The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Saturday, October 19, Van Leaves at 9:30, South Portico, Mary wrote.

  “Thank you, dear,” Edith said, and filed it beneath “Manicure, Tuesday P.M.”

  TODAY IS MONDAY, OCTOBER 21

  THE NEXT MEAL IS: LUNCH

  The signboard at the nurses’ station was meant to give everyone a leg up on reality. Edith, studying it, finally decided to make a note. Lunch, she wrote on the back of an envelope from one of those dear old oil companies her husband had loved. “Important,” the envelope read. “Proxy material enclosed.”

  Important. Edith took it in her lap to the window, as she had taken Isaac’s letters to the field to read them, when they were engaged. She would wade in among the red and yellow hawkweed, hitching her skirts to take the sun on her legs. She smiled. She was nostalgic for all life now, every detail. How well her imagination had served her, back then, reading love between Isaac’s lines on pump repair and shipboard meals!

  “Do you know,” she said to Lila, who had just come with the sherry for the bridge game, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such a beautiful fall.”

  Lila agreed, but Mary Gunn, who had been keeping nervous vigil since Frank’s funeral on Saturday, waiting to see Lila, came up behind them to say she could see no beauty in anything so slothfully tended. The topiary seemed to shrink as she spoke. “Can I speak to you in your office?” she asked Lila, in an ominous undertone.

  As soon as she delivered the sherry, Lila said, and went off with a sigh, feeling properly chastised for taking pleasure where there was none to be had.

  Courteous, Edith thought, Mary Gunn had never been. Imagine speaking so cruelly of that field, where they had all gathered raspberries as children. But Mary was in mourning; she must be forgiven.

  “How are you feeling dear?” Edith asked.

  “Fine, thank you. Fine,” Mary said. “One learns to handle these things.”

  One does? Edith wondered if she had mistaken the subject.

  “The service was lovely, though,” Mary added, with a fearsome emphasis that caused Edith to touch her notes, though she dared not look down in case one marked “Funeral” should appear on top.

  “I was so sorry to have missed it,” Edith said, considering various excuses before falling back on her usual “It’s this damn chair.” (She did not speak the word “damn,” of course, only mouthed it.) “There’s never a ride available.”

  “There was supposed to be a van.”

  “Oh,” said Edith, covering her notes with her hands, “oh, no, I don’t think…”

  “Perhaps there was an administrative error,” Mary said. “Lila was supposed to arrange a van.”

  “Exactly. An administrative error,” Edith said, so relieved she felt a surge of warmth toward Mary. “There was no van, I’m sure,” she said, “and it’s such a shame, dear. I so wanted to go. I’m sure it was grand,” she said, heading off toward the bridge game, the wheelchair in drive. “Next time, absolutely,” she called over her shoulder. Then she was aghast. Hadn’t they been discussing a funeral? It couldn’t be.

  “Tra-la, tra-la-la-la,” she sang, softly, absently. It was the most rousing phrase of “The Marseillaise,” which she had used to sing to herself just before she descended the staircase into the midst of a fête, her fine blond hair piled high. She had always felt triumph was at hand when she heard those notes: now they carried the faux pas out of her mind. She was sure, suddenly, that the cards would fall for her today.

  Next time? Mary heaved her purse onto Lila’s desk and took a seat. “There seems to have been an administrative error,” she said, resting her cigarette in the ashtray in order to look Lila straight in the eye. “There was no transportation to Frank’s funeral.” Her voice thinned and threatened to fail. “Edith Fickett was unable to go to the church.”

  This, Lila saw, was the saddest thing in the world, the trifle that condenses a life of pain to a single, lethal drop. Brucie, who drove the van, had said there were no riders: funerals were far too common at Elysian to attract much attention, and Saturday had been blustery, and the Reverend Sleight was rumored to believe in Hell.

  “There’s no need to apologize,” Mary said. Lila had intended no apology, but she was ever willing. Mary’s sorrows, her joyless smile which served only to confirm the fitness of everything wrong, could not be helped, but it was crucial, awful, that her plans had gone awry.

  “I’m so sorry…” Lila began.

  “Please.” Mary held up a hand. “These ceremonies.” She blew out a great smoky breath and lit a new cigarette. “… but they are important to some people … you should have heard Edith just now, she was devastated.”

  That wicked old dissembler could not be devastated by a freight train, thought Lila, pulling a sympathetic face.

  “I think it would be best if we played a tape of the funeral,” Mary said, “for those who were unable to attend.”

  “There’s a tape?” All life looked bizarre to Lila—the crucifix swinging between Jean B.’s breasts, the nurses’ aides running through their cancan for the Folies Bergère—but this, she was sure, taxed propriety’s limit.

  Mary pulled her purse into her lap and rummaged. There it was, a purse-sized tape player and miniature cassette. “You see,” she said, “I just held it in my lap, with the prayer book. I wonder you don’t use one of these in your work, Lila. The sound quality is remarkable.” She pressed a button, and the machine issued an unearthly fugue.

  “We can reserve one of the sitting rooms for tomorrow night, serve … sherry, and a few small cakes, and there should be a simple flower arrangement, nothing ostentatious…”

  Without ostentation, who would want to attend? But Mary was all animation, now they had a plan. She lit a new cigarette, though one was still burning down in the ashtray, and flipped through her notebook to start a new page.

  Lila clasped her hands on the desktop and spoke as teacher to student, or mother to child. “It is unusual…” she began.

  Mary had evidently been waiting for this; she sprang.

  “Unusual,” she said, and began a lecture that was to cover the spread of fascism and the rise of an anti-intellectual elite before reaching the sturdy declaration that she and Frank had never trod upon the ordinary paths, though of course if Lila …

  “Forgive me,” Lila said, “you are absolutely right.”

  “You don’t have to give in,” Mary said, no less sharply. Frank would never have given in, Lila thought. They must have been like two dogs with an old sock.

  “I want to give in,” Lila said. From the absurd she had risen, to the absurd she was doomed to return.

  When Mary, having issued a few more directives, left, Lila pulled a sheet of oaktag from her drawer and drew a thick black border around it.

  Frank Gunn, she wrote. Selections from His Funeral. This didn’t look very inviting, so she added Refreshments in violet below.

  * * *

  “Look, you have a second chance,” she said to Edith Fickett as she pinned up the sign. “Frank Gunn’s funeral again tomorrow.”

  Edith was too well bred ever to show surprise. “Oh, lovely,” she said softly to herself as she searched for her notepad. “Lovely, lovely, lovely, hooray, hooray, hooray.” With not a trace of irony, so Lila saw she had put it out of her mind.

  “Tomorrow,” Lila said again.

  “Tomorrow,” Edith echoed.

  “Write it down,” Lila said. Tomorrow, Edith wrote, with two underlines.

  “And you are really planning to go, aren’t you?” Lila asked.

  “You are so nervous, dear,” Edith said. “It hurts me to see you overwrought. The things of this world aren’t so important as all that, you know. And don’t make such a face, Lila, you’ll cover yourself with wrinkles, and around those beautiful blue eyes…”

  On she went, while Lila imagined a quick and tidy strangulation, carried out with the lorgnette chain. A mannerly, elegant death.

  * * *

  “Lila, this is extremely
unusual.” The chill in Jean B.’s voice froze everyone in the room. The nurses’ aides, rehearsing, let their skirts fall and stood like girls under a dancing-master’s rebuke. Jean B., holding out the funeral poster, was all atremble. She saw danger in every mystery, and few things were not mysterious to her.

  “Is it some kind of a … a … a joke?” she asked. Lila’s heart went out to her, by accident. She sounded so afraid.

  “Mrs. Gunn wanted to play a tape of Mr. Gunn’s funeral, for the shut-ins,” she said, with enough gravity that Jean B. returned to her notes.

  “Well, it doesn’t come under Recreation,” Jean B, said, finally. “There’s no policy on this.”

  “I know.” A tiny smile crept over Lila’s face. She couldn’t help it.

  “I have had enough of your insolence,” Jean B. snapped.

  Lila remembered, suddenly, the ruler over the knuckles: the awful surprise of pain and the other children looking down, as the aides in their pink costumes did now. To be spoken to so, and by a woman as shallow, as pitiable, as Jean B.! Everything a failure, all her plans unaccomplished, the efforts of affection wasted, the daily toil to produce … prettily wrapped bridge prizes and inspiring bulletin boards.

  Jean B. held up the sign, as if to rip it, but she must have seemed foolish even to herself for a moment. “It’s not to happen again,” she said, smacking the sign down on the table and hurrying out.

  But it would, Lila thought, if she liked. It would happen again and again until The Elysian View Home was nothing but a three-ring funeral, with herself bespangled in its midst.

  She had wished for many things before: a thriving love, a secure future, an important job, but finally, something was to be granted. Frank Gunn’s soul could not rest, it seemed, without Edith Fickett’s benediction, and Edith, at the mere mention of death, felt the time was right to make order from chaos in her top bureau drawer.

  “Important,” Edith said, taking out the letter she had received the day before, turning it over in wonder. The Admiral had always managed their money, so now it was her job to keep the important things together, in the top drawer, for the man from the bank. She took out everything with a dollar sign or number and piled it on the bed. When she came to her note, “Tomorrow,” she felt a little thrill, wondering what was to happen tomorrow. Was it a holiday? Was there an Indian summer picnic planned? Of all picnics she loved an Indian summer picnic best. Whatever it was, it was important, and she set the note in the Important pile, efficient and pleased.

  Tomorrow had come, in fact, and nearly gone. In the Admiral Isaac Fickett Memorial Sitting Room, Lila had arranged six armchairs in séance position. Most of the furniture at Elysian had been donated, and Mary Gunn’s tape player sat like a sacred scarab on the round table Edith’s grandfather had brought back from India in the Bright Prospect, his clipper ship. Mary carried two pots of mums from windowsill to table, waiting for the mourners, then back to the window again. The dinner hour was ending, the hour of Frank’s service had come. She heard snatches of aimless, companionable chatter as the residents turned into their rooms. No one came to her door. She returned to the window, watching couples who lived as she and Frank had, in cottages on the grounds, pass beneath her toward their lighted homes. When she went to the door again, she saw no one in the hall.

  Seeing the note “Tomorrow” on top of the pile she had just made, Edith had a foreboding and considered several disagreeable obligations, never thinking of Frank Gunn. Well, better not to worry … The last item in her top drawer was a cocktail napkin from the Queen Mary, with a perfect lipstick imprint. Oh, those dear old ships, where she and Isaac had reclined in the palm of each other’s affection … (Isaac had been cranky, ill at ease as a passenger, but never mind.) The sun rose, it seemed, solely to warm them, the sea moved solely to rock them, and here was her only souvenir. She added it to the Important pile, which she wrapped in Saran Wrap left from a breakfast in bed, and tied with red ribbon, for importance. A good evening’s work, and she was looking forward to tomorrow again, without remembering why.

  Mary Gunn heard a step in the hallway and stood to receive her guests. There was only Minna Wence, making slow progress in her walker but smiling enormously, with a great red bow in her hair.

  “Thank you,” Mary said, with injured gravity, shaking Minna’s hand. “He would be so glad to see you.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear,” Minna said. “Will there be dancing?”

  * * *

  Important, Lila wrote, in scarlet, on a sheet of oaktag so large she had to spread it on the floor. (“What’s needed,” Mary had explained, “is a larger sign. Edith couldn’t see it from the wheelchair. She was terribly disappointed.”) Frank Gunn’s Funeral Will Be Replayed at 6 P.M. Wednesday Evening. Attendance Is Mandatory. Lila sucked on her pen a moment and decided to throw caution to the winds. This Means You, she added, then gathered caution back to herself and illuminated the letters until they became lilies, one by one. “If it makes Mary happy,” she thought as she worked, knowing full well that she would not make Mary happy and must continue to try.

  When time came to face Jean B., Lila found her strength in the hand mirror, in her own silver-blue eyes. Edith’s flattery might be ungenuine, but it was not in fact untrue. Lila held the mirror closer until she could see only her eyes, the old beauty of determination unchanged though the flesh had slackened over it. Until Edith spoke, Lila had forgotten what she could draw from her own image. She shut the mirror in the desk drawer and went to face Jean B.

  “Mrs. Fickett has asked that we hold another service,” she explained. The Ficketts’ only daughter had committed suicide years ago, so their fortune would now go to Elysian View.

  “Very good,” said Jean B. Her phone rang, and Lila could hear in the new warmth of her voice that it was a man. A prosthetics salesman, from the conversation. Jean B. had left the convent in search of a more worldly love but had found none. Past forty now, with only the dream of romance, never the old soupbone love, she toyed with her crucifix and tossed her hair, and Lila had to turn away.

  * * *

  “Lila, Lila, a snake!” Minna Wence was reared up in her chair, watching a National Geographic special on the nurses’ station TV. The snakes did look real, taunting the camera, lolling out of the trees. Cheerful Nurse Carp explained from behind the desk that it was only the television, nothing to fear.

  Lila took two quick steps and lifted the spectral snake from the old woman’s lap, turning her arm so it could be imagined to wind upward, even to shoot its quick tongue. She held it out to Nurse Carp, who shrank at first, though finally she accepted it and carried it away behind the desk.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Wence, smoothing her robe, then her hair. When she touched the bow over the bald spot, her thoughts returned happily to things satin.

  “Will you be at Broadlawns tomorrow, Lila?” she asked. Lila wished she had been born into the right age or class to have been at Broadlawns once. She pictured a brigade of florists, passing fuchsias like fire buckets up the wide stairs. She leaned against a chair and spoke as from delicious indecision.

  “I don’t know … I just can’t make up my mind.”

  “What I was wondering…” Mrs. Wence hesitated, as if about to ask a great favor, then plunged ahead. “Would you … could I … borrow the gold chiffon?”

  The gold chiffon? From the look on Mrs. Wence’s face, Lila could almost conjure herself young and fair in a gold chiffon cloud. “Oh, it would look wonderful on you,” she said. “Of course you can wear it. I have a new one, cut very low.”

  The old woman’s face lit like a girl’s. “Tell me all about it, dear.” Lila gave her a boost into her walker and kept lingering pace along the hall, describing clouds of silk the bound less blue of the evening sky. It was the morning of the third funeral, and as she talked she ticked off her responsibilities in her mind.

  “… and a wide, soft sash that almost touches the ground,” she said, as they turned at Mr
s. Wence’s door. She had forgotten for a moment that she was inventing the dress, and began to worry about matching shoes.

  “Oh, Lila, it will be grand.” Mrs. Wence dropped into the chair Lila pulled out for her, with a soft smack like a fly ball into a fielder’s mitt. “I’m so tired of my white, even if it did come from Paris.” She gestured toward the closet. Lila stepped in, between the Floridian polyesters and Irish cardigans redolent of Bal à Versailles.

  “This one?” she asked. It was a white silk sheath, slit as high as any man would dare hope, beaded from nape to knee.

  “Oh, my dear,” Mrs. Wence said, clapping her hands together. “Oh, try it on.”

  Lila was sure she could shrink or swell to fit anything beautiful, but once she had shimmied in, she despaired of escape. “Oh,” Mrs. Wence said, soft and reverent. In the mirror Lila saw herself truly: pale and tall as a marble Athena. At a quarter to six, still unsure she could ever remove the dress, she carried a tray of pink and green cakes the length of the main hall, easily drawing attention from the TV.

  “For the bereaved,” she said to the ladies assembled. “After the service.”

  Mrs. Wence, stalled in her walker, broke into a stricken, yearning smile and peered toward the confectionary until Lila had to offer an arm, so that both of them lost balance, grabbing blindly at the walker and bracing for a rain of cakes. The tray teetered overhead, shifting now toward the window and the setting sun, now eastward again, until, through a feat of perfect attention, a momentary forgetting of all but the cakes aloft, the women kept them there, and themselves upright as well.

  “Is there a party?” Mrs. Wence gasped.

  “Shall we go in together?” Lila said.

  Though she had filled the room with white lilies, Lila could do little to lighten the aspect of Mary Gunn, who stood wringing her hands in the doorway, looking about as if, though prepared to resent anything, she could find nothing out of place. But here was Lila, in her white dress. Mary turned her head and offered her hand only to Minna Wence.