The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Audie yelled, “Katie, your hat!”

  “Ma, my hat’s gone!” For the first time I wondered if she could hear me over the wind. “It blew away.” How blessed were the drivers across the highway, speeding toward my hat! I felt I would cry.

  “We can’t get back there,” Ma said. Her voice rose in annoyance. “I told you to take it off,” she said. “It’s ten miles to the turnoff, and we couldn’t just stop on the highway, even if we did find it. It’s probably already been run over anyway.” Now I thought she would cry. “Why did you have to wear it, all of a sudden? Nobody can see you now.”

  “It’s your own fault, Katie,” Audie said.

  “Well, don’t make her feel any worse about it,” Ma said.

  I couldn’t have felt any worse about it. I knew how childish it would be to cry over a lost hat, so I closed my eyes and tried to forget it. I tried to think of my new car, or of the glorious eve of my birthday, when Ma and Audie and I had felt like three goddesses in our stolen bower. Instead, I thought of Jack Cirillo, until I could remember exactly his slow voice and his slow touch and could feel my own fearful pleasure again. Ma, never a masterful driver, was creeping along in the right lane now, and car after car whipped past us, sounding like scythes. Then I heard a siren.

  “I’m only going forty. They can’t want me,” my mother said. The car pulled up beside us. “My God,” Ma said, “this car is hot.”

  But the policeman was smiling. “Did any of you ladies lose a hat?” he asked.

  “Me!” I said. “I did.” He produced it, perfectly intact. To my mother he said, “You shouldn’t drive so slowly on this highway, ma’am. It can cause an accident when you get so many vehicles built up behind you.” He was plump and blue-eyed and cheerfully exasperated, as if he had spent too many days chasing cars full of deciduous women, natural outlaws, who shed their hats and scarves in the wind.

  “Officer, I’m sorry,” my mother said. “I’m not used to driving this car yet, and I’m afraid if I step on the gas too hard it’ll just shoot out from under us. And I get so nervous driving in traffic, I just think it’s better to be on the safe side. But I’ll try to drive faster now, because I don’t want to cause an accident.”

  He stepped back. “Well, it’s just a suggestion,” he said. “Have a nice day, now. And keep hold of that hat.”

  “I will,” I said, and I felt my mother’s smile, suddenly, on my own lips: a smile of fondness and defiance mixed, a tiny challenge. “Thank you so much,” I said to the policeman. My mother stepped on the gas, and we were off like a shot.

  “I’d like a pair of driving gloves,” she said to me. “Brown and beige, to match the car.”

  “We’ll each get a pair,” I told her.

  “I’m not sure they make them in children’s sizes,” Ma said.

  I stretched my hands out in front of me. They were slender, strong, and against the dashboard they showed a pale, almost luminous shade of white. They were not the hands of a child, but I didn’t say that to Ma. In a week I would have my driver’s license. I pressed the leather of the seat; it was perfectly resilient, rising up against my hand. I could hear the engine shift to a higher gear, and I could feel the smoothness, the power, of the new speed. I wanted to tell someone that this was my car. I wanted to tell my mother that I loved my car, but I decided not to. Instead, I tucked a strand of hair slowly behind my ear.

  In the back seat Audie crooked her elbow and pulled an imaginary horn, but no truck answered. There were no trucks on the highway.

  “Bee-Beep,” I said.

  “Honk, hooonk,” went my mother, imitating swans. “You were so funny, Audie, running from that swan.” She reached back over the seat, and Audie squeezed her hand.

  “We have to make a plan to cheer your father up,” Ma said.

  “He’ll probably be happy enough to see we aren’t in jail,” I told her.

  “He should be,” Audie said. “We’re incorrigible.”

  She was right. We turned off the highway, past the bright, defenseless gardens of Connecticut that lined the road home.

  Katie Vanderwald

  Where there was a pea pod, Audie saw a pea pod. She seized it, snapped it into her colander, and moved on. Lucky, or there would have been no dinner, because Kate, having picked only one pod, felt she had harvested earthly grace itself, and wasn’t this enough? She was satisfied— she was grateful— as long as the dirt was black, the vines lush, and the squashes blooming in the next row.

  Now they were homely peas again, a square of butter softening over them while Ma poured milk into the blue pitcher and Chucky perched on the stepstool to wash his hands. He was fair and tousled, a straw angel, but Ma turned his palms up and saw the truth.

  “These may be wet,” she said, making a monstrously sour face, for the benefit of the girls, “but they are not washed.”

  A baffling oracle. Chuck, his head full of beetle lore from the day outside, returned to the sink. He was the youngest, and the boy, at everyone’s mercy. Sitting straight, at the head of the table, he searched for an adult topic.

  “What’s for dessert?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, what’s for dessert?” Ma said. She plucked the vase of petunias away from his notorious elbow and set it out of reach on the sill. “Do you think we’re some kind of ranch-house people who think about food all the time? Pick a peach if you want dessert.”

  “Ma-a.” The peaches were still little green fists on the tree.

  “Well … raspberries, then, since you have the courage to eat out of those hands.”

  “We have dessert when Pop’s home,” he said.

  “Then it should be clear enough,” she said, “that there will be no dessert tonight.”

  Ma was like the weather. Her children basked or sought shelter, depending on the prevailing wind, and to mention Pop was seeding the clouds. If they were careful, though, they could bring her back to them. It was like coaxing a deer to your hand, and gentle Audie did it best.

  “You sit down too, Ma,” she said, patting the chair beside her. Ma wouldn’t eat with them, but when Pop was away she would sit and listen to their day’s adventures, her attention so perfect that every triumph was exalted and every disaster redeemed in the pleasure of telling the tale. Kate’s duty (and glory) was to examine each day in all its detail and present it whole and alive, over dinner, to Ma.

  They had all been good days that summer. Kate was sixteen, Audie fourteen, and since Pop had lost all the money, Ma had gone back to work and was paying her daughters to look after the house and garden, and keep an eye on Chucky, who was only six.

  They ran free, within the limits of their preserve. When Pop bought the property, he had been riding the futures market like a white wave, and they could have whatever they wanted. They wanted a farm, a castle, a cave, a precipice with lake beneath, an orchard, an arbor, a swamp, and a clear stream. If you looked with a generous eye, you could see they had got it all, and without leaving Connecticut. The formal garden had grown wild among its trellises, the goldfish pond leaked, but the house was properly cavernous, built of stone from the fields where sheep now grazed. It faced south along the Wiscoponomuc Brook, in the shade of a forested hill. Chucky ruled the two tiny islands upstream from the bridge, watched by Audie from the crotch of the red maple, which held her like the palm of a giant hand.

  Kate never left the house. Her chores took hours. Ironing, she felt determined as a Chinese laundress striving for the sake of the moon-faced infants who clung to her skirts while she worked. When she dusted the piano, she would sit and, though she had neglected to practice, would imagine her début: wearing a plain black sheath (to shame vanity, before art), she would swoop over the first chord like a lioness on a gazelle, and then—fluid, agile, precise, beginning with the lower, yearning registers and drawing in the upper strands one by one—she would restore the music to its living form. Later, in their bleak, cold-water flat (she pictured a sink with one faucet and a poor ragged towel), h
er husband would press her to him, searching her face, worried, awed. It would be wonderful to play the piano, she was sure.

  Kate was noble, Audie thought, unfathomable, and embarrassing. She might look up from shelling peas, as she had done that afternoon, and say, “What if you had to leave the country, to follow the man you loved. Would you go?”

  “You mean, to get married?” Audie asked, feeling squeamish, shaking the bowl to see if they had enough.

  “No, I mean love,” Kate said, with such force that Audie shrank. And giggled.

  “Forget it,” Kate said. “I mean things of the soul.”

  So she did. Her soul escaped in ways she herself could not hope to follow, and returned to whisper tales of things she would never see. Now, suddenly, she was having a romance, but she had learned, talking to Audie that afternoon, not to chop prodigious feeling into words.

  So when Ma was sitting and ready to hear all, Kate had nothing to say. “Well,” she started, and finally turned to Audie, “did we have a good day?”

  “Um,” Audie said, “a pretty good day. We had a guest.”

  “A guest?” Ma raised an apprehensive eyebrow. The week before, a magazine salesman had found the house somehow and plagued them until Audie went back up her tree, leaving him to pace underneath. Like a frustrated hound, as Kate told it. It was her job to keep the pot boiling! Any secret worth keeping would be cruel to hoard.

  “Kate’s friend Amir,” Audie said.

  “He’s a Turk,” Kate explained. “Aunt Elayne brought him back from her trip.”

  “Quite a souvenir,” Ma said. She took Kate’s chop bone and sucked at the marrow. Elayne was Kate’s boyfriend’s aunt, a dietitian whose quest for a husband kept Ma well amused.

  “He came to see the American countryside,” Audie said.

  “Actually,” Kate said, “he came to see me.” Ma’s eyes widened, for the thickening of plot. “We went for a walk in the woods,” Kate said.

  She meant to stop, but their silence made her guilty. “I got a little lost,” she said, “and we came to a place I never saw before. All birch trees and a soft, soft forest floor—you could imagine Indians there.”

  What an adventure it had been! Kate knew she was none of the things she imagined, neither delicate nor particularly receptive, and certainly not Chinese: Ma was black-Irish, Pop the palest Dane. She was a pitiful, straggly thing, with a face made mostly of glasses and teeth. When a man as lithe and insinuating as Amir wanted to touch her, it was proof of the power of dreams.

  “So I said, ‘I think we’re lost,’ and then … he took me in his arms, and bent me back, and kissed me and kissed me, just like Clark Gable.”

  “My God, Kate.” The indulgent smile froze on Ma’s face. “How old is this boy?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  Audie was paying terrible attention to her peas, and Chucky said, “Lost? Only a moron could get lost up there.”

  Kate had sent something of herself up, kitelike, that afternoon, to meet Amir on his lofty crag, and here it crashed back at her feet and was trampled by the careless throng.

  “What about Bobby?” Ma asked.

  Bobby. His family was on vacation. Now that she thought of him, Kate remembered that he never washed his hair and didn’t dare say he loved her, though he went for her blouse like a nursing infant every time they were alone. Nothing she did with Bobby was worthy of a report.

  “He’s in Hyannis,” she said.

  “Boy, you’re tough,” Ma said. “You must get it from your father.”

  Audie flashed a quick warning, and they waited to see if the cloud would pass.

  Chucky wasn’t attending. “May I have the milk, pleeze?” he asked. Ma turned the pitcher so he could reach the handle.

  “And I’ll come pick raspberries with you, okay?” Audie said, finding the thread, about to mend the conversation, but Chucky was pouring the milk over his chop.

  “Chucky!”

  “Oh,” he said, and put the pitcher down, still in his trance, watching as a couple of peas swirled to the center of the plate. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was thinking of…”

  “You never think,” Ma said. “Look at that. What’s the matter with you? Now you’ll be hungry all night.”

  “I won’t, Ma,” he said sorrowfully. “I’ll eat raspberries.”

  “Get up,” she said. “Get out of here. We’re all alone in the woods here, don’t you understand? We can’t just run out for a sandwich.” Ma had arrived from Manhattan full of pastoral romance, but the woods loomed too dark for her, with Pop always away. She took up Chucky’s plate so fast, the milk splashed over the table, onto the floor.

  “Now see what you made me do?” she said.

  “You rest, Ma,” Audie said. “We’ll do the dishes.”

  “GO!” Ma roared, and they faded out the back door.

  Down by the brook Chuck spread skunk cabbage leaves with mud and rolled them. “These are fish,” he said. “Want a bite?”

  Kate put her feet in the water, and real fish darted between her ankles. Amir had kept trying her name, as he tried all English words. He could stretch the plain “Katie” until it sounded narcotic. She fell asleep that night rehearsing the memory, while Ma and Chucky laughed in the kitchen, eating peanut butter out of the jar.

  * * *

  Mrs. Schnippers played the double bass, and looked like a double bass, but taught the piano, which was more in demand.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve never heard anyone play with more expression.” A smile tempered her enormous face.

  “And that’s the hard part, really. Later you’ll learn the notes. Here…” She slid over and went through the first few measures, then threw caution to the winds and played the whole piece.

  “I see,” Kate said, “I do.” But Mrs. Schnippers was too involved to stop.

  “I was careening where Haydn meant to spin,” Kate said, and Mrs. Schnippers nodded emphatically, while the music went round. Kate was sure now that she could do it too.

  When she couldn’t, her fingers stumbling and colliding over the keys, Mrs. Schnippers promised that practice would help. Her Saint Bernard, on the rag rug, shuddered in his sleep. Mrs. Schnippers had left the conservatory to marry Mr. Schnippers, who was out with the cows.

  It was milking time, and time for the 5:35 from New York, which, after Pop got off at Wassaic, would retreat as neatly as if reversed on film, leaving him silhouetted, briefcase in hand and coattails flying, against the pasture that sloped up behind the track. Ma, in her best white dress and her pearls (descended through Pop’s family to settle around her neck), had dropped Kate at the lesson and gone to the station with Audie and Chuck. She loved to laugh in lipstick, holding Chucky transfixed, but as Pop approached, the mouth went straight. He kissed the cheek and turned to the children. “Lucky Chucky! Auderino!” Ma, who said love made him speak nonsense, would turn away. When Pop got in the driver’s seat, he’d start to sneeze. Hay fever. They’d picked buckets of bee balm and loosestrife in his honor that morning, and Chuck’s hands were yellow with pollen.

  “Do you get any chance to play the bass now?” Pop asked Mrs. Schnippers while Kate gathered her music. The double bass leaned beside the empty music stand, which cast a scrollwork shadow on the wall.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “We have our Wednesday quintet.”

  Pop smiled to show Kate might learn renunciation here, but he lost his easy demeanor as soon as they left the house.

  “It’s high summer,” he said, to break the silence as they walked back to the car, looking over Don Schnippers’ fields. Kate scrunched into the back seat with Audie and Chuck.

  “How was the lesson?” Ma asked. Did she know? Last week, Pop had stayed in New York, so Kate had driven home from her lesson the long way, past Elayne’s. Amir had been sitting on the front step alone. He looked so dangerous, with those quick eyes and long fingers! She had only sat with him an hour, trying to answer his questions about American girls while he watched h
er mouth form the words.

  She had told Ma she was late because Mrs. Schnippers got carried away. Kate had reported wishes as horses, and molehills as the mountains of pain they caused, but she had never truly built a lie before. As soon as she had spoken, she believed herself, and Ma’s suspicion seemed unfair.

  “She said she’d never heard anyone play with more expression,” Kate said.

  “Expression,” said Pop, who could launch a great distance from such a word. “That’s emotion, I suppose. The emotional force. That’s what music is, basically, wouldn’t you say? It’s true in the market too. Everyone gets the same information—it’s instinct that sets one apart.”

  He was off, explaining how a drought might inflate corn prices while beef would plummet, or how it might work the other way around. Finance was a heady geometry to him, but Ma had had to sell their living room furniture, through a newspaper ad. She reached back over the seat and squeezed Chucky’s hand.

  Her doubts had poisoned the atmosphere at home, Pop said, and now he often spent weekends with his mother in New Rochelle.

  Marry an orphan, Ma told them.

  “I,” she said, “do not need the recommendation of some teacher to be proud of my children.”

  Pop had lost track of the subject. “A recommendation can be the worst indicator,” he said. “It’s usually best to move against the crowd…”

  They turned up the dirt road over Kepple Hill, where boulders tilted like ruins in the fields, with cornrows rippling outward. Everything was the dusty green-gold of August. But Kate would go to live in Amir’s barren country and bend herself to his ways. And no oil-lit tents either, she admonished herself, no Arabian Nights. They’d live in a tiny apartment over an asphalt bazaar. Passion would have to suffice.

  “I see what you mean, Pop,” Audie said, staring out the window.

  “I don’t,” Ma said. “I’d say expression was the force of the will, if I was asked. I’d say Kate should write symphonies of her own.”