The White Rose (44 page)

W
hen Oliver finally returns to the room, he waits in the doorway for a minute, as if for permission to enter. Sophie, though clearly aware of him, does not speak, and her silence is not gentle.

“I thought what you said to Barton was wonderful,” he tells her at last, both because it is true and because he needs to say something. “You were…I thought you were very brave.”

“Oh, very.” Sophie's voice is caustic. “Put me right up there with Sophie Scholl.”

“It took courage,” he says. “You were gracious, but you were clear. I thought you were amazing.”

“Amazing would have been telling him last week,” Sophie says. “Or better yet, last month. And sparing us all…this,” she says, gesturing around the room.

“I wanted to spare you this,” he says, growing afraid. He walks over to the chair, and then, finding no graceful way to sit beside her, he sits on the floor at her feet. He is too frightened to touch her. The idea of losing her, too, is nearly unbearable. “Sophie,” he says, “I'm not going to burden you with the details, but I promise you, this wasn't a scam. I mean, not just a scam. Barton was very, very interested in that girl. In…the person he thought I was. He has been for months.”

“I don't want to think about Barton,” she says and turns her head. “I don't have to now, and I don't want to. I want you to tell me something else.”

Oliver nods, waiting.

“I know it's none of my business, but how long did it go on? With her.”

“It is your business. Since last spring.”

Sophie absorbs this information.

“And when did it end?”

The answer to this does not come as easily. Finally he tells her: “Five minutes ago.”

He takes her hand between his hands. Sophie doesn't move but she doesn't resist. “Do you need to go back to the house?” he says.

Sophie nods. “I do. It's going to be a scene over there. We've got two hundred people to head off at the pass, before Saturday.”

“All right,” he says, resigned, but Sophie is shaking her head.

“No,” she settles back a bit in the armchair and turns to him. “I have a little time. And Frieda is already working on it. She'll be in her element. She loves a crisis, especially one I've caused.” She considers. “You haven't met Frieda, have you?”

“Only on the phone,” he tells her. “And when she told me to bring your roses to the service entrance.”

“Oh,” Sophie says with some embarrassment. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm not sorry. How would I have met you, otherwise? How would I have been able to see you half undressed, with a big hole between the buttons of your shirt?”

Sophie leans forward in the armchair and swats him. “You said you couldn't see anything!”

“I lied,” he says. “I won't lie to you again.”

She looks at him. She smiles. Then Oliver feels it all fall away: the strain, the wondering how it will end. But there is another thing.

“Sophie,” Oliver says, “there's something I have to tell you.”

She smiles at him and pushes her hair behind her ears. “If it's that you like to wear women's clothes, I already know that.”

“No, it's not that. I didn't like it. Much, anyway. But it isn't about that.”

“Then it must be about why you named your shop the White Rose,” she says. “That is, if you know me well enough yet.”

Oliver nods. “I do. I mean, I think I will. But it's not that, either. Well, that's not true. It's part of the same story, what I need to tell you. Not a story,” he shakes his head. “I mean,” he rolls his eyes.
I am making a mess
, he thinks. “Not a made-up story. It's something that happened. In the past.”

“Well, you've come to the right place,” Sophie says, looking only slightly more worried. “As a historian, I'm partial to stories about things that happened in the past. How far back in the past?”

Oliver closes his eyes. “I was six years old. So twenty years ago.”

Now, at last, Sophie seems to understand that he is serious, and she must be serious, too. “All right, Oliver,” Sophie says. “You can tell me.”

But he doesn't, for another minute, and when he speaks again it's only in frustration. “I don't know how to do this,” Oliver says, shaking his head. “I've never done this.”

She doesn't say anything, and she doesn't touch him. She just waits.

“I got sick when I was six. I had leukemia. Now,” Oliver says hurriedly, “I'm not trying to be dramatic, or whine about it. There's no suspense about this, okay? You know how the story comes out. I mean, it's twenty years later. I'm here, right?”

“Right,” Sophie agrees, but her voice is uncertain.

“And I'm not saying it was so horrible, I suffered so much, blah, blah, and I nearly died, because I don't remember it like that. And if I did nearly die I didn't know it at the time. Actually,” Oliver looks at her, “what I remember about it all is…almost nothing. Which is
incredible
. Don't you think? Because I read the file when I was older. When I was twelve. I found it in my mother's desk and I read the whole thing. I don't remember the drugs or my hair falling out. I don't remember having a spinal tap. Is that incredible?” Oliver says. “I mean, a spinal tap? How could all that have happened to me and I can't remember?”

“Maybe you were protecting yourself,” Sophie suggests. “You…detached, I guess. For self-preservation. But you said
nearly
nothing. You do remember something.”

“Right. Yes,” Oliver nods. “I remember…waking up in my bed, in the hospital. I don't remember lying in bed awake or falling asleep, only…waking up. It was like being trapped inside the same moment, over and over—waking up, then waking up again. Except it wasn't always exactly the same. When I woke up, I might see something, or hear something someone was saying, but then I would wake up again. It just kept on like that, for weeks and months.”

Oliver sits on the floor still, facing away from her, his hands interlaced, and Sophie can see—eerily white in the growing darkness—the knuckles of his hands, tensing and tensing. She reaches down to touch them, but they don't stop. She touches his hair, his face, but he doesn't seem to respond to that, either. “It sounds kind of merciful, actually,” she tells him. “If I had a very sick child, I'd hope he could experience it like that.”

“I suppose,” Oliver says. “Yes, I can see that. Though it's been hard in retrospect, like I can't really believe any of it actually took place. But,” he says concentrating, “there was something that happened once.”

“When you woke up,” she prompts him, after a minute.

“Something I saw. I was lying on my side in the bed, and I opened my eyes. And someone had put a flower on the table next to my bed.”

“A white rose?” guesses Sophie.

“Yes. I didn't know anything about flowers, but I knew it was a rose. I saw it was white. It was so big. It seemed bigger than me, but I couldn't have been thinking clearly. And I remember, just…staring at it. I remember seeing every part of it. It was so…It was a
living
flower. Does that sound crazy? Bright white, like it was almost glowing. The petals looked like they were wet, like someone had just cut the rose in the rain and rushed to the hospital to bring it to me. It was in a plastic cup. You know, a hospital cup. I just looked at it as long as I could, and then I must have fallen asleep.”

Sophie waits. “It had to have been beautiful,” she finally says, “if you remember it so well.”

Oliver nods. “It was. Then I woke up again, and I remember, I felt excited to see the rose there. But this time it wasn't as big. It was sort of…flagging.” He shakes his head. “I know this sounds ridiculous.”

“It doesn't,” says Sophie.

“It had some brown at the tips of the petals. And it was smaller than I remembered.”

“Okay. And the next time?”

“Smaller. But I could sit up in bed. So maybe I just felt bigger. And the stalk looked thinner. And the leaves were getting limp.”

“It was dying, in other words.”

“Yes. Exactly. But the thing is,” Oliver says, “that's when I started to get better. And this is the point where I start remembering more things, you know, which is strange. Isn't that strange? I don't remember being sick, but I remember getting better? I remember sitting up and eating. I ate an orange. I remember going to the playroom upstairs with my mother. I remember going in the elevator in my wheelchair. There was an aquarium, and a Ping-Pong table. But the rose died. And the funny thing is, I don't think I was even that sad about it. I watched it get so withered and brown. I didn't touch it. And then one day I woke up and it was gone. Somebody had finally thrown it away.”

“But you were cured,” says Sophie.

“Well, in remission,” Oliver tells her. “Nobody said cure, at the time. The drug they used was still pretty new. I don't think anybody felt very confident about predicting the outcome, though after twenty years I think we're allowed to call it a cure. So I left the hospital, went home, went back to school. I got to grow up and be healthy. And all I knew about having had leukemia was the waking up and the rose.”

It's dark in the room now. There is light from under the bathroom door, light from under the bedroom door, light from under the door to the landing. But it's still so dark, Oliver can barely see Sophie. Which is good, he thinks, because it means she can barely see him.

“Sometimes,” says Oliver, “I think that's the rose I'm trying to make. The new rose. You know.”

“The Lady Charlotte rose,” Sophie says.

“Yes. That's the rose in my head. I never saw it again. I
want
to see it again. I want…” He stops, suddenly shy. “I want to say thank you. Is that nuts?”

“I don't think it's nuts,” says Sophie.

“Maybe that rose wasn't even real. Maybe I made it up. Or it was a delusion, or something. From the drugs. And if it hadn't been a rose, it would have been something else.”

“But to you it was a rose,” she confirms.

“Yes. My white rose.”

He stops. He closes his eyes.

“I might not be able to have kids,” Oliver says softly.

He can hear her breathe. He can hear the old walls of the inn, the air in those walls, humming. “You might not be,” Sophie says.

“No,” his voice cracks.

“Because of the leukemia.”

“No. Because of one of the drugs. Cytoxan. I read the release form in my file about not being able to have children. I've read some other studies, too.”

“But you don't know for sure?” Sophie says.

“No.”

“All right,” says Sophie, after a moment. “Now you've told me.”

“I know you want them,” Oliver says, distraught.

“I want them,” she agrees. “Do you?”

“I want them,” Oliver starts to cry again. “I really do. For years I pretended I didn't. I even broke up with my girlfriend from college because I couldn't tell her. I said I didn't want to have children. But I do. I don't know what to do.”

“All right,” she tells him. “It's all right.”

“I'm sorry, Sophie.”

“
Oliver
.” And she gets off the chair and sits down, beside him, on the floor. She takes his head in her hands and makes him look at her, though it's too dark to really look. “I love you,” she tells him. “I want this. I want you.”

Oliver, like something switched off, stops crying. “Really?”

“We don't know what will happen. We don't even know if there's a problem.”

He nods, terrified.

“I'm a brave woman,” she reminds him. “You said so.”

“I did,” Oliver agrees. “You are.”

“What you told me, what you're afraid of,” says Sophie, “that's not where we end. It's where we begin.” She smiles. “You see?”

“Yes,” he says, because he does. And that's a gift, of course, like anything of real value, even if he will never know precisely whom to thank. He holds her and holds her, and laughs out loud, and says, “Then let's begin.”

I must, by all means, express my most heartfelt thanks to Richard Strauss and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal for the gift of
Der Rosenkavalier
. That a work so intuitive about women's experience was created entirely by men is an ongoing source of wonder to me. If I wore a hat, I would tip it.

I thank Michael Davis of Elan Flowers in Manhattan and Stephen Scanniello, eminent rosarian, for teaching me more about flowers in general and roses in particular than I had any right to pretend I knew. Penelope Coker Hall told me all about life in Millbrook and Corinne Linardic, MD, helped me with medical research. Charlotte Wilcox's epitaph was ruthlessly stolen from
Epitaphs to Remember: Remarkable Inscriptions from New England Gravestones
by Janet Greene. The chapter about Bedford Hills owes much to Jean Harris's book
They Always Call Us Ladies
, and even more to the incomparable Hettie Jones, who helped me get it right, or at least right-ish. I am, as ever, grateful to Deborah Michel, goddess of plot, for her incisive reading and great friendship. I thank Pam Bernstein for the purloining of her Hamptons home (and so much more), Joan Hamburg for the benefit of her experiences, and the Bread Loaf School of English for serving as my virtual artists' colony, these past years.

Thank you, thank you, Suzanne Gluck, for all of the enthusiasm and support you brought to this novel, and thank you, Jonathan Burnham, for giving it such a good home.

 

“Jean Hanff Korelitz's incisive and urbane new novel, THE WHITE ROSE, harks back to the gender confusions of Shakespeare's comedies while adding some surprising contemporary twists…THE WHITE ROSE, a retelling of Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier, is really a roman a clef, a sendup of gossip columnists and Manhattan strivers and a paean to professional fulfillment. Korelitz's characters—charming, idealistic and contradictory—are what that make this novel so appealing…This novel represents a significant step forward.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“THE WHITE ROSE is a delight. A novel of manners and love, it is droll, sexy, and very clever.”

—Scott Turow

“This is a great love story—tender, sophisticated, perverse, drenched in feeling. Jean Hanff Korelitz has a sharp eye for the social workings of modern Manhattan and the backgrounds are utterly convincing. But she also knows how to talk about love in all its unexpected varieties with verve and sympathy. She joins sensuality to worldliness, frivolity to deep seriousness—and she manages to talk about all the gripping topics of our day, including race, wealth, aging and our historical legacy. This is a book that will appeal to every reader.”

—Edmund White

“THE WHITE ROSE is such a deeply satisfying read, the kind we have missed and longed for: a real story peopled by intriguing characters behaving badly in the most gratifying and acutely witty ways. Every sentence sparkles and every dilemma entertains.”

—Elinor Lipman

“Korelitz is a strong writer…capable of descriptions that are hers alone.”

—
Washington Post

“Korelitz is alert both to New York's social geometry and to the melancholy that underlies the glittering surface of her novel.”

—
The New Yorker

“Juicy Fun.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“A modern-day
Rosenkavalier
, as atmospherically situated among Manhattan's affluent Jewish elite as the Strauss opera was among Vienna's aristocrats…Elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of complex emotions.”

—
Kirkus

“The belief that love always involves sacrifice and is worth the sacrifice it demands drives this warm, worldly novel. Even when their own comfort is at stake, Korelitz's characters succumb to generous impulses, making this a satisfying, emotionally rich read.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Korelitz persuasively conveys the depth of her paramours' emotions and perceptively gauges their motivations in an insightful, sensitive, and poignant romance.”

—
Booklist

“A heady bloom, ripe with unlikely yet rewarding elements of romance.”

—
Library Journal

“You don't have to be an opera buff to appreciate Jean Hanff Korelitz's dramatic novel.”

—
New York Post

“THE WHITE ROSE resonates with a bittersweet sense of time passing and happiness that cannot last. Its gently melancholy mood and deliberate pacing make it quite different from Korelitz's previously published fiction.”

—Newsday