Mystical Rose (2 page)

Uncle Brian had arranged a mortgage on the farm when he worked at the bank. Mama wrote to him for help the spring after Victor died and we couldn’t put any crop in the field, but the letter came back inside another envelope. It was a surprise to see his gaunt, spare figure in the kitchen a few months later, to hear his voice, so like Daddy’s, ask Mama if we could put him up for a while since he was out of a job, and maybe he could help out around the farm for a bit. Hello, Rose, he said to me, twisting his knuckles together. Mama didn’t say anything.

Have a drink, said Daddy, pushing the bottle forward.

And so Uncle Brian came to live with us. A broken man, life trickling out of him like sawdust. Daddy didn’t mind. He was a burnt-out shell himself, with gypsies camping inside his mind. My mother and I toiled with our heads down, fearful of what today would bring.

Lady Margaret Rolyoke was a thin dry woman, beautiful from a distance. A white orchid of a woman: exotic, colourless, odorless. The sort of woman men don’t need. She was Lady Margaret because she was the daughter of a duke. Her husband was plain Mr. Rolyoke, Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the winter, Cobourg Ontario in the summer. You know, I still think about them. All the chances missed. Needless pain, prolonged until it ceases to matter, like a stone in your shoe that you get used to walking with, until you take it out and then you think, How could I have gone on like
that? He’s been dead for almost fifty years, and she for ten or more, and I’m still limping.

I knew the Rolyoke place before I went there to work. Everyone in Cobourg and Hamilton township knew the huge log palace, one of dozens of stately homes just a ferry ride away from Rochester, New York. The best air in North America, pure ozone, they said, optimal climatic conditions — I wonder if they really were. Cottesmore Hall, Hamilton House, Strathmore, Bagnall Hall, Heathcote, Sidbrook. Oh my. The names bring back a hint of vanished glory, like a whiff of old perfume clinging to a fur coat at the back of a closet. And all the grand homes needed seasonal attention from local plumbers and glaziers, butchers and fruiterers, gardeners and house servants.

I met Lady Margaret by accident. Mama would have spoken to her about me, but I’d never seen her. Early in the morning on my first day and I was trying to find the servants’ entrance so I asked the first person I saw. Herself as it happened, taking a walk in the garden. I’m lost, I said, and she took me by the elbow — a curious gesture, more like a police officer than a friend — and led me around the far side to the very door. You must be the flower girl, she said. I was still in mourning for Daddy. When she saw the band she expressed very civil condolences. I hope you’ll be happy here, she said. I ducked my head and she walked me into the back kitchen and told that bitch Parker to call Adam, and meanwhile to be especially nice to me. I was sixteen. Parker smiled and said, Certainly my lady, and the minute we were alone she slapped me spinning against the far wall.

Black boots with buttons, cotton stockings, and two petticoats, even in the middle of the hottest summer in years, long loose housedress the colour of pale coffee, with a white apron and cap. Everything from the skin out starched until it stood by itself, and God forbid — well, You know what I mean — that you should have to scratch. No wonder Parky was always in a bad temper, she sweated so. The uniform was the Duchess of Ainslie’s design, Robbie told me later. Lady Margaret’s mother. I would have met her at the wedding if she’d been there.

My first garden party. Admiral Byrd had just flown over the North Pole and everyone was talking about it. Only he wasn’t an admiral yet, was he? When they weren’t talking about him they were talking about the Sesquicentennial Exposition; my, I got sick of that. The Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, I can hear Parky’s voice now. Such elegance, she said. You wouldn’t have understood it, Rose.

The south lawn, also known as the lake lawn because it went right down to the pebbled shore of Lake Ontario, on a late afternoon in
June. The sun burned a hole in the middle of an empty blue sky, the shadows were thick under the maples, and the wavetops glistened and sparkled. There was just enough of a breeze to ruffle skirts and keep away the flies. I was in charge of the muffins. Really, muffins. I was to go around with the covered tray, making sure that the ladies had an opportunity to partake. Would you care for a muffin, madam? This was my line — I only had to rehearse it a couple of times to get it right. Parker didn’t think I was refined enough. Mr. Rolyoke’s wrong about you, she said. You’re not ready for company. You’ve only been here a week. You’re an outdoor girl, she told me, withering. A gardener’s help. Can’t even hold a tray steady, can you?

Try to walk across the kitchen, Miss Rose, suggested Mr. Davey gently. He was the one who drove the cars — kindling, that’s not the word. Why can’t I think of the word? A fat man, not too old, with a kind word for everyone, he’d been badly burnt in The War. We were all a little afraid of his appearance. He and Parker were the only servants who went south with the Rolyokes in September. I walked across the kitchen towards him, offering the tray and saying my line, only I hesitated when I was about to call him madam. I felt myself blushing and he smiled — that is, his mouth twisted sideways. Looked hideous, but I knew it was a smile. Walking back across the kitchen I tripped over Parker’s outstuck foot, made quite a din. She sniffed when Mr. Davey helped me up. Thanks, I told him. He shook his head. Not at all, Miss Rose, you don’t weigh more than a feather.

The ladies at the party were nice to me too. So young, they said, which I didn’t feel. So tiny, they said, which I wasn’t, not really, just undernourished. So pretty — well, I suppose I
was
pretty. I’m sorry, Harriet, but I was, with my dark hair (though it wouldn’t
curl no matter how hard I tried), dark eyes, straight teeth that gave me no pain, eyebrows that curved naturally. Ah, but it’s a long time since I looked like that. The boys at school thought me a beauty. I remember very well the day one of them brought the family cart to take me home. The harness was decked out in ribbons, and the old Clydesdale’s coat and mane were combed until they shone like gold. The looks the other boys gave — now what was the Clydesdale boy’s name?

My uncle suggested the hunting trip. He and Daddy were sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine they’d made in an old swill tub out of cabbage hearts and sugar, and Mama and I were arguing about whether I could go to the Park Theatre with Gert to see
The Big Parade
. David — I mean John Gilbert — was in it. Mama was saying it was too expensive and I was saying, Oh please. Uncle Brian finished his glass and banged it down on the table.

Moose, he said. The only animal worth shooting. He blinked. The end of his nose twitched. He didn’t look like a hunter.

Daddy stared at him. Said nothing.

I’ve shot many a moose, said Uncle Brian. The woods around Kirkland Lake are full of them. You want to aim just behind the foreleg, he said, sighting along his outstretched hands as if, trembling from the wine, they cradled a gun.

The single oil lamp, hung on a nail from a low beam, flickered and died, leaving the kitchen in smoky firelight. Romantic but chilly. I could feel the wind blowing through an assortment of cracks in the walls and windows.

I was sick of the place, sick of the constant tension of uncertainty, not knowing how much there’d be to eat or what quiet horror Daddy and Uncle Brian would get up to — one night one of them
found a rabbit cowering under a corner of the outhouse and brought it to the cleared table. They wouldn’t let it go and they wouldn’t kill it, but let it hop uncertainly up and down the bare wood, laughing every time it relieved itself. After an hour the thing just lay down, it was so tired, and Uncle Brian bashed it with a brick.

Why can’t I go to the movies? I said loudly to Mama. Gert’s going. Everyone else is going. Why can’t I do anything except sit here in the dark? It’s not right, I said. Fifteen years old and telling my Mama right and wrong. But I knew, and so did she.

I’d like to let you go, Rosie, but we need the money.

But it’s my money, I said.

You want a big-game rifle, said Uncle Brian, pouring wine. That popgun of yours won’t do the trick. A moose’d just laugh at your old buckshot loads. Now John Habemayer over the other side of Burnham Road, he’s got a proper rifle. Used to hunt a lot — you’ve seen the heads on his wall, haven’t you? I wonder if he’d let us borrow it for a few days. There’s moose in the Ganaraska Woods.

Daddy didn’t say anything.

It’s my money in the sugar can, I said.

Mama frowned. It won’t cost but a quarter, I said. There’s still more than a dollar left over from my flowers.

I remember weeding, hunched over a row of newly planted greens, digging and pulling until my back ached. Every year the same, as far back as I could remember. As soon as I was old enough to stand, I was old enough to pull weeds. Hawkweed and chickweed mostly:
quicksighted
and
assignation
. And nettle:
slander
. I thought of them as tough stinkers and evil creepers.

And then, shuffling forward like an old woman, my back bent, I came upon an unexpected — You know the flower I mean, the white
wildflower, what’s it called, Angelica, no, dammit, I mean undammit. Why can’t I remember the name? Anyway, there it was in the middle of a row of peas, and I couldn’t bear to pull it up by the roots. So beautiful, with its white petal wings and golden face, smiling up at me, and there were a couple more nearby, crowding the shoots in the next row. I came back that evening, and carried the flowers to a bed I had dug along the border of the east field, far out of the way. The soil was thin, mostly gravel. I cleared a space for the daisies — I don’t know why I couldn’t think of the name before — and transplanted them. All that summer I collected wildflowers from among the wormeaten vegetables, and replanted them in my little garden.

I wonder if after all that was the main attraction of it — it was mine. I’d have been twelve or thirteen, and there wasn’t much I could call my own. The miracle a few years back was a warm memory, flowers appearing like magic on our front steps, but they weren’t my flowers. Poor Mama had had half a mind to dig them up and take them back to Mr. Cuyler.

But this was charity from the land itself, from You, I suppose, and Mama actually smiled when she saw the garden. Doesn’t that look nice, she said. She made a point of collecting samples for me, and by the end of the summer my flowers made a border all down the eastern fence — almost half a mile. I had enough of a patch to be noticed by the neighbours on that side of us, the ones related to the McAllisters.

Mrs. McAllister mentioned to me and Mama in the summer, when our corn was being ground and we were in the parlour drinking tea and Daddy and Uncle Brian were up at the mill drinking whisky, that cut flowers were fetching a penny a bunch in town.

Cut flowers. What if they don’t come back? I asked Mama. What if they die and don’t come back? She hugged me. They will,
she said. So I dragged myself out to the east field in the morning, and stood at the edge of the garden as the wind came up and bowed the white heads, and the purple, and the pink and yellow. And I took the old scythe with a new cutting edge I’d put on it, and went to work killing my garden.

I made nine dollars that first year, selling bunches of flowers from the back of Gert’s daddy’s cart. Her mama would have remarried by then, and Gert’s new daddy had a livery business in town, which, and he was a very generous man, is how come we could get our corn to the mill without Victor. Gert still sat next to me in school, and liked me even if the boys mostly ignored her. She did, didn’t she? I’d hate to be wrong about that. I liked her too. Nine dollars was two weeks’ wages at the furniture factory or tannery. I gave the money to Mama and went out to my garden and cried, because it was just part of the east field now, bare and brown, and winter was coming.

Please let me go to the movies, I said to my mama, the year my daddy died.

A full-grown moose can derail a train, said Uncle Brian. I remember being on a sleeper from Sudbury to someplace and all of a sudden in the middle of the night — Bam! — like the end of the world. Throws me right out of the bunk. I’m thinking we’re caught in a landslide, and then I see the porter shaking his fists out the window. Fucking moose, he says, means we’re stuck here until they can send another engine. Timiskaming, that’s where we were going. Only we’re not. And then a huge shape lumbers past the window. I see it against the snow — a moose. It’s walking, and the train is derailed.

Daddy poured a drink for each of them.

Don’t go to the movies, whispered Mama. Don’t leave me here alone, Rose.

Robbie wasn’t there the first summer I worked for the Rolyokes, the summer when Admiral Byrd flew over the Pole, and Gert’s mom went crazy because Rudolph Valentino was found dead, and Houdini — the scariest thing I heard that summer — Houdini stayed underwater in a coffin for an hour and a half. I almost fainted when Mr. Davey read me the story from the newspaper. Robbie was off in Europe learning French, or shooting, or sailing.

I didn’t even know there was a young Rolyoke. No one spoke of him. It wasn’t until we were sitting alone with the world beneath us that I realized who he was.

I say, there! he called to me, a nicely dressed young man, squinting up. What are you doing? It’s too early for chestnuts, and besides, this is a private —

His voice broke off. He stared harder. I should say we were about forty feet apart, vertically. I was halfway up a big chestnut tree with a coil of rope over my shoulder.

You’re a girl, he declared in surprise. I suppose it was the workman’s trousers that hung on my skinny hips. They’d had to find a
pair from the boy who polished boots and silver. Not that a lot of girls wear dresses to climb trees. Did I blush? I didn’t like to be mistaken for a boy.

He wasn’t local, I could tell by his accent, and because I didn’t know him. I took him for a guest at the big log house. I edged out along my branch, keeping a good handhold, and reached up to tie one end of the rope to the middle of the rotten bough above me. The air around me was heavy with dust and mould. A squirrel, scolding from a nearby tree, sounded very loud. I wiped cobweb out of my eyes.