The Rose Garden (27 page)

Jimmy, the little baby, was Rose's pet. Dom liked him, but Rose clung to him, and when he fretted she would hang over the side of his cradle and talk to him, and dangle toys in front of him, and try to make him laugh.

Mary and Dom were not long married when Mary began to nag at him to give up his job at the draper's. Her reason for doing this, which she could not reveal to him, was that she could not bear to let people see him smile. She was unsmiling herself, as her father had been, and she believed that people only smiled in order to curry favor. People like herself, at any rate. “People like us,” she was always saying, “people like us,” but she did not know what
she meant, unless it was that the rest of the people in the world were better off, or that they had some fortunate secret, or were engaged in a conspiracy in which she was not included.

Dom's smile did not disturb her until one afternoon she went over to the draper's to buy the makings of a dress for herself. She did not want him to wait on her, because she was ashamed to let him know how many yards it took to go around her, but she watched him with a customer, and it was then, against his own background of trying to sell and trying to please strangers, that she saw the history of his hopeful, uncertain smile, as he eagerly hauled down rolls of cloth and spread them out for inspection. After that day she gave him no peace till she got him out of his job. She told him that he could take over the running of her shop, and Dom liked that idea, because he had always wanted to be his own man, but he was just as anxious-faced behind her counter as he had ever been, and she gradually edged him back into the kitchen, out of sight.

She only wanted to take care of him, and protect him from people. She had known from a child that if she asked she would get, because of her deformity. She had always seen people getting ready to be nice to her because they pitied her and looked down on her. Everyone was inclined to pity her. How could they help themselves? She was an object for pity. The dead weight of her body, which she felt at every step, was visible to all the world. She almost had to kneel to walk. Even her hair was heavy, a dense black rug down her back. She was always afraid people might think she was asking for something. She always tried to get away from people as quickly as she could, before they got it into their heads that she was waiting for something. What smile could she give that would not be interpreted as a smile for help? In fact, that is what she thought herself—that if she smiled at them it would only be to ingratiate herself, because she had no other reason to
smile, since she hated them all. If she had said out loud why she hated them, she would have said it was because they were too well off, and stuck up, and too full of themselves. But she never would give them an opening for their smiles and greetings, and she came to feel that she had defeated them, and shut them all out. To have rescued Dom's weakness from their sight, and from their scornful pity—that was a triumph, although she was unable to share it with him, since she did not know how to explain to him that while she thought he was good enough, other people would never think him good enough, and therefore she had to save him from them, and hide him behind herself.

To pass the time, Dom began to do odd jobs around the house. Once in a while he took a broom and swept the upstairs rooms. Sometimes he got a hammer and some nails and wandered around, trying to tighten the floor boards or the stair boards, but the rigid, overstrained joints and joinings of the house rejected the new nails and spat them back out again before the tinny glitter had even worn off their heads. He often spent the whole day at a game of patience, and when Mary came back out of the shop to see about their middle-of-the-day meal, he would be sitting hunched over the kitchen table, with the cards spread out in front of him and a full cup of cold tea, left over from his breakfast, at his elbow. When Rose got to be big enough, he liked to tell her about the days when he was a draper, and he collected a few reels of thread, and some needles and pins, and bound some pieces of scrap cloth into near rolls, and the two of them would play shop for hours.

Before Rose was born, Dom scrubbed out the old cradle in the kitchen, and polished it till it shone. The cradle had been there for Mary, and after she grew out of it it was used as a receptacle for old and useless things of the house. Before Dom scrubbed it, Mary cleared it out. It was a huge wooden cradle, dark brown and almost as big as a coffin, but seeming more roomy than a coffin, and it had
a great curved wooden hood half covering it that made the interior very gloomy. It stood on clumsy wooden rockers. There was no handle to rock it by. Mary remembered her father's hand on the side of it, and the shape of his nails. She had slept in the cradle, in the kitchen, until she was four, or nearly five. Her father had looked after her himself, so the cradle was left within easy distance of the shop. She could well remember her father looking in at her. Sometimes a woman would look in at her, but her father did not encourage visitors. He had the idea that all women were trying to marry him, or to get him to marry again, and he kept them out.

If Mary made a sudden movement, or jumped around, the cradle would rock far to the left and far to the right on its thick, curved rockers, and she knew that no power on earth could stop it until in the course of time it stopped itself. If she tried to clamber out, the cradle would start its deliberate plunging, right, left, right, left, and she would cower down with her face hidden in the bottom until the cradle was still under her again. She was always afraid alone in the dark bottom of the house. Her father slept upstairs. At night she would see his face, darkened by the candle he held aloft, and then the very last thing she would see was his shadow falling against the shallow, twisting staircase.

In the cradle, when she set about emptying it, Mary found a dark-red rubber ball with pieces torn, or rotted, out of it, and some folded, wrinkled bills, and a new mousetrap, never used, and a pipe of her father's, and two empty medicine bottles with the color of the medicines still on the bottoms of them, and a lot of corks, big and little, and a man's cloth cap, and a stiff, dusty wreath of artificial white flowers from her own First Communion veil, and a child's prayer book, her own, with the covers torn off.

When they were first married, Dom used to walk to early Mass with Mary on Sunday, but after a while he began making excuses,
and they got into the habit of attending different Masses. She continued to go to the early Mass, and he would go later. When Rose started to walk, he took her with him. He would wash her, and do her hair, and see that her shoes were polished, and then she would give Mary a kiss goodbye and run off down the street after him.

One weekday morning, about a year before he died, Dom gave Mary the shock of her life. Instead of lying on in bed, as he usually did, he got up at seven-thirty, and shaved himself, and did himself up the way he used to in the days when he was at the draper's. When she saw him go out, she said nothing, but after a few minutes she locked the shop door, and went back and sat down at the kitchen table. People came knocking, but Mary paid no attention, and when Rose came to stand beside her she pushed her gently away. At three in the afternoon, she told Rose to mind the baby, and she put on her hat, and her Sunday coat, and went out looking for Dom. There was no sign of him on any street. At the draper's she stood and looked in, but he was not there. The man who had taken his place was only a youngster, very polite and sure of himself, she could see that. It occurred to her that even if she met Dom, she'd hardly know what to say, so she turned around and went home.

“Oh, I thought I would never see you again!” Mary cried.

Dom did not look up, but Rose looked up from her bead box.

Dom asked, “What put that idea in your head?”

“I thought you'd gone off on me.”

“Can't a man even go for a walk now, without the house being brought down around him?”

“I was full sure you were gone for good, when I saw you walking out of the door this morning. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what I was going to do.”

“Where would I go, will you tell me that?”

“Is that all you have to say to me, after the fright you've given me—that you have no place to go to? Is that the only reason you came back?”

“Rose,” he said, turning from the stove. “Give us a look at the little necklace you're making there.”

Mary got the tea ready. When they were all sitting at the table, she said loudly, “I suppose it was on Rose's account you came back. You were afraid I wouldn't take good enough care of her, I suppose?”

“That's a nice thing to say in front of the child,” he said.

“You take her part against me.”

“Somebody has to take her part.”

“And who's to take my part?”

“Aren't you able to look after yourself?”

“I wish to God she'd been born crooked the way I was. There'd have been no pet child then.”

“God forgive you for saying the like of that!” he shouted, and he jumped up out of his chair and made for the stairs.

“God has never forgiven me for anything!” she screamed after him, and she put her head down against the edge of the table.

Rose slipped around the table and put her arm around Mary's neck. “I'll mind you, Mammy,” she said.

Mary looked at her. Rose had her father's uncertain smile, but on her face it was more eager. Mary saw the smile, and saw the champion spirit already shining out of Rose's eyes.

“Who asked you to mind me?” she said. “Go on and run after your father. You're the little pet. We all know that. Only get out of my sight and stay out.”

Rose got very red and ran upstairs. Mary got to her feet and lumbered up after her. Dom was lying on the bed with Rose alongside him.

Mary said, “Nobody's asking you to stay here! Nobody's keeping
you. What's stopping you from going off—and take her with you. Go on off, the two of you.”

“I wish to God I could,” Dom said. “I declare to God I wish I could, and I'd take her with me, never fear.”

That night, as they lay in bed, Dom said, “Mary, I'm terrible sorry about what I said to you today. I don't know what got into me.”

“Oh, Dom, never mind about it,” she said. “I gave you good reason.”

Encouraged by these words, she put her arms around him. With his body in her arms, she was comforted. That is what she wanted—to be allowed to hold him. She thought it was all she wanted—to be allowed to hold a person in her arms. Out of all the world, only he would allow her. No one else would allow her. No one else could bear to let her come near them. The children would allow her, but their meager bodies would not fill her arms, and she would be left empty anyway.

As Dom fell into sleep, his body grew larger and heavier against her. Holding him, she felt herself filled with strength. Now if she took her arms from him and stretched herself out, she would touch not the bed, and not even the floor or the walls of the room, but the roofs of the houses surrounding her, and other roofs beyond them, far out to the outer reaches of the town. She felt strong and able enough to encircle the whole town, a hundred men and women. She could feel their foreheads and their shoulders under her hands, and she could even imagine that she saw their hands reaching out for her, as though they wanted her.

In all her life, there was no one had ever wanted her. All the want was hers. She never knew, or wondered, if she loved or hoped or despaired. It was all the one thing to her, all want. She said every day, “I love God,” because that is what she had been taught to say, but the want came up out of herself, and she knew
what she meant by it. She said, “I want the rose garden. I want it,” she said. “I want to see it, I want to touch it, I want it for my own.” She could not have said if it was her hope or her despair that was contained in the garden, or about the difference between them, or if there was a difference between them. All she knew was what she felt. All she felt was dreadful longing.

When Father Mathews found that Mary wouldn't allow him to get one of the neighbors up to take his place at the bedside, he didn't know what to do. It seemed un-Christian and unfeeling to leave her alone, but he was dying to stretch his legs and get a breath of fresh air, and above all he wanted to get away out of the room. He decided that the most likely thing would be to talk his way out, and so he said again what he had said before—that Dom's fortitude was an example to the whole parish, and that he had left his children a priceless legacy of faith and humility, that the priest and the teachers at the school would have a special interest in the bereaved little ones, and that Dom's soul was perhaps even at this instant interceding for them all before the throne of the Almighty.

“What about me, Father?” Mary asked.

“What was that?” asked Father Mathews.

“What about me, Father? That's all I'm asking you.”

“Oh, Mrs. Lambert, your heart is heavy now, but have no fear. God will comfort you in His own time and in His own way.”

“I might have known you wouldn't give me a straight answer, Father.”

“Mrs. Lambert, Our Blessed Lord enjoins us to have
faith,
” Father Mathews said gently.

He was developing a headache out of the endless talk, in this airless room, with no sleep all night, and he was beginning to wonder if he hadn't already done more than his duty.