Rose's Garden (10 page)

Entering the loft, he hung his hat on the hook by the door, tucked away a barbed spray of pyracantha that had crept around the door frame, and wandered around to the open roost boxes facing the hillside. Inside he discovered one of his pigeons, a male, sitting on a nest. Conrad leaned forward and smiled in at him. The pigeon's eyes were closed, his wings drawn up close to his body. Conrad had always liked this about pigeons—that they took turns, the male and the female, incubating the eggs. It was, as Rose had pointed out, a liberated arrangement, the female taking the watch from late afternoon, through the night, until early morning, the male sitting on the nest during the day.

“I think it's a very nice way to do it,” Rose had said, standing beside Conrad and watching the birds with him. “Very fair.”

Conrad had not had any particular hand in pairing these two. Though Lemuel, who was fanatical about breeding, often mated grandfathers and granddaughters, mothers and sons, in order to ensure a fixed characteristic and reduce variations in the strain, Conrad had never felt quite right about this system. Though he dabbled some with controlled mating during the years he was establishing his flock, over time he grew faintly uncomfortable with the notion of forcing marriages among his birds. After all, they mated for life, barring catastrophe; and so, after a while, he simply allowed his pigeons to choose their own mates. Once a pair had
announced itself, he helped out by moving the two birds to a shared coop, feeling pleased that nature had taken its own mysterious course.

Lemuel, on his visits north, had shaken his head over Conrad's increasingly ragtag flock, pushing his hands through the long white hair that swept back from his forehead; but Conrad had been unmoved by his disapproval.

“It's the inevitability of love, Lemuel,” he had said to counter his father-in-law's exasperated exclamations over his birds. And jabbing Lemuel in the ribs with his elbow, Conrad had chided him. “How would you have liked to be mated off to someone you hadn't chosen?”

But Lemuel, his bearing offended and erect, had shaken his head, harrumphed like a man who has failed to impress some obtuse student and so packs up his compass and calipers, his tools and instruments of exact science, and gives up. “You're going to have rats, Connie,” he said. “That's where romance will get you with pigeons. Nothing but rats.”

But these two birds, rock doves, had already successfully raised a dozen or more broods, proof of the utilitarian virtue of love, generations ensuing from a spark. Conrad, who had witnessed their original mating ritual early one spring morning several years before, had been charmed by them: the male bird had put on an impressive performance, strutting and pacing around the female, his greenish purple crop swelling. The female, her eyes at half-mast, had opened her beak for the male to dip his own into hers—kissing, Rose had called it. And afterward Conrad had been touched by the birds' fastidious attention to each other, their joint efforts to feed the young peepers after birth. He referred to them as Pasquale and Evita, Rose's suggestions, after her fondness for a couple who operated a truck garden near the highway and who
each summer produced mountains of chili peppers, their fantastically spirited flavors somehow disguised by their colors, disarmingly innocent, like boiled sweets. The pigeons' original names, though marked carefully in Conrad's ledger, had long since been lost to him.

“Well, well, Pasquale,” he said now, looking in on the bird. “Congratulations.”

Evita stood at the corner of the coop, bobbing her head against the wire mesh. Conrad reached inside and raised the door. She waited hardly a moment before taking off into the air, as if her cramped condition on the nest had made her itchy, restless to get away. Pasquale opened one eye to watch his mate leave, and then closed it again.

“Oh, it's hard work, I know,” Conrad said, wiping the floor of the coop with a rag, scrubbing at a stain.

Stepping back outside the loft, Conrad walked slowly to the bench on the grass. The purple heads of late summer clover floated at his feet. Evita flew around high in the sky with the dipping flight characteristic of pouters, her wings held breathlessly wide. Conrad sighed, leaned back against the bench, and closed his eyes.

And then it occurred to him that the eggs, which hadn't been there a day or so ago, must have been conceived not long after Rose's death. He tried to count back, twenty days, twenty-one, but found he couldn't; he didn't even know what day it was. The time seemed lost to him, as though he had slept through it. And then he had to squeeze his eyes shut against the realization that the two things were so closely related—these baby peepers, now circling and circling inside the soft, damp orb of their eggs, and Rose's death.

He had been inattentive to the birds over Rose's last days. He remembered that much. At night, with the hospice volunteer
seated on the slipper chair by Rose's bed, inclined toward the whispering voice, Conrad had left to hurry down to the loft, taking deep draughts of air as he descended the steps down toward the stony smell of the river. He had filled the pigeons' pans with grain and then rushed back up to the house, not bothering to sweep out the mess that had accumulated in the coops.

In their shadowy bedroom, Rose had lain in bed, her seed and flower catalogs spread out over the quilt. Her voice had been a whisper, but night after night that last week she had made him sit beside her, paper and pencil at his knee, and take down all the names of the things she wished ordered and planted after her death.

“These anemones,” she said. “These lilies, ‘Enchantment'”—her finger grazed the page—“for by the front fence. To the left of the beech. Don't plant them too deep. Little bleach mark on the foliage. No deeper.” She tapped at the paper. “These daffodils. One hundred. For the lower terrace, by the loft. Aconitum, larkspur. You know. Fifty. Always needed blue in the border by the kitchen. Glows in the dark. Pretty.”

It was, he had begun to realize, an endless list. He could have sat there for days, and she would never have run out of things she wished done, wished to do, her garden endlessly in need of dividing, rearranging, pruning, sifting; she liked that the garden often surprised her, surprised them both, some flowers migrating of their own accord to spots more suitable for them.

Once, stopping, dropping the pencil on the carpet by the bed, where it fell soundlessly, he had just watched Rose, her voice droning on quietly, whispering flower names. “Montbretia. Nice. Pretty beside the white lupines. Upper terrace. Might have to overwinter in the basement, though.”

She was talking, he realized, as though she was just going away on a short trip.

“Conrad,” she said at last, breathless, glancing over at him. “You're not taking it down.”

“I know,” he said. “I'm sorry.” He stared at her, but she looked away, picked up where she had left off, her finger trailing over the pages. He retrieved the pencil from the floor but did not write.

Rose looked sidelong at him, then closed her eyes. “Conrad,” she said. “Please.”

“You want to work me to death?” he said, trying to laugh, but his voice cracked. “Is that it?”

And she had wept then, that soundless weeping that seemed to belong to her last days, the terrible pause between each breath, so long that Conrad sometimes held his own, waiting and willing her chest to rise convulsively again. The tears spilled out from under her eyelashes, their sparse fringe.

“I just—” she said, “I just want you to have something to do.”

And Conrad had stopped at that, had looked over the slight rise under the blankets that was Rose's wasting body. To do? he thought. And suddenly the prospect of life without her beside him became horrifyingly real, as if he had been so concentrated on her illness, on fending off her pain, that he had forgotten what came next, what came afterward. He saw himself surrounded by a dizzying array of bulbs, corms, roots, tubers, and plants, vines growing over his feet, thorny tendrils creeping around his ankles, Rose's instructions swirling in his mind, the spade heavy in his hand.

EVITA HAD DISAPPEARED
into the milky sky. Conrad gazed up the hillside at his garden, its tumbling, frothing mass of leaf and blossom. It seemed to sway there, a cataract of green falling from the sky itself, a voluptuary draped in silken vines and flowers. He could not see the house at all, obscured behind this rising cloud bank of green. Rose had never gone anywhere in the garden without her clippers; she was always pinching things back, ripping out woody undergrowth, pruning the shrubs and trees. But without her attentions, the garden seemed to be subduing the earth itself, wild creepers running over the paths, burrs and brambles over taking Rose's clean squares of grass. Trumpet vines crawled up the trunks of the dwarf pear trees; purple thistles sprouted in the wildflower meadow. Conrad felt, looking up at it, that the garden was moving toward him, engulfing him. Not burying him exactly, but winding him all around in a cocoon of fragrant green, the arms of vines coiling up his legs and trunk, laying little leaf hands over his mouth, silencing him. A fog rose—columns of vapor, the wavering architecture of air. Thunderheads gathered in the sky.

A man could lose himself here, Conrad thought, and realized it was true. He could enter the overgrown bowers of his garden and never appear again, hemmed in by thorns and vines, impeded by an army of flowers, an ocean of green. At any moment he could take one step from which there would be no turning back. He could be lost, even in his own place.

THE DAY AFTER
Rose died, Henrietta Ellis came to the door early in the morning, knocked, and let herself in without waiting for Conrad to answer.

Behind her in single file were the other members of the Pleiades. A brood of rock doves, they were dressed alike in suits of varying shades of pale gray, their hair degrees of white tending to blue. Each bore in her hands a twinkly, foil-covered platter. These women had been Rose's closest friends.

Conrad had been standing in the kitchen, holding on to the sink and looking out the window after having forced himself to drink a glass of milk. He had been trying, in the face of the terrible constriction that had seized his lungs after Rose's body was borne away, to draw a deep breath. He did not seem able to breathe properly. The sensation frightened him, and he wanted to tell someone, report it, but could not think whom to call.

Henri, tall as a ship, sailed up behind him, turned him to face her, and enfolded him in a wordless embrace. Then she pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. Each of the Pleiades came in their turn, put their casseroles and cakes upon the counter, and held Conrad close for a moment. They all smelled the same to him, of powder and lotion and something dusty—a moth wing. Their cheeks were soft, their hands gentle and trembling. The little jet buttons on their suit jackets, carved with tiny anchors or fleur-de-lis, pressed into his chest. The short stiff bangs of black netting that jutted over their hats tickled his nose. Conrad allowed them to
hold him. Sighing, he drew a deep breath at last and leaned into them, into their familiar female smell and fluttering hands.

Henri pulled out the remaining chair for Conrad, patted it, and set her enormous pocketbook on the table. Conrad sat down and looked around him. He realized he looked filthy, sleepless. A derelict. He would have broken Rose's heart, looking like that. He saw Nora Johnson glance at her friends and then stand up to fill the kettle. “Tea,” she said firmly.

Conrad made as if to rise, thinking to be helpful, but she put a soft, dry little palm on his shoulder. “I know where the cups are,” she said. “I know it as well as in my own house.”

“I'll bet he hasn't eaten, either,” Henri said, looking up from a paper that she had withdrawn from her pocketbook.

“Toast then,” Nora said. “And some of Rose's apricot jam.”

Conrad looked up at her, saw her face wither and fall and then, with effort, right itself. She smiled at him. “Nothing but the best,” she said, but her mouth wobbled, and tears slipped over her eyes and down her cheeks. Conrad felt his own jaw start to tremble. Nora turned away.

“Conrad,” Henri said after a second, leaning forward and laying a hand on his arm. She sat back then and took off her hat, extracting the pins and laying them side by side on the table. She patted her hair, took a breath. “Conrad, you know we wouldn't intrude, but I think it's fair to say that Rose would wish us—to help you. With the arrangements. You just tell us if there's anything special you want, and we'll take care of the rest.”

She reached for her pocketbook, extracted her glasses, and shook out the sheet of lilac paper before her. “We did have some—ideas,” she said, looking out at Conrad from over her glasses. “Rose did.”

Conrad looked at her. “We never talked about it,” he said after a minute.

There was a silence at the table. Conrad looked down at his hands and then up at the ring of faces around him. He realized that they already knew that. That Rose had, in her final conversations with her friends, told them everything they needed to know, understanding that Conrad was incapable both of talking about her death beforehand and of executing anything afterward. What had she wanted? Flowers? Music?

What did
he
want? What was fitting? What would ever be fitting enough?

And then, as if in a contraction of time, he saw Rose on their wedding day, up on the roof of her parents' brownstone, Lemuel's pigeons loosened to the skies as Conrad bent Rose back to kiss her, her spine the stem of a flower in his hands, the birds flying up and away, streamers of white.

“I'd like to bring the pigeons,” he said abruptly, looking around at the Pleiades. “I'd like to send the birds up.”

There was another silence. Mignon French, a transplanted Southerner, round and gentle as a fantail pigeon herself, who was always given the role of the victim in the Pleiades' performances, leaned over the table and touched Conrad's arm. Her nails were pink, like little shells. “What a lovely notion—” she started to say.