Mystical Rose (13 page)

What? I said. Oh, hello, sir.

A drink, Rose. Come on, it’s your day off. And you can call me Robbie.

I nearly fell off the bench, I tell You.

Five nines are forty-five. Six nines are fifty-six. No, they aren’t, but damned if I know what they are right now. Mind you, I didn’t know what they were then.

Mother?

There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold, I say. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that … that would make fifty-four.

Oh, dear, she says. Poor Mother.

I used to know that. We all had to recite it in school. Did you have to learn the poem, Harriet? I ask. There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun by the men who —

Mother? Are you feeling all right?

I struggle up to a sitting position. Of course I’m all right, I say. Seven nines are sixty-three. Eight nines are … I feel pretty good, I say. Mind you, you look kind of tired, Harriet. Should you take a nap or something?

A very grey afternoon seen through the windows of this little room with the two beds and the two old ladies in it — three old
ladies if you count Harriet, who is sitting by my bedside holding a magazine with a picture of a princess on it.

Are you sure you’re all right? I say.

Yes, Mother.

She’s a little irritated with me harping on her like that. She folds the magazine. The princess’ face is cut off above the smile and she looks suddenly sad.

Do you know what eight nines are? I ask.

The bells stop ringing at last. The loudspeaker comes on, says … something. Harriet’s head snaps up, and she drops the sad princess.

The old lady in the other bed sits bolt upright and opens her mouth to shriek, you’d think she’d never heard an announcement before. She’s short of breath, can’t get much volume for her scream of terror. Someone tapes a piece of yellow paper to our room door, then rushes off. People have been rushing up and down the corridor all day. The loudspeaker tells us not to — not to something, worry probably, they usually tell us not to worry. I remember listening to a lecture in the lounge my first week here, an earnest young woman telling us all not to worry, that worrying was dangerous all by itself. Enough to make you worry even if you were healthy.

We wandered around Harbor Park all afternoon, Robbie and I. The first of two half-days off in a row that week, it was time away from my real self. Maybe for him too; maybe he didn’t have many half-days off. He held my arm, pointed out ships on their way to England and South America that were loading, getting ready to head across three thousand miles of ocean with nothing in it but grey water and a few floating shells full of human hopes.

His car was parked on the street. He confessed that he’d
followed my tram to the park. By then I would have been used to his presence, his affection. I remember thinking, I could have saved a nickel.

And tomorrow’s your birthday? Really? Happy birthday, Rose. Let me buy you something, he said. Let me buy you another drink.

I didn’t say no. I didn’t say no when the boys at school gave me sweets or apples, or sticks whittled into the shape of long thin dogs or long thin horses. I said, Thank you.

I should give you a real gift, he said. Maybe I’ll get you something nice to wear. If I remember, he said.

He drove me home, walked me right up to the servants’ door and said, Hello there, Parker. Who smiled a strange, sickly smile. I went upstairs to change and that night — that very night it would have been — I heard a knock at my door. A faint scratching, like a mouse behind the wainscotting.

What’s wrong, I asked my husband, with what we’ve been doing?

It isn’t any good for making babies, whispered Robbie from between my naked knees.

Why not?

Dr. Wilson says so.

You
told
him about us? Robbie! I’m mortified!

Would I have said mortified? Maybe embarrassed is what I said. I’m pretty sure I would have been both mortified and embarrassed.

I couldn’t feel Robbie any more. Not in the usual way against me, a garter snake in the warm summer grass, inquisitive and then cautious. He was fumbling around with his hand.

What are you doing now? I asked.

Do you remember the blood just before Harriet was born? he
said, shifting against me on the bed so that his face was right by my ear. The blood on the … um … sheets, he said.

I nodded without speaking. I could feel his unshaven chin against my cheek.

The doctor asked what we … did together. And when I told him, he … he said that we’ve been doing it wrong, Rose. All wrong.

I didn’t say anything. Inside I felt horrified. He knows, I thought. Dr. Wilson knows what we do together. Perspiration on my forehead. Also I was ashamed for doing it wrong.

Rose?

Yes, I whispered back.

Can you feel it when I do — this?

Harriet is sitting me up in my bed, an unusual vantage point. I feel clothesline. That’s not it. I try to take in what’s going on while I comb the tip of my tongue to find the word. Not clothesline. Nurses drop blankets on the two beds, disappear. The loudspeaker warns us not to worry. Are you worried? I ask Harriet. She shakes her head.

It’s just a drill, she says. Nothing to worry about.

Sounds like my dentist.

Fire! Fire! Help, Mike. Help!

That’s the sad lady from across the hall. Poor sad lady, she asks after Mike every goddamn day. Did I say that to You? Imagine — ungoddamn, then. Every single day. Mike is her son, and he died last year, some kind of car accident. He lived through the operation, and then died in the recovery room. The day after I found this out she came to our room and asked if we’d heard any news about her son’s operation. She had such a hopeful look on her face I didn’t know what to tell her. Such a strong boy, she said. Always
in trouble on the playground. Stitches, we wouldn’t believe. But what was a mother to do, a man was a man, you couldn’t hold them back. He’s a hawk, he should soar, she told us, and we nodded. One of the doctors led her away. A few seconds later a shriek of pure grief echoed through the wing. She knew. Once again, and with all the grief of first loss, she knew that her son was dead.

I think about this sad lady a lot. Every time she finds out about her son’s death she collapses. Every time it’s like the first time, and let me tell you it’s awful finding out that someone you love is dead — listen to me telling You what it’s like. You know, don’t You?

I wonder why they keep telling her.

Robbie was getting a promotion, and the life insurance went with it. That’s why he was seeing Dr. Wilson in the first place. It’s Maple Leaf company policy, he told me, smiling at supper over a bouquet he’d bought on the way home. Yellow irises and begonia, I can still see the primary colours —
sorrow and passion
and
dark thoughts
.

Where did you buy these flowers, I asked, and how much did you pay?

It’s a celebration, he told me, and pulled a bottle of legal whisky out of a brown paper bag. People are buying more Maple Leaf products than they have for years, he said. The company has made a profit for the last three quarters. The Depression is over, he said.

That’s what the radio and newspapers were saying. Mind you, they’d been saying that for years and years and there still seemed to be hungry people hanging around outside the Zimmerman Bakery. Harriet liked waiting with the shabby men and women, sniffing the smell of fresh baking, and always seemed disappointed when we couldn’t stay for the handouts. The women still smiled at her; the men still looked embarrassed.

Robbie’s promotion had to do with him finding a new way to organize the Accounts Receivable, which when he explained it sounded a lot like Paid and Unpaid to me, but I’m no businessman. My accounts receivable at the flower shop were an embarrassment.

What about Harriet? I asked.

She can’t hear us. She’s asleep.

No, no, I mean — what about her birth? We couldn’t have been doing it wrong.

I asked the doctor about that too. He said that there have been pregnancies that resulted from — what we do. But not too many. He said that this kind of — Robbie whispered the word in my ear, his breath heavy with the whisky —
sex
would explain the blood. Usually the blood comes when you … when a woman … does it the first time.

Oh.

Not during labour.

Oh.

Can you feel this? he asked.

I can’t tell you how I felt when he crept out of the little upstairs room, my bedroom, closing the door so that it didn’t click, creeping silently away. I lay in a kind of golden glow. The closest I can come would be to describe it as if I’d spent the time in Captain David Godwin’s arms. His physical arms, I mean, not the imaginary ones I had used to feel all warm and girlish about. Mystical and perfect, of course, but … at a loss too. There was so much to understand. Bewildered and transcended, I felt part of a larger whole. I had no desire to do it again. I could not walk around at the top of Mount Everest, or in the middle of a shower of falling
stars. It was not a repeatable experience, and to tell the truth I do not know if we ever did repeat it. Were we doing it right? How would I know? I tell you we can’t have been doing it wrong. I’ve never felt better. Scared, confused, but right.

That would have been when the baby was made. Must have been. On my birthday. And that must have been when the cufflink was left. Must have been then. I don’t remember it, but that’s natural, isn’t it? Who would have noticed a man’s shirt at a time like that?

A loud knock at the door in the middle of the night. Not Robbie’s knock, and besides, he had a key.

Mrs. Rolyoke?

An official voice, hard to understand through the fog of sleep. Flashing lights from the street outside the house. It’s dark.

Mrs. Robert Rolyoke?

Yes? I said, clutching my housecoat, peering out.

Was that my voice? It sounded more like Mama’s. Yes?

Something terrible has happened, said the impersonal voice, from a long way off. A lot farther than the other side of the front door.

What happened? Is it Robbie — my husband? Is he all right?

My voice.

You must prepare yourself for the worst, ma’am. I’m afraid there’s been an accident.

Soldiers die away from the field of battle. Traffic accidents happen in wartime. Soldiers on leave are still subject to the laws of chance and human nature. They die at the hands of careless drivers and jealous husbands and stick-up artists. They slip in bathrooms, get bitten by mad dogs, and succumb to fatal diseases. They get caught in machinery, burn to death, and fall out of things from great heights or at high speeds.

A policeman with a round red face sat on the chesterfield in our living room, holding his cap in his hands while he told me what had happened to Robbie. An embarrassed policeman. I would have been in shock, I suppose, worrying about whether I should offer him tea or a drink. Wondering about the correct reaction to tragic news.

This is what the policeman told me.

Robbie and young Sam were crossing Queen Street in front of City Hall around ten o’clock that Thursday night. Sam had been here to dinner — he was a shipmate of Robbie’s, another sub-lieutenant. A nice young man from a small prairie town who wanted to see a bit of Toronto before going back to the ship. He
had eaten an extra portion of macaroni and cheese, and an extra slice of canned meat. Harriet had eyed him all through dinner, fourteen years old she would have been, swooning with everyone else over James Mason and Lew Ayres. I suppose Sam did look a little bit like young Dr. Kildare.

Queen Street was empty at ten o’clock at night, except for a car with a very drunk man at the wheel. The car was stopped, and the man was trying to close a door that didn’t want to stay closed. He tried with the window down and the window up, and every time he slammed the door shut it opened again, and he fell out of the car. Robbie and Sam — his full name was Sam Howe, he ended the war as a captain with a medal for valour — were waiting for an eastbound streetcar. They watched from the corner stop, applauding, as Sam told it later, at Robbie’s funeral, when this unnamed drunk man finally got the door closed from outside the car. Realizing his situation, he ran around, but the door on the other side of the car — the only other door — was locked. He swore cheerfully, ran back, opened the driver-side door, got in, closed the door after him, and fell out when it banged open. The man lay on the pavement, his sides convulsing as he laughed.

Robbie and his friend decided to help. Sam got into the car and started the engine. Then he got out, and together he and Robbie bundled the man into the driver’s seat. Then they slammed the door and stood back as the car lurched forward. A successful operation, only Robbie’s coat was caught in the locked door. And as the car went forward so did he, knocking on the window to attract the man’s attention. Which he couldn’t. So he tried to take off his coat, still running beside the weaving backfiring car, slowly and then faster, my poor Robbie, while Sam stood open-mouthed in the middle of the street.

I can’t smell smoke, I tell the nurses. Two of them, moving fast.