The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “If I have a breech birth, it’s your fault,” she said. “Poor Bonzo. Poor baby Bonzo.”

  Steve pulled her to her feet and kissed her.

  “Charley horse!” she yelled, pinching his leg. He fell back onto the bed, and she went downstairs to slice cucumber for the ants.

  Pop called her before she could start breakfast.

  “How are you two going to make out financially after the baby is born?” he asked.

  “Terribly,” Audie said.

  “We’ll all be poor together,” Pop said. “The lawyer is charging me twenty-five hundred dollars for court appearances alone.”

  “Oh, Pop, what are you going to do?” She didn’t want to know. She lifted the flour canister carefully over a molested cucumber slice and started to mix batter for a coffee cake.

  “Something always turns up,” he said. “Is Steve getting the stoves for your mother?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, he’ll pick up a little extra money from that. And maybe I can help too.”

  Audie smashed the lumps out of the batter.

  “How would you like to sell the stoves when you get them?” her father asked.

  She poured the cake carefully into the pan. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll pay you two hundred dollars apiece for them.”

  “Steve’s probably not going to have time to go get them.” Audie shook much too much cinnamon over the cake. She tried to pick it up with a damp paper towel.

  “Well,” Pop said, “will you consider it?”

  “I’ve got something burning in the oven,” she said. “I’ll call you back. I love you.”

  “I love you too, sweetie,” he said.

  * * *

  The stoves rested side by side in Audie’s living room, disconnected, like men too old for battle. Audie sat beside them, wearing her nightgown. Still, she was too hot. The fan just blew hot air in at her. Her list of names had spread to a second page, and on the sheet facing it she was working out a budget—wood versus oil. The installation and the first cord of wood would easily use up four hundred dollars. She went back to the names. Steve had suggested one, finally. Wilfred, his grandfather’s name. It was printed in his thick script at the bottom of the boys’ column. Audie drew a slow line through the rest of the list.… Desire for peace, she wrote beside the baby’s name. On the other side the names of the girls she might someday bear continued down the page. The stoves stood at the boundary of her circle of lamplight. Even the dog didn’t venture past them. He ran around, barked at her and at the stoves, and bit her feet, so she pulled them under her with great effort.

  The phone rang. She let it go on until Bonzo went crazy with it. She knew it was Pop.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “No,” she said. “I was in the shower. But I’m dry now.”

  “How’s my grandson? All ready to be born?”

  “He’s really quiet. I think he’s resting for both of us.”

  “How are the stoves?”

  “They’re here. Steve hasn’t hooked them up yet.”

  “How much do you want for them?”

  “I can’t.”

  He laughed. “Even your mother would be pleased. She’ll know she’s soaked me twice.”

  “We’re going to name the baby Wilfred,” she said.

  “Do you remember the day we bought the stoves?” he asked her.

  “I do,” she said.

  “You were just a little girl. We had such a nice time that day, do you remember?”

  “I do,” she said. “But I was fourteen. And I’d like to give them back, but I can’t.” She could imagine the phone calls.

  “Audie, I only gave them up because I trusted you.”

  Audie sat silent beside the stoves. Her foot was asleep. She couldn’t seem to lift herself off it with the phone in her hand. The baby was still quiet. She pressed her hand into her stomach, willing it to move.

  “Audie, are you there?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Audie, you don’t have to tell your mother. You keep them for a while and give them back to me when she’s forgotten. Do you remember the way we ran the pipes around the living room to radiate heat? And the time your mother cooked a whole dinner on the stove top for your birthday?”

  Ma would have said she’d cooked dinner there because her real stove didn’t work. “I remember,” Audie said. “I remember everything. I remember you and me and Ma and everyone cooking on the stoves, warming our feet against the stoves, cutting the wood for the stoves, but I can’t make a deal like that. You gave them to her in the settlement. It was your decision.”

  “And she gave them to you. And they’re mine,” he said.

  Finally the baby moved, kicked fiercely. The pain ran the length of her nerves.

  “Pop, I don’t want the stoves. They’re in the way. They take up the whole room. I think I will sell them. Maybe you can buy them from whoever I sell them to.”

  “We built the road up to your house with the wood for those stoves,” he said.

  She stood up. “My house. My house? Where is my house? Give me back the road to my house and I’ll give you back the stoves! Okay? They’re your stoves, they’re Ma’s stoves, they’re my stoves now! They’ll probably burn the house down. But I can’t give them back to you. Ma would hate me!” She crumpled her list of names and threw it at one of the stoves. Bonzo went yapping after it.

  “Pop,” she said, “no one’s going to cook on them now.”

  “I’ll cook for Wilfred,” he said.

  Wilfred caused her another deep cramp.

  “I love you, Pop.”

  “I’ll come get them next weekend,” Pop said. “Steve can help me.”

  “Okay,” Audie said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  She pressed the button and dialed her mother.

  “Ma,” she said, “I just blasted Pop and it’s not fair unless I yell at you too. I’m sick of it. I’m selling the stoves back to him. I know you’ll hate me but I don’t care. Everyone will hate me anyway. You’re telling me what to do, he’s telling me what to do, and I don’t know what to do. And don’t tell me I’m taking Pop’s side. I just want to be home with Steve and Wilfred and bake bread and try to live. I don’t have room for the stoves!”

  “Who’s Wilfred?” Ma asked.

  Audie could feel it again. The pain was exactly what they had described in the classes. “What does it feel like to be in labor?” she asked.

  “If you have to ask, you’d better call Steve,” Ma said. “I’ll meet you at the hospital. And don’t worry, Audie,” her voice was perfectly, powerfully calm. “You have plenty of time.”

  Bonzo leapt up from sleep and attacked Audie’s leg.

  “Lie down,” she told him.

  She dialed. “Steve, Ma thinks I’m in labor. Will you come get me?”

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, we have plenty of time.”

  She rose, squeezed between the stoves. Bonzo followed her up the stairs. Each footfall echoed upward, but the house was full of the first summer air, and she heard none of the usual unsettling sounds. She turned on the light in the baby’s room. She had swept and dusted that morning, so everything was in order. The quilt with the heart appliqué rested smoothly over the crib mattress. In the rocking chair Pop’s old teddy bear sat forlorn. A ladybug crawled along one of the stripes in the wallpaper, and Audie let it continue along her hand. She opened the window. Across the street houses were still lighted and a woman stood on her front steps, calling a dog. Audie reached out and shook the ladybug into the cooler air.

  Elysian View

  If only we could know the future, we wouldn’t so much mind death, but as it is, we are waiting for the morning mail. Every lady at The Elysian View Home died with a lottery ticket in her purse. The living stayed on in hope of victory at the next bridge game, or an extra piece of cake for dess
ert. Lila Vanderwald was Director of Recreation at Elysian, responsible for arts, crafts, and cocktails, wheelchair aerobics and the annual Mother-Son Ball. It was the only job she could find after the divorce. If she hadn’t poured the first half of her life down the drain of her marriage, she could have been an international banker by now, or a federal judge; a citizen of marble hallways, wealthy, important, in charge. Instead, skirt hitched, she was kneeling on her office rug to cut paper palm trees for the upcoming “Evening at the Folies Bergère,” a clump of silver glitter glued by mistake in her silver hair. She was fifty-two. Possibility seemed to be closing against her. She saw she was going to die wishing, for the same things she had wanted all her life.

  These bitter thoughts twisted again at the sight of Jean Brenehan, former Sister of Mercy, now Chief Administrator. Lila sat back on her haunches and blinked. Jean B. remained sanctimonious even beneath false eyelashes and décolletage: her much-uplifted bosom quivered with disapproval now, for no reason Lila could guess. Her face, Lila thought, revealed how few and how small were the thoughts that passed behind it, all of them suitable to be jotted on the clipboard she held at her side.

  “Frank Gunn is dying,” Jean B. said, smartly. Room 115 would be free.

  “I’ll go up,” Lila said, meaning to show that some people cared more for the man dying than for his empty bed. She groaned as she stood, not so much from exertion as dramatic habit: she gave a little extra emphasis to each act until her life seemed as large as it should have been, with many tragedies and comedies each day. When it came time for Lila’s raise, though, Jean B. would remember the groan and say she wasn’t agile enough, or was too loud.

  Even crying was forbidden: it only added to the general hysteria and confused the bereaved. If Jean B. was all rules, Lila was all transgressions, and she wept now with both grief and spite. She knew little of Frank Gunn, save that he drank, was said to be lecherous, and had once told a woman at a party she was the ugliest woman he’d ever seen. He had gone grim and gray with disappointment long before he was old, but Lila was sure she had seen into his fierce heart. When he first came to Elysian, he had scribbled a poem on a napkin and held it out for her to read, his face hopeful that one time. But the letters bled to blots, and she tried vainly to decipher them while he smiled up at her, awaiting her reaction. Finally she laughed and bent to ask him what he had written, but his dignity was offended and he turned away. Since then she had taken every opportunity to admire him, but he dismissed her. Now he was dying, still unpraised.

  The pietà in Room 115 stanched tears. Mary Gunn was fumbling through her husband’s IV tubes, trying to hold him, touched by the same shaft of sunlight that crossed the dead man’s knees. Peevish Mary, usually prepared to take offense wherever offense might offer, was speaking in a high, gentle voice, as if reassuring a child.

  “Oh, Mrs. Gunn…” Lila rushed halfway across the room toward her before remembering that only the head nurse was supposed to attend a death.

  Mary started, regained herself. “Come in,” she said dryly, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Her hair was braided and wound Valkyrie-style, her eyebrows shaven, replaced with a fiercer, painted pair. Mary Gunn dealt in matters of fact, or tried to. She allowed an embrace but straightened her collar the minute Lila let her go.

  Lila wanted to say that she was afraid of Jean B., not death, but Mary had unzipped her purse and was rooting among the cigarette packs and pill bottles there, all business. She found a small, battered notebook, wet her thumb, and flipped to the page marked “Funeral.”

  “Mr. McHoul from the funeral home is on his way,” she said. “The service is to be Saturday, at St. Paul’s. We’re not God-fearing people”—she gave a small, ironic smile—“but these old New England churches are as light as the Italian. We were married in Florence, you know.”

  “No,” Lila said, “no, I didn’t.” The thought of that wedding and its vain attendant hope so tightened her throat that she dared not go on.

  “Well, no matter.” Mary flipped a page, as if to hurry on to the next detail, then looked away, over the lands given by the Elysian family for the nursing home. The slope had been an overgrown orchard once, but it was pruned to miniature perfection now, studded with ornamental shrubs. Two maples had been left standing, streaming yellow leaves over the pond.

  Mary gathered Frank’s comb and tube of salve. “One thing,” she said, “he didn’t say a word. You hear of the final summoning of strength and what-have-you, but in fact he just died, just as you’d expect.”

  Had Mary been expecting a last endearment? “They rarely speak,” Lila lied, thinking of Lettie Willward, who had sat bolt upright, uttered a neat, satisfied “Grand slam,” and subsided as if deflating, never to take a trick again. And Mr. Oliver, whose wife had died only a month before him, had cried, “There you are!”

  “Mr. Gunn was such a good man,” Lila said, feeling this in every bone, only because she was sure Mary would want to hear it. “Everyone will miss him.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, “we’ll need to run a bus to the funeral.”

  She was serious, Lila realized, in time to convert giggle to cough.

  “Well, a van at the least,” Mary said. She gestured toward the window, where at the base of the long hill St. Paul’s steeple rose like a sugar cake decoration. “It’s nearly a mile. And remember the traffic when the Admiral died.” Admiral and Edith Fickett had stood at the center of town society. Lila had nearly fainted in the crush at that funeral, but Frank Gunn, failed poet, was not likely to draw a crowd. However, she promised to arrange transportation, and at the thought of stalwart Mary harboring so fragile a wish, she burst into tears again.

  “Don’t, dear,” Mary said, giving her a couple of stern pats. “Well,” Lila thought, “who but a fool wouldn’t cry?” She would cry until Thornhill River ran salt if she felt like it, if Frank Gunn could die without admiration, without speaking to his wife. If she, Lila Vanderwald, was meant to have lived without love, without making even the smallest mark.

  “I’m sorry,” she wept, face in her hands. Leaving, she turned to repeat the apology, but Mary had forgotten her. She had taken the sheet in her two hands to pull it over Frank’s face, but instead she sat and put her ear to his chest.

  At the nurses’ station the oldest ladies were set out like so many houseplants in the society of the hall. They leaned in as Lila passed, and called to her: Lila, Lila, like a soft wind. Rheumy-eyed, fumbling, they needed her and couldn’t see the tears. She bent to each of them, close enough so they could see her smile and smell her cologne.

  “You were the best dancer, Lila,” said Minna Wence, who had lost the knack of the present altogether. Lila imagined, in spite of herself, the fresh-cut lawn bordered with mock orange, her feet bare in the grass, her dress whirling out behind. The ladies of Elysian View remembered well the parties given by the Admiral and Edith Fickett at Broadlawns, once the imperial palace of Main Street, broken into condominiums now. Beside the starry-eyed Minna sat Edith herself. Commanding even from her wheelchair, she lifted her lorgnette and looked up at Lila very much as if she were actually looking down.

  “Have you been crying?” she asked. How, Lila wondered, did such a curved and shrunken person contain so strong a voice? The collar of Edith’s lace robe reached her ears, and the hem hung long as a christening gown. Within lived a woman who in her most difficult hours had needed only to consult Emily Post, and who had carried the authority of this text with her through the years.

  “Frank Gunn died,” Lila said, with a great sniff. She recalled, though, that Edith had not cried even at the Admiral’s funeral, but had stood shaking every hand, accepting tribute, holding the light as Lila had seen the river do after the sun was down.

  Edith would never fail to show proper sympathy, though she remembered only vaguely, and with a vague distaste, who Frank Gunn was. “Oh, my dear,” she said, letting the lorgnette hang. “He was such a good man.” If she could not recall why she disliked him,
here she was proven right: death looked like a failure of dignity to Edith Fickett, just the sort of thing one might expect of Frank Gunn. She had learned to speak only good, though; it wasn’t hard to imply the rest.

  “So sad,” she said, “he was a communist, I believe.” But she didn’t know Lila’s politics. “Those communists must have been so brave,” she added. “Now he’s gone to a better place.” How could there be a better place? Well, this sort of thought was best suppressed.

  “Say,” she said, hurrying on, “Lila, have you seen the Admiral this afternoon?”

  Edith allowed no contradiction, but policy insisted that Lila remind her: the Admiral was dead.

  “Oh, Mrs. Fickett,” she said, pleading, “you know…” but Edith had raised the lorgnette again. Lila took a deep breath. “Admiral Fickett is dead. You know that.”

  “Of course I know that, Lila, but he hasn’t come home to lunch.”

  True enough. “I’ll check the billiard room,” Lila said.

  “Oh, no, he doesn’t approve of billiards.”

  “I’ll try the tennis court,” Lila said. She headed in a direction that might, if there had been tennis courts, have led to one.

  “Thank you, dear.” Edith folded her hands and turned to Minna Wence, who was still dreaming of waltzes past and asked what the theme of the next Broadlawns dance was to be.

  Edith kept her lap full of notes, reminding herself of appointments and chores, but, sifting them now, she saw no plans for a party. “Honestly,” she confided to Minna, “these days there seems to be nothing on my mind but my hair.” Had she sent the invitations and forgotten the party? She forced a gay laugh. “I haven’t decided,” she said.

  When Mary Gunn came along, carrying an exhausted, grief-struck silence only a shade deeper than her usual, Edith remembered the conversation with Lila and was prepared. “He was such a courageous man,” she said. She would not, of course, speak ill of the dead, nor think it, but unfortunately this left her at a loss for words. “When is his funeral, dear?” she asked. “Here, will you write it down for me?”