The Rose Thieves (10 page)

“Where are you going next week?” Audie asks. “Do you want to stay with us for a while?”

No one else has remembered. Grace pokes her toe into a knothole in the floor. “Maybe you ought to go with Ma.”

“We've got lots of room,” Audie says. “We're looking for a couch in the classifieds.”

“Merci beaucoup,” Kate says, because in English she would probably cry.

“That's right, you know French now,” says Audie, with such wondering admiration that Kate knows she ought to say—in a French so vividly expressive anyone could understand—something wise and gentle, something so true that this moment will ignite before it, burn to ash, and blow away.

“Yes,” she says, “now I know French.” She starts to gather up the dishes, but once Audie has taken Grace in, she leaves them and goes down the steps to the lawn: to try, finally, to print the place sharp in her mind. Peony petals are strewn in the ruined garden. The Jeep faces resolutely downstream while the willows around it fill with the last light. The light gilds everything—deep woods and bramble and swamp—and this will be her memory, she knows. She won't remember the true thing, the din of irreconcilable emotion; she'll remember how she wished it could be. The insects are setting up their low rhythms, calling and answering. The boulders throw ancient, familiar shadows over the field. The house might be one of them: it stands like a stone lion against the hill. If Kate could be sure no one saw her, she'd kneel.

Shoe

I've never seen a picture of my grandfather, but in my idea of him he's not old. I've never seen a photograph, even a poster of a movie star, that can compete with my image of him: very dark in every way, moving powerfully but fluidly, without great thought or care. I believe he's too powerful to be elegant, but that he appears elegant when he wears a suit, that his elegance is assumed with the suit. He's tailored, mustached, composed, a perfect line drawing of a man.

He once designed a famous building, the New York office of the Bank of the Lesser Antilles. He fought in World War II, was in Paris when the city fell. He grew up in Maine, one of a fatherless family of fourteen, living on potato soup. Somewhere in upstate New York a town is named for him: L'Eglisier. These are facts, but they may not pertain to my grandfather. I've heard them or overheard them, but when I repeat them, I suspect myself of lying: if I'm talking to an architect, I make my grandfather a criminal lawyer or a chef. I know that he lives in Sioux City, Iowa, or in Arizona now that he's retired.

I tell people that I'm a dancer, and I usually feel this is the truth. I'm not a ballerina or a chorus girl but a dancer without the jewels and veils. I study with a well-known master who keeps a studio on the lower East Side of New York. We lean over, curve our backs, swing our arms loose from our shoulders, jutting one hip upward. We topple and thud to the floor. Taught to consider ourselves substantial, we rarely leap. We move “sinuously—like globs of syrup.”

I'm not good at what I do. My muscles are naturally tense. I picture Isadora Duncan wistfully as I flop along with the corps.

We have, as an exercise, to find an attitude for one of our grandparents, to “fit our muscles along his or her bones.” I choose my grandfather. He walks along Gramercy Park, with his pipe. He is wearing a suit. He stops, standing at the wrought-iron gate, holding the pipe just away from his mouth. His other arm is loose at his side. It is evening, and around him everyone is hurrying. They might as well blur. He stands distinct and relaxed, looking away from the street, into the park. Light slants around him, through the tops of the trees.

*   *   *

When I was a child, perhaps six, I found a shoe in my grandmother's closet. She was a schoolteacher, a woman with many small bottles of perfume and a great number of shoes, all leather, all subdued. Among these was a single shoe, a delightful shoe compared with the others: a high, wedged heel covered in white canvas, stitched all over with glass beads, red and gold and blue. It had no mate that I could find, and it seemed to be a work of art, placed, mistakenly because of its shape, among the shoes.

My mother took it from me before Grandma could see it. Ma's anger has always been cold and terrible. She loses her peripheral vision and sees only the offending act. It is as if she would tear you apart. I stood absolutely silent in front of her, hoping she would overlook me, and she did. She took the shoe straight back to the bedroom, and then she went into the bathroom and took a shower. I climbed up on the back of the couch and pressed my face against my grandmother's window, watching the customers at the deli across the street. When I heard the water stop, I slid down and sat delicately, my feet flat on the floor, a magazine open on my lap.

*   *   *

I am improving the attitude of my grandfather. I think of him in Paris, in uniform. He stands very erect, but easy. My shoulders are loose, one hand rests against the wall in place of the Gramercy Park gate, the other is cupped around the space for a pipe. My eyes are absolutely clear, but I don't see the deep-colored leaves that drift in front of me in the park. He is picturing some scene from the past or the future, not a hazy fantasy but the kind of sharp-edged vision that precedes action. He is entirely absorbed.

One man in the class is lucky. His grandfather was a hunchback. He stoops, and each day the hump is more pronounced. His muscles really work. I am amazed at how close he can come to deformity and how easily he stands up, stretches out, and returns to his own shape.

*   *   *

Some weeks before my mother turned thirty-five, she got a birthday card from my grandfather. It was a “Happy Belated Birthday” card for a child, with a pastel circus tent embossed on it, signed “Love, Dad,” with his name in parentheses below.

“My father had a wonderful sense of humor,” my mother said. Then she looked at the postmark. “Chicago. I wonder if he lives there.” She read the little printed poem on the card out loud, but it didn't seem to mean anything special. She put her arms out to me and held me, and cried.

It was that year, I think, that I found the shoe again. At first I thought it was the mate to the one at Grandma's. I had forgotten the shoe, probably forgotten it the same day I first saw it, but now, discovering it in the back of an old bureau we had stored in the cellar, I remembered my mother's face, distorted with anger, returned to composure only after she came out of the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel that gave her the height of a statue. I did not mention it this time. I reached into the drawer for the shoe and carried it up to my room, where I stuffed it inside one of my own boots. Knowing Ma's response to it, I waited until I was alone with my grandmother.

“Where did you get that?” she said, when she saw the shoe in my hand. I had never heard her speak so sharply.

“It's just like the one at your house,” I said.

“There's only one shoe like that,” she said. “Give it to me.” She took it out of the room, and when she returned, she was kind and befuddled again, asking if I wanted to help her make candied apples.

That night, I sat on the top stair and listened to her arguing with Ma. Grandma sounded tired, frustrated. Over and over again she said, “I don't know.” Ma's voice was bitter sarcastic, very low. I could hardly hear it, and what I heard I couldn't understand.

I searched the shoe stores for a pair like the jeweled wedgie I had found, but there were no wedged heels at all that year. When I finally described the shoe to a saleswoman, she went behind the counter and said to the cashier, “Marty, this girl wants a pair of hooker shoes.”

*   *   *

I'm at work on the hips, in particular. My grandfather is not a man who would place great emphasis on his hips, I don't think. His shoulders are very sharp, his spine is straight, but his hips are casually at rest. His feet are slightly apart, and his body rises comfortably out of this powerful stance, mannered and elegant with a hard, sure gaze.

My classmates regard me with derisive awe.

“What was this guy, a male model?”

“One of the first,” I say. “That's how he put himself through architecture school. It was the Depression, you know.”

“Well,” says this woman, whose grandmother must have been a potato farmer, from the attitude she strikes, “maybe you should think of him later in life, give him some more character.”

She means to be helpful, I know. “He died in World War II,” I say. I don't think of this as a real lie.

“Well, you can't just do a pose. Look how stylized this is.” I look into the mirror as she runs her finger along the curve of my outstretched arm. Maybe style was his natural way. “You've really got to get in there and give us his heart,” she tells me.

I strive. I know he stands at the fence. I know he's attractive, intriguing to the men and women who pass him, carrying baskets of bread, sausages, and cabbage. The air is stingingly cool, the sweetness of the decaying leaves is masked by an odor of coffee and diesel exhaust. Two children squeeze through a break in the fence, and my grandfather looks above them, outward, making a plan, I think. He's still too stiff, too separate. I sag a little and lose him altogether. I want to be stoop-shouldered and cross-armed, to hang my head. It is his ideas, his emotions, that give him his substance. I don't know how to work backward.

*   *   *

When I was seventeen, my boyfriend went away for the summer and came back engaged to be married. For weeks I was despondent. My mother was despondent for me. We stayed up all night watching late movies, and I shuffled to school exhausted, got high in the parking lot at noon, giggled through French class, and fell asleep in study hall.

One night, in the middle of
Zombies from Beneath the Swamp,
we were picturing the married life of my boyfriend and his fiancée: gray dish towels figured prominently in the discussion. I would get even with them just by letting them live their drab little wedded life. “And,” Ma said, laughing, “as a last resort, you can always send her your shoe.”

“What?” I said.

We were terribly punchy; she had a pillow over her face and was laughing uncontrollably. She dropped the pillow slightly so she could see me. “Of course, I don't think
those
shoes would do it.” She pointed to my desert boots drying beside the fireplace. “It should be something a little risqué, preferably something that reveals some toe.” She put the pillow back over her face and laughed.

The zombies had gained entrance to the manor house, and the pretty blond girl sat up in bed suddenly, the silk strap of her nightgown slipping over her shoulder as she screamed.

“That's what your grandfather's mistress did,” she said, “and it worked like a charm. Just the shoe, no message, but my mother didn't have much trouble figuring it out. It's not every day that people send single shoes in the overseas mail.”

The girl in the silk nightgown was, by now, a zombie. She still looked pretty, but when she tilted her head and turned toward the camera, we could see it: her eyes were dead.

“Of course,” my mother said, “she had the shoes for it. Your grandmother had boots. Out went philandering Philip.”

“Where did he go from there?”

“Well,” she said, “he lived on Gramercy Park for a little while, and he didn't go back to France. That's all I know.”

“Don't you wonder where he is?”

“Why? Do you think he wonders about me?” She was quiet for a few minutes. Then she said, “I'm sorry I brought it up.”

The next night I stayed up alone.

When my parents were divorced and we moved out of the house, I found the shoe again. It was very well hidden this time, in a barrel of old stuffed toys that had long since been turned into mouse nests. I was alone when I found it, and I packed it with my few clothes and books and took it to New York with me.

*   *   *

I can't find an attitude for my grandfather. I know it's supposed to be an attitude, not a pose, I know I should look for his heart. We're not supposed to do research, but I have to resort to it. I find the New York office of the Bank of the Lesser Antilles: it takes up three rooms in a hideous blue-and-white box of a building downtown.

Finally, I take the shoe with me to Little Italy, where I ask people until I find the address of a shoemaker. He lives in an apartment with beaded curtains, beaded radiator covers, and a vat of soup in which whole chickens roll in boiling stock. Yes, he can make another shoe like this. It will cost one hundred dollars. Beadwork is expensive. I talk him down to fifty-five, which still means I have to cancel my dentist appointment. As I leave, he says, “Fifty-five for you only,” and pinches my ass quickly twice, once on each cheek. I don't object when he does this; but the next week, when I return to pick up the shoes, I stand in the doorway to hand him the cash, and back all the way to the stairs.

*   *   *

Now that I have the shoes, I have everything. They very nearly match. The beadwork of the older shoe has a harsh glow; I imagine there's gold in the dye. The new pigments are too basic, too exact. I want to run home, but I walk, taking the stairs two at a time all the way up the six flights to my apartment.

I've never asked again about my grandfather, or the shoe. My mother got one more card from him, at Christmas, years after her divorce. Its printed message read:

To wish you loads of Christmas cheer,

And love that grows each passing year.

She threw it out in a pile of sale announcements and grocery circulars, and I didn't bother to retrieve it. It was postmarked Sioux City, Iowa. Maybe he's a salesman. Or maybe he's been a hog farmer all these years.

In the center of my room I stretched my arm out. I'm my grandfather, at the Gramercy Park gate, in 1945. It's autumn, and the sky is steel-gray, just before dusk. Children play in the park, their coats folded on schoolbooks on the benches. I look out over their heads, over the fallen leaves in the park. I want to feel my muscles drawn into place around some emotion. My grandfather looks out past the gate into the network of color and movement that makes up the city, but he sees the horizon of Sioux City, Iowa: uniform and yellow gray.