The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “My father had a wonderful sense of humor,” my mother said. Then she looked at the postmark. “Chicago. I wonder if he lives there.” She read the little printed poem on the card out loud, but it didn’t seem to mean anything special. She put her arms out to me and held me, and cried.

  It was that year, I think, that I found the shoe again. At first I thought it was the mate to the one at Grandma’s. I had forgotten the shoe, probably forgotten it the same day I first saw it, but now, discovering it in the back of an old bureau we had stored in the cellar, I remembered my mother’s face, distorted with anger, returned to composure only after she came out of the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel that gave her the height of a statue. I did not mention it this time. I reached into the drawer for the shoe and carried it up to my room, where I stuffed it inside one of my own boots. Knowing Ma’s response to it, I waited until I was alone with my grandmother.

  “Where did you get that?” she said, when she saw the shoe in my hand. I had never heard her speak so sharply.

  “It’s just like the one at your house,” I said.

  “There’s only one shoe like that,” she said. “Give it to me.” She took it out of the room, and when she returned, she was kind and befuddled again, asking if I wanted to help her make candied apples.

  That night, I sat on the top stair and listened to her arguing with Ma. Grandma sounded tired, frustrated. Over and over again she said, “I don’t know.” Ma’s voice was bitter sarcastic, very low. I could hardly hear it, and what I heard I couldn’t understand.

  I searched the shoe stores for a pair like the jeweled wedgie I had found, but there were no wedged heels at all that year. When I finally described the shoe to a saleswoman, she went behind the counter and said to the cashier, “Marty, this girl wants a pair of hooker shoes.”

  * * *

  I’m at work on the hips, in particular. My grandfather is not a man who would place great emphasis on his hips, I don’t think. His shoulders are very sharp, his spine is straight, but his hips are casually at rest. His feet are slightly apart, and his body rises comfortably out of this powerful stance, mannered and elegant with a hard, sure gaze.

  My classmates regard me with derisive awe.

  “What was this guy, a male model?”

  “One of the first,” I say. “That’s how he put himself through architecture school. It was the Depression, you know.”

  “Well,” says this woman, whose grandmother must have been a potato farmer, from the attitude she strikes, “maybe you should think of him later in life, give him some more character.”

  She means to be helpful, I know. “He died in World War II,” I say. I don’t think of this as a real lie.

  “Well, you can’t just do a pose. Look how stylized this is.” I look into the mirror as she runs her finger along the curve of my outstretched arm. Maybe style was his natural way. “You’ve really got to get in there and give us his heart,” she tells me.

  I strive. I know he stands at the fence. I know he’s attractive, intriguing to the men and women who pass him, carrying baskets of bread, sausages, and cabbage. The air is stingingly cool, the sweetness of the decaying leaves is masked by an odor of coffee and diesel exhaust. Two children squeeze through a break in the fence, and my grandfather looks above them, outward, making a plan, I think. He’s still too stiff, too separate. I sag a little and lose him altogether. I want to be stoop-shouldered and cross-armed, to hang my head. It is his ideas, his emotions, that give him his substance. I don’t know how to work backward.

  * * *

  When I was seventeen, my boyfriend went away for the summer and came back engaged to be married. For weeks I was despondent. My mother was despondent for me. We stayed up all night watching late movies, and I shuffled to school exhausted, got high in the parking lot at noon, giggled through French class, and fell asleep in study hall.

  One night, in the middle of Zombies from Beneath the Swamp, we were picturing the married life of my boyfriend and his fiancée: gray dish towels figured prominently in the discussion. I would get even with them just by letting them live their drab little wedded life. “And,” Ma said, laughing, “as a last resort, you can always send her your shoe.”

  “What?” I said.

  We were terribly punchy; she had a pillow over her face and was laughing uncontrollably. She dropped the pillow slightly so she could see me. “Of course, I don’t think those shoes would do it.” She pointed to my desert boots drying beside the fireplace. “It should be something a little risqué, preferably something that reveals some toe.” She put the pillow back over her face and laughed.

  The zombies had gained entrance to the manor house, and the pretty blond girl sat up in bed suddenly, the silk strap of her nightgown slipping over her shoulder as she screamed.

  “That’s what your grandfather’s mistress did,” she said, “and it worked like a charm. Just the shoe, no message, but my mother didn’t have much trouble figuring it out. It’s not every day that people send single shoes in the overseas mail.”

  The girl in the silk nightgown was, by now, a zombie. She still looked pretty, but when she tilted her head and turned toward the camera, we could see it: her eyes were dead.

  “Of course,” my mother said, “she had the shoes for it. Your grandmother had boots. Out went philandering Philip.”

  “Where did he go from there?”

  “Well,” she said, “he lived on Gramercy Park for a little while, and he didn’t go back to France. That’s all I know.”

  “Don’t you wonder where he is?”

  “Why? Do you think he wonders about me?” She was quiet for a few minutes. Then she said, “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  The next night I stayed up alone.

  When my parents were divorced and we moved out of the house, I found the shoe again. It was very well hidden this time, in a barrel of old stuffed toys that had long since been turned into mouse nests. I was alone when I found it, and I packed it with my few clothes and books and took it to New York with me.

  * * *

  I can’t find an attitude for my grandfather. I know it’s supposed to be an attitude, not a pose, I know I should look for his heart. We’re not supposed to do research, but I have to resort to it. I find the New York office of the Bank of the Lesser Antilles: it takes up three rooms in a hideous blue-and-white box of a building downtown.

  Finally, I take the shoe with me to Little Italy, where I ask people until I find the address of a shoemaker. He lives in an apartment with beaded curtains, beaded radiator covers, and a vat of soup in which whole chickens roll in boiling stock. Yes, he can make another shoe like this. It will cost one hundred dollars. Beadwork is expensive. I talk him down to fifty-five, which still means I have to cancel my dentist appointment. As I leave, he says, “Fifty-five for you only,” and pinches my ass quickly twice, once on each cheek. I don’t object when he does this; but the next week, when I return to pick up the shoes, I stand in the doorway to hand him the cash, and back all the way to the stairs.

  * * *

  Now that I have the shoes, I have everything. They very nearly match. The beadwork of the older shoe has a harsh glow; I imagine there’s gold in the dye. The new pigments are too basic, too exact. I want to run home, but I walk, taking the stairs two at a time all the way up the six flights to my apartment.

  I’ve never asked again about my grandfather, or the shoe. My mother got one more card from him, at Christmas, years after her divorce. Its printed message read:

  To wish you loads of Christmas cheer,

  And love that grows each passing year.

  She threw it out in a pile of sale announcements and grocery circulars, and I didn’t bother to retrieve it. It was postmarked Sioux City, Iowa. Maybe he’s a salesman. Or maybe he’s been a hog farmer all these years.

  In the center of my room I stretched my arm out. I’m my grandfather, at the Gramercy Park gate, in 1945. It’s autumn, and the sky is steel-gray, just before dusk.
Children play in the park, their coats folded on schoolbooks on the benches. I look out over their heads, over the fallen leaves in the park. I want to feel my muscles drawn into place around some emotion. My grandfather looks out past the gate into the network of color and movement that makes up the city, but he sees the horizon of Sioux City, Iowa: uniform and yellow gray.

  I myself see, at this moment, a pair of extravagantly, surpassingly gaudy shoes. I give up on my grandfather and put them on.

  They are the highest heels I’ve ever worn, and the minute I stand in them, my body conforms to their dictates: my ankles tilt forward, and every other bone leans back to balance them. I stretch my arm out, bring the other to my mouth with the imaginary pipe, and I am indeed a ridiculous figure. I walk confidently in these shoes, taller and more fluid, and I cannot possibly move like my grandfather now. I stand straighter than I ever have, my breasts thrust forward against the cloth of my shirt, head back, almost thrown back. If I were to laugh right now, it would be a strong but not derisive laugh that I think my grandfather would attend: the laugh of someone who understands what he looks for and what he sees.

  Nonchalant

  Kate closed Buddy’s up early because of the snow. It took all her strength to pull the door shut against the wind, and she felt herself very slight, almost weightless, her hair blowing to mix with the storm. She wore the red scarf she had knitted for Michael, which he hadn’t taken to New York with him. He had said then that he’d be back before the cold, but he no longer spoke of returning. Evidently, fiddle players were much needed in New York; Kate hadn’t thought he would get enough work to keep him a month, but he’d left in September and it was nearly Christmas now.

  Kate’s own work kept her in Chiverton. Buddy said she was the best cook he’d ever had, and at Buddy’s she could do things according to her mood, serve coq au vin one night and meatball subs the next, boil an egg if someone was allergic, bake a cake if someone was sad. Only Michael had escaped her ministrations, though his name was still on her mailbox and she was still watering his plants.

  So let him stay in New York. Carson had a formula for it: If someone has lived away from you as long as they’ve lived with you (and if the distance is one hundred miles or more), you can’t consider yourself in love. Kate tried to be nonchalant—Michael had been mostly a pain in the ass anyway, schlepping home from some woman’s apartment with a camellia for Kate, his confessions so detailed he seemed not so much penitent as nostalgic. He had invited her to come to New York with him, but so halfheartedly it would have seemed importunate to accept.

  Even in the light of the evening snow, Chiverton was a dingy town, whose tinseled storefronts still displayed the galoshes and baby dolls no one wanted last year. Three blocks east and Kate would be home; three more and the town subsided into fields until the valley sloped up into the hills again. The wreath on the door of The Shamrock, where Michael once played three nights a week, obscured most of the neon Schlitz sign, and Kate peered through the letters, thinking she might find Carson or someone else who’d want to walk with her, but there were only a few kids playing Pac-Man. They spent all their aimless force on the machines, unconcerned with the snow, which sifted through the pools of streetlight onto the little spruces along the sidewalk. Watching them, Kate knew she was absolutely lucky to be here, alone, in a red scarf. Carson would say she was feeling negative ions rather than joy, but the snow tumbled freely out of the pure blue above; science had nothing to do with it.

  * * *

  Carson was going bald. When he was eating lunch at Buddy’s and Kate stood at the counter, he knew she could see the spiral of missing hair at his crown, and he sorted through the rest of his hair, trying to push some wisps over the empty spots.

  “I’m still kind of a handsome guy, don’t you think, Katie?” he asked. She was pulling apart a lettuce for salad. “That Annie in the florist is kind of a snack cake, don’t you think? And I think she sorta likes your friend Carson here.”

  Carson wore more than one plaid at a time, and he was developing a beer belly despite heroic effort, but he was handsome, and when Kate looked down at his pleading face, she smiled. She knew everyone thought they were lovers. Sometimes she thought so herself.

  “You are unquestionably the handsomest regular customer at Buddy’s,” she told him, “and Annie’s a real Twinkie.”

  “Wait,” he said, as she went back into the kitchen. “Katie, wait. What do you mean, regular? What kind of stranger’s been coming in here behind my back?” While Kate was trying on several enigmatic looks, in came Terri Brinn, who worked with Carson at the hospital.

  “Terri, is there anyone you know—and be honest, I mean really, you can be totally honest—but do you know anyone who can really be said to equal the Carson charm?”

  Terri regarded her engagement ring with some distress, but finally said, “Hi, Carson. Hi, Katie,” and went to sit at the end of the counter, on the other side of the mailman. Terri lived in the apartment below Kate’s, but she had moved in after Michael left, so she, like everyone else, had the wrong impression about Carson. She smiled apologetically as Kate told her the specials. Kate smiled sweetly back at her. Terri would just murder her Don if he seemed to care about another woman’s opinion of him.

  “Who is it?” Carson was saying. “You can tell me, Katie. I know you, Katie, and it’s probably some big dumb goof who hasn’t got nearly the Carson savoir faire.” Almost everyone was looking by now, and Kate began to feel she actually had betrayed him.

  “It’s nobody, Carson. It was a slip. You are by far the most gorgeous hunk of man who’s ever slurped his soup at this counter, who’s ever deigned to pick his teeth with one of Buddy’s toothpicks here.”

  “I don’t know, Katie, you don’t say that with any conviction.”

  “Oh, Carson.” Kate leaned over the counter and spoke quietly to him, exasperated and laughing. “You know I think you’re wonderful.”

  “Listen, this other guy didn’t go in the flower shop, did he?”

  It occurred to Kate that Annie would have been the one who suggested camellias healed all wounds, and she stood up to go back to the kitchen.

  “Carson, I’m not thinking of anyone in particular.”

  “Oh, I get it,” he said. “Michael, right?”

  “Carson, shush. Please?”

  “I get it,” he said. The mailman paid for his piece of quiche, taking a toothpick and looking as if he felt a little sad about not being the handsomest man at Buddy’s. Kate was careful to touch his hand as she took his money, to smile right into his eyes.

  “You can’t be in love with a dead horse, Katie,” Carson said. “Step over it and go on.” A familiar argument, but too sensible to work.

  “So what’s the pathology report?” she asked.

  “What? Oh, on the horse? I haven’t read it yet.” She always gave him Michael’s letters to read. He was, after all, a researcher, and the tortured sentences in which Kate tried to find love he studied with the same reasoning calm he used on white cells devouring each other in a drop of blood.

  * * *

  The snow was an inch thick on the telephone wires, and Terri Brinn, soon to be Terri Brinn Reilly, Mrs. Don, stood on the landing, waiting to ask Kate in for hot chocolate and wedding dress analysis. Kate had never seen her without makeup before, and this new vulnerability (her skin was pocked, but her eyes without the heavy liner were full of shy friendship) became her. Don Reilly’s picture dominated her coffee table, as his laugh often dominated the building when he was visiting her. He was a truck driver for a dairy company, and he wore a blue uniform with DON stitched on the breast pocket in red.

  “My fiancé says I look best in empire waists,” Terry said. Empire was a word Kate had never dared to speak, having been told that when used sartorially it was pronounced ahmpeer. To hear Terri say “empire” was a relief that nearly made her giggle. Wedding dresses seemed worthy of hours of discussion now, and Kate agreed that Terri would look best in empires,
in cap sleeves, in panne velvet and inset lace.

  Wedding breakfasts were harder—no pictures—but here Kate had experience. Chicken croquettes looked so stodgy, but lobster bisque was a wonderful color, for February.

  “That’s soup, isn’t it?” Terri said. “Don likes something substantial. Wouldn’t Carson want more than soup?”

  “Carson eats what I tell him to eat,” Kate said. “But you’re right. It should be beer and those sausages—bangers, right? Lobster bisque is too prim. A wedding ought to be vital.”

  “Doesn’t the royal family serve chicken croquettes?” Terri asked her.

  * * *

  Michael had been in a state of suavity when Kate was last in New York. His apartment was directly over a fish storehouse, but he served brandy in cut glass, had flowers—daisies, not camellias—on the table in a beer mug. The quartz heater glowed like a fireplace, and he even had presents for her, things he had been saving for weeks. She couldn’t imagine him seeing a bunch of silk ribbons in a store window, thinking of her, turning back to buy them.

  Hardly any subject was comfortable. “What’s V.S.O.P.?” she asked.

  “Very Superior Old Panacea,” he said. She allowed a wan smile.

  She stretched her legs toward the heater. “What does it mean: ‘Heats the surface without heating the air’?” she asked.

  “Physics,” he said, annoyed. “It’s just an advertising gimmick.”

  The moon, which had been hanging over the Chock Full o’ Nuts sign across the river, dropped into New Jersey. On Michael’s dresser was a collection of barrettes, expensive ones in the shapes of leaves, threaded with gold. Kate said nothing. She felt suave too. She didn’t feel natural with him until they were making love.

  The next days were better. They went walking, around the construction area that was destroying the view from his apartment, down to the fish market, and through all the accessible areas around the harbor. Boarded-up warehouses that had seemed abandoned turned out to be in use, full and quiet. In the grocery store Michael told the manager about her job at Buddy’s, saying that she made Chiverton seem cosmopolitan. The man had never heard of Chiverton.