Mystical Rose (6 page)

Dog spoon laughter edge quarterback, said Dr. Sylvester, in a nice wool suit. I beg your pardon? I asked. I assumed I’d heard wrong, but no, it was part of the test.

He repeated them, and then wanted me to say them back. I cleared my throat, something sticking there from breakfast, and repeated them flawlessly. I’ve always been able to do that. Song lyrics too. Remember Minnie the Moocher? Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi?

The past is always knocking on the door of the present, said Dr. Sylvester, this time in a nice linen suit. Was he talking to me? A pleasant image that, only the past isn’t always polite. Sometimes it knocks the damn door down and comes barging in.

I believe, said the doctor, that the past cannot be suppressed without cost. In wilfully suppressing the past we are living two lives at once — our real life and a fantasy life where the past hasn’t happened. Do you follow?

He wasn’t talking to me. Harriet nodded.

As we get older our minds lose their agility. We can no longer keep the past out of the present. And so, in people like your mother, past and present co-exist. Short-term memory gets swallowed up by long-term memory. She is living in the present — but the present is 1927. Or 1912. Rose — he knows my name, how lovely. I smile at him. Rose, what date is it today?

The verdict should have been accidental death, but Uncle Brian felt so guilty. I shot Jesus Christ, he told the court. That’s who it was, in the woods, larger than any other animal. I knew what I was doing and I shot Jesus, only it turned out to be my brother. I deserve to die, he moaned. If you let me go I’ll only do it again.

Mama had tears in her eyes when they led Uncle Brian away, and I knew something important had happened because Mama hadn’t cried in years, never did cry but from relief.

Funny how relieved you can feel in a courtroom — I cried too, when I entered the small courtroom in the basement of City Hall. The varnished hall outside was full of smoking women, but it wasn’t the smoke that made my eyes water. It was relief at finding her. Not Mama. Harriet. I’m always getting them mixed up.

I showed my yellow summons to three or four different people before someone told me what the trouble was. That’s the date of your hearing, said an old tired guard, pointing at the top of the cardboard. The thirteenth. That’s tomorrow.

Harriet was ahead of me, pacing up and down the shiny tiled floor in her winter coat and new Christmas galoshes.

Tomorrow, I said to the guard.

Uh huh, he said.

I sighed and called Harriet. I walked slowly out of the big stone building, part of a crowd of preoccupied people. Sleet was coming down, and umbrellas and coat collars were going up. The newspaper boy in front of the cenotaph was shouting about victory in the Ardennes. No empty seats on the streetcar, of course. We stood and swayed on this chilly, soggy, crowded, and totally wasted afternoon while the streetcar jostled its way down Queen Street. Everyone around me was reading war news stories. I got a seed catalogue out of my purse and tried to pay attention to the loveliest words in English, words of hope and glory, of trust that the coming year would bring forth beauty.

Look at this one, Harriet, I said, pointing to a perfectly shaped Dorothy Perkins in, reputedly, a vivid pink. The photograph was
black and white, but you could see that the bloom was large and perfectly shaped, petals crisp and curling.

Harriet wasn’t beside me. I searched through the strap-hangers while fear rose hot and bitter in my throat. My daughter was not in the streetcar. We were across the Don River already, out of the downtown. Closer to home than City Hall. The bathwater flooded over the sides of my mind. I had left without my daughter. I had no mental picture, no actual memory of Harriet’s departure from City Hall. I leaned over to pull the call-stop bell.

Dr. Sylvester was interested in my actual memory, my ability to make pictures in my head. I’m going to tell you a story, he said once. I don’t know what kind of suit he was wearing, which visit this would have been. Harriet wasn’t in the room. I smiled because I loved stories. Still do.

This one ended and I thanked the doctor. He asked me what I thought and I told him the truth, that I was very glad he’d taken the time to tell me the story. You’re a busy man, I said with my fluffy wide smile, and old people like me like to hear stories from the world outside. I live in an apartment now, I told him, and I don’t get out much. He frowned, wanted to hear more about the story. How much did I actually remember? he asked. Did I have any mental pictures?

I remember the first time I held a man in my arms, I said. I can close my eyes and see the moonlight playing on the muscles of his back. A cold winter moon. We lay in a castle overlooking the river, and he was kind and good and mysterious to me.

Dr. Sylvester’s frown deepened.

The westbound streetcar, taking me back to City Hall, was almost empty. I can feel the swaying carriage, feel the hard wooden back
of the seat next to mine. I stared out the window to the right, and left, in case Harriet had decided to walk home by herself. The driver called out the stops — Church Street, Victoria, Yonge, Bay Street — and then I was running through the still-falling rain, up the worn slippery stone steps, looking for someone to tell my story to, a uniformed someone who would lead me away from the crowds to a quiet room where my daughter would be sitting safely, waiting for me.

No one had seen her. No one knew her. The lost and found was full of old hats. I began to cry.

The lady in charge of the lost and found had a hump on her shoulder and dyed blonde hair. She looked at my summons. I suppose you’ve tried your hearing room, she said. I shook my head. My hearing isn’t until tomorrow, I said. She looked at the yellow cardboard again. The thirteenth is today, she said.

She led me to the basement, down a hallway filled with the smell of cigarette smoke and stale, unwashed, made-up women. The tall, narrow wooden door was closed tight. She put her humped shoulder to it and opened it for me. There was a hearing in progress, judge and official reporter, police witness, and my Harriet on her feet, asking questions. Are you wearing a watch? she asked the fat smiling policeman from last month.

Yes, miss, he said politely.

I turned to thank the lady from the lost and found, but she was gone. The tall door had closed behind her. I took a seat at the back of the room, settling into my relief like sleep, letting it wash over and renew me.

Without looking at your watch, do you know what time it is right now?

Not exactly — not to the minute, miss.

And are you in the habit of checking your watch every minute, officer?

No, miss, but —

Did you check your watch when you were in the flower shop?

Not
while
I was in it, but —

Is there a clock in the flower shop? A visible clock? Anywhere in the store.

No, miss.

So you don’t know what time it was, when you were in the shop. Not to the minute.

No, miss. Not to the minute. But it was plainly past six o’clock.

Then why, officer, if it was plainly past six o’clock, did you buy flowers yourself, while you were in the store?

I watched the smile grow on the judge’s face. He didn’t try to hide it.

Did you take the flowers home, officer? Harriet asked the policeman.

Why, uh, no, miss. I gave them to a … to a friend that night.

Did your friend like the flowers?

Yes, miss, she did.

The policeman was smiling too. He enjoyed answering my daughter’s questions. He liked her as much as the judge did.

Harriet was on her feet. She always wandered around as she talked. Her hands were in the pockets of her skirt. Her hair was plaited, and hung below her shoulders. The braided brown strands swung back and forth as she walked.

Tell me, officer, were you on time for your date?

The policeman’s smile broadened. To tell the truth, miss, I was late.

I guess you didn’t check your watch, officer. Hmm?

With smiles and handshakes, on grounds that the evidence was inconclusive, the case was dismissed. The judge got down off his chair and held open the door at the back of the room for Harriet. Buy this young lady a treat, he ordered me. And get yourself a clock.

You stride through time like Your living room, but it’s dark, and I’m scared. Sick people go in the middle watches, they say. Two, three o’clock in the morning — a busy time for You. It’s so dark. I’m glad I’m in my mama’s arms.

2
Christmas

A cold bed in a cold house. Even in summer, even at the height of summer when the sweat ran off our bodies and into the ground, into our clothes, into the coarse sack sheets we put on the beds — even then it was a cold house. I shivered, getting out of my sweat-crusted bed. Shivered, on my way to give Victor a big hug. Climbing up on the side of his stall to put my arms around his great shaggy neck. Smell of a hot barn in summer, old hay and wood floor, mice and flies and hot horse.

And I so cold.

Daddy scared me, with his talk that didn’t make sense. Mama tried, I think, but she had no time for me. A wan sometimes-smile would live on the surface of her lips for a second or two, a troubled shadow when I wanted a bright blaze of love. Poor Mama. Poor Daddy. Poor me.

And then David came. A sunny youth, a soldier from Daddy’s battalion. He was younger than Daddy, of course, a young man with crinkled dark hair and a dimple near the corner of his mouth. Hello, there, he said, rising from the middle of the row of rusty
lettuces I was trying to care for. Hello. That was the first time I saw him. His uniform was tattered but somehow clean. I knew it was clean. He was such a clean young man. What is your name? he asked me. I told him, mentioning that my father had been in The War.

We didn’t have to wonder which war, back then. There was only one war. Nowadays I hear people saying, Which war do you mean? As if it matters, which one.

Nice to meet you, Rose, David told me. Dusting the knees of his ragged battledress trousers, tucking in the puttees that were always coming unwound.

You are beautiful, I told him. He ducked his head shyly, no doubt used to being told. And let me lead him into the house.

It made me warm, to think of him in the same place as me. Walking out in the fields with me, cleaning out Victor’s stall, weeding that damned — sorry, undamned — vegetable patch. Are there weeds in heaven? Flowers I think of, but a weed is only a flower with no admirers, a pretty girl perhaps, but unmoneyed, unknown, and so she sits at the edge of the dance floor, waiting to be asked. Shepherd’s parsley, cudweed, ox-eye daisies — I’d like to see them in heaven. But not the creepers and stinkers in our vegetable patch. How I hated them.

David didn’t say much. I didn’t let him. But he was sunburnt and helpful, and he had a crooked smile. And while the rake and hoe fell with dull strokes on the hard earth, he told me about machine-gun nests and barbed wire and trench rats. He let me give him water from our well, in a sweating pitcher. He let me sponge his aching back, sitting in a kitchen dapple of sunshine. He let me take him with me, to school, to work, to bed. He was my warmth, David Lawrence Godwin.