Age? Seventy-nine. Address? Main Street. I fished for her driver’s license and found the picture was a true one: it caught her smile that wishes to please and mocks the wish at once. The others in my family, seeing the license, would have had to recount the time she got wedged in the drawbridge, or the time she sideswiped the mounted policeman’s horse. I’m the only one of us who can fill out a simple form.
Next of kin? My mad mother. My grandfather fell in love with a Parisian woman and never came home from the war. When we heard last year he was dead, Grandma said with a wistful laugh that she supposed she could stop waiting for a letter now.
Religion? Irrelevant, I thought, but wrote Catholic, remembering Ma’s tales of parochial school, though in fact there’s no religion, no system for us at all. We’re on the loosest of terms with God. We’ve been lucky all our lives, bobbed from mishap to mishap like a family of corks on a wild sea, so we trust of each accident the knowledge it will bring, the new vista it will spread before us. I looked up from the clipboard to see them consulting, comforting, tête-à-tête, relishing the adventure, but something of Lawrence’s wintry spirit had settled into my bones, and I considered that our luck was only luck and would change.
“She’s gonna be just fine!” Here was Ma’s brother, Cap, in his big fur coat, just blown in with his equally fur-coated new wife, Rosetta. Cap believes in positive thinking, and it’s his knack of making people think positively, about “no-risk bonds” and “guaranteed options,” that obliged him to spend most of the last decade in Brazil. Still, he’s Grandma’s favorite, according to Ma. His rough, spreading face was radiant with corruption. His thunderous humor made the party.
“Wish we had olives,” he said, unscrewing a small silver flask. “Doesn’t seem like a real emergency, without an olive.”
He bent a monstrous smile on Lizzie, who had been stroking the hem of his coat. She fell back, giggling, half in terror, but when her brother started laughing too, she drew herself up.
“We have to be quiet,” she said, in a pious hush.
Yes, everything was to be savored: when the great automatic doors puffed open to admit a priest whose robes billowed around him, Ma said, “Someone’s dying,” just as, when she closes the last window against a storm, she’ll whistle softly and say, “Thar she blows.”
We watched the priest make his way down the corridor, until he turned into Grandma’s room.
“My God!” Ma was after him in an instant, the nurse behind her trying to tell her that last rites were a formality before any surgery at all.
“But she’s an Episcopalian!” Ma wailed. The priest stood, hand raised, in the open door. Grandma lay in the center of the high, bright room, wrapped in a sheet. She opened her eyes. She sat straight up.
“Get out,” she said. “Go.” She pointed to the door with a hand that trailed a long tube.
The priest turned to us for an answer, but when he saw our faces, his fell.
“I’m sorry,” Ma said, very kindly. “She’s an Episcopalian.”
“Katie, what did you tell them?” she asked me. “She only converted to please my father. She hasn’t been Catholic for thirty years.”
“She’s so fickle!” I said. I apologized to the priest, but really I was pleased; I had added my voice to the family clamor. For a moment I had stepped inside their circle and felt its narcotic comfort—I was glad, suddenly, to be home, to be sharing the glory of disaster.
As the hours of the operation passed, I heard Ma tell the story of the priest again and again, to the nurse, to the other meek emergency patients, until I knew it would take its place with Grandma’s drawbridge escapade and the time Ma got hung by her thumbs.
The hospital began to seem like Ma’s living room. Grace spread cancer pamphlets facedown on the floor and knelt to draw scenes for the children: red barns and sheep fluffy as the clouds above, all pierced by the sun’s yellow spines. Ma and Cap bickered over his flask: he accused her of swilling; she swore to everyone present that ever since childhood he’d been stingy and cruel. Audie got her casserole out of the car, and we picnicked under the “No Food or Drink” sign with our usual insouciance—who can deny us, all of us together?
Vulgar, I thought, and ostentatious, and typically self-absorbed. Are we so clever or lovely or even so kind that even our vices are charming? Surely, we would be struck dead any minute, for hubris. I feigned an interest in the bulletin board, though I hadn’t eaten all day. When I turned around, the nurse was handing out plastic spoons. Everyone wanted a bite. Audie wrote out the recipe for the woman with the lacerated hand and took calls on the desk phone, which rang constantly, always for us. All the relatives were calling from pay phones: Aunt Georgie from her Clam Shack, my brother from his corner bar, Grandma’s brother Arvid from a Labor Day flea market in Vermont. They’d get cut off, call back again, and again. “Yes,” Ma kept saying, shouting to be heard over the surf, the ball game, the white-elephant hunting hordes. “Yes, a real priest!” A new batch of wounded—a whiplash and a broken toe—got to hear about the mounted police. By midnight everyone knew that Cap was Grandma’s favorite, after Ma’s father ran away.
“‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.’” Ma spoke with an awful solemnity, as if she were quoting Thomas Jefferson and not Oscar Wilde. She wanted another laugh, but she had touched Audie’s fears.
“If it’s cancer, she’ll never forgive me,” Audie said. “I promised I wouldn’t let them hurt her.” She was rocking Timmy asleep, and she settled him again, squaring her shoulders to summon her ire. “I won’t let them keep her here. They have no right…”
“Don’t be silly,” Ma said, still playing to the house. “Our family doesn’t get cancer.”
“Your father just died of it,” I said.
“Well, you can hardly consider him one of the family.”
Audie was crying. “We should never have made her come here,” she sobbed. “All she wanted was to die in peace.”
Lizzie, who had been coloring quietly, jumped up and flung herself into her mother’s arms. Ma encircled them with one arm, Grace with the other. I watched from infinitely far away.
“Give me the flask, Cap,” Ma said.
He held it away. “No, Lila Ann. It’s my last sip.”
“To think,” Ma said. “She’ll die loving you more than me.”
Grace looked up from her knitting, which had grown spectacularly. “Is she going to die?” she asked.
“No,” Cap said. “She’s as tough as an old stewing chicken, and this is all the gin I have.”
But when the nurse went to pick up a biopsy in the operating room, he said, “I knew it, it’s cancer.”
His new wife is Brazilian, wide and squat and generally eroded. She speaks very little English, so Cap feels free to call her “that toad I married,” even when she’s in the room. Now he hid his face against her shoulder and shook in the circle of her heavy arms as if he were sobbing too.
It was not cancer, however, but a mechanical disorder so common it had no name: her intestine had gotten a crimp in it and burst. The surgeon in his gown looked ten feet tall, but we hardly listened to his warnings. No complication, no trauma for us—we were beyond such things.
“I told you she’d be fine,” Ma said.
“No, I told you,” said Cap.
Behind him the nurse was taking another call, a man choking. The ambulance couldn’t find the house.
“Turn right,” the nurse repeated, but their radio wasn’t working. Brimfield is all back roads winding up and down the hills. “Turn right, right!” she said, louder every time, but it seemed that only I could hear her.
By the exit, my family was at rest in the palm of His hand. Motley, disheveled, Audie and Grace each bearing a sleeping child, they willed the doors open and spilled out, all but singing, into the dark. I picked up the empty casserole and followed them. The summer air was back, soft and powerful.
“It’ll be a toug
h recovery,” Cap said, taking off his coat. “You’ll have to stay with her, Lila Ann.”
“You do it,” Ma said. “You’re the one she loves.”
She was overcome with bitterness, now we were out of harm’s way. “My little vacation with my daughters, completely spoiled,” she said in the car, as if Grandma had nastily planned the whole thing.
I drowsed in the back seat, lulled by the old, familiar angers. We were safe at last, almost home. At the crest of Withans Hill three deer turned to watch us; Ma stopped the car, and we watched them too, in thrall to their beauty and fear. The floodlit church spire shone in the valley, with all Connecticut unfurled beyond. The dark houses stood with their maples, the hedgerows continued their orderly advance over the hills. I was certain the choking man must have been saved. Surely, everyone in that quiet landscape was safely asleep, in the arms of his beloved and the sight of God.
* * *
A few hours later the church burned to the ground. I was sleeping in the living room, so I could have looked out to see the flames, but when I heard the sirens I turned over and pulled the sheet up over my head. I woke in the morning to the bump of Abe’s wheelbarrow along the back drive, sat up to see him resting on his rake like a figure out of Breughel, dwarfed by the tasseling corn.
It was one of those late-summer days that seem to swell with abundance, so that all life promises to ripen as simply as the apples on the trees. It was luxurious to miss Lawrence with the sun streaming through the screen door and the hot smell of the fields rising. Damning him, I longed for him. I wanted to see him stand with his coffee at the window, looking into the tangle of brush behind our apartment like a sailor scanning the sea. He has a stern, pure gaze that seems to see beyond the ordinary turmoils and obligations into a world of light, and people sometimes take him for a minister, but he’s a history professor, or was until he came into his inheritance and retired. He was forty-five and filed to his essence, a bare moral wire, when I seduced him. I wanted to lift my arms and be borne up out of the family morass, to marry above my station.
The gods must have sent me to him for a joke! He had lived so deep in the world of abstraction that he claimed never to have touched silk or tasted ginger. When I brought home a bunch of red tulips, he stepped back in awe; as they opened in their vase, he would approach them shyly, lifting his hand beside their loose heads like a conductor urging a crescendo. After his years of austerity I was a wild extravagance, and if at first I delighted him, I soon became an embarrassment. He returned to his contemplations, reading hour by hour in his favorite chair, looking up only to take a judicious note. Nothing came up to his standards, including his own works, which, beyond pronouncing them “mortal indeed,” he refused to mention. He did once compliment a phrase of mine, but in general he kept his face in his book as if he hated to look up and find me deviling the room. I tried to be braver, wiser, more grave, but nothing impressed him. Under his gloomy authority I felt I would wither away.
When I remembered my parents, my grandparents, the way they gave up on each other, I knew I should seize myself and persevere. I began to lecture Lawrence, eloquent as a prisoner addressing his cell wall. Marriage, I said, was a vocation; we must strive to build a temple between us, of simple, soaring lines. He’d give an impatient nod. Finally, recognition, which had been gathering, crystalized, and I said I had to leave.
“All right,” he said, with a deep, acquiescent sigh. “What is it you want?”
I wanted laughter over nothing; the midnight recounting of dreams. I couldn’t believe my life had ebbed so—that I had to ask for such things. “It’s so simple,” I said. “Plain dumb love.”
A condescending smile flickered over his face. He’d taken a note or two on love. I waited for him to bring the whole of history down against me, to tell me again that no minor alliance counts for anything in this world of Declines and Falls. But something—my pure youth, I suppose—touched him.
“It’s my fault,” he said. His voice was dry and tender—he pitied me. “You got in with the wrong man, that’s all, and you were too young to know.”
His face, all pain, rebuked me. I’d crashed into his cloister—I’d been too young to care.
Now I felt plenty old, inoculated with his doubts—I would never belong among my own blithe people again. My anger was hardening to a cold, immovable weight, but even this seemed to unite us. Leaning back among the bedclothes, I considered that, like my mother and grandmother, I was lost to my marriage and that without Lawrence I would have to begin a long life alone.
“Coffee?” Vinnie Duff stood at the screen door. With his overalls, and the sun angling through his straw hat and curls, he looked like a scarecrow cut down from its stick. The first time I saw Vinnie, he was sailing backward past our window, riding the top rung of his ladder into the rhododendrons. He’d been painting the soffits at the wrong angle. When I ran out to help him, he propped himself on an elbow and said, “Now, when you’re falling, the first thing to remember is save yourself, don’t worry about the bucket.”
Vinnie knows a lot about falling, but he’s a terrible gardener. Though he gave up law school for the simple life back in 1969, he still prizes reason over insight: he can’t keep the roses from smelling of garlic, or save the scrofulous sunflowers, but he can always explain what went wrong.
“I’m in bed, Vinnie,” I observed, but the shortest route to the garden is through Ma’s living room, and they’re all used to traipsing through as they please. Vinnie clomped into the bathroom to bring me a robe, turned his face resolutely to the wall as I put it on. Then he sat me down and told me, very gingerly, as if afraid I’d develop a crack, that Ma was back at the hospital where Grandma was dying again.
My hair was dirty and tangled, and I pulled it back with a piece of string while he made coffee. Without the camaraderie of crisis, death was its old black self again. I saw my grandmother’s life shrunken—ruled, like all lives, by small hopes and fears, ended here arbitrarily after the years of schoolteaching, the years of duplicate bridge …
As I explained this to Vinnie, it devolved somehow into the story of Lawrence and me. Vinnie and I had never gotten far beyond the weather before, but I couldn’t stop talking. He closed one eye to consider me as if I were a blighted rose.
“Well,” he said finally, “doesn’t death just show how small these little love worries are?” He looked extremely pleased with himself; he’d proved I ought to cheer up.
“No, Vinnie,” I said. He gets everything backward. But I was not feeling discursive—my voice quavered.
“Wait, wait, Katie!” He jumped up in a panic, hoping to avert tears. “How about a tour of the garden?”
I followed him, repeating the flower names as he spoke them: cleome, portulaca, cosmos. I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, so I tried to be calm, but when we came to the astilbe, the word was so lush and strange—more lovely than the flower—I spoke it in a sob. He patted my back as if I were choking.
“I’m sorry,” I said, to gain license to continue.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said awkwardly, touching my shoulder.
“For heaven’s sake, Vinnie,” I said. “Put your arms around me.”
He obeyed. His smell, of sweat and fresh earth, penetrated grief. Looking up, I caught his eye by accident. What you can learn in a half-second! Vinnie and I have known each other for years, and thoughts of him might have crossed my idle mind before, but in that instant we were suddenly a weedy Tristan and his sleep-sodden, tear-blotched Iseult. Flustered, I let go of him. Flummoxed absolutely, he loped off toward the woodshed, calling over his shoulder that he was sorry, he’d forgotten he had to meet Abe.
* * *
Grace cried in hiccups, in a corner of the windowless “quiet room,” where the hospital, to spare us the indignity of public grief, had shut us up alone. The walls were blank green, the seats alternated orange and mauve. For solace there was a Bible; for nourishment, a jar of mints.
“What is i
t, honey?” I asked. Cap was with Grandma, Audie had taken the children to the lobby shop, and Ma was asleep across a row of seats, so the task of comfort fell to me.
“Nothing,” Grace said, from the depths of a sob. “It’s just, I don’t know…”
She’s always anxious, uncertain, as if she were on the brink of disaster somehow and the next flower she picked might rip the ground from beneath her. I get impatient—I tell her this world is all we have and we ought to take our chances here, rejoicing, but I can’t persuade her to take heart.
“I never know what’s wrong, Kate,” she said. “That’s what’s wrong.” I patted her shoulder but without much hope.
Ma woke by maternal instinct and felt blindly for her glasses.
“Who’s crying?” she asked, thickly, pulling herself up and stumbling across the room to take Grace’s other side.
“Now, Grandma’s had a long, happy life,” she began. I shook my head, knowing Grace mourned something far beyond this, but the old commonplaces, the old cadences, worked their old effect. Grace nodded acquiescence, wiping her eyes. Her knitting, a mass of rough, greenish stuff, spilled over her knees like a fisherman’s mossy net.
“It’s lovely,” Ma said dryly. “What is it?” Over Grace’s head she made a face: we all wonder why Grace can’t, just one time, wear red.
“It doesn’t matter,” Grace said. “It’s all screwed up.”
“Honey, you do everything perfectly,” Ma said, but this just prompted a new sob. Our little griefs, which will do circus tricks for the right audience, loomed up against us now we were all alone. Grace refused consolation, and Ma, having failed, started to cry too.
“I can’t even help my own children,” she said. Still weeping, Grace swore this wasn’t true. Convinced mine was the purest sorrow, I opened the Bible, thinking to escape them, but Cap burst through the door.
The Rose Thieves Page 14