Rose's Garden (7 page)

But then the telephone rang. Miss Barteleme threw Conrad a glance and turned to lift the receiver.

And in the opportunity created by the ringing phone, Conrad saw that he could make one more effort on his own behalf, one more appeal. Giving up now was just—what would Rose have said?—fainthearted. No man who's seen an angel ought to be fainthearted.

Miss Barteleme waved the letter opener at him as he brushed past, her eyes and mouth popping protest.

Conrad stepped around the corner of the hall and then stopped, for Nolan had someone with him. Conrad looked through the glass partition. Nolan's back was to him, but Toronto stood before Nolan's desk. He looked up, caught Conrad's eye, and then quickly averted his gaze.

“Look at this,” Conrad heard Nolan say.

Conrad paused, strained to overhear. He watched Toronto, realizing that Nolan expected a laugh, for it was Conrad's letter Toronto was now holding.

But Toronto read quietly, his lips moving slightly, standing before Nolan's desk. Conrad watched his face, not knowing what to expect.

“Well,” Toronto said at last. He did not look up from the page. And then, with an athlete's agile grace, and before Nolan could say anything further, Toronto stepped out of the office, closing the door behind him. In the hall he stopped, looked up, and met Conrad's eyes. Conrad glanced into Nolan's office, saw him, dismayed, rearrange his collar, swivel around, and open his mouth to call after Toronto, “Kenny, don't get any—” And then Nolan saw Conrad and froze.

Just then, having disentangled herself from the phone, Miss Barteleme came after Conrad, huffing and puffing, affronted. “Mr. Morrisey,” she said. “Time to go.”

Conrad allowed himself then to be taken by the arm and escorted to the door, but not without casting a look back over his shoulder toward Toronto, who put up his hand, a small wave.

Maybe there's hope, Conrad thought. But then, surprised, he thought, That man really has the kindest face I've ever seen.

STANDING ON THE
street before the plate glass window of the Aegis's office, Conrad glanced into people's faces. Laurel was a small town, not more than nine hundred people, and he recognized, at least vaguely, many of the passersby. But now every old man he saw reminded him of Lemuel, hawklike and proud, his mane of white hair and soft beard folding tentlike around his long face, making him look like an exotic Jacobin pigeon, its eyes peering through its feathered ruff. Every woman, small and slender,
was, for a second, Rose. He put his hand against the door frame, steadied himself against the sensation that he had been uncoupled from his life. That he no longer knew anyone. That he was surrounded by strangers. Someone, a woman he did not recognize, passed him and nodded. “Good morning,” she said, her voice pleasant, sympathetic. Conrad stared after her.

He had no plans, no destination. He stepped off Main Street and walked down the hill to River Road. Behind him the town resolved into the small inverted bowl of its streets and roofs. On the far side of the river rose the coarse foothills of the Sleeping Giant, the last of the low-lying crests of the White Mountains. To reach Laurel from the south, one had to pierce the slumbering body of rock through its low granite heart. The mountain's brow, nose and chin, rising chest, sweeping legs, and protruding feet looked unmistakably like an enormous man laid down heavily upon the sloping fields.

Conrad had been hired as a junior member of the engineering team some months after the tunnel project had begun. He remembered the moment when blasting had broken through the far side of the mountain, when a jagged hole of light had penetrated the dark rock. And he remembered, too, the feeling he'd had when he and Rose first arrived in Laurel. Surrounded on three sides by mountains and cinched in by the belt loop of the Mad River, which cut a gorge through Mt. Abraham and was continually fed by the rainwater washing down its granite slopes, Laurel felt comfortingly invulnerable. The low, rock-strewn grasslands to the west were given over mostly to dairy farms and, farther north toward Lake Champlain, to orchardists, who planted their hillsides with rising and falling Vs of trees, which gave the land a sprightly buoyancy.

Conrad had imagined that they had severed time itself when they arrived that first day in the town square. He saw how mountains
rose up around them on three sides, how the forests and dappled orchards on the fourth side made a maze as dense and elaborate as any grown to thwart a fairy tale's sorcerer. Nuclear missiles, airborne diseases, even the insidious contagion of society's most perverse tendencies, would fall away against the town's natural geo graphic baffles.

Parking their car and walking across the velvet grass to the ornate bandstand in the center of the square, they had looked around, pleased. A Victorian affair with ornate trim capping the hexagonal roof like the fringe on an old-fashioned surrey, the bandstand was used in summer for a concert series and, occasionally, for a blood-donation clinic. Then, nurses would mount the short flight of steps to the varnished floor within, their white tunics fluttering, a Red Cross banner tied to the posts and flapping mightily. A steady trickle of people, who arrived with their sleeves rolled past their elbows, would be admitted under the pink lights and given juice in white paper cones, their dark blood draining into pint bags.

For the town's bicentennial celebration, Harrison Supplee, who owned the hardware store and took it upon himself to orchestrate most civic events, had asked Conrad if he wouldn't see whether he might do something with the bandstand. “Spruce it up, you know,” he'd said vaguely, as the two of them had stood there one morning surveying it. Conrad, whose gilding business was by then an unqualified success, had looked it over, pronounced it sound, and spent the spring and summer evenings preceding the festivities gilding the interior framework of the bandstand. The delicately arched rafters and soaring cross ties had been painted with gold leaf, endowing the construction with a weightless grace. Rose said it looked as though you could pluck off a piece and it would melt in your mouth like sugar.

Those long evenings, as the sky grew dark, purple martins and
bats had crossed the square, and Conrad had painted away happily in the glare of a utility light. The twin lamps by the hotel's green awning had glowed yellow. Single blue lights burned in the rear rooms of stores fronting the square, throwing window displays—an old-fashioned mannequin, the shining, curved armatures of plumbing fixtures, the dark spines of books—into exaggerated relief. From a distance, it appeared as though Conrad were a man on a boat, riding the dark surface of a still lake.

But that first day, sitting on the rounded benches within the bandstand, he and Rose had looked out at the square—the needle hands of the clock on the granite wall of the bank moving slowly around, the cordial progress of slight traffic, the flapping canopy over the doors of the hotel, the white spire of the Congregational church glinting in the sun. Rose had gripped his arm. “Oh, we'll be happy here,” she'd said. “I can feel it.”

Now, arriving at the bottom of the hill at River Road, Conrad stopped at the bulwark by the water and stared out over the Mad River, its surface strangely flat and colorless between eroding concrete banks. Once he had seen a great blue heron down here. It had been a strange sight, like a man from the past who wanders through some complicated fold of time to arrive in the present, incongruously dressed, vulnerable, ugly of feature. Conrad, who usually had his binoculars with him when he went for a walk, had pulled them out and put them to his eyes, the world rearing up into close focus inside a tiny circle. Looking through his field glasses, he always felt that he had left his place on the ground, was balanced aloft like a bird, his eyes trained on the bulging and convex dimensions of the world. He had fixed on the heron, alighted on an old truck tire half-submerged near the bank. After a minute it had unfolded its wings and flapped away slowly upriver, as though saddened by the changed reality of what it had found.

Staring out over the river now, Conrad suffered a moment of terrible disorientation. Leaning over, he put out his hand toward the water, but no reflection met his palm, no answering shape rose to meet his flesh. One of his eyes, his left, had begun troubling him; his vision would fade in and out. Was it this that accounted for the fact that he seemed so insubstantial now, too insubstantial to have a reflection? Trembling, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a handful of coins, leaned over the water again, and let them trickle from his palm. The surface of the water scattered reassuringly as though under a quick shower of rain.

But the moment when he felt himself to have disappeared, and the unalterable descent of the coins, recalled to him another moment when he had hung above the world, terrified and uncertain.

IT WAS THE
largest, most ambitious gilding job Conrad had ever undertaken. Earlier that year he had gilded a set of enormous gates woven with prancing horses and wild sea froth and wheeling planets at a Du Pont estate in Pennsylvania; it was the first job on which he had tested his new technology: a carbon-core brush used to electronically deposit plating solutions—water-soluble mixtures of zinc, nickel, cadmium, lead, tin, and, of course, gold—on virtually any surface. His employer had been so pleased with Conrad's meticulous results that he had recommended him for the bank job in Connecticut. After consulting with various engineers, Conrad had decided that the work was best done safely at ground level on thin shells, which could then be hoisted by helicopter and adhered to the original dome. And it would only take about thirty-eight ounces of gold.

The day the shells were to be fitted in place, Conrad joined the contracting crew as they ascended through the building and swung in harnesses to the lip of the dome itself, where the men
were to catch and steady the new pieces as they hovered above. Conrad himself was just along for the ride, as he put it.

“I just want to see it all fall into place,” he explained as they attached the belt to him.

But as Conrad and another man stepped to the trapeze and attached themselves to the safety cables, the harness at one end of the trapeze snapped, a noise like the report of a starter's gun, hollow and pointless. Conrad clung to the cable, the breath itself shocked from him; his partner, suspended in his safety belt, dropped away and caught with a jerk, hanging against the edge of the building like a man pretending flight in a theater performance, strung up awkwardly on guylines.

It was very quiet. Even the drone of the helicopters seemed to fade away in that moment. The sun, tilting toward noon, roared white and soundless above them. The city lay spread out below, its streets crawling with traffic. Conrad noticed, though he could not have said why, a woman in a lilac coat walking slowly around an empty fountain in the park, with an insect's creeping pace.

The dangling man hung perhaps twenty feet from Conrad. When the sound of the man's weeping reached Conrad, he was surprised. The man's grief sounded like a child's, a fretful child shedding tears in some distant, private place where he did not expect to be discovered. Conrad looked down, caught his breath again, and noticed with a perverse clarity the action unfolding below, as the people gathered there became alerted to the men's plight.

They were rescued in short order, the other man hauled up and poured upon the floor, his bowels and stomach having released their contents. He could not be pried from the floor and made to stand. Conrad knelt beside him, the floor spinning under his knees, breathing hard, breathing in the stench. Afterward he had
wanted only to get away, be alone, had excused himself with a vague wave and taken himself to the diner across the street from the bank, the bell jangling loudly above his head as he pushed open the door with a shaking hand. Seated in a booth, wedged into its corner, he had eaten and eaten—a roast beef sandwich with gravy and potatoes, and then another; two pieces of apple pie; and then a piece of Boston cream pie. He finally had to force himself to stop. He wiped his mouth shakily, then he reached for his wallet and, frightened, discovered it gone, as though everything that established him as a certain person had fled from him in that moment when he hung in the sky, as though he had been emptied, turned upside down and shaken, stripped of all possessions, identity, and substance.

When he returned home two days later, the job having been completed without further incident, he let himself in through the front door. The radio in the kitchen was slightly mistuned, an unsettling static interrupting the voices. He felt a sudden alarm and called for Rose.

But she was upstairs, seated at her dressing table, applying her makeup, the long blue bars of the afternoon light falling through the curtains and over the floor. Rose belonged to an amateur theater troupe, a group of seven women who called themselves the Pleiades. They performed publicly once a year, a charity event held in Conrad and Rose's garden on the upper terrace, the tree branches hung with paper lanterns. But they met weekly for rehearsals, to sew their costumes, and to simply talk, these seven women who revolved around one another in perfect order, no need for a sun at their center. Their performances were, for their respective families and for the town itself, events of signal importance. Two Chinese screens from Rose's childhood home in Brooklyn formed the wings of the stage, the women disrobing there between scenes,
their white spreading backsides and heavy breasts briefly exposed to the chill as they shed gowns for togas, armor for pantaloons, hurriedly shaking their feet free of clothing. Rose always hired a band to play on the front steps—a tambourine player, a fiddler, two trumpeters, and a pianist, who sat down at the old black upright, which had been wheeled out to the porch. A cranberry goblet of champagne trembled on top of the piano; a bouquet of roses in a silver tumbler dropped petals on his hands.

Sometimes before their weekly meeting Rose would sit at her dressing table, her hair brushed back from her face and caught in a net, and make up her face, just as an experiment. Conrad never failed to be startled by Rose in full costume, but the effect of her transformation into someone he did not know seemed even more complete when it was partial, just the woman herself, her dressing gown slipped to her shoulders, her bare feet hooked over the rung of her chair, her new face staring back at itself in the silvery mirror. This was how he came upon her that afternoon, her face flecked with green shadows, her mouth painted into a tiny bow.