Rose's Garden (11 page)

But Henri interrupted her. “At what point—” she said, looking down through her glasses at the paper in her hand, “at what point would that be done?”

“At the end, of course,” Nora said, putting a plate of toast and a glass jar of apricot jam down in front of Conrad. She handed him a napkin. “Eat,” she said, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She waved her hand in the air with a vague motion. “It would be at the very end.”

Henri took a fountain pen from her pocketbook, wrote something in slow, tiny script at the bottom of the paper. “Very well,”
she said. She screwed the top back on her pen, set it down carefully beside her, looked at none of them in particular. “At the end.”

Nora sat down again beside Conrad, folded her hands in her lap. After a minute she leaned over, put her head against his shoulder. On his other side, Grace Cobbs leaned in, too, the blue sheen of their twin permanents glowing against Conrad's white shirt. They both must have been at the hairdresser's already that morning, Conrad thought, sniffing, the two women's heads resting lightly against his arms; they smelled the same, like setting lotion. Across from him, Adele Simms and Helen Osborne and Mignon stretched out their hands for Conrad's, and Henri, too, put hers across the patchwork of laced fingers, so that for one blessed moment, as Conrad sat there, he could feel nothing but the clasp of familiar flesh, the singular sensation of being touched by a multitude of hands, that infinitely reassuring embrace by a constellation of Rose's dearest friends.

“‘So part we sadly in this troublous world, To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.'” Henri looked up as she spoke. She was clear-eyed and strong and held Conrad's eyes in her own.

“Queen Margaret,” Nora said, lifting her head, smiling. “Wasn't Rose a marvelous Margaret?”

AND SO CONRAD
had brought the pigeons, keeping them in their cages in the back of his pickup truck until toward the end of the graveside service at the cemetery. He stood surrounded by the Pleiades, a dark pool of mourners casting a shadow over the tender spring grass. Escorted to the graveside, Conrad searched the crowd. He could not understand, briefly, why he did not see Rose when so much else seemed familiar.

And then, during the readings offered by each of the Pleiades, who wore a uniform shade of blue black and had feathers—the
quills of blue jays and the brown spears of hawks' tails—in their hats, their lapels bursting with clusters of Rose's favorite anemone, the exquisite white ‘Honorine Jobert', Conrad had simply wandered away from the gathering at the graveside.

The Pleiades had watched him go, but Henri was reading, and none of them liked to interrupt her. Conrad just walked away; he had no particular relation to this ceremony. He was just a spectator. He glanced up once at the sky, a solemn and perfect blue, and reached to loosen the knot of his tie at his neck. He felt light headed, almost disembodied, as though his hands were not attached to his wrists. He took off his suit coat, laid it on the front seat of the truck.

In the cages he'd assembled twenty of his whitest pigeons, the fantails and the ice pigeons, the Silesian croppers and the white kings, the frillbacks and the Antwerp smerles. Trying to rid his head of the cottony sensation of dullness, he slid the cages around noisily on the bed of the pickup until they were all facing the open tailgate, and then he bent over to look in at his birds. Something like sand shifted inside his head when he leaned over. But he put his finger to the cage that held Pearl. She held his eye a moment; the world, contained in her black iris, was reduced to a wavering parallelogram. And then, as Henri closed her book and Father Mortimer stepped forward to begin the prayers, Conrad opened the cages.

The pigeons flew out in a shuddering of wings, taking off toward the light, toward the high, etherizing reaches of the sky, just as the Pleiades stepped forward to link hands and bow their silver heads over the dark mouth of the grave. The birds circled up and away, aiming at some invisible passage.

All but one.

Pearl, her wings held wide in a stately attitude, drifted just
above Conrad's head, caught in a perfect updraft. Conrad craned back painfully, put his hands up—did she want to come back to him? But as he did so, he felt a capful of wind strike him gently around the head, cuffing his ears. And then he heard it, a sudden, low whine, as a long, dark current of warm air leaned in across the cemetery from over the mountains. The air smelled of faraway places, of sandbars and the ocean, a foreign scent laden with spice, the smell of places Conrad knew he'd never been and would never go. He turned to face it, saw the trees turn in the powerful gust, the canopy over the grave flap. Nosegays laid to rest here and there at the heads of the departed came loose, ran across the grass, bright spots of false color. Gyres of tiny new leaves circled and spun. The hats on the heads of the Pleiades tore loose, blew away; those gathered at the graveside clutched at their lapels, at one another, afraid they would be torn apart forever and yet exhilarated, too, by the sensation of abandon the wind created in their hearts.

Conrad staggered in the sweeping, salty respirations of the wind but managed to stand his ground, his white shirt flapping. He saw his pigeons scatter as if they had been shaken from a tablecloth, their primary and secondary feathers spread wide. They were trying to find a grasp on the slippery air, the fields of their feathers separating against the fierce draft, their bodies vertical for a moment before they were blown back and away. He saw Pearl above him, braced impossibly against the wind. He put up his arms again to catch her back, show her where he was. But as he did so, he felt himself leave the ground for an instant, not flight nor falling but an instant of perfect weightlessness, as if the wind were testing its grip on him, too, testing gravity's strength, testing the intention in Conrad's heart. It was only an instant, and yet in that moment a wondrous relief came over him.

And as he held there in an inhalation of indecision, his shirt
filling with the wind's powerful breath, he saw a young woman he did not immediately recognize step away from the edge of the huddled collection of mourners, their dark coats shiny as crows' oily feathers. She was small and thin, dressed in a drab overcoat; her narrow wrists emerged from the cuffs, fragile and stiff. Her light-colored hair was so pale it was nearly white. Delicate strands whipped across her face. All around her blew a brilliant confetti of leaves torn loose, the shorn red foliage of the Japanese maples and the crimped, green paper fans of the ginkgoes, the purple leaves of the copper beech and the notched feathers of the honey locust, pale and buttery.

He saw her leaning into the wind, coming toward him, her eyes lifted in recognition; and at that moment he remembered her—the smile of pleasure she'd given Rose in the hallway, her foolish dress, the way Rose had slipped an arm round the girl's waist, steered her into the sunlight at the back of the house, and shown her the view.

When his toes touched ground again, he felt his muscles weaken like water. Pearl was beating her wings steadily against the gusts, holding her own above Conrad's head. Conrad came to his knees, dazed and light headed. He saw that the mourners at the graveside were separating, the women tucked under the men's arms, teetering backward. The tent was plucked from its tethers, flew off at a tilt. Conrad saw Henri stagger away, her blue gray permanent ruffled up oddly in the back; Mignon French raced past him, taking little running steps, tears streaming down her pink cheeks. Everyone seemed to be calling to him, trying to say something. Conrad raised his arms to the wind, feeling his shirt flatten over his chest like a sail. The sky was sharp and blue, filled with the invisible landscape of the wind as it carved out canyons and valleys, angles of ascent.

And then, as if she could hold on no longer against the steady
assault, Pearl veered off and away, a white speck disappearing over the bowl of the hill, toward the river and home. The cemetery was empty except for Conrad and—standing a respectful distance away, clutching the pliable body of a Lombardy poplar, which the wind bent toward the ground—a girl who understood that she'd seen a man caught for one impossible moment between heaven and earth.

IF HE CLOSED
his eyes, Conrad could remember the sensation of that moment of weightlessness, and also the sight of Pearl vanishing over his head, the intimation he'd had at that instant that he might never see her again. Now, taking a seat on the bench in front of his loft, he turned away from the view of his garden and looked out over the river toward the mountains instead. Evita had vanished into the dark clouds.

He could not see the sun, though he could sense its hot, distant presence above him, obscured behind the wall of damp clouds; he judged that it must be nearly noon. Conrad felt observed, underfoot; fetching Pearl from the loft, he brought her back outside with him and sat down again, his hand curled protectively over the pigeon's back. He gazed up at the sky. The clouds seemed to have closed solidly overhead, a wall of rock. For a moment he imagined Evita breaking through them, emerging into a light so fierce and joyful that it would burn the eye, replace the gift of ordinary sight with vision, the mundane with the miraculous. As a child he had believed that if his pigeons could talk, they would tell him the truth about heaven, for he was certain they saw it each time they rose up out of the gritty, particled air of New York, disappearing over the skyline. He believed that they saw the globe of the earth rotating smoothly ahead of them, saw their own dovecotes blinking on the surface of the planet like lighthouses at the dark edge of the sea.

How did they do it? His birds' ability to navigate home, no matter how far they'd flown, no matter how disorienting the weather, provoked an amazement in Conrad that had grown over the years rather than diminished. In the late 1800s, a famous pigeon, a black hen from Philadelphia named Dinah, had been clocked at faster than a mile per minute, and Conrad's own racing homers had once flown one hundred seventy miles in just under three hours during a bad storm. This was an impressive time, Conrad knew, one that didn't allow for much correction or dilly dallying. Rose had believed romantically that it was simply the pigeon's love of home that brought it back each time. But Conrad, unwilling to settle for that explanation, had been more persuaded by recent experiments with infrasound. A researcher at Cornell had discovered that pigeons were able to detect sound energy at eight octaves below the limits of normal human hearing; this, more than any other explanation he had ever heard for the homing pigeon's navigational abilities, made sense to Conrad. He could easily imagine that his birds lived in a universe ringing with a complex musical score unheard by human ears, a concert of the noise of movement itself, its massive displacements and adjustments like icebergs shouldering through the Arctic Ocean. It all seemed infinitely reasonable to him. It seemed, in fact, the only possible explanation for his pigeon's miraculous ability to avoid becoming lost.

Conrad stroked Pearl's feathers and looked up into the threatening sky, hunting for Evita: the clouds rolled from side to side above him as though he stood on a tilting deck, and there was no sign of the bird. He reached up and put Pearl on his shoulder. Not many of his pigeons were as easy to handle as this one. Rose used to tease him that Pearl was a little bit in love with him; and it was true that she billed and cooed at his approach, that she settled into his hands like a domesticated cat when he stroked her. She liked
riding on his shoulder, too, nibbling at his ear. Rose, watching Pearl trail after Conrad one day in the garden as he worked his way down the boxwood bushes with the clippers, had put her hands on her hips and said, laughing, “That bird's not a homing pigeon; she's a bloodhound. I believe she would find you if you were lost in Manhattan.”

Conrad had put down the clippers, wiped his forehead, looked up, and put out a hand to Pearl, who fluttered down and landed on his forearm. “She just knows a good thing when she sees it,” he'd said, pursing his lips in a kiss to Pearl. “Don't you?”

Pearl rode easily now on his shoulder, an acrobat on the high wire, adjusting her balance to Conrad's stride. “Come on,” he said to her, getting up from the bench.

Inside the loft, Conrad sat down in the cracked-leather swivel chair at his desk and began riffling through the stacks of journals and papers there, Turvey's Dictionary and Guide for Pigeon Racing, Levi's The Pigeon, years' worth of back issues of the American Pigeon Journal and British Homing World. And then, under a pile of newsletters from the Pigeon Fanciers of America, he saw Rose's notebook, the one she had written over her last few weeks, a guide to the garden, intended to help Conrad remember what tasks needed to be done throughout the year.

How had it made its way here, to his desk? He did not remember bringing it down to the loft. A man from the funeral home had found it under the sheets when Rose's body was lifted to the gurney, and he had handed it to Conrad, standing mutely at the bedside. Had he carried the notebook here that night? He couldn't remember. But, then, he didn't remember much of anything from the last four months.

Now though, shifting Pearl to his lap, he found his glasses in his pocket and fitted them to his nose. He cracked the spine of the
notebook and bent it open. Rose's handwriting sloped downhill, threatening to spill off the page. It was, he realized as he turned the pages, a monumental labor for one whose strength had been so uncertain at the end that even lifting a spoon to her mouth had seemed to exhaust her.

It was all very predictable, though. He riffled through the pages and read her instructions—when to feed the fruit trees and how much; when to prune which roses; what needed to be dug up and brought to the basement to overwinter; what needed to be divided and moved.

But then, tucked into the back of the book like an afterthought, on a loose sheet, Conrad discovered a recipe for something called rose beads. He put his finger to the lines, read slowly.