Her Name Is Rose (15 page)

“Ah,” Pierce said, coming into the kitchen, “pink grapefruit and blue cheese!” Louise had set the table and placed her famous salad on place mats. “No one does it like you, Mother.” He winked at Rowan and handed her the flowers. “I don't suppose you've prepared the mignon and the Idaho, too?”

“You're too much, Pierce. You make me laugh.” She was on the verge of tears.

“You shouldn't have,” Pierce said, picking up her hands and holding them in his own. “We could have ordered in—”

“I needed to do something while I waited for you.… For you both.”

Pierce “at home” had revived Louise, Rowan observed with some regret as his mother steadied the bouquet into a glass vase. Then she broiled the steaks under the grill. The potatoes, wrapped in tinfoil, waited on the plates. For a few minutes they made small talk like nothing had happened. Both men leaned back on the kitchen counter, side by side, arms folded across their chests. Pierce asked Rowan how the landscaping business was going.

“In L.A. it seems every other house has a fancy tree lit up with soft lights and smart water features and minimalist planters. What's it like in New York? Still doing those brownstone gardens in Brooklyn?” He seemed truly interested. He was, after all, the older brother. Rowan said he was working on a redesign for Paley Park on East Fifty-third, in fact.

“Dogwoods and box and a few multistem Himalayan birch.”

“It's time you came out to Brentwood, buddy, helped me with my ten-by-ten gravel backyard. What would you say to a swimming pool?” Pierce chuckled and gave his brother a soft thump on the back.

Their conversation seemed to settle Louise. She asked them then to sit down and they held hands across the kitchen table, as was customary in the Blake household. Louise looked to Rowan. “Will you say grace, please?”

*   *   *

After the dinner, which none of them could really eat, some of Louise's neighbors stopped by; it was late, but Pierce and Rowan pretended it was polite to slip away. They stepped outside onto the deck. Fireflies flashed with silent electricity. A breeze stirred the trees and offered some relief to the hot night.

“We could take Mother's car down to Muscoot's?” said Rowan.

“That old haunt? Doesn't have this fresh air, Ro.” Pierce slapped his hands together and laughed his big, deep laugh. “Let's just walk a bit. We're past those days, don't you think? Beer joints?”

They walked in silence with the crickets sounding. A few stars hung above the 16th fairway. Rowan said nothing, although he ached with emotion. And he wanted a drink. From time to time he glanced over at Pierce and wondered if his brother thought him much altered from his visit last summer.

“Come on. Cheer up, and tell me, how's it going down there in the Big Apple? You seem a few bites short? Is it just Burdy, or something else?”

It wasn't something else. It was that, and,
everything
else. Between bidding for projects, executing accepted ones, and training new staff, he was keeping late hours. It left little time for leisure or dating and he ended up exhausted at night but also wired. It was a balancing act but the seesaw of his life catapulted him, more often than not these days, through intoxication, landing him on the flat of his back, inches away from the proverbial gutter. But each day he got up and was back in the game, although each day a little more bruised.

Rowan leaned nearer. “You wouldn't say no to a martini, would you? Back at the house?”

“Once Mother's in bed I've got to phone some clients back in L.A.”

“Sure,” said Rowan. “I've got some calls to make, as well.”

When the friends had left, Louise found her sons out on the back deck sitting in her Adirondack chairs. “You boys are terrible,” she said, “deserting me,” but her eyes understood. She knew Pierce was assuming his big brother role. She kissed their heads. “Good night.”

When Louise was in bed, the brothers came inside and Rowan mixed gin and vermouth. (Louise always had a bottle of Bombay and one of Jameson in the cabinet.) He'd finished his second before Pierce returned from his phone calls.

“So, tell me,” Pierce said, “what's up?”

Rowan followed his brother's eyes, which went to his empty glass, but he looked directly back at Pierce, challengingly, and Pierce shrugged. “Just go easy on that stuff.”

They talked instead about Pierce's latest project on a copyright infringement case. And after just one martini Pierce went to bed.

*   *   *

Rowan drifted like a buoy lost of its mooring. The night closed in like a dark ocean, his head barely above water. No land in sight. In which direction he should swim, he'd no idea. Just thinking about it disabled him moment by moment. (And fuck it, he was a good swimmer.)

It was because of his grandfather, Burdock Emmet, that Rowan had become interested in architecture in the first place. Burdy had taken him under his wing after the boys' father had left, moved away, and remarried a woman from Singapore who had an export business, leaving Louise embittered for years. The boys had taken it hard and they hardly ever saw him now. Stepping, as best he could, into the hole left by Rowan's father, Burdy had parceled encouragement in little chunks and had weaved the glory of architecture into Rowan's mind. Under the tree at Christmas were books like
Great Moments in Architecture
and Wilde's
Michelangelo: Six Lectures
alongside an essential something from Ireland. “You mustn't forget your Irish roots, Ro. And you know, if I were you,” Burdy had said as they walked along the putting green, “I'd be thinking seriously of becoming an architect when I grew up. Building good buildings is good citizenship. What do you think of that?”

Rowan thought for a second. “I'd like to be a musician. But Mother says I should listen to you.”

Burdy laughed. His eyes glistened. “And so you should, lad, so you should. Keep up the saxophone playing, and the golf practice, and your studies, and you'll be a proper Renaissance Man.” He put a light hand on the boy's shoulder. It was a hand that felt like a father's might.

Now, alone and the only one awake in 316 Greenview, it was that hand he missed. Outside the dark grass sloped away. The crickets, or the peepers as his mother called them, were chirping a very quiet song. In the Bombay there was one measure left. Rowan turned the bottle in the half light. In it was mostly a pale emptiness.

*   *   *

Louise and Pierce, as the executors of Burdy's affairs, decided on a private cremation with just the three Blakes at the funeral home. Neighbors and close friends were advised of a memorial service being held at the golf club two days later. The Hills, as it was known locally, was a close community and many of Burdock Emmet's friends, and Louise's, were expected. And after the service they'd planned to spread Burdy's ashes on the putting green. Because his mother had asked him to please play, Rowan had taken her car to his apartment in Stamford and spent a few hours practicing his saxophone.

*   *   *

“Early summer,” Pierce said, gazing toward a grove of sugar maples burnishing in the late afternoon, “is a perfect time to celebrate a life well lived.” They were sitting, mother and sons, over iced Arnold Palmers—half lemonade/half iced tea—on the open deck of the golf club while the Healy Room was being set up for the memorial service.

“The obituary was in the papers this morning,” Louise said. Her shoulders had a slumped look and her grief was palpable. She had changed into a black dress for the service. “People will have read it.… Did we ask the Wilsons? And the Morgans? And his old secretary? Dad had so many friends.” She fingered the string of her pearls. Rowan realized suddenly how hard this was going to be for her, how much she was going to miss her father. He'd been selfish, thinking only about his own sorrow and how Burdy's death was going to impact
his
life. He reached over and grabbed her hand. She smiled weakly. “Thank you, dear. I'm all right.” Pierce looked to Rowan and nodded his head.

The likelihood of there being guests whom Rowan had long forgotten now struck him. Not being an ace at chitchat like Pierce, he thought about it just long enough to shrug it off because in that moment he didn't care about them. It was Burdy and his mother and the hole opening larger in his life that consumed his attention. That, and how soon he could have a martini. Just one. He'd promised Pierce.

The Healy Room's fourth wall opened onto a terrace overlooking the putting green. With the short service completed, the staff mingled with trays of drinks and finger sandwiches among the large crowd who'd come to pay their respects. The Arnold Palmers turned into Leland Palmers (added gin and Limoncello) and the twilight scattered across the course, hitting every blade of grass. Given the occasion, Rowan wasn't expected to be entertaining. He'd already done his bit. He'd managed to play “Amazing Grace” and his playing had taken the mourners beyond the place Pierce's moving eulogy had brought them.

“Thank you,” his mother had said. “It's all I want for you, you know?” Her eyes stayed fixed on his face long enough for Rowan to feel her meaning. She didn't need to say the words: amazing grace.

Rowan leaned alongside the iron balustrade that supported the glass roof of the conservatory and surveyed the gathering. Burdy was there in the faces of all his friends, his aging golfing buddies, his bridge partners, and his fellow hospice volunteers. Rowan recognized many of them, even some of his father's old business associates. (Because of such short notice, his father was unable to come from Singapore, he'd said, but he told Pierce, who'd telephoned him with the news, that next time he was in New York he'd be sure to be in touch with Louise and Rowan. Living on that side of the world Pierce saw him more than Rowan did, although not regularly. The boys had pretty much dismissed their father and his lackluster attention.)

The music for the service had been left up to Rowan and as he listened to the violin trio, a woman in her seventies dressed in a pink two-piece suit with black trim weaved her way through the crowd toward him, carrying a silver purse in one hand and a drink in the other.

“I love that old spiritual,” she said, stopping in front of Rowan. “You played it well.”

“Thank you.”

“‘I once was lost and now I'm found.'” She gave her glass a little swirl, ice cubes, lemon, and mint colliding. “It's a pity we didn't have the words to sing along with you,” she said. “I love a good old singsong. But that wouldn't do now, would it? No. Not at all, at all. Not appropriate. What was I thinking?” She pronounced “what” with a breathy H. “Too much Leland and not enough Arnold.” She laughed at herself, her white permed hair bouncing as she did.

Rowan shifted and looked toward Pierce. Who was this woman? But his brother was deep in conversation with some people Rowan didn't know. He looked to his mother, but she was surrounded by a group of women, members of her yoga class or creative writing group, or something. They had that intimate posture about them—a posture women of a certain age have who know each other from a “shared experience.” There was no one to help him recall the name of the woman before him. So he went with it, took another sip from his glass, and smiled, hearing Burdy's voice in his ear saying,
This woman is a flibbertigibbet.
Rowan watched her thin, disappearing lips move sideways as they opened and closed and made sounds. For a few moments he just watched them. How sweet the soundless, he thought, and laughed. He'd had three martinis and was just beginning to float. He motioned to a waiter.

“Oh, I know. One does tend to drink too much on these sad occasions. But this isn't really that sad. Is it, do you think? Mr. Emmet's was a full life, God bless him and save him, and may he rest in peace.”

At the mention of “Mr. Emmet,” Rowan suddenly remembered. “Mrs. Dillon! A full life. Yes. You're absolutely right. Forgive me for not recognizing you.”

“I was wondering if you had forgotten me.” She sipped her drink rather coyly.

“Momentarily.” He smiled. “Momentarily. But a laugh as jolly as yours is hard to forget. I
am
sorry. How have you been?”

“Not too bad. Although I was sad to hear of my dear Mr. Emmet. Will you miss him terribly?” Subtlety was not her forte.

“Yes.” What more could he say?

Burdy had schooled him: always be a gentleman when speaking with your elders. Suddenly he felt like a twelve-year-old again and then he recalled Mrs. Dillon had been Burdy's secretary. When Burdy retired twenty years ago, so had she. Originally from Ireland, she was interested in, what was it? Something? What? Reading the tea leaves! When he visited Burdy in his office, occasionally Mrs. Dillon would make him a cup of tea and then “read” the leaves. Afterward, she'd say something enormously positive about the loose leaves left in the cup. “You're going to grow up to be an astronaut. Or maybe an architect. Something that begins with an A. And you're going to be rich and famous. Oh yes, and of course one day you'll go to Ireland and find a nice girl. And it will change your life.” It took a long time, but Rowan eventually figured out that her fortune-telling was always the flowering of some seed Burdy had planted earlier.

“It's been years since I saw you, dear. I didn't really expect you to remember me, although I hoped you would.”

“I do remember. Of course. You were Burdy's ‘Galway Gal Friday.' Isn't that what he called you? And, I remember you were at my graduation.” Rowan was pleased; his memory had returned and the moment unveiled like a curtain drawn back upon a stage.

“That's right. But that was a long time ago.” She finished her drink. “I think that was the last time I saw you.”

Across the putting green in blackness a bank of trees was silhouetted against the sky like a ship harbored in a dark sea.