Rose's Garden (16 page)

And then something struck the back of his head as he knelt there, a pinprick of pain that loosened in him a ganglion of fury. He lifted his eyes, felt the first random drops of rain like hail strike across his head and shoulders in a yoke, surprisingly heavy. Struggling angrily out of his jacket, he folded it awkwardly, lifted the bird, and placed it carefully on the cloth. He rose to his feet with the pigeon cradled near his chest and stood then to face down the accumulated threat of the afternoon, the gathering storm, the dark windows of his house. He turned toward the porch, the fierce heat of anger on his face running with the scattered rain. And then he stopped, for there on the top step of the porch, laid there in the
timeless instant when he had knelt—was it in prayer?—over this lost bird, was a basket. A wreath of steam rose from the willow lid.

He turned to catch the deliverer, to be a witness, to say what he saw, but there was nothing. Just his garden gate slowly closing and a pattering sound, light as snowfall, which might have been the rain.

HE ATE EVERYTHING
in the basket, sitting on the floor by the French doors, the repast spread out on newspaper, the wounded pigeon resting in a blanket by his knee. A beef stew, clover rolls dusted with flour, a tin of gingersnaps, a carafe of dark beer—it tasted as good as anything he'd ever eaten. It occurred to him fleetingly that he didn't need to eat it all, that he might do well to save some, but he couldn't seem to stop. Through some combination of the cook's skill and his own bottomless hunger, he was given an endless appetite, a craving that felt, even as he enjoyed the meal, vaguely unconnected to food. It was odd how the contents of the basket, while always comforting him, also aroused in him a desire for more.

Between mouthfuls, he forced a dropper into the bird's beak, dripped herbal tea into its craw. And gradually the pigeon revived, rustling within the warm folds of the blanket, opening its one eye and fixing Conrad with a look that he took to be one of gratitude.

At last, finished with his meal, Conrad licked his fingers for the last of the gingersnap crumbs, leaned back against the legs of the chair, gathered the bird onto his lap, and gently inspected its wing.

“Now, what happened here?” he asked, gently extending the pigeon's wing. He probed near the missing eye with a finger, but the pigeon retracted its head sharply into its breast. “I think you're a homer who's never going home again, my friend,” he told it. “At least not without a chauffeur.” He inspected the band on its leg.
He didn't recognize the code—no numbers, just a series of letters that spelled out hi roller.

Conrad stood up, the pigeon in his arms, and walked to the open French doors leading out to the garden. The rain of an hour or so before had been a false start—just a fistful of cold drops and then no more.

“Well, let's get you a proper meal,” he said. “Introduce you around.”

As he stepped outside, he felt how the temperature had dropped; the warm atmosphere of the sunstruck earth had turned dank, and the coolness palmed his cheek. He crossed the terrace, past the black circle of the reflecting pool, that bottomless well. Stepping up to the retaining wall, he looked down over the sloping terraces below.

And then he froze at the shape he saw moving there, small and dark, a bowed head, something, someone standing there inside the vegetable garden. The stroking motion of his hand over the pigeon's back ceased. Rose?

No, no, too short, too squat, he saw; too thick at the waist. An angel? They come like this? In broad daylight? Short and square? He glanced behind him at the house. Had he missed someone there, an intruder who had shadowed him, evaded him, standing in a dark corner, behind the door, in the recess beneath the stairs? The basket, he thought. Was this who'd been feeding him?

When he began to descend the steps, slow and tense as if he might have a fight on his hands, he saw the figure more clearly, though it did not move as he approached the garden. The face was obscured by a scarf tied over the head, the plane of the jaw averted. Conrad shifted the pigeon to one arm, walked to the gate, lifted the latch. At its warning click the figure turned, startled.

“You said you'd welcome visitors in the afternoons,” Betty
Barteleme said, her eyes wide. “But I didn't think I should bother you.”

Conrad took her in—her cheap black coat with the wide, twisted belt cinched around her middle, her good shoes filthy now and ribbed with mud, her face white beneath a faded paisley scarf. A brooch at her chin, a cameo, pinned the scarf there.

“Miss Barteleme?” he said, amazed.

“I came to see for myself,” she said. “But I'm not a snoop, I'll have you know that.”

“No, I—” Conrad began, confused, but she interrupted him.

“I saw your letter,” she said. “When I was tidying up yesterday. It fell on the floor by Kenny's desk. I picked it up to put it back and then I—I read it.” She stopped. “I haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since.” She glanced at him quickly, then turned away again. “But I'm not a snoop,” she repeated, sniffing. She extracted a pale blue tissue from her sleeve, touched it to her nose.

“No, I'm—”

But she interrupted him again. “This is where?” she said. She looked around, nodded slowly. “I can see it. I can.” She put her hands out. “A big angel, with wings like—an angel's.” She closed her eyes. “He puts his hand on your brow”—she reached and touched her own forehead, lightly, with one black-gloved finger—“and you're—comforted, aren't you?”

She opened her eyes. “My mother saw an angel when I was born, you know,” she said quickly, though Conrad could barely hear her, did not know. How could he know?

“It was in her sewing room. I was not a week old,” Betty went on quietly. “She said she turned around, feeling something there behind her, and saw him, saw him bending down and smiling at me, his hands on my cradle. She wasn't afraid at all, she said. She
knew he meant me no harm. ‘Oh, you're special, Betty,' she would say to me. ‘You've an angel's breath on your face.'”

Betty stopped, turned to Conrad. “But you don't see it there, do you?”

Conrad took in her face, the puffy eyes, the jowls, the violently black hair escaping from under her scarf. He did not know what to say.

“I don't either, though I've looked and looked,” she said, reaching into her sleeve again for the tissue. “It's a plain face, I know. More than plain, even. I don't know how that could be, how an angel's breath could have done that.” She looked up at Conrad. “You don't think it was—a joke?”

“Oh, no, I—” But his voice failed him. Rose had been so beautiful.

“And now—” Betty drew in a long breath. “Now I have to think, you see. Decide what to do. You don't know him—Nolan—Mr. Peak,” she corrected herself. “He's a man of honor, true honor.” She said this last fiercely; Conrad was surprised at her vehemence. “He would never do anything he thought wasn't strictly—by the book. And I have never, in all our years, never gone against him.”

She had drawn herself up now, stood facing Conrad fully. “Of course, he's never asked me, but I know he sees what I think about things. I catch him watching me sometimes. He wouldn't let on about this, you see, because he has a man's sort of pride, he's—” She took a deep breath, held Conrad's face in her eyes. “But this time—this time, he's mistaken. He thinks there's no such thing as angels.” She put her hands up to her face, covered it with her gloved fingers.

Conrad took an anxious step toward her, but she waved him away, collected herself. “Your wife,” she said, taking a deep breath, looking out over the terraces beneath them, the waves of green interrupted
here and there by patches of soft color, the roses and the lilies, the chrysanthemums, the fringed heads of the butter-colored dahlias. “She had a real green thumb on her, didn't she?”

Betty folded her gloved hands, knit her fingers together, sniffed. “Of course, she was lucky, she had the time for it. I just do my African violets. You can do those on a windowsill, you know. Perfect for a working girl like myself. But your wife—” She shook her head at the waste of death, as if it were a lack of judgment or a sin of excess. “She had a heart of gold, too, didn't she? Green thumb and heart of gold.” She laughed a little. “I used to see her at the cemetery sometimes when I'd go to sit by Mother. She always had a big basket of flowers, arranged them for people's stones. And that child—you know, the funny one who works out there now, Kate and Eddie's girl—oh, she followed your wife all over the place. They had flowers in common, I suppose. But it was something else, too, wasn't it? Sometimes I'd see them, walking around out there together, pointing at things, kneeling down on the ground together, looking and touching. Like a mother and daughter, I thought, or two sisters. I don't know how your wife got her to talk. Won't say anything to me when I try to wave hello. She's done wonders with the gardens out there though, you know. Keeps them up very pretty.” Betty nodded slowly, as if Conrad had agreed with her.

“Your wife always had a bunch of those pink roses for Mother, who loved them so. She used to come and read sometimes to her, too, after Mother lost her eyes. Poetry. That's what Mother liked.”

Betty clasped her hands before her stomach, as if it hurt her. “But you already know that,” she said. “You know all about that.”

But Conrad hadn't known. Betty Barteleme's mother? He didn't think he'd ever seen her, ever even known her mother was here in Laurel. Or had Rose mentioned it to him, choosing something from the bookshelf to read to her before she went off, and he'd just
forgotten? He shook his head. And the notion of Rose and Hero, wandering the cemetery together, like a mother and daughter.

He'd known Rose worked there sometimes. The Friends of Mt. Olive maintained an heirloom rose collection on the grounds; he remembered Rose corresponding with various growers about it from time to time. People used to send her canes through the mails, wrapped up in plastic bags. There was a whole group devoted to it, preserving the old varieties. He'd once said to her that he thought it sort of a waste, having it out there at the cemetery.

“Why not have it someplace where people can enjoy it?” he'd said.

And Rose, putting on her straw hat, ready to go, had stopped for a moment in the hall and thought.

“Who says no one enjoys it?” she'd said after a minute.

Like a mother and daughter. After that one miscarriage of Rose's, early on, they hadn't ever really talked about having children. That it might have been his fault, their lack of progeny—he'd hated the disappointment of that, imagining that he might have failed her in that essential way. And he never wanted her to feel that it was her fault, either. He had assumed that, like himself, she didn't talk about it out of respect for his feelings. But perhaps it had always been there for her, he thought now. He had mostly forgotten about it, except for moments now and then when he found himself imagining what Rose's child would have looked like, a replica of her, her childhood all over again, replayed for him like a favorite piece of music.

But that wasn't quite right, was it? Hadn't he thought, too, that they didn't need a child? Hadn't he thought there might be less of Rose for him if there were a baby, someone who could possess Rose in ways Conrad himself would never know? The sheer ugliness of that thought made him feel shrunken now, cut down.

In Hero, in that lost girl, what had Rose found?

Had he not known half of it? What had he missed?

He returned his eyes to Betty's face and saw instead back into his life, to a bridge there that collapsed into rushing waters, no passage across.

“Well,” Betty said quietly after a minute, seeing his expression. “We always find out too late, don't we?”

CONRAD BACKED AWAY
, let her stand there, her head bowed. He closed the gate quietly behind him, walked carefully to his loft. A handful of his pigeons were there, waiting on the landing board in the chalky light of early dusk, looking at him. “I forgot all about you,” he said aloud, startled. How could he have done that?

He put the lost pigeon in one of the open roost compartments, where it could leave if it had a mind to, though he didn't think it could fly very far—if at all now—with that wing. He moved to fetch grain, fed his own pigeons as they came in now, perhaps seeing him there below. They dropped one by one to the landing board after circling the roof. He began to shut them in, counting them in his head. “I'm sorry,” he said to them. “I've never done that before. Forgotten you.”

And then he realized finally, as he counted, who was missing—one missing. The archangel. He stopped, breathing hard. Where was the archangel? He stepped backward over the grass before the loft, scanned the sky, the dark clouds. Nothing.

Conrad waited a long time, standing in the growing cool of the early evening. Betty Barteleme vanished from his garden as though she, too, like Lemuel, like the angel, had been only a spirit. He waited awhile and then, fearful of climbing back up to the house as it grew dark, began to hurry up the hill.

The bird never appeared, never came home. Not that afternoon, nor that night, nor the next day, nor any day after that.
There was a one-eyed jack now in Conrad's roost, a pigeon that had become lost en route, had felt itself caught up and run off course by the sloping currents that crossed the country in a parabola of aching wind, and had fallen at last at Conrad's feet, a survivor whose passage had cost him an eye and a wing, part of the precious instruments that steered him home. This survivor found himself in new country now but was already assimilating the telltale signs of this new place, the angle of the terra-cotta roof, the arm of the silver river curled around something precious, the precise geology of this changed world.