A queen’s name. I’d never lived up to it, shrank beneath, in fact, the name my mother had given me during one of her many excursions into excess, the moment of triumph when I, her first child, was born. Triumph had not come often enough to her: awaiting it she had raised us good and thoughtful among the treacherous rose trellises of Republican Brimfield, had organized first the Congregational Churchwomen, then the PTA, then the tiny, furious Democratic Committee and the vigil against the war—all the while concealing my father’s financial reverses and suffering, in the privacy of our sunny farmhouse, the alternate agonies of migraine and inchoate, despairing rage. She wanted to stand like the Statue of Liberty over some great harbor, but she was stuck in Brimfield, washing my father’s shirts, rinsing them, wringing them, closing the faucet so hard the handle came off in her hand.

  Now that Al had asked her to manage the theater, she would succeed at last, if only I would stop doubting and love her as she loved me, if I would step into the place my name had reserved for me, and shine. It was because of me, she said, that Al wanted her: his son was in my class at school, so Al had seen my honors speech and called Ma the next week. I was her talisman, the proof of her powers, and I must always stand at her side.

  On the opening night of Bring Down the Moon, written by Arthur Winograd and starring Cameron Spencer, I wore a black dress chosen by the costumer to set my skin “Grecian white.” He wrapped my shawl to show a shoulder and tucked, as I twirled for him, a silk rose into my hair. I seemed quite nearly my proper self, for the first time.

  “You look magnificent,” Ma said, emphasizing each word, as if she were sending me into battle. She lifted her white silk skirt to step onto the front terrace, her nearsighted squint making her seem languorous, half-intoxicated with the evening, the laughter of her guests, the name Cameron Spencer on her marquee.

  “Is the tape showing?” she whispered. (Her dress was backless and she’d had to use masking tape in place of a bra.) I shook my head. So she tossed her head in the joy of conspiracy and went among the townswomen she despised, smiling, shaking every hand. This was hers, all hers, who had been cutting my dresses down for my sister while these ladies partook of their mountains of little sandwiches, their oceans of tea.

  I, Katerina, let myself out of the box office and went around to the deck, where the last scraps of wood and muslin lay, abandoned in the haste to finish the final preparations inside. The sun burned low in a hazy sky. A dog barked, and from the dressing rooms came loud laughter, the affected jocularity of actors wound tight, ready to go on. Then an ominous rumble: someone was testing the thundersheet. The sacraments of evening. Safe above the fray, alone for a last moment, I stood as open and grateful as in a cathedral: in this green world, already blessed, we had made another of colored light and papier-mâché. It seemed as if my knowing this, my solitary contemplation, put me deeper at the center than Ma with her guests, or even Maura on stage.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the stage manager said, knocking at each door, purposeful and nonchalant. “Fifteen minutes, Miss Fairchild. Fifteen minutes, Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spencer? Damn, where is the old boy?”

  Cameron Spencer had seemed, disappointingly, to be a perfectly ordinary aging gentleman, distant, retiring early to the special room we had reserved for him at the Brimfield Inn, never really a part of the group. He had absorbed from his various roles the manner of a lord, as lords are depicted in theater: he was courteous and aloof and one always expected to hear he was out with the hounds. Now, as my mother in her silver sandals ran along the torchlit path to find me, I realized that I had lost him, that just before she said I looked magnificent she had sent me up to bring him down from the Inn.

  “I’m sorry,” I said automatically, but she wasn’t angry. She simply would not allow an emergency, now.

  “Go up there and find him,” she said, “and run. He’s in the first scene.”

  It was a block uphill to the clock tower and two more around the town green to the Inn, but I found him before that, on the porch of the Methodist parsonage, watching the day go down.

  “Hello, dear,” he said, as I came up the steps to him. “I would stand, but…” But he was too drunk to stand without aid.

  “We have to go to the theater,” I said in a very small voice. I could hardly believe Cameron Spencer would hear me across the gulf of stature and age.

  “Our car will arrive,” he said, patting my wrist, ruminative, worldly-wise. Youth is always impatient. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “It’s ten minutes to curtain.” This roused him. I was sorry, as I steadied him along the main street, that I had to leave his bottle beneath the wicker rocker of the sternest censor in town, but I knew Ma would be pleased.

  At 8:30 the stage manager gave our honored guest a shower. At 8:40, ten minutes past curtain time, Al pushed my mother on stage to speak.

  “Good evening, and welcome to the Brimfield Playhouse. Tonight we are proud to welcome a very special guest, Cameron Spencer, the greatest character actor of this century, Academy Award nominee for Sword of Honor, Academy Award winner…”

  I heard her proud, shaken voice over the loudspeaker in the green room, where I was cutting Cameron Spencer’s boutonniere from the ingénue’s bouquet. Once I’d dispatched my press release, we had lost interest in the business of the Oscars, and I was curious to hear what she would say.

  “… for Ship of the Desert, in 1948.” She had invented it. On she sailed.

  At 8:50 the curtains parted to reveal the star himself, natty among the plastic vines we had trained over the arbor and sprayed with false d
ust. He faced his audience with perfect haughty irritation:

  “Open the window, Vera. There’s not a breath of air in here.”

  It was the first line of the third act. Maura, in chiffon peignoir with rose shears, smiled helplessly. “It has that feel, doesn’t it,” she said, “but you mustn’t be so gloomy. Winona’s giving us breakfast in the garden.” She touched the paper roses. Garden.

  “Quite,” said Cameron Spencer.

  Maura looked desperately about. “And you’re looking forward to seeing Teddy, I’m sure.”

  With this, Cameron Spencer remembered Teddy’s cue, and a flustered young man in panama hat entered stage left.

  “Teddy, darling,” Maura said.

  We watched from the back of the theater, under the spotlight platform.

  “Thank God Art Winograd is dead,” Al said. He let the lobby door slam as he left, and Ma let her composure go.

  “The one good thing that ever happened to me,” she said, “and look.” Maura was fitting each line Cameron Spencer spoke like a jigsaw piece into the puzzle of the play. Again, I guessed Ma blamed me. She followed Al.

  “Doesn’t have Winograd’s usual clarity,” a man in the back row whispered to his wife. “Is it a later work?”

  It was our best night ever: 235 seats sold. Back in the cabin, while the play ran its rudderless course, we counted out the box office, laying the ticket stubs out over a card table and tallying them with the cash. Al’s cigar glowed in the thirty-watt gloom. We had nearly a thousand dollars, enough to pay half our past-due bills, though I’d still have to wait for my ten.

  “He’s done his job,” Al said, grim.

  Ma watched him, a smile of recognition forming, as if she were learning an essential truth. “Perfectly,” she said. Satisfied, she zipped the money into the bank bag and finished her drink. “In truth,” she said, “it’s Katerina who’s done her job.”

  First I thought this was sarcasm, but I remembered The Beacon had run my press release on the front page. “Where would I be without you?” Ma said, worshipful, nearly, as if she were in the play.

  “Theater’s such a messy art,” said Al.

  Out in the parking lot, a car started and drove away. But most of the audience stayed. They had come to see the star, and by the third act Cameron Spencer was sober, if drained. He ordered Maura to open the window again, and as they were now enclosed among velvet armchairs borrowed from Brimfield’s finest homes, we could all appreciate his need. He had to be prompted, but he spoke always simply, from the purest feeling, as we rarely do in life. One knew his character, finally, better than any uncle in his hopes and fears, his proud folly. With the last line, wry, ironic, wise, the entire ragged play was drawn together and presented whole and sweet. A hush fell over the house. The ovation might have shaken the mice down from the rafters.

  Under the spotlight platform we clapped till our hands were sore, enriching the applause, while Maura bowed deep to the stage. I unlocked the box office to bring out the red roses we had for our star. Ma was laughing again, buoyantly self-assured. She had waited for this, all those lost days at home, and never patiently: now she would accept her laurels, even if they were theater laurels fashioned of tissue and wire. She turned to me, her chronicler.

  “I told you I’d do it,” she said, and for a moment the vessel of her pride tipped to fill me too. Applause will cure everything, all sorrows and doubts, for as long as it lasts. I thought she might send me up with the roses—I even wanted to go.

  “Once more, dear friends, into the breach,” she said, turning to bear her burden of roses toward the stage.

  Cameron Spencer accepted them as a man does who has received many a public bouquet. As if he had won the Academy Award. As if this gift, this call to the theater, were God-given, not his to claim. Spent, mortal again, he made a last, sweeping bow while my mother stepped to the edge of the spotlight, beaming as if she had made him of whole cloth and according to her own design.

  Al’s smile was ghostly: his teeth were small and stained and widely spaced, and in the dark at the back of the theater it seemed to be the smile of someone who saw almost all. I pulled the shawl tight around my shoulders and leaned beside him, considering triumph, smiling too. We would smile together again after the show, when my mother, called to explain Ship of the Desert, waved a hand and let her laugh float away like a child’s balloon.

  In the Zoot Car

  The night before my sixteenth birthday, my sister Audie filled my mother’s car with flowers she had stolen from every garden in town. Brilliant peonies, lilacs of every shade, the year’s first opening roses overflowed the back seat, blocking the rear window, spilling to the ground when we opened the doors. Ma didn’t care. The townspeople didn’t like her, and if Audie wanted to run through their gardens in twilight, scissors flashing as the blossoms fell into her arms, Ma wouldn’t stop her. She smiled and raised her eyebrows to me. After all it wasn’t her fault—she hadn’t told Audie to go. Now her little white car was full of pinks and lavenders and blues, and we gathered them in triumph, overwhelmed by fragrance and humidity.

  “I’ll swoon,” I said, thinking that to swoon would be to allow the flowers their full impression, meaning to entertain my mother.

  She laughed. “Swoon later,” she told me. “Help me carry them inside first.” It didn’t matter where they came from or who they were for; my mother owned them now. She was generous, as ever: “Go look at yourself in the mirror with all those lilacs in your arms,” she said to me. “You look like a painting.”

  We spent all day cutting them, arranging them in crystal vases and milk bottles, even filling the sink in the guest bathroom with them, since we had no guests. I had other presents: flowered stationery, a silvery-green straw hat—a bowler—with a green ribbon, a book of plays, a printed cotton skirt, and a V-neck leotard. Pop was taking me, next week, for my driver’s test. He wanted Audie to take the flowers back to the gardeners who’d grown them.

  “Don’t be so stuffy, Gil,” Ma said. “They won’t even notice the flowers are gone.”

  “We have the same flowers here,” Pop said. “The lilacs are choking the front path.” He looked from one to the other of us as if we represented some baffling and dangerous tribe, but he and Ma were past quarreling, so he said no more and left us to ourselves.

  Audie’s hair was cut so straight across the bottom, it looked like a blond broom. She poked a red rose into the center of one vase and straightened up, smiling.

  Ma kissed the top of her head. “You’re lucky they didn’t come after you with shotguns,” she said.

  By afternoon we did have a guest. The car came carefully up the driveway, seeming to float slightly on its wheels. It was the same colors as a fancy wing-tip shoe, something from the forties. A zoot car.

  “Is that Cappy?” Ma cranked open one of the upstairs windows and leaned out. “Gil, it’s my brother. Kids, your uncle Cappy’s here.” She pulled one white bloom from a vase and tucked it in her hair on the way down the stairs. I was behind her, in new clothes, new perfume. No flower would stay in my hair.

  Cap’s voice was enormous. “Where’s the birthday girl?” he asked, embracing my mother, as Audie, grinning, waited her turn.

  I climbed over the porch railing into the garden.

  “There she is!” Cappy said. “There’s my princess. She’s growing up pretty, she’s going to be as pretty as her ma.”

  The car was mine. Uncle Cap gave me the keys and showed me all the buttons, to open the windows and the trunk, to move the radio antenna up and down. The seats were beige leather, the top beige linen, the paint metallic brown. It was a Lincoln Continental, eight years old, as wide and square as a river barge. I stood in the driveway with the keys in my hand, beyond disbelief. It might as well have been a rocket.

  “She can’t keep a gift like this,” Pop said. “It’s too much. This is absurd.” Cappy had gone in to call a taxi to take the train home.

  “He wants her to have it. He’ll
be terribly disappointed if you don’t let her keep it.”

  “It’s some kind of illegal payoff, you know that.”

  “Well, Katie didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t punish her for it.”

  They stood on the porch, hushed, but arguing. At the sound of a door slamming inside, Ma dropped her hands from her hips and came over to me.

  “Now, be sure to thank him, honey,” she said, pushing my hair back from my face. “It’s a beautiful car.”

  Theater, that’s my mother’s business. Pinstripe patent-leather Lincoln Continentals might rain from heaven and she would be graciously, nonchalantly thankful for each. Her dresses were handed down from her sister or borrowed from the costume shop, but though they pulled at the shoulders or had to be draped to hide a stain, they could not shade her beauty. She had only to throw her head back, laughing, and the men in a room would gather around her, talking politics, psychology, theater, touching her shoulder, puffed with opinion and booming with their own jests.

  Cappy called to her from the porch, “You can drive it too, Lila Ann, if Kate will let you.” He handed the registration to my father as he came down. “It’s in your name, Gil…”

  “Cappy, we can’t let you do this.” Pop started off strong. He was right. The car seemed a burden to me, as if I would have to carry it. “It’s too much, we can’t accept it.”

  “It’s registered to you, kiddo; if you don’t want to let her drive it, that’s fine.” Cappy kissed me, over my ear, through my hair. “My princess deserves a proper chariot,” he said.

  * * *

  Until I got my license, I was allowed to drive the car only between the house and the corner, half a mile. We had to go to New York on Saturday, though, Ma had a meeting, and she was taking Audie and me to see Grandma while she was there. It was the first really hot day that year—the lilacs were drooping from their branches. Audie and I sat at the kitchen table in city clothes, eating breakfast.