The Rose Thieves (19 page)

When I remembered my parents, my grandparents, the way they gave up on each other, I knew I should seize myself and persevere. I began to lecture Lawrence, eloquent as a prisoner addressing his cell wall. Marriage, I said, was a vocation; we must strive to build a temple between us, of simple, soaring lines. He'd give an impatient nod. Finally, recognition, which had been gathering, crystalized, and I said I had to leave.

“All right,” he said, with a deep, acquiescent sigh. “What is it you want?”

I wanted laughter over nothing; the midnight recounting of dreams. I couldn't believe my life had ebbed so—that I had to ask for such things. “It's so simple,” I said. “Plain dumb love.”

A condescending smile flickered over his face. He'd taken a note or two on love. I waited for him to bring the whole of history down against me, to tell me again that no minor alliance counts for anything in this world of Declines and Falls. But something—my pure youth, I suppose—touched him.

“It's my fault,” he said. His voice was dry and tender—he pitied me. “You got in with the wrong man, that's all, and you were too young to know.”

His face, all pain, rebuked me. I'd crashed into his cloister—I'd been too young to care.

Now I felt plenty old, inoculated with his doubts—I would never belong among my own blithe people again. My anger was hardening to a cold, immovable weight, but even this seemed to unite us. Leaning back among the bedclothes, I considered that, like my mother and grandmother, I was lost to my marriage and that without Lawrence I would have to begin a long life alone.

“Coffee?” Vinnie Duff stood at the screen door. With his overalls, and the sun angling through his straw hat and curls, he looked like a scarecrow cut down from its stick. The first time I saw Vinnie, he was sailing backward past our window, riding the top rung of his ladder into the rhododendrons. He'd been painting the soffits at the wrong angle. When I ran out to help him, he propped himself on an elbow and said, “Now, when you're falling, the first thing to remember is save yourself, don't worry about the bucket.”

Vinnie knows a lot about falling, but he's a terrible gardener. Though he gave up law school for the simple life back in 1969, he still prizes reason over insight: he can't keep the roses from smelling of garlic, or save the scrofulous sunflowers, but he can always explain what went wrong.

“I'm in bed, Vinnie,” I observed, but the shortest route to the garden is through Ma's living room, and they're all used to traipsing through as they please. Vinnie clomped into the bathroom to bring me a robe, turned his face resolutely to the wall as I put it on. Then he sat me down and told me, very gingerly, as if afraid I'd develop a crack, that Ma was back at the hospital where Grandma was dying again.

My hair was dirty and tangled, and I pulled it back with a piece of string while he made coffee. Without the camaraderie of crisis, death was its old black self again. I saw my grandmother's life shrunken—ruled, like all lives, by small hopes and fears, ended here arbitrarily after the years of schoolteaching, the years of duplicate bridge …

As I explained this to Vinnie, it devolved somehow into the story of Lawrence and me. Vinnie and I had never gotten far beyond the weather before, but I couldn't stop talking. He closed one eye to consider me as if I were a blighted rose.

“Well,” he said finally, “doesn't death just show how small these little love worries are?” He looked extremely pleased with himself; he'd proved I ought to cheer up.

“
No,
Vinnie,” I said. He gets everything backward. But I was not feeling discursive—my voice quavered.

“Wait, wait, Katie!” He jumped up in a panic, hoping to avert tears. “How about a tour of the garden?”

I followed him, repeating the flower names as he spoke them: cleome, portulaca, cosmos. I didn't want to make him uncomfortable, so I tried to be calm, but when we came to the astilbe, the word was so lush and strange—more lovely than the flower—I spoke it in a sob. He patted my back as if I were choking.

“I'm sorry,” I said, to gain license to continue.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said awkwardly, touching my shoulder.

“For heaven's sake, Vinnie,” I said. “Put your arms around me.”

He obeyed. His smell, of sweat and fresh earth, penetrated grief. Looking up, I caught his eye by accident. What you can learn in a half-second! Vinnie and I have known each other for years, and thoughts of him might have crossed my idle mind before, but in that instant we were suddenly a weedy Tristan and his sleep-sodden, tear-blotched Iseult. Flustered, I let go of him. Flummoxed absolutely, he loped off toward the woodshed, calling over his shoulder that he was sorry, he'd forgotten he had to meet Abe.

*   *   *

Grace cried in hiccups, in a corner of the windowless “quiet room,” where the hospital, to spare us the indignity of public grief, had shut us up alone. The walls were blank green, the seats alternated orange and mauve. For solace there was a Bible; for nourishment, a jar of mints.

“What is it, honey?” I asked. Cap was with Grandma, Audie had taken the children to the lobby shop, and Ma was asleep across a row of seats, so the task of comfort fell to me.

“Nothing,” Grace said, from the depths of a sob. “It's just, I don't know…”

She's always anxious, uncertain, as if she were on the brink of disaster somehow and the next flower she picked might rip the ground from beneath her. I get impatient—I tell her this world is all we have and we ought to take our chances here, rejoicing, but I can't persuade her to take heart.

“I never know what's wrong, Kate,” she said. “That's what's wrong.” I patted her shoulder but without much hope.

Ma woke by maternal instinct and felt blindly for her glasses.

“Who's crying?” she asked, thickly, pulling herself up and stumbling across the room to take Grace's other side.

“Now, Grandma's had a long, happy life,” she began. I shook my head, knowing Grace mourned something far beyond this, but the old commonplaces, the old cadences, worked their old effect. Grace nodded acquiescence, wiping her eyes. Her knitting, a mass of rough, greenish stuff, spilled over her knees like a fisherman's mossy net.

“It's lovely,” Ma said dryly. “What is it?” Over Grace's head she made a face: we all wonder why Grace can't, just one time, wear red.

“It doesn't matter,” Grace said. “It's all screwed up.”

“Honey, you do everything perfectly,” Ma said, but this just prompted a new sob. Our little griefs, which will do circus tricks for the right audience, loomed up against us now we were all alone. Grace refused consolation, and Ma, having failed, started to cry too.

“I can't even help my own children,” she said. Still weeping, Grace swore this wasn't true. Convinced mine was the purest sorrow, I opened the Bible, thinking to escape them, but Cap burst through the door.

“Nice, regular breathing!” he said.

“She's on a respirator, Cap,” Ma told him.

“She's gonna be a brand-new old lady in no time flat,” he said, with a broad wink at the wary Grace.

Ma blew her nose. “She's not a used car, Cap,” she said.

Never mind, he told her. Even the economics would work out. We'd save hundreds a day if Grandma was released early. Uncle Arvid could take care of her—he'd been a medic in the Second World War.

“Is that what you told the doctors?” Ma said. Arvid saw too much in Europe, and he's been on lithium since V-E Day. He's an antique dealer now.

“Don't be silly, Lila Ann,” said Cap with deafening assurance. “He can nurse her. You know he passed the postal exam.”

“He quit the second day!” Ma said, but she caught herself. “We don't need to get into this. Her blood pressure's almost nil now.”

“Don't say that, Lila Ann,” Cap said between his teeth. His first wife was killed in a car wreck, while he was in Brazil. We didn't know what name he was using, couldn't find him, so Grandma arranged the funeral. After he came home, he stuck close to her, and he wasn't going to let her go too.

Audie appeared in the doorway with the children, who carried new silver pinwheels like wands.

“We should have let her stay at home,” she said. “Now she'll go to her grave hating me.”

“Well, she never loved me at all,” said Ma.

“She's not going to her grave,” Cap said. “They promised they'd keep her alive.”

“I'll pull the tubes myself,” Audie wept.

Grace had dried her tears while the others squabbled, and I saw her summon courage again.

“We ought to call Daddy,” she said. “We ought to let him know.”

I laughed, God forgive me.

“Katie,” Grace said. “He's one of the family.”

Yes, but the last time Ma saw him, in the courthouse parking lot, she tried to run him over. After a decade of divorce she's still in a rage.

Lizzie blew a wicked gust into her pinwheel. “Grandma hates Grandpa, doesn't she?” she said.

“They have a difference of opinion,” Audie began, but Ma laughed and swept the child up in her arms.

“You are such a vicious child!” she said, rocking her proudly, kissing her, while Lizzie beamed.

Grace and Audie and I look nothing alike—Grace is all angles, Audie's taut, and I tend toward the blowzy—but our eyebrows confirmed us as sisters now: all were raised. Lizzie leaned back in Ma's arms, pinwheel blazing, and everything came right side up again. By the time the nurse knocked to say Grandma was conscious, we felt her recovery was only our due.

Cap took it as proof he could sell anything.

“I told them!” he crowed at her bedside. “They didn't believe me, Ma.”

Amid the thump and flutter of the machines Grandma opened a weary eye. Though her face showed mostly pain, she seemed to be asking a question, and after a few tries we guessed it.

“No,” Ma said. “It wasn't cancer. You're fine.” Grandma's face went calm.

“
Now
will you say I was right?” Ma asked. “
Now
are you glad we brought you?”

Grandma set her mouth in a stubborn line.

“I know how you'll remember this,” Ma said. “This will be the time Cap saved your life.”

“Ma,”
I said.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Ma said. “I told her. She's fine.”

And we tumbled, jubilant, into the big waiting room, like actors out from the curtain, almost expecting applause. Abe was there, as if Ma had conjured him, twisting his canvas fishing hat in his hand, chewing a dead pipe. He twinkled all over to see us, tamped his pipe as if to light it, but remembered the no-smoking sign. On the seat beside him was a silver ice bucket with his wife's monogram.

“Champagne!” Ma cried.

Alas, no. Rolf had cut off his hand with the chain saw, and Abe knew it would keep best on ice.

*   *   *

Thanks to this, the hand could be promptly reattached, once the microsurgeon flew in from New York. In forty-eight hours Rolf's fingertips were glowing a healthy pink, and they said he'd move his thumb by Halloween.

Now, Ma, said, we had to have champagne. There was everything to celebrate: Grandma was about to be released, and Great-uncle Arvid was leaving the flea market early to come down and nurse her. Lizzie had gone forth to kindergarten, leaving Audie in tears at the bus. Grace shook out her knitting to reveal a sheath that fell straight from shoulder to hip to knee. She tugged at the hem in bitter frustration, pronouncing it uneven, wracked with flaws, but it became her absolutely. Regal and diffident, she boarded the bus to Boston with her many satchels and her bouquet of wild asters, bravely offering her ticket to be punched, turning in the door to smile goodbye, an angel of uncertainty.

Best of all, Abe's wife was marching on Washington, against nuclear arms. She would be spending the whole night away. Ma decided to give a party, just the two of us and Vinnie and Abe. All week she'd been lost in her sorrows, so I had yet to tell her about Lawrence, but as we rifled her closet for silk and satin, with the evening like a great city on the horizon, my marriage began to seem just another run-of-the-mill disaster, and I considered how I might fashion it into a tale.

“I've left Lawrence,” I began, meaning to make it funny, but I felt dizzy suddenly, as if I were looking over a high cliff.

“Oh, Kate,” Ma said. “Oh, honey, I'm so sorry.” She had been holding up a blouse in the mirror, and she set it down for a minute, but it was the same blue as her eyes and she couldn't quite let it go.

“Well,” she said to my reflection, “at least you only wasted three years. With me, it was twenty.”

“I had to leave, Ma,” I said, afraid I might start crying. “I couldn't stand it anymore, I…”

“I told all of you not to get married,” she said. “Now, I wash my hands.” She held up two necklaces: “Gold or pearls?”

“Gold,” I said. I felt yanked back from the precipice, saved. “Flash before luster.”

“That's my Katie,” she said, looping them together over her head.

When Abe saw us in our finery, he went back across the driveway and returned with his wife's satin kimono over his jeans and a pointy Chinese hat. Vinnie had been haunting the second-hand stores and wore all his favorites: emerald jacket, orange tie, pants of emerald-and-orange plaid.

“Why no imagination?” he asked. “Why the same tired colors over and over again?” Vinnie and I had been awkward since our embrace in the garden, stranger to each other than if we'd never met. We'd gotten into each other's imagination. He kept arriving at the screen door, endlessly smiling, talking just to keep my attention. He brought me new facts shyly as if they were jewels: from the juice of the privet berry, I learned, the first mapmakers distilled their ink. Tropical earwigs come in violent colors and eat meat. That afternoon, impatient with entomology, I'd asked him what he wanted of love. “Comfort,” he said, very uncomfortably. “Buy an armchair!” I told him. I preached transports of devotion, jabbing my finger into the air. “Love is the last frontier!” I said. Wanting to drink from his teacup, and deeply, I seized it so mightily I drenched us both. I tried to blot his shirt with a dish towel, but he kept backing away. Now, when he sat down at the picnic table beside me, he kept a little distance, afraid of what I might do.