The Rose Thieves (15 page)

Even crying was forbidden: it only added to the general hysteria and confused the bereaved. If Jean B. was all rules, Lila was all transgressions, and she wept now with both grief and spite. She knew little of Frank Gunn, save that he drank, was said to be lecherous, and had once told a woman at a party she was the ugliest woman he'd ever seen. He had gone grim and gray with disappointment long before he was old, but Lila was sure she had seen into his fierce heart. When he first came to Elysian, he had scribbled a poem on a napkin and held it out for her to read, his face hopeful that one time. But the letters bled to blots, and she tried vainly to decipher them while he smiled up at her, awaiting her reaction. Finally she laughed and bent to ask him what he had written, but his dignity was offended and he turned away. Since then she had taken every opportunity to admire him, but he dismissed her. Now he was dying, still unpraised.

The pietà in Room 115 stanched tears. Mary Gunn was fumbling through her husband's IV tubes, trying to hold him, touched by the same shaft of sunlight that crossed the dead man's knees. Peevish Mary, usually prepared to take offense wherever offense might offer, was speaking in a high, gentle voice, as if reassuring a child.

“Oh, Mrs. Gunn…” Lila rushed halfway across the room toward her before remembering that only the head nurse was supposed to attend a death.

Mary started, regained herself. “Come in,” she said dryly, “there's nothing to be afraid of.” Her hair was braided and wound Valkyrie-style, her eyebrows shaven, replaced with a fiercer, painted pair. Mary Gunn dealt in matters of fact, or tried to. She allowed an embrace but straightened her collar the minute Lila let her go.

Lila wanted to say that she was afraid of Jean B., not death, but Mary had unzipped her purse and was rooting among the cigarette packs and pill bottles there, all business. She found a small, battered notebook, wet her thumb, and flipped to the page marked “Funeral.”

“Mr. McHoul from the funeral home is on his way,” she said. “The service is to be Saturday, at St. Paul's. We're not God-fearing people”—she gave a small, ironic smile—“but these old New England churches are as light as the Italian. We were married in Florence, you know.”

“No,” Lila said, “no, I didn't.” The thought of that wedding and its vain attendant hope so tightened her throat that she dared not go on.

“Well, no matter.” Mary flipped a page, as if to hurry on to the next detail, then looked away, over the lands given by the Elysian family for the nursing home. The slope had been an overgrown orchard once, but it was pruned to miniature perfection now, studded with ornamental shrubs. Two maples had been left standing, streaming yellow leaves over the pond.

Mary gathered Frank's comb and tube of salve. “One thing,” she said, “he didn't
say
a word. You hear of the final summoning of strength and what-have-you, but in fact he just died, just as you'd expect.”

Had Mary been expecting a last endearment? “They rarely speak,” Lila lied, thinking of Lettie Willward, who had sat bolt upright, uttered a neat, satisfied “Grand slam,” and subsided as if deflating, never to take a trick again. And Mr. Oliver, whose wife had died only a month before him, had cried, “There you are!”

“Mr. Gunn was such a good man,” Lila said, feeling this in every bone, only because she was sure Mary would want to hear it. “Everyone will miss him.”

“Yes,” Mary said, “we'll need to run a bus to the funeral.”

She was serious, Lila realized, in time to convert giggle to cough.

“Well, a van at the least,” Mary said. She gestured toward the window, where at the base of the long hill St. Paul's steeple rose like a sugar cake decoration. “It's nearly a mile. And remember the traffic when the Admiral died.” Admiral and Edith Fickett had stood at the center of town society. Lila had nearly fainted in the crush at that funeral, but Frank Gunn, failed poet, was not likely to draw a crowd. However, she promised to arrange transportation, and at the thought of stalwart Mary harboring so fragile a wish, she burst into tears again.

“Don't, dear,” Mary said, giving her a couple of stern pats. “Well,” Lila thought, “who but a fool wouldn't cry?” She would cry until Thornhill River ran salt if she felt like it, if Frank Gunn could die without admiration, without speaking to his wife. If she, Lila Vanderwald, was meant to have lived without love, without making even the smallest mark.

“I'm sorry,” she wept, face in her hands. Leaving, she turned to repeat the apology, but Mary had forgotten her. She had taken the sheet in her two hands to pull it over Frank's face, but instead she sat and put her ear to his chest.

At the nurses' station the oldest ladies were set out like so many houseplants in the society of the hall. They leaned in as Lila passed, and called to her: Lila, Lila, like a soft wind. Rheumy-eyed, fumbling, they needed her and couldn't see the tears. She bent to each of them, close enough so they could see her smile and smell her cologne.

“You were the best dancer, Lila,” said Minna Wence, who had lost the knack of the present altogether. Lila imagined, in spite of herself, the fresh-cut lawn bordered with mock orange, her feet bare in the grass, her dress whirling out behind. The ladies of Elysian View remembered well the parties given by the Admiral and Edith Fickett at Broadlawns, once the imperial palace of Main Street, broken into condominiums now. Beside the starry-eyed Minna sat Edith herself. Commanding even from her wheelchair, she lifted her lorgnette and looked up at Lila very much as if she were actually looking down.

“Have you been
crying?
” she asked. How, Lila wondered, did such a curved and shrunken person contain so strong a voice? The collar of Edith's lace robe reached her ears, and the hem hung long as a christening gown. Within lived a woman who in her most difficult hours had needed only to consult Emily Post, and who had carried the authority of this text with her through the years.

“Frank Gunn died,” Lila said, with a great sniff. She recalled, though, that Edith had not cried even at the Admiral's funeral, but had stood shaking every hand, accepting tribute, holding the light as Lila had seen the river do after the sun was down.

Edith would never fail to show proper sympathy, though she remembered only vaguely, and with a vague distaste, who Frank Gunn was. “Oh, my dear,” she said, letting the lorgnette hang. “He was such a good man.” If she could not recall why she disliked him, here she was proven right: death looked like a failure of dignity to Edith Fickett, just the sort of thing one might expect of Frank Gunn. She had learned to speak only good, though; it wasn't hard to imply the rest.

“So sad,” she said, “he was a communist, I believe.” But she didn't know Lila's politics. “Those communists must have been so
brave,
” she added. “Now he's gone to a better place.” How could there be a better place? Well, this sort of thought was best suppressed.

“Say,” she said, hurrying on, “Lila, have you seen the Admiral this afternoon?”

Edith allowed no contradiction, but policy insisted that Lila remind her: the Admiral was dead.

“Oh, Mrs. Fickett,” she said, pleading, “you know…” but Edith had raised the lorgnette again. Lila took a deep breath. “Admiral Fickett is dead. You know that.”

“Of course I know that, Lila, but he hasn't come home to lunch.”

True enough. “I'll check the billiard room,” Lila said.

“Oh, no, he doesn't approve of billiards.”

“I'll try the tennis court,” Lila said. She headed in a direction that might, if there had been tennis courts, have led to one.

“Thank you, dear.” Edith folded her hands and turned to Minna Wence, who was still dreaming of waltzes past and asked what the theme of the next Broadlawns dance was to be.

Edith kept her lap full of notes, reminding herself of appointments and chores, but, sifting them now, she saw no plans for a party. “Honestly,” she confided to Minna, “these days there seems to be nothing on my mind but my hair.” Had she sent the invitations and forgotten the party? She forced a gay laugh. “I haven't decided,” she said.

When Mary Gunn came along, carrying an exhausted, grief-struck silence only a shade deeper than her usual, Edith remembered the conversation with Lila and was prepared. “He was such a courageous man,” she said. She would not, of course, speak ill of the dead, nor think it, but unfortunately this left her at a loss for words. “When is his funeral, dear?” she asked. “Here, will you write it down for me?”

Saturday, October 19, Van Leaves at 9:30, South Portico,
Mary wrote.

“Thank you, dear,” Edith said, and filed it beneath “Manicure, Tuesday
P.M.
”

TODAY IS MONDAY, OCTOBER
21

THE NEXT MEAL IS: LUNCH

The signboard at the nurses' station was meant to give everyone a leg up on reality. Edith, studying it, finally decided to make a note.
Lunch,
she wrote on the back of an envelope from one of those dear old oil companies her husband had loved. “Important,” the envelope read. “Proxy material enclosed.”

Important.
Edith took it in her lap to the window, as she had taken Isaac's letters to the field to read them, when they were engaged. She would wade in among the red and yellow hawkweed, hitching her skirts to take the sun on her legs. She smiled. She was nostalgic for all life now, every detail. How well her imagination had served her, back then, reading love between Isaac's lines on pump repair and shipboard meals!

“Do you know,” she said to Lila, who had just come with the sherry for the bridge game, “I don't believe I've
ever
seen such a beautiful fall.”

Lila agreed, but Mary Gunn, who had been keeping nervous vigil since Frank's funeral on Saturday, waiting to see Lila, came up behind them to say she could see no beauty in anything so slothfully tended. The topiary seemed to shrink as she spoke. “Can I speak to you in your office?” she asked Lila, in an ominous undertone.

As soon as she delivered the sherry, Lila said, and went off with a sigh, feeling properly chastised for taking pleasure where there was none to be had.

Courteous, Edith thought, Mary Gunn had never been. Imagine speaking so cruelly of that field, where they had all gathered raspberries as children. But Mary was in mourning; she must be forgiven.

“How are you feeling dear?” Edith asked.

“Fine, thank you. Fine,” Mary said. “One learns to handle these things.”

One does? Edith wondered if she had mistaken the subject.

“The service was lovely, though,” Mary added, with a fearsome emphasis that caused Edith to touch her notes, though she dared not look down in case one marked “Funeral” should appear on top.

“I was so sorry to have missed it,” Edith said, considering various excuses before falling back on her usual “It's this damn chair.” (She did not speak the word “damn,” of course, only mouthed it.) “There's never a ride available.”

“There was supposed to be a van.”

“Oh,” said Edith, covering her notes with her hands, “oh, no, I don't think…”

“Perhaps there was an administrative error,” Mary said. “Lila was supposed to arrange a van.”

“Exactly. An administrative error,” Edith said, so relieved she felt a surge of warmth toward Mary. “There was no van, I'm sure,” she said, “and it's such a shame, dear. I
so
wanted to go. I'm sure it was grand,” she said, heading off toward the bridge game, the wheelchair in drive. “Next time, absolutely,” she called over her shoulder. Then she was aghast. Hadn't they been discussing a funeral? It couldn't be.

“Tra-
la,
tra-la-la-la,” she sang, softly, absently. It was the most rousing phrase of “The Marseillaise,” which she had used to sing to herself just before she descended the staircase into the midst of a fête, her fine blond hair piled high. She had always felt triumph was at hand when she heard those notes: now they carried the faux pas out of her mind. She was sure, suddenly, that the cards would fall for her today.

Next time? Mary heaved her purse onto Lila's desk and took a seat. “There seems to have been an administrative error,” she said, resting her cigarette in the ashtray in order to look Lila straight in the eye. “There was no transportation to Frank's funeral.” Her voice thinned and threatened to fail. “Edith Fickett was unable to go to the church.”

This, Lila saw, was the saddest thing in the world, the trifle that condenses a life of pain to a single, lethal drop. Brucie, who drove the van, had said there were no riders: funerals were far too common at Elysian to attract much attention, and Saturday had been blustery, and the Reverend Sleight was rumored to believe in Hell.

“There's no need to apologize,” Mary said. Lila had intended no apology, but she was ever willing. Mary's sorrows, her joyless smile which served only to confirm the fitness of everything wrong, could not be helped, but it was crucial, awful, that her plans had gone awry.

“I'm so sorry…” Lila began.

“Please.” Mary held up a hand. “These ceremonies.” She blew out a great smoky breath and lit a new cigarette. “… but they are important to some people … you should have heard Edith just now, she was devastated.”

That wicked old dissembler could not be devastated by a freight train, thought Lila, pulling a sympathetic face.

“I think it would be best if we played a tape of the funeral,” Mary said, “for those who were unable to attend.”

“There's a tape?” All life looked bizarre to Lila—the crucifix swinging between Jean B.'s breasts, the nurses' aides running through their cancan for the Folies Bergère—but this, she was sure, taxed propriety's limit.

Mary pulled her purse into her lap and rummaged. There it was, a purse-sized tape player and miniature cassette. “You see,” she said, “I just held it in my lap, with the prayer book. I wonder you don't use one of these in your work, Lila. The sound quality is remarkable.” She pressed a button, and the machine issued an unearthly fugue.