Mystical Rose (8 page)

The smell of smoke hanging in the air over the harbour. The twisted blackened hull lying on its side with the water lapping against it. Crowds of people staring, crying. Ruby clutching my arm. She’d have known by then about Montgomery. First time I
remember her crying. Not the last. Harriet away at university with her trunk full of clothes. Me, all in a guilty glow. Did they ever find Montgomery’s body?

I’ve always been drawn to water; I stare into it the way other people stare into fire. I like to lose myself in the rise and fall of the warm bosom of the world. We all come from water, don’t we. Ruby said once it was because I was born under Cancer, a water sign. My preoccupation with water was part of my future. I was going to die in the water, she said. It was a prevision of my own death. Ruby was full of weird shit like that — sorry, unshit. Sorry, Ruby. You know Ruby, don’t You? Course You do.

Ruby was an air sign. I think that was it. She told me, smiling, that she was going to go out flying through the air. We laughed over that idea, Ruby flapping imaginary wings and crowing like a bird. That was before the fire, before she fell apart. Before I deserted her.

Her ladyship wants to see you — right now.

How to convey the venom in those words? She just spat them out at me. I was always at a loss in the face of genuine emotion. I stared at her. Yes, Miss Parker, I said, putting down my dustcloth.

She’s in the little sitting room. Don’t leave your cloth lying on the table, you useless girl.

Yes, Miss Parker.

The sun shone outside. I know because it made the motes I released, in dusting, dance in the light. Morning sunlight, not afternoon. I don’t know what day of the week it was. Not a Thursday. I had a half-day off on Thursday.

Where are you going now? The sitting room is that way.

To the pantry, to put away my cloth, I said.

Didn’t you hear me? She wants to see you right now.

Turning me around and pushing me at the stairs. She liked putting her hands on me, Parky. She was bigger than I.

Will you hold my dustcloth for me? I asked.

Do I look like a housemaid? Of course not.

The uniform had no pockets. What should I do with my cloth then? I asked.

Parker got even angrier. Can’t you solve even the simplest problems for yourself, you piece of Canuck farm trash? she asked contemptuously.

Who’s Canuck? I asked indignantly.

Funny to think of now, but not then. I’d never have thought of myself as anything but English. Don’t ever forget that you were born in Gloucestershire, my mama told me. Canada was a stepmother, cruel and unfeeling. I lived like Snow White, dreaming of a jewelled birthright across the sea. I hung onto a mother country with all an orphan’s strength. A funny thing.

Parker walked to the sitting room with me, a lot of exercise for her. She was all flushed and red in the face. Passion and a bad heart. She knocked on the door and then stood back as I entered alone. Lady Margaret didn’t get up from behind the desk. Just sat there, controlled, playing with the small gold cufflink.

You sent for me, milady? I said.

And now You’ve sent for me. And I’m scared, and guilty, the way I was with milady.

If I were You, I’d resent all the years that Rose Rolyoke spent serving others instead of You. Serving Mama, and the Rolyokes, and Robbie, and Harriet, and all my customers.

A life of service. Sounds good, doesn’t it. But I’m not good. Not
really. I’m not anything, really, not right now, small and struggling with the alarms going off outside and people running.

Mama, Mama.

Above my head, swaying back and forth, the bars of the birdcage flash. Pretty birds. Pretty pretty. And they sound so soft and quiet.

All the noise outside.

“There there,” says Mama. “There there, my pretty.” That’s me. And the lights go out.

A second of silence, and then everybody starts hurrying around again in the dark.

Where are the birds, I wonder. I can’t see them any more.

I’m not too worried. I am a little hungry, though. I start to cry.

“There there,” says Mama. Holding me tight.

The house was small and insecure, sagging between its two neighbours in the row like a tired toddler between two parents. So small it didn’t have a full second storey, just a staircase up to a single room. Are you sure you wouldn’t want anything grander? said the real estate agent with the big ears.

Robbie looked at me.

We have five thousand dollars, I said.

More money than I’d ever handled before, and I wasn’t going to waste any of it. I’d found the bank draught in the pocket of my going-away dress. Light blue, with buttons going down the front and a high neck. I’d picked it out at Macilheeny’s on Market Street in Philadelphia, on a sunny afternoon in early autumn, flies buzzing against the big west windows with their dark wood mullions. Macilheeny himself waited on us, a smirking sharp-eyed pleaser with a deep bow for Mr. Rolyoke.

Do you like it, Rose? he asked me, while Macilheeny pulled my sleeve straight.

It’s beautiful, I said.

Fine, then. We’ll take it.

Mr. Rolyoke drew out his wallet. Macilheeny fawned.

That morning — no, it would have been the morning before — the morning before we bought the dress I was standing in front of Lady Margaret in the small library, listening to things I didn’t understand.

You’ll have to go, she said.

I nodded but wondered why.

You will never see him again, she said.

Why not? Is he dead? I said, aghast.

She didn’t reply. I asked again, feeling quite upset. If he was dead I wanted to know it. Has there been some kind of accident? I began.

There has been a grave miscalculation, my good slattern — and you have made it. Get out of my house this instant!

I’d have been — just — nineteen? No idea what she was talking about. I felt odd inside, had felt odd all day, wondered if maybe I was coming down with influenza. The new girl’s sister was recovering from it; she’d been pretty bad, said the new girl.

Yes, milady, I said, remembering her title now that it wouldn’t do me any good. Now that I didn’t need it.

From behind me, a welcome voice.

Excuse me, said Mr. Rolyoke, entering the room in a cloud of pipe smoke, with a smile for me and for his wife, and a dismissive wave for Miss Parker, whom he had discovered listening outside the door.

Why can I not remember more of the night we had together? The night that made the child. A whispered greeting I recall, but the love and tenderness and leaving are gone. Next morning I woke
from a dream of fulfilment with a heaviness on me, a sense of dread and unremembered loss. And it was my birthday.

What was he like? I don’t know. What was Robbie like? Good and kind, fond of a laugh, and of me, not a thinker or a doer, nor yet a dreamer, which doesn’t leave much, does it? He was nice and, before I married him, rich. Is that why I married him? Because he was nice? Because he was rich? Because I was pregnant and he was there? All good reasons. No. I married for no good reason. All part of the service.

Dr. Sylvester wore a concerned look. Harriet’s hand was on my arm. I smiled at the doctor. How many genuinely handsome men do you meet?

Mrs. Rolyoke, are you paying attention?

Yes, doctor, I said.

Mother, are you all right?

I’m fine, I told my daughter, more harshly than I meant to. Why are we so often harsh to those who love us? Is it because we can’t stand pity, or to disappoint them? Because they care too much, or not enough? I was just thinking, I told Harriet.

Yes, Mother.

She was mad at me. Maybe that’s why I spoke so harshly — there’s a coat of frustration underneath the caring, and frustration is a darker colour, hard to paint over.

Go on, doctor, I said. I’m listening.

He pointed his face at me but I could tell he was speaking to Harriet.

The medical tests are all negative, he said. Bloodwork, urinalysis, electrolytes — everything is normal. No diabetes or thyroid abnormality, no kidney or liver disease.

He consulted some notes here, nodding his head.

The ESR rate is negative, he went on, which means there’s nothing blocking blood flow to the brain. There’s no vitamin deficiency, blood and urine and CSF screens are all clean. No endocrine abnormality.

He looked up at me. I guess I’m pretty healthy then, I said.

You are a fine physical specimen, he said.

Well well. I smiled. You’re not so bad yourself, I told him, but he didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile. Not used to taking compliments. Harriet looked pained.

What’s wrong? I said.

How long ago would this have been, now — not too long. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. These days time collapses like a folding chair. Or a road map — if you don’t fold it up right you end with a pleated mess. That’s the way time works for me right now.

Robbie didn’t know about the bank draught. The old man likes you, he said when I showed it to him, in our Niagara Falls hotel room.

Why can’t I remember Robbie better? A restless man who looked younger than he was. Kind, distracted, surprisingly good at managing Accounts Receivable. Curling ruddy hair like so many of his mother’s family: I’ve seen photogravures of an Ainslie great aunt who looked exactly like Robbie from the neck up.

I liked the cosy house on Waverley Street, but I said no to the real estate agent. Too much, I said. He asked what we would be able to pay. I told him.

But that’s a lot less, he said.

Robbie climbed up the stairs. Pretty dim it looked up there, from the sunny living room. The faint rumble of the streetcars two
blocks to the north sounded like far-off thunder. From the front window I could see down to the foot of the street, where the pavement ended and the sand began. Lake Ontario, the water I’d always known, it seemed. I was ready to call this place home. Would you reconsider your first offer, ma’am? said the estate agent. I know the vendors are anxious to sell. Won’t you make another offer?

Look, Rose, said Robbie, craning down from the upstairs, his face poking through the turned wooden bars of the railing. He made a face like a little child or a gargoyle, sticking out his tongue and glaring. I smiled up at him.

Just a few hundred dollars more, said the estate agent. Please, ma’am.

No, I said.

Please, Mrs. Rolyoke.

No.

A sigh from beyond the veil that falls over me now and then. I can’t seem to push the veil aside, but sometimes I can hear the world through it.

If you don’t eat you’ll feel really sick, and we wouldn’t want that.

Now there’s a gap in the darkness, like a policeman with a flashlight looming out of the night. I can see my favourite nurse, the one with the tight grey hair and nobby nose, holding out a spoon full of whatever it is I’m supposed to be eating.

Oh, hello, I say.

Hello, Mrs. Rolyoke.

What is that? I ask.

Rice pudding.

She’s kidding. I know what rice pudding looks like, and it isn’t that. Actually, there are two kinds of rice pudding and neither one
of them is that. My mama used to make rice pudding on top of the stove, thin gruel with milk and sugar and sometimes an egg for thickening. It tasted good, after cabbage — well, what wouldn’t? My daddy used to go off to the barn without finishing his pudding. Mama and I would huddle together over the table to share the rest of his bowl, a spoon for me and a spoon for her. Hers was bigger than mine.

And there’s another way to make rice pudding, a grand and elegant one in the oven with raisins and currants and extra eggs and cinnamon on top. Sometimes Parker made it for Mr. Davey, the chauffeur, if he’d run an errand for her. I wonder if she’d have made it for him if he hadn’t run the errand. He shared with me, and I remember the feeling of wonder I had, all that cooked rich goodness. I tried to compliment Parker but she snorted and turned away.

No, I say to my nurse. I turn away my head. Just like Parky, only my face isn’t red and I’m not filled with self-disgust. I like rice pudding, I say.

Then try some.

She doesn’t understand. What I mean is I like rice pudding and this isn’t rice pudding.

Please, she says.

I hate it when they beg. I make a no no motion with my head, back and forth, tick tock like a clock, back and forth.

Robbie loved the house. He liked the neighbourhood, with all the houses close and friendly, and the front porches with people sitting out in the cool of the summer evening. He liked the smell of the lake and the hot pavement, and summer strangers walking by with picnics and beach umbrellas. In the winter he liked the quiet, the
empty cold, the walls of ice piled up around the edge of the lake. But mostly he liked to walk around the block, smoking that ridiculous pipe he never got to draw properly, maybe pushing Harriet in her pram, smiling at the people he recognized, and then come home. His face would light up when he rounded any of the corners from which he could catch a glimpse of our house. Rosie’s house, he insisted on calling it. But he liked it too. Maybe he hadn’t ever had anything of his own either.

Yes, the eaves hung unevenly, and the trough we put in didn’t attach properly, so that in a rainstorm you could look out on a solid wall of water rolling down off the sagging roof and into the shaded climbing garden at the back.

Not much scope for flowers: a few yards of lawn in the back, even less in the front. I dug out the beds and planted — this was new for me — seeds and bulbs I’d bought. Cleaning out the basement I’d come across the book of Victorian flower language,
Love Letters from a Victorian Garden
, a thin foxed volume smelling of brickdust and rot, with a picture of motherwort on the cover. I found out that motherwort means
concealed love
— a powerful idea. I read the book over and over again, the only book in my whole life I have read more than once, surprising in myself a silent but unmistakable thrill at an instinctive understanding of a strict, arbitrary, and severely limited form of communication. Flowers are silent too, and patient, and impossible to deflect from their appointed purpose. Easy to harm but hard to kill off entirely. I sympathized with flowers. Nursing Harriet may have had something to do with my mood. Lots of time awake, with nothing to do except be there. Love. I remember thinking about love flowing out of me with my milk, filling my baby up so that she rolled over and went to sleep stuffed with love. She burped love and cried love,
and threw love up all over her new nursery clock, a birthday present from Mama and Bill. Robbie, just home from work, looked pleased at the mess. He hated that clock, which chimed out the first notes of a Silly Symphony every hour. When Harriet smiled up at her daddy, standing in the nursery doorway in his last year’s suit and tie, he began to chuckle.