The Rose Garden (35 page)

The Door on West Tenth Street

B
luebell the old black Labrador retriever is going to have a holiday from the city. She is going to Katonah, a distant suburb of New York, where she will have trees, grass, hedges, night-smells of earth, and, at a distance, a road to watch, and passing cars. She will have a house of her own, to guard. There is a field in Katonah where she can run as hard as she likes, and, not far away, a lake where she will swim, holding her head high, pouring herself through the water while her big, heavy old body feels light again and her legs stretch themselves. In the lake in Katonah, Bluebell's short, thick, powerful sea legs will stretch themselves until all the dull constriction of city sidewalks and city streets crumbles away from her webbed paws and from inside her muscles. Her legs will become sleek again and they will do what they like, sending her through the water at exquisite speed, so that the people watching her think, Why would anybody want to go faster than Bluebell, and how can anybody bear to go more slowly than she goes when she swims?

Bluebell is a changeling, anxious to please, but water is her element, and when she swims she becomes herself, a solitary reveler
with a big, serious, courageous head and a store of indifference that make it seem sometimes that she might never come back to land. She always comes back, shaking herself so that the water springs off her and her fur stands up in spikes. And after shaking she stands for a minute, staring about her with the mad cousinly friendliness of her true cousin, the dolphin. She is ready for anything. At that moment, wet and rakish from her swim, Bluebell seems to have traveled to earth from a far distance—from the bottom of the sea, twenty thousand fathoms down, where the Fish King has his court. The Fish King never speaks, not even to say “Now” or “At once.” His words are made of thunder and they reverberate at his will. Great sounds issue from him—sounds of wrath, sounds of mirth, and sounds of hunger. But he never speaks. He sits in oceanic silence under an immense floating canopy that is really an upturned lake of fresh clear water, and in its blue depths and shallows small green flowers and silver goldfish play games with the sunlight that was trapped in the water on the day the lake was stolen—a Monday in Norway, centuries ago. Bluebell has seen the Fish King and his canopy, and she knows his palace guard of dignified young whales, and the thousand sequined mermaids who are his dancing girls. She was at home with them, and she is at home with us. She has seen everything. It is written in her face, in her sad, bright eyes. There is hardly anything she does not know, except when to stop eating. Her true memories are ancestral—they haunt her sleep. In daily life, the compromise she makes is wholehearted, but there is nothing in it of acquiescence. Housebound, she remains herself. She is a dog.

But today Bluebell is going to the country. She is going to Katonah, where her big, hungry nose will find something to smell besides concrete and stone and lampposts, and gutters that seem interesting but that always prove unresponsive in the end. Bluebell
does not know that her leash is going to be put away for a month. To her, this is an ordinary day, and it starts as usual in her Greenwich Village apartment. She rouses from her sleep on the bedroom floor, on a dark, flowery carpet that is thin and worn to pale string in spots—a length salvaged from the acres of carpeting that once covered the lobbies and stairs of one of those majestic old New York hotels that disappeared last year, or the year before, or the year before that. The carpet smells of Bluebell's sleep and of the cats' sleep and of the vacuum cleaner, but that is all. There are no memories in it, no echoes of country grass and leaves and earth, no bits of sand, no woodsmoke, no pine needles, nothing of the house by the ocean in East Hampton, where Bluebell lived for most of her life. This is an apartment carpet, anonymous, warm, comfortable, and dull. No field mice ever ran across it, flying for their lives from the cats; no field mice, no moles, no chipmunks, no baby rabbits. Once a regiment of tiny black city ants marched across it and disappeared into the wall. And once an enormous black water bug hurried out of the bathroom and across the carpet in the direction of the kitchen. And a soft, pale-green caterpillar, a visitor from nowhere, crawled timidly about in the dark foliage of the old carpet for a little while before he curled up to die. But that is all. It is a poor, boring carpet, and Bluebell yawns when she wakes up, ignoring it. She stands and stretches and looks about her, showing she is ready for her walk.

Bluebell's walk takes her around Washington Square, and as she passes the doorman of the big apartment house on the corner he grins and says, as he does every morning, “Hello, Old-Timer.” Bluebell is nearly eleven years old, and her young, original, shining black face is disguised by a dusty mask of gray hairs, gray eyebrows, gray muzzle, and long gray jaws. The mask makes her comical, and people smile when they see her and say, “Oh, my,
that's an old dog.” People walking behind her smile, too, because, although her thick, heavy tail is still coal black, her behind is gray and it waggles importantly as she goes along. But however she goes, trotting, cantering, plodding, or simply dawdling, she always looks what she is—a dog out of water, not at ease in the city but putting up with it very well. She is amiable, although not particularly obedient, and she accepts her leash and makes her way, leading with her strong, wide-set shoulders and getting all she can out of this strange world where she has to behave like a clockwork dog who can go only in squares, circles, and straight lines. And she searches. She keeps looking for a black door in a little white house on West Tenth Street. Twice on her walks she happened on that door and refused to pass it, struggling to get into the house and even barking once, but for weeks now, for months, she has not seen it.

The house belongs to a man who took Bluebell to Montauk for six weeks last summer, and when she sees the door on West Tenth Street she knows what lies behind it—a cliff dropping into the Atlantic Ocean. Bluebell loves that cliff, which gave her a wild dash to her morning swim and, on her way back, countless difficult crannies to dig and burrow into. The house on West Tenth Street looks like a real house, and no one passing it would dream that all of Montauk lies behind it—the cliff, the sand, and the ocean. Everything worthwhile is there behind that door, which Bluebell knows is closed only to hide the sea from dogs who are not going there. She has not seen that door for a long time now, but she has not lost hope. She watches for it. She looks for it everywhere, on all the streets east and west of Fifth Avenue, and along Fifth Avenue, and along University Place, and on Fourth Avenue, and on Seventh Avenue, and on little Gay Street and on Cornelia Street and even on Bleecker Street, behind the stalls of vegetables
and fruit, but she is never confused into thinking that a strange door is the door she wants. There is only one door on West Tenth Street, and she will know it when she sees it again.

Even in the city, Bluebell had adventures. As she walked around Washington Square Park one morning, she came alongside a very, very old man sitting alone on one of the benches that line the paths around the grass. He was more than old, he was ancient, and although it was a glowing day, Indian summer, he was warmly dressed in an overcoat and a muffler and a crumpled gray hat, and he wore laced boots, and his hands were clasped together on his walking stick, and his eyes were closed. Bluebell passed very close to him, and he may have heard her dramatic breathing as she pressed on in her pursuit of the Atlantic Ocean (hiding behind that door on West Tenth Street, so near, but where?), because he opened his eyes and saw her. He didn't smile, but he looked at her. “Hello, Snowball,” he said, thoughtfully. “How are you doing, Snowball?” Then he closed his eyes again and went on sitting by himself in the warm sun.

Another time Bluebell found a dead sparrow lying at a grassy corner in the center of the Square, where the fountain is. (Where the fountain
was.
It has been dry for a long time.) The sparrow, no bigger than a withered leaf, lay on his side, with his wings folded and his legs close together. He was a very neat little dead body. A wild bird, his fate was strange anyway—to share a shabby city park with hungry, watchful pigeons, big fellows. How old had he been when he learned to dash in among them and grab his crumb? He must have been strong and clever to survive to his full size. His cleverness was finished now, and the story of his life was not even history—it was a big mystery that he had never known anything about, and that was wrapped about him now as he lay by the grass.
He lay there, with the secret of his nature in open sight for anybody to look at; but only to look at, not to touch, not really to see, never to understand. He was a sparrow, whatever that is. Samuel Butler said life is more a matter of being frightened than of being hurt. And the sparrow might have replied, “But Mr. Butler, being frightened hurts.”

Bluebell looked at the sparrow, and then she sat down and began to contemplate him. There was nothing to smell, but the light breeze blowing from the south, from Sullivan Street, touched a loose feather and it stood up and waved, a tiny flag the color of dust. That was all. It was quite otherwise with the mighty pheasant, an emperor pheasant, Bluebell found dead on the beach in East Hampton one autumn morning, her third autumn by the ocean, years ago. That was an unearthly morning—one mislaid at the beginning of the world and recovered in East Hampton under a high and massive sky of Mediterranean blue. An Italian sky, a young and delighted ocean, a blazing sun; and far away on the white sand something crimson that caught the wind. The wind was so new that it blew cold, in its first rush across the world, but the air was soft. The pheasant's head and body were almost buried in the powdery sand, but he had fallen with his wings wide open, and one of them slanted up to make a wedge of color in the air.

That autumn morning was early in November—the time of year when millions of small stones appeared in flattened wind formations at intervals along the lower part of the beach, where the sand is hard and flat near the water's edge. Some of the stones are as big as walnuts and some are as small as grains of rice, and they lie tightly packed, a harsh sea fabric, while their faint colors—ivory, green, silver, coral—are always vague, almost vanishing, always about to dissolve into the stone. Bluebell used to race along the beach until she was almost out of sight, and at that distance, far away, she became a big black insect with four waving
legs and a waving tail and wings that were either transparent or folded. Because it was impossible that a creature who skimmed so confidently and at such speed across the sand and in and out of the water and along the top of the dunes should not also be able to fly up and away and out to sea, with the sea gulls. The sea gulls detested Bluebell and flew off screeching with irritation whenever they saw her hurrying toward them. They stood in a long single line, staring at the water, and waited until she came close to them before they took flight. Their feet left a delicate tracery of pointed marks, a Chinese pattern, in the clean wet sand. Bluebell's big paws made untidy holes in the sand, and sometimes troughs, and even when she did make a recognizable paw mark it was indistinct and awkward, not to be compared with the delicate sea gull imprint. She had attacks of wanting to dig in the sand, and then she dug as frantically as a dervish looking for a place to whirl. She loved to chase her ball into the ocean. She had a succession of balls—red, green, blue, and white, and sometimes striped—but one by one they drifted out to sea while Bluebell stood at attention on the shore and watched them go. She knew the power of the big waves, and how they hurled themselves so far down into the sand that they were able to drag it out from around her legs.

After Christmas, when the storms began, the beach was whipped and beaten into bleak terraces—long ranges of sharp sand cliffs descending from the dunes to a struggling, lead-colored sea that foamed into mountains against the sad sky, while the sea gulls screamed their warnings all day long. One day in January, Bluebell received a present from the grocery shop of an enormous bone, a bone of prehistoric size and weight, a monumental thighbone with great bulging knobs at each end. She took hold of the bone at its narrowest place, in the middle, but even so she had to open her big jaws to their widest and her head was pulled forward by the bone's weight. She straightened up and carried the
bone from the kitchen to the lawn in front of the house, where she placed it on the frozen grass and looked it over tenderly before she started to attack it. Two sea gulls appeared out of the fog and circled about not far above her, watching for a chance at the bone, and the day was so strange that the sea gulls seemed to speak as natural claimants for the fog that was taking possession of the house. It was a dark-white day under a lightless sky and the view was ghostly. The small grove of trees at the end of the driveway had become a dim outpost, and to the left of the house, toward the ocean, there was nothing to be seen except shapes formed by the fog. Outside the house only the two sea gulls and Bluebell with her bone had substance. The fog reached the windows as the afternoon wore on, and night came to find the house shrouded, lost, hidden, invisible, abandoned except by the ocean, which filled each room with the sound of eternity, great waves gathering themselves for the clash with earth and darkness. Bluebell had been in and out of the house all day. About seven in the evening she cried to be let in, but when the door was opened to her she backed away from the light and was immediately lost except for her face, a thin gray mask with imploring eyes looking out of the fog. Her eyes were pleading, not for permission to come in but for permission to bring her bone into the house. She vanished and reappeared a minute later, a transparent dog face that held in its ghostly jaws the great bone, which glowed phosphorescent, while beyond it four round diamonds flamed suddenly—two of the cats returning from their usual night-watch. There was no moon that night; no moon, no stars, no clouds, no sky, no real world—only the little house settling slowly into its place in safest memory, guarded by the silence that poured out of the voices of the waves.