Rose's Garden (8 page)

“Connie!” Rose spun in her seat, pleased, as Conrad entered the room. She turned her strange face to her husband. “You're early!” She held out her arms. Conrad crossed the room, kissed her mouth delicately. He stood back and regarded her face.

“Who are you?” he asked, taking a seat at the foot of the bed.

“I thought maybe Lady Macbeth,” Rose said, turning back to the mirror. “The green is ominous, isn't it?” She lifted one eyebrow with a finger, turned back to him. “I missed you,” she said. “It went all right?”

Conrad looked at her through the gray cast of the mirror. He wished that she were not, at that moment, made up. He wanted to see her face as it was at night before they went to bed, freshly washed, a faint sheen of night cream glowing on her cheekbones, the satin ribbon of her nightgown tied in a loose bow.

Rose stared at him when he failed to answer her. “What is it?”

Conrad heard the alarm in her voice but could not think exactly what to tell her.

“Rose,” he said finally, “I almost died.”

“Oh, my dear!” She came and sat by him on the bed, her hand on his thigh, and listened quietly.

When he finished, he raised his hands to her. “I couldn't get enough to eat afterward,” he said helplessly. “I went to a diner and had lunch, a place nearby. And I'd lost my wallet somehow. I couldn't even pay for it.”

Rose put her arms around him. “It was a gift,” she said quietly at last. She caught his hands and held them to her cheek. “I'm so grateful.”

A MOVEMENT ON
the far side of the river recalled Conrad to where he was. He put his hands on the stone bulwark, felt its gritty surface. This close, the river smelled sour, and Conrad realized that he, too, reeked of neglect, abuse. He needed a hot shower, a haircut, a proper lunch with someone across the table for company. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had any of those things. No wonder Peak had thrown him out. I need to make an effort, he thought. See someone I know.

And suddenly the thought of the Smile Market, Lenore's voluble presence behind the cash register, the delivery boy's loose-lipped grin, made him hungry for company, for food. He had not eaten much lately. The last mysterious basket had been delivered to his front porch a week ago—a curry so spicy it had made his eyes water, rich with currants and almonds and crimped shavings of carrot. It had come with a wax paper packet of thin, crisp breads and a little tin of chocolate truffles. Conrad had eaten the truffles in the dark of the arbor that night, as if he couldn't wait, couldn't get enough; he'd eaten all of them in a single sitting, a pair of
Rose's shoes in his lap, one hand fitted inside, nestled against the sole. When he'd finished, he had set her shoes down on the soft floor of the arbor, pointed them toward the horizon, the mountains now framed by the broad palms of the grape leaves. He had sat in the twilight, watching the shoes, until a rabbit had crept from the underbrush, inched forward, and touched its nose to the empty toe of Rose's shoe. Conrad had held his breath against the grief.

WHEN HE STEPPED
up to the cash register at the Smile Market, carrying eggs and a box of cinnamon rolls, a net bag of oranges under his arm, Lenore snapped open the cash drawer, sized him up, and said, “Well, you don't look any different.”

Conrad startled, imagined May Brown on the phone to Lenore, hooding her eyes, looking out her kitchen window through the small dangling parachutists of her spider plant. “Lenore?” she must have said. “It's me. May. You'll never guess. Conrad Morrisey saw an angel last night. He showed me the exact place.”

Conrad looked at Lenore suspiciously. Just what, exactly, had May Brown told her?

“Heard you had a visitation,” Lenore said, lowering her voice.

Conrad nodded at her, mute. His appetite for telling his story had waned in the face of this other, more urgent appetite, forkful upon forkful. He saw, for a moment, Nolan's dismissive expression, Toronto's careful silence. And May Brown's closed-up face, her eyes darting away. I should have kept it to myself, he thought.

But Lenore continued, quietly. “My aunt saw them, too,” she said, packing Conrad's eggs sideways in his bag. Conrad glanced at her face, was distracted by the bracelets on her arm, the charms dancing there, her freckled skin like a pigeon's breast, mottled beneath the secondary feathers. One of the charms, a little pair of pewter shoes laced with a ribbon, held his eye.

“Ever since she was a little girl,” Lenore went on. Conrad looked up at her. “Said she always saw them in the fig tree, talking and laughing and eating figs. They told her she would die painlessly and so she never had to worry. And she never did, after that.” Lenore took Conrad's bills, smoothed them in her hands, turned them faceup. “And do you know what?”

“What?” Conrad asked, leaning toward her.

“She did die painlessly. Fell asleep at eighty-five years old in the waiting room, waiting on the dentist, and never woke up. Never had to have her tooth pulled, either.” Lenore handed him his bag.

Conrad felt disappointed. He had thought Lenore would tell him something more persuasive, more—uplifting. Something about how the woman's life had been changed.

“What was it like?” Lenore asked. “May Brown said you showed her the place where it landed.”

“It wasn't like martians,” Conrad said, offended suddenly. “It didn't land.
He
didn't land.”

“It was a he,” Lenore said, nodding, as though that confirmed it. “It always is.”

“It is?”

“Seems like it. My aunt's always were. You know—” She paused to inspect her hands, her white fingers splayed, her many rings bunched nearly to her knuckles. “I used to go out to that tree sometimes, stand underneath the branches. I'd had a little brother who'd died. I used to stand there, thinking about him and missing him. I thought maybe the angels, my aunt's angels would, you know, sense me there, and come down and give me some comfort. Show me my brother again.” She stopped and looked at Conrad. He was startled to see tears in her eyes. “He was just a little boy,” she said, staring at him as though she were seeing not Conrad but the child, a boy in a white nightgown sweating under a fan that revolved
slowly in a darkened room, insects gathering thick at the window screen.

“You're lucky,” Lenore whispered. “Very lucky.” She straightened her back, looked hard at Conrad. “Rose would be happy,” she said.

Just then, another customer stepped up behind Conrad, a young man with a ponytail, a bunch of cellophane-wrapped roses in his arms. Lenore glanced at him, smiled.

“Have a good day,” she said then to Conrad. “And don't be a stranger.”

AT HOME, CONRAD
tied Rose's apron around his waist and fried himself three eggs, prodding them with a spatula and listening to the snap and spark of butter in the pan. He considered Lenore's surprising confession, the image of angels in a fig tree, fitted in among the crooks of the branches, passing the soft fruit from hand to hand, their robes tucked up around their knees. Her story had seemed so unextraordinary, he thought—as though angels were perhaps always present, and it was all a question of looking up at the right moment and seeing them picking their teeth, spitting out skins.

His eggs set, he put the plate on a tray, along with the box of cinnamon rolls and two oranges, and went outside to the garden. He pulled a chair over to the stone wall at the edge of the highest terrace and set the tray down. As he ate he looked out over the gardens. The perennial borders, which Rose had orchestrated for a long season of bloom, had seemed to pause earlier that summer at five feet. Now, though, they were heaving themselves upward, seven feet, eight in places, the lilies blown open, the hardy amaryllis strong as Doric columns, the heads of the alliums persevering into August, as enormous and round as moons.

Everything that summer was, in fact, twice, three times its usual size. Though the season was sloping toward September, the garden still seemed to be horned everywhere with new buds, overlaid with yellow pollen, vines laying a multitude of tiny forked feet along the tree trunks and up over the eaves of the house, exploding
into blossom. Conrad reached for an orange, held it in his hand. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he gazed around him. Even when Rose was alive, he thought, the garden had never seemed so lush. In a way, it seemed to be thriving because of his neglect. As he stood up now and looked down the hillside, he felt that he was witnessing an incantation, a strange magic in the milky sap that ran through the leaves, some advance work taking place in the very cells of the trees and flowers, their membranes swelling with bubbles of water, with sweet air, with lively anticipation.

Swarms of bees, wide as the wingspans of planes, tilted back and forth in the indistinct light that fell from the overcast sky. Agitated flocks of birds disturbed the lindens, shaking loose fistfuls of leaves and clouds of the trees' winged pellets, which spun to earth. The garden seemed to be burning with a green fire, with a spongy, condensing verdancy.

Yet when he left the highest terrace and began descending the steps, a conjurer's quiet fell over the grass. The crowds of flowers, blossoms that had multiplied that summer by tens and hundreds, slowly folded their petal hands over their bristling black eyes, a thousand averted gazes.

Full of the hush of bewilderment, in grief over Rose's death and his own inconceivable lingering on without her, Conrad walked across the soft grass. At his approach the swallows fell silent in the trees. His face was brushed by the thousands of tiny new leaves, pale as moonlight, that overran the paths. Pollen rained upon his shoulders, a shower of gold.

Beneath his feet new shoots were coming up everywhere, even raising the flagstones of the terraces. He stood beneath the impossible hollyhocks, giants towering dreamily over his head. He reached toward the sunflowers, which wagged their heads high above him, wide and darkly yellow, crowded against the gray sky.
He stood beside the treillage for the wisteria, tangled with explosions of curling vine, beryl green as Fourth of July Catherine wheels. The sky seemed to darken even further, as though the rain would begin at any moment, and the ground—the boiling, violent, joyful, terrifying ground of Rose's garden—faded into dimness. The preposterous activity at his feet, new growth shouldering up through the dirt, green and yellow and white and furled tight, lost its clarity. The surface of the earth fell into shadow deep as a pool of water.

Conrad walked among the pear trees, his shirt unbuttoned now against a strange heat that had risen into his cheeks. His old man's soft belly lay draped over his belt, a low breeze brushing the fine white hair there. He stepped carefully, laying his hands, which were mapped with an unfamiliar continent of age spots, on the golden fruits. This was to be an endless summer, he felt, pausing in the Concord grape arbor, the dusky fruits there grown so thick and heavy they rested on his head and shoulders like a dripping bishop's wig. This was a summer that reached its high bright equinox and then, with a heroic thrust, drove on, drove up and over the tight white glass ceiling of the August sky.

This was the most painful season of his life, he thought, coming to his knees in the fragrant beds, cupping the flowers in his hands. It was the most beautiful and the most painful. And it seemed that it would never end.

BACK INSIDE THE
house, Conrad surveyed the mess he had been living in, the litter of clothing, the pile of unwashed dishes. It was as if the garden itself, in its long, exhausting season of bloom, had issued an opiate that filtered into the rooms of the house, made him feel sluggish and drugged. Cleaning wasn't his strong suit, but it hadn't really been Rose's either; she had liked a sense of industry
about her. Conrad had thought it a trait inherited from Lemuel, who always seemed to be trailing things untidily from his pockets, paper scraps and lengths of twine. There was something faintly necromantic about Lemuel's disorder—Rose's, too. It was as if in their various experiments with plants or instruments they were always on the addictive brink of discovery. Lemuel had once invented an electrical contraption for altering the angle of the interior shutters' slats so as to provide Rose's night-blooming cereus with a perpetual, false darkness, day shortened to an arctic winter, brief and bright. Adele, though, had asked him to take it down after Melchior, the monkey, had become entangled in the pulleys and nearly hanged himself in the mechanism's ropes.

Conrad walked from room to room. The mess of the last four months seemed so deep that his resolve to put things in order failed before it. This was just purgatory, he felt, staring out the window at his garden. It was a long hesitation that would end in the first killing freeze. And then the garden would collapse under its own preposterous weight, overgrown fruits and flowers, barbed seed heads big as grapefruit and freckled pods thick as a man's finger, all of it cut down. And when that day came, he thought, he would fling out his own arms, would open his mouth, would agree to be taken. He wanted to be taken. Lemuel should have taken him. What did he mean, leaving him here all alone?

Sitting in the kitchen, he emptied Rose's sewing basket, took out each spool of bright thread, lined them up like a battery of soldiers, the pins and needles a sparkling pile of arms laid down, surrendered. One day, he told himself, the clematis would unwind its arms from around the windows, where its plate-faced blossoms pushed up against the glass and stared at him. The grandiflora ‘Queen Elizabeth', with its pink vigorous ruff, would tremble at the touch and drop its multitude of petals. The poppies would fall,
the phlox would scatter, and the air, now choked with drifting clouds of seed, white thistles with black, driving tips like arrows, would, at last, empty.

WHEN HE CONSIDERED
how he might spend the rest of his day, he was overwhelmed by the mass of empty hours ahead of him. He was used to Rose with her brimming agenda. For four months he hadn't even pretended to be useful. Now, though, since the angel, he felt vaguely that he ought to try. Pacing restlessly, he walked into the living room, glanced out the front window at the street to see if another basket might have been left for him. The eggs and the Smile Market's cinnamon rolls had helped, but something in him yearned for the strange familiarity of those baskets, their contents always hot, their effect on him like Rose herself—calming, sweet, and filling. But the step was empty and Conrad felt disappointed. He turned away from the window. He wanted his pigeons, wanted their company.