“Nice, regular breathing!” he said.
“She’s on a respirator, Cap,” Ma told him.
“She’s gonna be a brand-new old lady in no time flat,” he said, with a broad wink at the wary Grace.
Ma blew her nose. “She’s not a used car, Cap,” she said.
Never mind, he told her. Even the economics would work out. We’d save hundreds a day if Grandma was released early. Uncle Arvid could take care of her—he’d been a medic in the Second World War.
“Is that what you told the doctors?” Ma said. Arvid saw too much in Europe, and he’s been on lithium since V-E Day. He’s an antique dealer now.
“Don’t be silly, Lila Ann,” said Cap with deafening assurance. “He can nurse her. You know he passed the postal exam.”
“He quit the second day!” Ma said, but she caught herself. “We don’t need to get into this. Her blood pressure’s almost nil now.”
“Don’t say that, Lila Ann,” Cap said between his teeth. His first wife was killed in a car wreck, while he was in Brazil. We didn’t know what name he was using, couldn’t find him, so Grandma arranged the funeral. After he came home, he stuck close to her, and he wasn’t going to let her go too.
Audie appeared in the doorway with the children, who carried new silver pinwheels like wands.
“We should have let her stay at home,” she said. “Now she’ll go to her grave hating me.”
“Well, she never loved me at all,” said Ma.
“She’s not going to her grave,” Cap said. “They promised they’d keep her alive.”
“I’ll pull the tubes myself,” Audie wept.
Grace had dried her tears while the others squabbled, and I saw her summon courage again.
“We ought to call Daddy,” she said. “We ought to let him know.”
I laughed, God forgive me.
“Katie,” Grace said. “He’s one of the family.”
Yes, but the last time Ma saw him, in the courthouse parking lot, she tried to run him over. After a decade of divorce she’s still in a rage.
Lizzie blew a wicked gust into her pinwheel. “Grandma hates Grandpa, doesn’t she?” she said.
“They have a difference of opinion,” Audie began, but Ma laughed and swept the child up in her arms.
“You are such a vicious child!” she said, rocking her proudly, kissing her, while Lizzie beamed.
Grace and Audie and I look nothing alike—Grace is all angles, Audie’s taut, and I tend toward the blowzy—but our eyebrows confirmed us as sisters now: all were raised. Lizzie leaned back in Ma’s arms, pinwheel blazing, and everything came right side up again. By the time the nurse knocked to say Grandma was conscious, we felt her recovery was only our due.
Cap took it as proof he could sell anything.
“I told them!” he crowed at her bedside. “They didn’t believe me, Ma.”
Amid the thump and flutter of the machines Grandma opened a weary eye. Though her face showed mostly pain, she seemed to be asking a question, and after a few tries we guessed it.
“No,” Ma said. “It wasn’t cancer. You’re fine.” Grandma’s face went calm.
“Now will you say I was right?” Ma asked. “Now are you glad we brought you?”
Grandma set her mouth in a stubborn line.
“I know how you’ll remember this,” Ma said. “This will be the time Cap saved your life.”
“Ma,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ma said. “I told her. She’s fine.”
And we tumbled, jubilant, into the big waiting room, like actors out from the curtain, almost expecting applause. Abe was there, as if Ma had conjured him, twisting his canvas fishing hat in his hand, chewing a dead pipe. He twinkled all over to see us, tamped his pipe as if to light it, but remembered the no-smoking sign. On the seat beside him was a silver ice bucket with his wife’s monogram.
“Champagne!” Ma cried.
Alas, no. Rolf had cut off his hand with the chain saw, and Abe knew it would keep best on ice.
* * *
Thanks to this, the hand could be promptly reattached, once the microsurgeon flew in from New York. In forty-eight hours Rolf’s fingertips were glowing a healthy pink, and they said he’d move his thumb by Halloween.
Now, Ma, said, we had to have champagne. There was everything to celebrate: Grandma was about to be released, and Great-uncle Arvid was leaving the flea market early to come down and nurse her. Lizzie had gone forth to kindergarten, leaving Audie in tears at the bus. Grace shook out her knitting to reveal a sheath that fell straight from shoulder to hip to knee. She tugged at the hem in bitter frustration, pronouncing it uneven, wracked with flaws, but it became her absolutely. Regal and diffident, she boarded the bus to Boston with her many satchels and her bouquet of wild asters, bravely offering her ticket to be punched, turning in the door to smile goodbye, an angel of uncertainty.
Best of all, Abe’s wife was marching on Washington, against nuclear arms. She would be spending the whole night away. Ma decided to give a party, just the two of us and Vinnie and Abe. All week she’d been lost in her sorrows, so I had yet to tell her about Lawrence, but as we rifled her closet for silk and satin, with the evening like a great city on the horizon, my marriage began to seem just another run-of-the-mill disaster, and I considered how I might fashion it into a tale.
“I’ve left Lawrence,” I began, meaning to make it funny, but I felt dizzy suddenly, as if I were looking over a high cliff.
“Oh, Kate,” Ma said. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” She had been holding up a blouse in the mirror, and she set it down for a minute, but it was the same blue as her eyes and she couldn’t quite let it go.
“Well,” she said to my reflection, “at least you only wasted three years. With me, it was twenty.”
“I had to leave, Ma,” I said, afraid I might start crying. “I couldn’t stand it anymore, I…”
“I told all of you not to get married,” she said. “Now, I wash my hands.” She held up two necklaces: “Gold or pearls?”
“Gold,” I said. I felt yanked back from the precipice, saved. “Flash before luster.”
“That’s my Katie,” she said, looping them together over her head.
When Abe saw us in our finery, he went back across the driveway and returned with his wife’s satin kimono over his jeans and a pointy Chinese hat. Vinnie had been haunting the second-hand stores and wore all his favorites: emerald jacket, orange tie, pants of emerald-and-orange plaid.
“Why no imagination?” he asked. “Why the same tired colors over and over again?” Vinnie and I had been awkward since our embrace in the garden, stranger to each other than if we’d never met. We’d gotten into each other’s imagination. He kept arriving at the screen door, endlessly smiling, talking just to keep my attention. He brought me new facts shyly as if they were jewels: from the juice of the privet berry, I learned, the first mapmakers distilled their ink. Tropical earwigs come in violent colors and eat meat. That afternoon, impatient with entomology, I’d asked him what he wanted of love. “Comfort,” he said, very uncomfortably. “Buy an armchair!” I told him. I preached transports of devotion, jabbing my finger into the air. “Love is the last frontier!” I said. Wanting to drink from his teacup, and deeply, I seized it so mightily I drenched us both. I tried to blot his shirt with a dish towel, but he kept backing away. Now, when he sat down at the picnic table beside me, he kept a little distance, afraid of what I might do.
The champagne cork shot off into a night of high, luminous clouds. We had damask on the table, Verdicchio in the ice bucket, Abe’s crystal, and Vinnie’s sweetest rose.
“I don’t know,” Ma said. “Why should it have been such a hard life?”
She seemed to ask in the name of science, but not even Vinnie could answer.
“They never loved me,” she said. Grandma’s resurrection had thrown things into sorry focus for her; she’d begun tabulating her troubles as if about to present a bill.
“Th
ey loved Cap,” she said. “He was the son. I was the slave.”
She deserved sympathy—her sorrows threatened at any moment to swallow her—but it was hard to weep for one who could call herself a slave in such round and ringing tones. We had finished the Verdicchio and opened a Côtes du Rhône; when no one answered her, Ma yanked the bottle from the bucket to pour another round. I winced as she plunged it back into the ice, remembering Rolf’s hand.
“I thought my father loved me, but clearly I was wrong,” Ma said. “I thought if I was patient, my husband … I thought if I gave him time…” She stopped. She had opened too deep a wound.
Vinnie commenced disputation: “But I’m sure your mother loves you.”
“Unwittingly,” Ma said. “Only because she’s my mother. Not in any real way.”
“You must feel loved here?” Vinnie tried again.
She looked straight into Abe’s eyes. “Must I?” she asked, from a bibulous mist. “Must I really?” He said nothing, holding her gaze.
“Forgive her,” I said to Vinnie. I was mortified.
“Nothing to forgive,” he said stoutly.
Abe continued intent on Ma, like a man staring into a flame. Drink made him stiffer and more formal as it unloosed the last of her stays. Meditatively, never taking his eyes from Ma, he held a cork in the candle flame and began, with slow, meticulous strokes, to black her face.
She kept perfectly still, lifting her chin, watching his eyes.
“Now I’ll be beautiful,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be beautiful. Don’t I look beautiful, Katie?”
She looked like a panther in the woods, her eyes burning.
“Fit to kill,” I said.
“Go to hell.” She tipped backward over the bench so that the soles of her feet showed where her face had been. Abe put the cork to the candle again and started to black them, toe by toe. Suppose his wife got home early? She might decide they needed a chauffeur after all. Ma couldn’t afford to pay rent—where would she go?
“So,” I said, hoping to rescue her, “who’s the arsonist?”
They would know, even if the police didn’t—the town was too small for a mystery. Already I’d heard how he did it: he opened electric meters and crossed wires, or yanked the propane lines, freeing the captive forces to wreak their natural havoc. Vinnie named as the culprit a big kid from the valley who’d been at school with me. It was rumored he’d singed his hair in the Town Hall fire. His girlfriend had trimmed it but then discovered he was unfaithful, and was showing the clippings around.
“Unfaithful,” came Ma’s wondering voice from below. “Maybe he loved them both. Maybe his heart is broken.”
“Ma,” I said, but Abe only smiled. Finishing her feet, he joined her upside down.
“I’ve blackened your soles,” he said.
“Forgive them,” I said to Vinnie, but he was paying them no attention. He’d been watching the gold beads flash at my throat, and when I spoke he looked guiltily away. We’d discussed celestial navigation, and I asked if he wanted to go look at the stars. No, he said, scandalized—it was getting late. Abe stood up at this and dusted himself, saying he couldn’t think where the time had gone.
Ma spent the night passed out on the bathroom floor. She was against the door, so I went around to the window to check on her. She mastered a giggle and, with the most solemn sincerity, apologized.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “You didn’t seem foolish at all. Good night, I love you.”
“No,” she said, with deep satisfaction. “Nobody loves me.” Then, all sleepy sweetness, by motherly rote: “I love you, sweetheart. Sleep tight.”
I squatted in back of the arbor to pee. The night was awash with stars. I fell asleep inventing harangues for Lawrence, lectures on the small acts of courage and generosity, the everyday absolution of love. I dreamed of Vinnie Duff, with his plain surprised face, his straw curls crazily bobbing. When he moved to kiss me, I fell back into space, but fear flashed to awe and as I woke with the dreamer’s start I knew it was glory, to be falling.
* * *
In the morning I brought Ma her breakfast in bed: two aspirins and a cup of tea. She lifted her head just enough to swallow and sank back against the pillow with a weak moan. We heard the front door open, then the back. Abe had gone through to the garden with a bucket of mulch. In the center of the living room table he’d left a tiny vase of love-in-a-mist.
“No,” Ma said, when I said I’d bring it into her. “Leave it where he put it. I can get up.”
One hand to her forehead, the other at the neck of her dressing gown, she leaned in the doorway and smiled until I thought she’d cry.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “It’s his way of saying he loves me.”
“Why doesn’t he just tell you?” I asked.
“He doesn’t have to,” she said, as if I were terribly obtuse. “Let’s boil some eggs. I’m starving.”
While the eggs bumped and knocked in a pot on the stove, she traced a looping “I Love You” in the film of grease on the cabinet door. She washed it with ammonia and scrubbed it with bleach, trying to erase it, but the words kept shining.
“Katie,” she said. “He’ll see it. He’ll know.”
“Believe me,” I said, “no one ever knows what anyone else means by that.”
She wasn’t attending. “I suppose it’s a sign,” she said, sighing prettily. “You can’t undo love.”
Her hangover cured, she strode up Grandma’s walk that afternoon like a banker, still in her black silk suit from work, her jug of scotch like a briefcase at her side.
Grandma wore an electric-blue silk suit with gold scarf.
“Saks Fifth Avenue,” she said with a coy blink. “Two-fifty at The Bargain Box.” She was triumphant now, gazing beatifically over her family, immortal at seventy-nine. She sighed over the handsome surgeon, contriving ways to see him again, but when Audie, who was still suffering, asked if she’d forgiven them for taking her to the hospital, she returned a final and capricious “No.”
“In retrospect we just should have strangled you,” Ma said.
We were all in the grandest high spirits. We had faced death; death couldn’t face us. Lizzie, still in her tutu from ballet, circled the room in lopsided pirouettes, nearly toppling Uncle Arvid, who tapped his hearing aid and steadied himself on his cane. Driving down the night before, he had turned off the road into the woods and broken an axle on a stone wall.
“There used to be a road there,” he kept explaining.
“You’re getting senile, Arvid,” Ma said sadly.
“What, Lila Ann?” He had picked up a silver-framed photograph of her as a child, alone in a rowboat like a tiny refugee.
“Nice,” he said. “Sterling.”
“The picture of a little girl who wasn’t loved,” said Ma. Her voice had a reckless edge, suddenly, and I braced myself. Seeing Grandma about to slip away, she had wanted to yank her back, to demand an apology. Now she had her wish, and I wasn’t sure what she would say. Arvid looked up at her in surprise.
“We all loved you, Lila Ann,” he said.
“You’re getting senile,” Ma snapped. “It was Cap you all loved. The son.” Arvid was six inches shorter than she, a poor adversary. She leaned down and shouted into his ear. “Remember?”
He reeled backward.
“And don’t fall,” she said, as if he had stumbled to provoke her. She seized his elbow.
“Now, Lila,” Grandma said, but she was too pleased with life to be truly grieved. “Don’t be silly. I loved you both. And where is Cap? He was so good to me when I was in the hospital.”
Her voice was foolish with fondness. Cap, we told her, was at an IRS hearing. Ma drew herself up with a delicate harumph, and when Audie and I returned little harumphing smiles, she was content.
“Katie,” Ma said, “will you promise to shoot me if I start to act like her?”
I promised, and with a glance Audie promised me that she’d shoot me if I ev
er got like Ma, who, mollified, was pouring juice for the children, scotch for us.
“Just a thimbleful,” said Grandma.
“You don’t get any!” Ma said. “A gallon of blood they took out of you, Mother, a gallon.”
But weights and measures had no place here. It was becoming a story. Even Lizzie, who sat in Audie’s lap straight as a music box figurine, had been hoarding details.
“A whole gallon!” she said, her eyes alight. “And we ate supper in the emergency room. And Aunt Katie called the priest.”
“I blame you, Kate, for saving her,” Ma said. “You got her pulse going.”
I was becoming a heroine. How large our lives looked, with the ambulance screaming, the priest’s flying robes!
“Kate, I suppose you know I’m president of the Episcopal Churchwomen,” Grandma said, rearranging her skirt.
“That election was rigged,” said Ma. “And we have to go.”
“No, Lila, when your poor mother just got out of the hospital?” Grandma said. “I need you to stay, at least until Cap comes.”
“Why should I?” Ma said. “Would you have stayed for me?”
The truth was, we had to get home before Abe’s stopping-by time, and I wanted to see Vinnie too. Ma drove like mad, and we sprang out of the car to range ourselves nonchalantly in the yard, Audie hiking her skirt to take the last sun while the children played a game of feints and whispers in the long grass. Who could resist having a drink with us? But Abe only passed through, on his way to the garden. His wife was bringing some of the nuclear ladies to tea. He cut a sheaf of zinnias and cosmos, limping more heavily than usual, looking sheepish, as if he ought to give the flowers to Ma.
“That was a lovely dinner,” he said, with a slight bow.
“Come back tonight,” said my wicked mother. Shrewd and wistful, mostly amused, he declined.
Ma watched his back in fond disappointment as he headed under the arbor, back to his wife.
“No love-in-a-mist for the nuclear ladies,” she said, gloating, turning her glass as if she might read her fortune in the scotch.
And, as if she had seen a happy fate there, she looked up smiling.
The Rose Thieves Page 15