The Rose Garden (9 page)

A month before, Isobel had run into him on the street, their first meeting for many years. Vincent is a waif, she had thought, looking at him in astonishment. Vincent, the eloquent, romantic poet of her childhood, an unmistakable waif. It was written all over him. It was in every line of his seedy, imploring face. Two days before Christmas, she had invited him to dinner. He was delighted. He had arrived in what he imagined to be his best form—roguish, teasing, sly, and melancholy.

Edwin offered him a martini, and he said fussily that he was on the wagon. “I will take a cigarette, though,” he said, and selected one from the box on the table beside him. Isobel found with disagreeable surprise that she remembered his hands, which were small and stumpy, with long pared nails. Dreadful hands. She wondered what wretchedness they had brought him through in the years since she had known him. And the famous bow tie, she thought with amusement—how poorly it goes under that fat, disappointed face. Clinging to that distinctive tie, as though anyone connected him with the tie, or with anything any more.

The minute Jonathan Quin walked into the room, Isobel saw that she could expect nothing from him in the way of conversation. He will be no help at all, she thought, but this did not matter to her, because she never expected much from her Christmas guests. At a dinner party a few days before, she had been seated next to a newspaper editor and had asked him if there were any young people on
his staff who might be at a loose end for Christmas. The next day, he had telephoned and given her Jonathan's name, explaining that he was a reporter who had come to New York from a little town in North Carolina and knew no one.

At first, entering the soft, enormous, firelit room, Jonathan took Miss Ellis to be his hostess, because of her black dress, and then, confused over his mistake, he stumbled around, looking for a chair to hide in. His feet were large. He wore loose, battered black shoes that had been polished until every break and scratch showed. He had put new laces in the shoes. Edwin asked him a few encouraging questions about his work on the newspaper, and he nodded and stammered and joggled his drink and finally told them that he was finding the newspaper a very interesting place.

Vincent said, “That's a magnificent scarlet in your dress, Isobel. It suits you. A triumphant, regal color it is.”

Isobel, who was sitting in a yellow chair, with her back to the glittering tree, glanced down at her slim wool dress.

“Christmas red, Vincent. I think it is the exact red for Christmas, don't you? I wore it decorating the tree last night.”

“And my pet Susan dressed up in the selfsame color, like a little red berry she is!” cried Vincent, throwing his intense glance upon the silent child, who ignored him. He was making a great effort to be the witty, rakish professor of her father's day, and at the same time deferring slyly to Edwin. He did not know that this was to be his only visit, no matter how polite he proved himself to be.

It was a frightful thing about Vincent, Isobel thought. But there was no use getting involved with him. He was too hard to put up with, and she knew what a deadly fixture he could become in a household. “Some of those ornaments used to be on the tree at home, Vincent,” she said suddenly. “You might remember one or two of them. They must be almost as old as I am.”

Vincent looked at the tree and then said amiably, “I can't
remember what I did last year. Or perhaps I should say I prefer not to remember. But it was very kind of you to think of me, Isobel. Very kind.” He covertly watched the drinks getting lower in the glasses.

Isobel began to think it had been a mistake to invite him. Old friends should never become waifs. It was easier to think about Miss Ellis, who was, after all, a stranger. Pitiful people, she thought. How they drag their wretched lives along with them. She allowed time for Jonathan to drink one martini—one would be more than enough for that confused head—before she stood up to shepherd them all in to dinner.

The warm pink dining room smelled of spice, of roasting turkey, and of roses. The tablecloth was of stiff, icy white damask, and the centerpiece—of holly and ivy and full-blown blood-red roses—bloomed and flamed and cast a hundred small shadows trembling among the crystal and the silver. In the fireplace a great log, not so exuberant as the one in the living room, glowed a powerful dark red.

Vincent startled them all with a loud cry of pleasure. “Isobel, Isobel, you remembered!” He grasped the back of the chair on which he was to sit and stared in exaggerated delight at the table.

“I knew you'd notice,” Isobel said, pleased. “It's the centerpiece,” she explained to the others. “My mother always had red roses and holly arranged just like that in the middle of our table at home at Christmas time. And Vincent always came to Christmas dinner, didn't you, Vincent?”

“Christmas dinner and many other dinners,” Vincent said, when they were seated. “Those were the happiest evenings of my life. I often think of them.”

“Even though my mother used to storm down in a rage at four in the morning and throw you out, so my father could get some sleep before going to court in the morning,” Isobel said slyly.

“We had some splendid discussions, your father and I. And I
wasn't always thrown out. Many a night I spent on your big red sofa. Poor old Matty used to find me there, surrounded by glasses and ashtrays and the books your father would drag down to prove me in the wrong, and the struggle
she
used to have getting me out before your mother discovered me! Poor Matty, she lived in fear that I'd fall asleep with a lighted cigarette going, and burn the house down around your ears. But I remember every thread in that sofa, every knot, I should say. Who has it now, Isobel? I hope you have it hidden away somewhere. In the attic, of course. That's where you smart young things would put a comfortable old piece of furniture like that. The most comfortable bed I ever lay on.”

Delia, the bony Irish maid, was serving them so discreetly that every movement she made was an insertion. She fitted the dishes and plates onto the table as though they were going into narrow slots. Her thin hair was pressed into stiff waves under her white cap, and she appeared to hear nothing, but she already had given Alice, the cook, who was her aunt, a description of Vincent Lace that had her doubled up in evil mirth beside her hot stove. Sometimes Isobel, hearing the raucous, jeering laughter of these two out in the kitchen, would find time to wonder about all the reports she had ever heard about the soft voices of the Irish.

“Isobel tells me you've started a bookshop near the university, Mr. Lace,” Edwin said cordially. “That must be interesting work.”

“Well, now, I wouldn't exactly say I started it, Mr. Bailey,” Vincent said. “It's only that they needed someone to advise them on certain phases of Irish writing, and I'm helping to build up that department in the store, although of course I help out wherever they need me. I like talking to the customers, and then I have plenty of time for my own writing, because I'm only obliged to be there half the day. Like all decent-minded gentlemen of leisure, I dabble in writing, Mr. Bailey. And speaking of that, I had a note the other day from an old student of mine who had through some highly unlikely chance come across my name in the
Modern
Encyclopedia
. An article on the history of house painting, Isobel. What do you think of that? Mr. Quin and Miss Ellis, Isobel and her father knew me as an accomplished and, if I may say so, a reasonably witty exponent of Irish letters. Students fought with tooth and with nail to hear my lecture on Irish writers . . . ‘Envy Is the Spur,' I called it. But to get back to my ink-stained ex-student, whose name escapes me. He wanted to know if I remembered a certain May morning when I led the entire student body, or as many as I could lure from the library and from the steps of the building, down to riot outside Quanley's—a low and splendid drinking establishment of that time, Mr. Quin—to riot, I repeat, for one hour, in protest against their failure to serve me, in the middle hours of the same morning, the final glass that I felt to be my due.”

“Well, that must have been quite an occasion, Mr. Lace, I should imagine,” Miss Ellis said.

Vincent turned his excited stare on Isobel. “You wouldn't remember that morning, Isobel.”

“I couldn't honestly say if I remember it or not, Vincent. You had so many escapades. There seemed to be no end to your ingenuity.”

“Oh, I was a low rascal. Miss Ellis, I was a scoundrelly fellow in those days. But when I lectured, they listened. They listened to me. Isobel, you attended one or two of my lectures. I flatter myself now that I captivated even you with my masterly command of the language. Isobel, tell your splendid husband, and this gracious lady, and this gracious youth, that I was not always the clown they see before them now. Justify your old friend, Isobel.”

“Vincent, you haven't changed at all, have you?”

“Ah, that's where you're wrong, Isobel. For I have changed a great deal. Your father would see it. You were too young. You don't remember. You're all too young,” he finished discontentedly.

Miss Ellis moved nervously and seemed about to speak, but she said nothing. Edwin asked her if she thought the vogue for mystery stories was as strong as ever, and Vincent looked as if he were about to laugh contemptuously—Isobel remembered him always laughing at everything anyone said—but he kept silent and allowed the discussion to go on.

Isobel reflected that she had always known Vincent to be talky but surely he couldn't have always been the windbag he was now. Again she wished she hadn't invited him to dinner, but then she noticed how eagerly he was enjoying the food, and she relented. She was glad that he should see what a pleasant house she had, and that he should have a good meal.

Isobel was listening dreamily to Vincent's story about a book thief who stole only on Tuesdays, and only books with yellow covers, and she was trying to imagine what color Miss Ellis's lank hair must originally have been, when she became aware of Delia, standing close at her side and rasping urgently into her ear about a man begging at the kitchen door.

“Edwin,” Isobel interrupted gently, “there's a man begging at the back door, and I think, since it's Christmas, we should give him his dinner, don't you?”

“What did he ask you for, Delia?” Edwin asked.

“He asked us would we give him a dollar, sir, and then he said that for a dollar and a half he'd sing us our favorite hymn,” Delia said, and began to giggle unbecomingly.

“Ask him if he knows ‘The boy stood on the burning deck,' ” Vincent said.

“Poor man, wandering around homeless on Christmas Day!” Miss Ellis said.

“Get an extra plate, so that Mr. Bailey can give the poor fellow some turkey, Delia!” Isobel cried excitedly. “I'm glad he came here! I'm glad we have the chance to see that he has a real Christmas
dinner! Edwin, you're glad, too, although you're pretending to disapprove!”

“All right, Isobel, have it your own way,” Edwin said, smiling.

He filled the stranger's plate, with Delia standing judiciously by his elbow. “Give him more dressing, Edwin,” Isobel said. “And Delia, see that he has plenty of hot rolls. I want him to have everything we have.”

“Nothing to drink, Isobel,” Edwin said. “If he hasn't been drinking already today, I'm not going to be responsible for starting him off. I hope you people don't think I'm a mean man,” he added, smiling around the table.

“Not at all, Mr. Bailey,” Miss Ellis said stoutly. “We all have our views on these matters. That's what makes us different. What would the world be like if we were all the same?”

“My mother says,” said Jonathan hoarsely, putting one hand into his trouser pocket, “that if a person is bad off enough to ask her for something, he's worse off than she is.”

“Your mother must be a very nice lady, Mr. Quin,” Miss Ellis said.

“It's a curious remark, of Mr. Quin's mother,” Vincent said moodily.

“Oh, of course you'd have him in at the table here and give him the house, Vincent!” Isobel cried in great amusement. “I remember your reputation for standing treat and giving, Vincent.”

“Mr. Lace has the look of a generous man,” Miss Ellis said, with her thin, childlike smile. The heavy earrings hung like black weights against her thin jaw.

Vincent stared at her. “Isobel remarks that I would bid the man in and give him the house,” he said bitterly. “But at the moment, dear lady, I am not in the position to give him the leg of a chair, so the question hardly arises. Do you know what I would do if I was in Mr. Bailey's position, Miss Ellis? Now this is no reflection on
you, Mr. Bailey. When I think of him, and what is going on in his mind at this moment, as he gazes into the heaped platter that you have so generously provided—”

“Vincent, get back to the point. What would you do in Edwin's place?” asked Isobel good-naturedly.

Vincent closed his mouth and gazed at her. “You're quite right, my dear,” he said. “I tend to sermonize. It's the strangled professor in me, still writhing for an audience. Well, to put it briefly, if I were in your husband's excellent black leather shoes, I would go out to the kitchen, and I would empty my wallet, which I trust for your sake is well filled, and I would tell that man to go in peace.”