Another year, the day turned out cold, and all the roses stood distinctly away from each other, and each one looked so delicate and confident in the sharp air that Mary thought she could never forget one of their faces as long as she lived. She had no desire to grow roses herself, or even to have a garden. It was this red garden, walled, secret, and lost to her, that she wanted. She loved the garden more than anyone had ever loved it, but she did not know about the forsythia that came in December to light up the end wall. No one had ever told her that the forsythia bloomed, or how it looked. She would have liked the forsythia very much, although it could not have enveloped her as the roses did. All during the year, she thought backward to her hour in the garden, and forward to it. It was terrible to her, to think that the garden was open to the nuns and closed to her. She spoke to no one about her longing. This was not her only secret, but it was her happiest one.
Mary’s father used to take in lodgers—one lodger at a time because they had only one room to spare. The lodgers were men who visited the town from time to time, commercial travelers. Sometimes a man would take a job in the town, and stay with them for a few months or so. Once they had a commercial traveler who made a habit of staying with them every time he came to town, and then he got a job selling shoes in a local shop, and stayed almost a year. When he left for good, to take a better-paid job with a brother-in-law who had a business in Dublin, Dom Lambert came, and moved into the lodger’s room.
Dom was a meek and mild little draper’s assistant, with wide-open, anxious blue eyes and a wavering smile. He was accustomed to watch his customers vacillate between two or more rolls of cloth, and his smile vacillated from habit. He had small, stained teeth that were going bad. When they ached, he would sit very quietly with his hands clenched together and ask for hot milk. He told Mary that his skull was very thin. He said it was as thin as a new baby’s, and that a good crack on it would be the finish of him. He was always stroking his skull, searching for fissures. He was afraid a roll of cloth might tumble down on him off a shelf and he would die with customers in the shop. Even a spool of thread, he said, might do considerable damage.
Dom dressed neatly, in dark draper’s suits. He was most particular about the knot of his tie, and he wore a modest stickpin. He was proud of his small feet, and polished his shoes in the kitchen every morning, assuming various athletic positions according to whether he was wielding the polish brush, the polishing cloth, or the soft finishing brush. He brushed his suits, too, and did his nails with a finicky metal implement he carried in his pocket. He tidied his own room, and made his bed in the morning. Every morning he left the house at eight-thirty, and he returned at six-thirty. He liked to read the paper at night, or play a few games of patience, or go for a stroll. He went to bed early, and in the morning descended looking brisk and ready to do his day’s work. Still, his color was bad, and he often had to hammer his chest to dislodge a cough that stuck there.
When Dom had been living nine years in the house, Mary’s father died very suddenly one night. Mary was lying awake in the dark, and she heard her father’s voice calling loudly. She found him hanging half out of bed, holding the little white stone holy-water font, which he had dragged off its nail in the wall.
“The font is dry,” he cried to her. “Get me the priest.”
He waved his dry fingertips at her, which he had been feeling in the font with, and died. Dom helped her to raise him back against the bolster. She lifted the dry font from the floor and upended it over her father’s forehead.
“There might be a drop left in it,” she said, but there was nothing. The font was sticky and black on the inside, and when she put it to her nose it smelled like the room, but more strongly.
“He went very quick,” Dom said. “Are you going to call the priest?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I meant to fill the font with holy water this coming Sunday.”
“Are you going to shut his eyes?” Dom asked, pressing his hands painfully together, as though he already felt the cold man’s lids resisting him.
“No,” she said. “They’ll be closed soon enough.”
She took up her candle and walked back to her room, her white flannel nightdress curved and plunging around her large body. She got into bed and pulled the clothes up around her.
“Good night now,” she said to Dom. “There’s no more to be done till morning.”
She raised herself on her elbow to blow out the candle.
Dom said, “Are you not afraid to be in here by yourself, with him dead in there like that?”
“He can’t do anybody any harm now,” she said. “What ails you, Dom? Are you trying to tell me you’re afraid of a poor dead man?”
“I’m afraid of my life,” Dom said. His shirt, which was all he had on, shivered in the leaping candlelight.
“Let me stay in here a minute,” he said.
“Are you afraid he’ll come after you, or what?”
“Let me kneel up here against the bed till it gets light!” he begged. “I’m not able to go back into that room by myself, and pass his door. Or put on your clothes, and we’ll go together to call the priest.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Mary. “If you won’t go back to bed, throw that skirt there around your shoulders, or you’ll catch your death.”
She dragged her great black skirt from where it hung over the end rail of the bed, and flung it to him. Then she blew out the candle and fell asleep, although she had intended to stay awake. As the room grew light, she woke up, to find Dom huddled against her in sleep. He was lying outside the covers, with his nose pressed against her shoulder, and her skirt almost concealing his head. As she watched him, he opened his eyes and gazed fearfully into her face. He started to close his eyes again, to pretend he was asleep, but thought better of it.
“I only wanted to get in out of the cold,” he said.
“That’s all very fine,” said Mary, “but don’t go trying to get on top of me.”
“Oh, God, I wouldn’t do the like of that!” Dom said.
“I don’t know, now, there was a man lodged here before you came. He weighed a ton, it seemed like.”
“A great big man!” said Dom, who was shocked.
“The same size as yourself. Maybe not even as big, but he was like lead. He came in here two nights running, just before he went off for good. The first night he came in, it was black dark. I thought for a minute it was my father getting in the bed with me, and then didn’t I realize it was the commercial traveler. The next night, in he came again. I let on in the morning nothing had happened, and so did he.”
“And did you not tell your father?”
“Why would I tell him?”
“Maybe it was your father all the time.”
“It wasn’t him. It was the commercial traveler, all right. If nothing else, I’d have known him by the feel of the shirt he had on him. Anyway, my father hadn’t that much interest in me.”
“Lord have mercy on him—your poor father, I mean,” said Dom, who was growing uncomfortable and ashamed as the increasing light disclosed them to each other.
Mary had run out of small talk, but because she wanted him not to go, and because she had as much ordinary courage as any other human being, she spoke up. “I’ll move over,” she said, “and you lie in here beside me. As long as you’re here, you may as well settle yourself.”
The bed in which they lay, like all the beds in that house, was made with only one sheet, the undersheet. There was no top sheet—only the rough warm blanket, and then another blanket, a thinner one, and on top of all a heavy patchwork quilt. The beds were high up off the floor, and made of brass, and all the mattresses sagged. The floors sagged, too, some sliding off to the side, and some sinking gently in the middle, and all of the rooms were on different levels, because of the way in which the two houses had been flung together. There were no carpets on the floors, and no little mats or rugs. The bare old boards groaned disag
reeably under the beds, and under Mary’s feet, and under Dom’s feet.
Mary and Dom got married as quickly as they could, because they were afraid the priest might come around and lecture them, or maybe even denounce them publicly from the pulpit. They settled down to live much as they had lived before Mary’s father died. Most of their life was spent in the kitchen. This was a large, dark, crowded room set in the angle where the two houses joined, and irregular because it took part of itself from one house and part from the other. The only window in the kitchen was small and high up, and set deep in the thick old wall. It looked out on a tiny, dark yard, not more than a few feet square, in which there was an outhouse. In this window recess Dom kept his own possessions—his playing cards, a pencil, a bottle of blue-black ink, a straight pen, a jotter, a package of writing paper with matching envelopes, and the newspapers. After Rose got big enough to be with him, he began to keep a tin box of toffees there, and he liked to play a game of coaxing with her, with a toffee for a prize. The toffees were not of a kind sold in Mary’s shop, which offered only cheap loose sweets, sold five for a penny, or even eight or ten for a penny. Rose liked those sweets, too, but she liked the tin-box toffees in the bright twists of paper best of all.
Rose was her father’s girl. Everyone said so. Mary said so, more often than anyone else. She said it bitterly to Dom, and mockingly to Rose, but once she had said it she shut up, because it was not to start a quarrel that she said it but only to let them know that she knew.
Jimmy, the little baby, was Rose’s pet. Dom liked him, but Rose clung to him, and when he fretted she would hang over the side of his cradle and talk to him, and dangle toys in front of him, and try to make him laugh.
Mary and Dom were not long married when Mary began to nag at him to give up his job at the draper’s. Her reason for doing this, which she could not reveal to him, was that she could not bear to let people see him smile. She was unsmiling herself, as her father had been, and she believed that people only smiled in order to curry favor. People like herself, at any rate. “People like us,” she was always saying, “people like us,” but she did not know what she meant, unless it was that the rest of the people in the world were better off, or that they had some fortunate secret, or were engaged in a conspiracy in which she was not included.
Dom’s smile did not disturb her until one afternoon she went over to the draper’s to buy the makings of a dress for herself. She did not want him to wait on her, because she was ashamed to let him know how many yards it took to go around her, but she watched him with a customer, and it was then, against his own background of trying to sell and trying to please strangers, that she saw the history of his hopeful, uncertain smile, as he eagerly hauled down rolls of cloth and spread them out for inspection. After that day she gave him no peace till she got him out of his job. She told him that he could take over the running of her shop, and Dom liked that idea, because he had always wanted to be his own man, but he was just as anxious-faced behind her counter as he had ever been, and she gradually edged him back into the kitchen, out of sight.
She only wanted to take care of him, and protect him from people. She had known from a child that if she asked she would get, because of her deformity. She had always seen people getting ready to be nice to her because they pitied her and looked down on her. Everyone was inclined to pity her. How could they help themselves? She was an object for pity. The dead weight of her body, which she felt at every step, was visible to all the world. She almost had to kneel to walk. Even her hair was heavy, a dense black rug down her back. She was always afraid people might think she was asking for something. She always tried to get away from people as quickly as she could, before they got it into their heads that she was waiting for something. What smile could she give that would not be interpreted as a smile for help? In fact, that is what she thought herself—that if she smiled at them it would only be to ingratiate herself, because she had no other reason to smile, since she hated them all. If she had said out loud why she hated them, she would have said it was because they were too well off, and stuck up, and too full of themselves. But she never would give them an opening for their smiles and greetings, and she came to feel that she had defeated them, and shut them all out. To have rescued Dom’s weakness from their sight, and from their scornful pity—that was a triumph, although she was unable to share it with him, since she did not know how to explain to him that while she thought he was good enough, other people would never think him good enough, and therefore she had to save him from them, and hide him behind herself.
To pass the time, Dom began to do odd jobs around the house. Once in a while he took a broom and swept the upstairs rooms. Sometimes he got a hammer and some nails and wandered around, trying to tighten the floor boards or the stair boards, but the rigid, overstrained joints and joinings of the house rejected the new nails and spat them back out again before the tinny glitter had even worn off their heads. He often spent the whole day at a game of patience, and when Mary came back out of the shop to see about their middle-of-the-day meal, he would be sitting hunched over the kitchen table, with the cards spread out in front of him and a full cup of cold tea, left over from his breakfast, at his elbow. When Rose got to be big enough, he liked to tell her about the days when he was a draper, and he collected a few reels of thread, and some needles and pins, and bound some pieces of scrap cloth into near rolls, and the two of them would play shop for hours.
Before Rose was born, Dom scrubbed out the old cradle in the kitchen, and polished it till it shone. The cradle had been there for Mary, and after she grew out of it it was used as a receptacle for old and useless things of the house. Before Dom scrubbed it, Mary cleared it out. It was a huge wooden cradle, dark brown and almost as big as a coffin, but seeming more roomy than a coffin, and it had a great curved wooden hood half covering it that made the interior very gloomy. It stood on clumsy wooden rockers. There was no handle to rock it by. Mary remembered her father’s hand on the side of it, and the shape of his nails. She had slept in the cradle, in the kitchen, until she was four, or nearly five. Her father had looked after her himself, so the cradle was left within easy distance of the shop. She could well remember her father looking in at her. Sometimes a woman would look in at her, but her father did not encourage visitors. He had the idea that all women were trying to marry him, or to get him to marry again, and he kept them out.
If Mary made a sudden movement, or jumped around, the cradle would rock far to the left and far to the right on its thick, curved rockers, and she knew that no power on earth could stop it until in the course of time it stopped itself. If she tried to clamber out, the cradle would start its deliberate plunging, right, left, right, left, and she would cower down with her face hidden in the bottom until the cradle was still under her again. She was always afraid alone in the dark bottom of the house. Her father slept upstairs. At night she would see his face, darkened by the candle he held aloft, and then the very last thing she would see was his shadow falling against the shallow, twisting staircase.
In the cradle, when she set about emptying it, Mary found a dark-red rubber ball with pieces torn, or rotted, out of it, and some folded, wrinkled bills, and a new mousetrap, never used, and a pipe of her father’s, and two empty medicine bottles with the color of the medicines still on the bottoms of them, and a lot of corks, big and little, and a man’s cloth cap, and a stiff, dusty wreath of artificial white flowers from her own First Communion veil, and a child’s prayer book, her own, with the covers torn off.
When they were first married, Dom used to walk to early Mass with Mary on Sunday, but after a while he began making excuses, and they got into the habit of attending different Masses. She continued to go to the early Mass, and he would go later. When Rose started to walk, he took her with him. He would wash her, and do her hair, and see that her shoes were polished, and then she would give Mary a kiss goodbye and run off down the street after him.
One weekday morning, about a year before he die
d, Dom gave Mary the shock of her life. Instead of lying on in bed, as he usually did, he got up at seven-thirty, and shaved himself, and did himself up the way he used to in the days when he was at the draper’s. When she saw him go out, she said nothing, but after a few minutes she locked the shop door, and went back and sat down at the kitchen table. People came knocking, but Mary paid no attention, and when Rose came to stand beside her she pushed her gently away. At three in the afternoon, she told Rose to mind the baby, and she put on her hat, and her Sunday coat, and went out looking for Dom. There was no sign of him on any street. At the draper’s she stood and looked in, but he was not there. The man who had taken his place was only a youngster, very polite and sure of himself, she could see that. It occurred to her that even if she met Dom, she’d hardly know what to say, so she turned around and went home.
“Oh, I thought I would never see you again!” Mary cried.
Dom did not look up, but Rose looked up from her bead box.
Dom asked, “What put that idea in your head?”
“I thought you’d gone off on me.”
“Can’t a man even go for a walk now, without the house being brought down around him?”
“I was full sure you were gone for good, when I saw you walking out of the door this morning. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“Where would I go, will you tell me that?”
“Is that all you have to say to me, after the fright you’ve given me—that you have no place to go to? Is that the only reason you came back?”
The Rose Garden Page 19