Late in the morning, wide awake and dressed at last, she heard the children on her front lawn, and she went out to wish them a happy Fourth of July. The children were going to the big fireworks display in the evening. Mary Ann was not going. The children teased Bluebell while they talked to Mary Ann, and as they talked they straggled irresolutely toward the driveway. They were on their way to the pond to take a boat out, but they were delaying. They were taking their time. Like Mary Ann, they had all the time in the world today. It was the Fourth of July, and the hours were turning in slow motion. There was nothing to do that had to be done, except wait for the fireworks to begin, and the children were finding time for long farewells to Bluebell, who could not go in the boat with them because she was too heavy. “Too heavy and too slippery,” the eldest boy said. One time they had taken her in the boat, and she rocked them all around the pond.
The youngest girl, Linnet, spoke up. “Bluebell might have drowned us all,” she said.
Linnet was only six. When the others walked, she dawdled behind them or ran after them, and when they stood as they were standing now, she stood in front of them, or at the side, apart from them. She was kneeling at the moment, in the grass beside Bluebell, who sat with her front feet apart and her gaze fixed worshipfully on the eldest boy, the leader in everything but particularly in this boating expedition from which she understood she was to be excluded. She had heard the ban (Bluebell is to stay), and she was determined to shame him into changing his mind. But the eldest boy was looking at Linnet, who had announced that Bluebell might have drowned them all. “Listen to her,” he said scornfully. “She wasn’t even there.”
The second boy came out of the reverie in which he spent most of his time. “She’s talking through her hat,” he said with finality.
Linnet’s elder sister, Alice, who was eight and very responsible, looked tolerantly at Linnet. “She wasn’t even there,” Alice said. “I wasn’t there, either,” she added sensibly.
“I only said might have,” Linnet said, and went on stroking Bluebell’s anxious, unresponsive neck.
Mary Ann looked at Bluebell, who might have been a murderess. “Bluebell only wanted to drown you so that she could save you,” she said.
The second boy emerged from his reverie for the second time, this time in a seizure of decisiveness. “Let’s go,” he said, so abruptly that Mary Ann thought they would all start running, but they still delayed, moving their feet in anticipation.
Bluebell accepted her fate with dignity. She sank to the ground, composed her paws, and began to gaze coldly past the children’s legs at something they couldn’t see even if they tried.
Linnet stood up. “I wish it was time to go to the fireworks now,” she said. “I have matches. I found them in the road.” She put her hand into the pocket of her dress and took out a battered white match folder.
Mary Ann took it from her and opened it. The heads of the matches were crumbling, they had been rained on, and they were quite useless. She handed the folder back to Linnet, who returned it carefully to her pocket. “I hope your mother knows you have those matches, Linnet,” Mary Ann said. “You know matches are forbidden.”
“But they’re for the fireworks,” Linnet said, and her face took on the dull expression of one who remembers this argument from other times, and the frustration of it, and sees more frustration ahead.
The boys were moving off, laughing unkindly. “She thinks they’re going to run out of matches at the fireworks,” the eldest boy said, and the youngest boy doubled up in noisy mirth.
Even Alice, who was so serious, had to smile. “Linnet, you know those matches were run over by a car and everything,” she said.
Linnet’s faith in her matches was evident in the bitter look she gave them all. But she had her triumph in her pocket, and she was stubborn. She could afford to wait for vindication, and enjoy the last laugh.
The boys set off backward and gradually turned until they were really walking off. “See you later,” they called to Mary Ann.
One of them called, “Goodbye, Bluebell,” and poor Bluebell betrayed herself, starting to attention and staring after them, so tense and ready that for an instant she looked like the royal hunting dog she might have been and sometimes thought she was, in her sleep, when she stirred and seemed to run, while her gruff baying showed the course and splendor of her dreams.
“Stay, Bluebell, good dog,” Mary Ann said.
“Come on, Linnet,” Alice said, and ran off after her brothers.
“No, wait a minute, Linnet,” Mary Ann said. She wanted to tell Linnet the truth, that the matches were no good, and to prove to her that they were no good, but instead she said feebly, “You know, you shouldn’t have those matches, Linnet.”
“But I found them on the road,” Linnet said.
“All right, well, I hope you have a nice boat ride.”
“I will,” Linnet said, keeping her hand in her precious pocket. “Goodbye, Miss Whitty,” she said politely, and she ran off.
Mary Ann watched her running, going more and more slowly as she drew near to the little group waiting impatiently for her by the edge of the road. The road was busy with cars driving down to the beach and driving away from it. The golf course was dotted with figures that moved gravely and then stood still, gravely considering the next move. It is not a very funny game, Mary Ann thought. She wished she had had the courage to show Linnet that her hopes were not only all false but all wrong, considering that they were based on matches that were strictly forbidden. I should have told her, Mary Ann thought sadly. No matter how you look at it, I should have made her see. I don’t think they light fireworks with matches, and even if they do they won’t run out of them, and even if they run out, Linnet will be much too far out in the crowd to help and even if she got a chance to offer the matches, the matches are no good. One way or another, she is going to be disappointed. But false hope feels the same as real hope, and she is going to have a nice day dreaming. She’s not going to have a chance at the fireworks, but that doesn’t alter the fact that I should have given her a lecture on obedience and a demonstration of what happens to matches that have been lying out on the road in the rain.
Mary Ann went into her house and let the screen door bang behind her. Bluebell dreamed of rescuing people from drowning, and Linnet dreamed of saving the fireworks extravaganza from disaster, and Mary Ann dreamed of being able to persuade a proud six-year-old girl that when the choice must be made between being a heroine and being a good child, one always chooses to be a good child. Well, I’ll see Linnet again before the display, Mary Ann thought, and I’ll tell her about the matches. She’ll be so excited by that time that she won’t care. I’ll make a point of seeing her. But I should have told her. I should never have let her go off like that. Linnet and the matches went out of her mind. What came into her mind was the house she stood in, which seemed now like a beached ship, stuck in the middle of the summer weather that only Bluebell was really at home in. The little house was very quiet. Buttoned up in its diamonds, with its shingled roof pulled down about its ears and its left shoulder turned to the ocean, the house seemed to enjoy the summer sun cautiously, as though it knew it wasn’t a summer house, and not a seaside house, and, in fact, not a real house. And it wasn’t a real house. It wasn’t a bit real. The living room, where Mary Ann stood, had been copied from the set of some opera or operetta—Hansel and Gretel, Mary Ann had heard, although she would have guessed Lilac Time. Whatever it was, and operetta or not, the performance must have depended on a good deal of coming and going, people appearing and disappearing and hurrying through from right to left and from left to right, or looking in, talking, perhaps singing, through the enormous windows in the back wall. A small flight of steps led up and off to the right and another small flight to the left. The living room had five ways out—five exits. Eight, if you counted the diamond-paned windows, which were big enough for two people to vault, scramble, or leap through at one time. Nine exits, if you allowed th
e fireplace, which was roomy enough to walk around in and had a chimney that was as big around as a barrel and went straight up through the roof like a tunnel. Mary Ann thought the chimney probably was a tunnel, mislaid from another stage set in another house someplace else. Journey’s End? As a chimney the tunnel did very well. She had no complaints about the fireplace. As a matter of fact, she had no complaints at all, but she could not help wondering what had been going on in the mind of the architect when he made his scale drawing for this room. He had got in all that the action of the operetta called for. There never was so much big detail in a room. Doors and windows and fireplace all stood out in their full theatrical size, all surrounded with big frames of blackened wood, so that you could see from a mile away what you were looking at. Only, there was no room left for walls. The architect forgot about the walls.
Mary Ann didn’t care. It didn’t matter. The room pleased her. She had grown fond of it. It was improbable and impermanent, and anyway it was only a stage designed for dialogue and gestures, with two small rooms right and left that were also full of doors and windows, and that were good only for lingering in, because they were anterooms, and as anterooms they resisted furniture the way a cat will resist a collar. Mary Ann had tried several arrangements, but at the moment both rooms were empty. The room with the mauve floor was empty, and the one with the shining dark-blue floor that led to the kitchen was empty. Anterooms were new in Mary Ann’s life, and she wanted to have them always. She had not known that rooms could be so content with themselves. But she wondered what the original caretaker had thought when he first stepped into his brand-new living room, with its operatic humility and its need to be explained and its obvious falseness and its meager fate; because it did not even represent a dream but was only the echo of somebody’s memory of romantic escape—to a hunting lodge, a mountain hideaway in Austria, or a secret place in Switzerland. It was a wistful conceit, and it stood here only because this site had presented itself and a house was needed here, for the caretaker. Someone must have thought, Since I cannot have that place at all, I might as well have it here, where I can at least look at it. The little house was not real. It was only a façade that stood at the end of somebody’s lawn, and Mary Ann thought it did wonderfully for a person who wanted to live by the Atlantic Ocean but who only wanted to live there for a while.
Late in the afternoon, Mary Ann went upstairs to sleep for a half hour, and she slept so late that she was awakened by the first of the explosions from the fireworks display. It was dusk outside her window, and a few minutes later, standing on the high ground of the children’s lawn, where she had a good view of the aerial lights, she felt that the night was cold. A cool, quick wind blew in from the sea. She would build herself a fire when she went back into the house. Bluebell, dutiful, sat beside her, and stared as she did into the distance, where they saw the sky brighten after explosions they heard but could not see, and then they saw shooting stars, streams of brilliance, and dazzling ribbons of color that turned into balloons and garlands and cornucopias as they ascended, to hang for an instant at their highest point and then vanish in glory.
Nearer to Mary Ann, on the beach below the children’s house, some people were having a private display, a very minor one. A few arrows of light shot up, and then again, more arrows. Someone was walking on the beach, throwing sparklers as he went. Lawbreakers, Mary Ann thought, disobedient people; everyone is committing sins today.
It had grown very dark, and she had had enough of the fireworks, the legal ones and the illegal ones. Time to go home and make a fire, but instead she went inside and made a martini. She tasted it. It was delicious, but she had made it too soon, and she left it in the freezing compartment while she virtuously washed string beans and lettuce and turned up the heat in the oven. All the time she was working, she enjoyed the attention of six pairs of animal eyes, five pairs solemn and the sixth pair, Bluebell’s, devotional. Every night, Mary Ann gave her cooking demonstration, providing the cats and Bluebell with their favorite entertainment, and every night, as she chopped and peeled and arranged her saucepans on top of the stove, she wondered if it was better to go to a restaurant and have a plate of food brought to you and know that the vegetables will be dreadful or to cook for yourself. While making up her mind, she had become an expert in very small plain dinners, and it was with some complacency that she left her work in progress, retrieved her martini, and returned through her blue-floored anteroom to her living room, where she proceeded to build a big fire. The flames blazed up, filling the room with shadows, and as she stood back to watch them she heard the fire alarm sound far away. Somebody’s house going up, she thought; it always happens on the Fourth of July.
She was quite wrong. It was not somebody’s house that the alarm was sounding for but the seven children’s house, and if Mary Ann had left her front door open, as she often did, even in the winter time, she would have seen the air outside filled with smoke that was billowing down in great clouds from the big house on the dunes. Great excitement was gathering at her windows, and she missed it all. She missed seeing the first engine come hurtling across the flat green and watery landscaped land that stretched from her right all the way back to the sky. On a dark night like this, with all its lights going, the engine must have been a wonderful sight. All lighted up, racing to the rescue, and followed by a second engine and then by a third. Mary Ann missed it all, and she missed seeing the swarm of small cars that flew after the engines and turned with them into her narrow driveway, which was full of holes and long deep ruts like trenches, so that they were all slowed up, coming along one after the other so close together that they might have been sections of a caterpillar. It was a very long, narrow driveway. At the best of times there was room only for one ordinary car. The driveway turned at a right angle from the road that led to the sea and came straight through the golf course and between the lawns to Mary Ann’s house, where it made a sharp right turn and disappeared between two dense walls of trees and bushes that led up to the children’s house and the sea. Those trees were full of pheasants, and if you walked up that dark curving avenue on a summer night, the wild beating of indignant wings drowned out the sound of the waves that beat out their slower measure on the beach below the children’s house. What the pheasants must have thought on this night on the Fourth of July was unimaginable. First they were enveloped in clouds of thick smoke, and then came the invasion by heavy machinery. And all Mary Ann was thinking about was whether or not to put the screen back in front of the fire she had made, or leave the fireplace open and risk sparks on the rug. She was putting the screen back when she heard the first of the engines come lurching and rumbling past her house, and she thought, What a big oil truck. But then came more rumbling and grinding, and she thought, Armored cars.
She ran to the door and opened it and ran out on her lawn, to find that the lawn had vanished. She was hostess to a long line of cars that had pulled in and parked in a neat row with their noses turned toward the big house, and the driveway was so jammed with fire-fighting cars and apparatus that she could not have crossed over to the children’s lawn even if she had wanted to. The smoke was thick, but the children’s house was visible, standing up against the night sky with all its lights on. If the lights are on, perhaps things are not so bad, Mary Ann thought, and she saw the miles of floorboards up there, and the deep shingled roof that would blaze up like a torch if a spark caught it. The smoke now seemed to be coming from behind the house. Perhaps it was only a grass fire.
She walked over to the nearest of the cars that were parked by her house and said foolishly, “What’s going on?”
The driver glanced at her and then looked back at the house. “Fire up there,” he said. The car was full of children, and they all stared out at Mary Ann. She walked away from them, and called Bluebell to follow her. She thought, There is that man has driven in here, tripping up the Fire Department, and now he’s trapped here with all those children, and they may not get out until morning.
The Rose Garden Page 28