Rose's Garden (6 page)

He had a regular group of devotees who took three meals a day there. Conrad liked the place, despite the food and the surroundings. The kitchen was grimy, and sitting at the counter, you could see into the back room, where a military cot with a rumple of blankets was pushed up next to the dishwasher with its comforting tumult of suds. Eddie concocted ice cream flavors that Rose said were the inspiration of a lunatic—pineapple, corn, and green onion—but Conrad had a secret taste for the black walnut, which Eddie served with a shot of rum.

Sometimes Conrad took Rose along with him for lunch there. Eddie would always come out from behind the counter on these occasions, a soiled dishcloth folded over his arm. He would stop at their table, bow painfully from the waist, take Rose's hand and bring it to his lips. “Give her anything she wants,” he would say to Conrad, staring at Rose's face.

Once, surprised at Eddie's serious expression during this exchange, Conrad had waited until Eddie had left them before leaning over the table and saying to Rose, “He doesn't just mean lunch. What does he mean?”

Rose hadn't looked up from her menu. “I think he's just trying to show me his gratitude,” she said.

“Gratitude? What for?”

Rose sighed. Still without looking up, she said, “Conrad, I've told you. Their girl. The one who works out in the cemetery gardens now.”

Conrad thought a moment. “The one who's not quite right”—he knocked against his temple—“in the head. With a funny name.”

“Hero,” said Rose, still looking at her menu. “From the myth, of Hero and Leander. It was Kate's favorite name.”

“That's it.” Conrad looked down at his menu, too, but after a minute he raised his head and glanced at his wife again. “Why is he grateful to you?” he asked finally.

Rose made a noise of impatience. “I help her in the gardens out there sometimes. I've told you that.” She hesitated, softened. “I feel sorry for her. Something about her—I don't know—reminds me of myself when I was her age—”

“Well, that's good of you.” Conrad realized he'd interrupted her. But he remembered meeting this girl Hero now; it had been at one of Rose's garden club meetings. Conrad had been carrying a tray of lemonade glasses down the hall when the bell had rung. He
had turned—slowly, so as not to upset the tray—to answer the door, but Rose had come flying down the hall past him and admitted a young woman in an inappropriately formal lilac dress, with long gauzy panels like bats' wings sewn into them; she had greeted Rose with a smile of immense shyness and beauty. But she was not what Conrad would have called a pretty girl. There was something too angular about her face, and her eyes and hair were strangely pale, he thought. She had the look—well, it was exactly the look of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, Conrad had thought at the time, startled by the realization that, as often as he'd heard the expression, he'd never actually seen anyone who fit the description quite as well as this girl. Hero had the look of something that has come to know the taste of its own wound.

“I'm so glad you came,” Rose had said, looking into Hero's face. She had taken her gently by the hand, stepping outside to the porch to draw her inside. They had passed down the hall together, Hero looking at the floor, a small smile still playing around her mouth. She had not looked at Conrad at all. But Rose, holding Hero gently by the arm, had glanced up at Conrad and given him a quick smile into which he thought he could read triumph.

Later, helping Rose clear away the glasses and the tea things, he had listened to her babble on about the meeting.

“And I was so pleased that Hero came,” she had exclaimed at last. “She didn't say anything, just sat there with us, but I think she actually enjoyed it. She's done the most amazing things with the cemetery gardens, Connie. You should see the white-and-silver garden she built by the fountain—white agapanthus and Michaelmas daisies, white honesty, white veronica—” Rose stopped, looked out over her own gardens. She and Conrad had just finished building the third terrace, and the first roses there, pink and richly yellow, were in bloom. “She has a strange feel for it, for knowing
what will work,” Rose mused aloud. “I just wish I could get her to talk.”

“She doesn't talk?” Conrad asked, picking up a tray.

“Well, of course, she does, but she clearly doesn't like to. She's terribly shy. You know, Eddie and Kate had her hospitalized for a number of years at that place in Grant's Falls until it closed down. There were awful stories about it. Don't you remember? People strapped to their beds, and their hands burned with cigarettes if they wet themselves or something.”

“Is she that bad?” Conrad felt momentarily disgusted.

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Well, what's the matter with her then?”

Rose shrugged, then picked up a teacup and ran her finger around the fragile brim. A low fluting noise left the cup, a soft treble. “The world is—too much with her,” she said after a moment, and she turned away from Conrad. “She's fragile. I don't know.”

But Rose had clearly adopted the girl. From time to time she would bring home some bit of news about her—that she had trained the clematis ‘Nelly Moser', with the dark crimson slash on each sepal, over the gates of the cemetery. Rose said the sight had made Havelock Eddison, the town's grim benefactor, who had made a fortune mining Bloodroot Mountain for iron ore, weep with pleasure at its beauty. She had successfully budded two of the magnificent heirloom roses by Mrs. Ashforth's grave and started six new bushes by the gardener's cottage. She had rooted several shoots of prize rhododendrons in an agar jelly.

But to Conrad, Hero was just another in Rose's collection of damaged souls: the sour-smelling drifters who came to the door appealing for grace and were served Earl Grey and sponge cake from Rose's good china; the blind, raving souls in the hospital's permanent wing whom Rose organized early each spring to pot
up bowls of paperwhite narcissus for the town's schoolteachers, and late each fall to bury tulip bulbs in the beds by the hospital gates; the shut-ins and crippled children and unfortunates for whom Rose had such ready sympathy. Sometimes, shopping in the Smile Market with Rose, he would return to their cart, having fetched some item from another aisle, to find Rose standing with her hands being held by an old crone with watery eyes, who would disengage herself as soon as she saw Conrad and scuttle away.

“Who was that?” Conrad would ask.

“Oh, that's Nellie Anderson,” Rose would say. “She cleans at the Congregational church.”

Conrad did not think of himself as a jealous man; but the broad range of Rose's tolerance and sympathy had the twin effect of making him feel unkind by comparison—he was frankly disgusted by and sometimes afraid of the people Rose embraced with such tenderness—and also angry with her, as if because she was so liberal with her attentions, he himself was suffering as a result. He knew that wasn't true. But nonetheless he found over the years that he didn't like to inquire much about any of her pets, as he called them—though only to himself, for he had used the word with Rose once to shocking effect: he had thought she might slap him, and she had refused to speak to him for three days, a vigil of neglect that she made look maddeningly easy. Hero, though she had come along relatively late in Rose's life, had fallen immediately into the category of people Conrad knew he was happier knowing nothing about. It wasn't that he was unkind, he thought. It was that he couldn't bear imagining even for an instant how terrible it must be to stand in their shoes. With her averted face and wide hands and foolish dress, Hero had made him feel, just in that one instant in his front hall, as though nothing he could do would ever be enough.

NOLAN ATE LUNCH
at Eddie's every day, Conrad knew. He sat alone at a table by the window, looking out through the curtains at the river from time to time in a suspicious way. He took in his food dutifully, alternating spoonfuls of ice cream and soup. Watching Nolan eat was like watching a dying man reluctantly take in just enough food to satisfy his doctor. Conrad, who considered his own kitchen and Rose's parade of succulent roasts, fragile pastries, and glistening vegetables fresh from the garden an almost erotic nerve center, wondered how anyone could like food so little. He himself was helpless in front of a warmed plate, placed before him by Rose with the flick of a clean towel. Though she herself seemed to exist mostly on air, she liked to sit across the table from Conrad and watch. “How is it?” she'd ask, and Conrad, forking in new pink beets, roasted crisp and bathed in butter and thyme, or shepherd's pie under a cloud of mashed potatoes, or angel food cake, iced with dark chocolate, would groan, reach across the table for her hand, kiss her knuckles.

What's the point? he had wondered, watching Nolan chew. You could shoot yourself in the head and it would be over quicker.

Now, standing before Nolan in his office, his letter in Nolan's limp grasp, Conrad wound his hat brim between his fingers, watched Nolan's bow tie go up and down, up and down, and waited.

“Can't print this,” Nolan said at last to Conrad's shuffling stance. “Won't. Don't print stuff like this. Angels. Ghosts. Whatnot. Whatever you saw—nonsense.”

He folded Conrad's letter neatly, set it on the desk, and flattened his palm over it as though it were an insect. He pulled at his collar. “I wouldn't mention this to anyone else, if I were you,” he added, leaning forward slightly. “Good day.” And he swiveled around in his chair.

I've been dismissed, Conrad thought, and glanced at the hourglass. The sand had run out.

Betty Barteleme, the walleyed gatekeeper at Peak's newspaper, lowered her glasses when Conrad came back into the front office. He lingered there, trying to find the words to say what he felt. Nonsense? he thought. What does he know?

Miss Barteleme sniffed, waved her letter opener at Conrad. “Go on home now, Conrad Morrisey,” she said through her nose as Conrad stood there, gazing at her, thinking. “You've bothered Mr. Peak enough already for one day. Go on home before I take a broom to you and your feathers.” But then, as if remembering Conrad's recent loss, she softened. “There's no point in waiting. He's not going to see you again this morning. He's a very busy man. Very, very busy.” She leaned over and patted his arm. “Go on.” And she waved the letter opener toward the door.

Conrad looked down, brushed at his trousers, saw a feather drift across the floor toward Miss Barteleme's dimpled ankle, turning over on itself like a tumbleweed. Miss Barteleme, of the fat, powder white Pan-Cake cheeks and penciled eyebrows and two-tone pantsuit—sizing her up, Conrad imagined that she now fancied she herself had a way with words, as if the talent for it were contagious. She guarded Nolan Peak like a little flat-faced dog, irksome and loyal. Now here was Conrad, squared off in a wordless confrontation with this officious woman who acted as though any business of the paper's readers was entirely irrelevant—even a hindrance—to the higher purpose of her beloved Peak's mysterious mission.

Well, you two deserve each other, Conrad thought.

He looked away from Miss Barteleme, past the browning arms of a philodendron draped over the doorsill, and into the newsroom with its clutter of desks. Kenny Toronto was sitting in a
swivel chair by the window, eating an egg sandwich; a beagle looked out at Conrad from under Toronto's desk.

Conrad raised his hand in reply when Toronto looked up and gave him a smile. Conrad liked Toronto. He'd given up a promising career in the minor leagues for a local girl who didn't want to leave home, but he had remained a happy man with a handsome demeanor, apparently without regretting that he had never pursued what might have been a lucrative and exciting career. He covered high school and recreational-league sports for the paper with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm. Toronto's house was also an unofficial sanctuary for wounded birds and animals—most people in town knew they could bring him a felled hawk with a broken wing, or an orphaned fawn, or a trapped raccoon with a shattered paw—not to mention a host of outlaw dogs and torn-up barn cats. Conrad himself had taken creatures to him from time to time. Once, Conrad had found a turkey vulture dragging a crumpled wing along the ground near the river. The creature had been enraged and wild with pain; Conrad had smothered it in a blanket and still taken sixteen stitches in his forearm. After several months of nursing, the vulture had developed a fierce affection for Toronto, refusing to leave and lurking in a darkly appreciative way in the trees around the cages Toronto had built behind his house, coming to feed from Toronto's hand when he called to it. Stella, Toronto's wife, raised chickens and peacocks and had once nursed a bobcat cub to adulthood.

Conrad nodded to Toronto now, but another meaningful sniff from Miss Barteleme set him to shouldering into his jacket, and he began his retreat, leaving his letter behind on Peak's desk, where he imagined it would soon enough end up in the trash. The frustration of it gave Conrad a hopeless feeling. It wasn't even so much a letter as an invitation, he thought, an invitation for all to visit his
garden, regard the ground, take from the sight of it whatever they wished. And for free, of course. He wouldn't charge, the way some blessed with evidence of whatever you want to call it—grace in the form of weeping virgins and statues blemished on the hands and feet in the middle of the night—have seen fit to do. Of course, there was no evidence of anything in his garden now. Nothing to see. It occurred to him that perhaps that was a problem; he wouldn't want anyone to be disappointed.

He stood at the door to the Aegis, ready to go, his hat in his hand, gripping the knob. He looked into the street, at the weak gray light that drained from the heavy bank of clouds over head. The mica in the sidewalk glittered, winked. Miss Barteleme glowered behind him, a tissue protruding from her sleeve. For a moment, Conrad imagined her, Miss Betty Barteleme, dropping slowly to her plump knees, rendered silent for once, her mouth in a gentle O, awestruck.