The Rose Garden (38 page)

Mary Ann could only imagine all that. What was certain was that Bluebell no longer decorated the front of the house for hours in the morning and during the afternoon. Now she was always
away, off somewhere, following the children into their house and out of it again, and traveling with them along the beach and over the golf course and even into the village. Bluebell had another secret now to lay on top of the eternal secret that was guarded, or imprisoned, by her animal silence. She had a new world of her own that was free of the cats and free of Mary Ann, but she showed her independence of them only at the moment of her departure from the house and the moment of her return to it. These days, when she went out in the morning, she was purposeful, and her eyes turned at once to the house on the dunes to see if anyone was out and about. And when she came back and her own door was opened to her, she burst in, breathless, and threw herself on the floor, unable to speak for exhaustion and importance. While she panted, her tail hammered on the floor and her eyes roved wildly around the room, reclaiming everything she saw, but most of all reclaiming Mary Ann. “I choose you,” Bluebell's eyes said to Mary Ann, “you, you,” and her gaze turned fervently to the kitchen, where her dinner waited.

The cats showed a faint, lazy interest in all this commotion. The biggest of them, the bright orange, sat up and then stood up and stretched, and lay down again, wrapping himself up in his own coat. “I am ignoring you,” each cat said, opening its eyes just enough to show a gleam of light, and then, closing its eyes again, each cat said, as always, “I choose myself.”

But the moment had arrived when East Hampton, with its waves and sand and its wide golf course and its ponds of wild water birds and its fine main street and its hilly green graveyard, was about to be revealed all over again by the new light. Mary Ann heard the first birds, the smallest ones, who sing suddenly at the end of darkness. She listened to their sweet voices, and then she stood up and went to open the front door. It was still night out, but the darkness had retreated into the bushes and trees. She could see
the sky shifting. It was the moment she liked, because it proved she was right and that nothing was real. It was also the moment when the cats went out to kill. She looked around the room and saw the big orange, the little black favorite, the long-haired wild one, and the quiet calico. Only Tom, the secret hunter, was absent. Tom hunted alone and far away and never, thank God, brought his little victims into the house. Mary Ann walked through the empty blue-floored room that led to her small kitchen and heated a saucepan of milk and gave it to the cats, hoping to lull them back to sleep and sloth. She turned out the light in the kitchen and saw the dim blue world outside. It was nearly time for the sea gulls to start their march inland. She would have liked to go outside to watch them, but the one morning she had gone out, her long white robe had startled them, and they had risen up in outrage and gone away screeching that their day was ruined.

She went upstairs and stood at her bedroom window, which faced the sea. The sea gulls were just appearing, coming in from the beach and lining up along the top of the long rise that banked the road going down to the sea. They began to walk at once, taking their usual path, which brought them at an angle across the golf course and down the children's lawn to Mary Ann's house. Now the golf course was ghostly with them, and they continued to advance, white birds that whitened and grew bigger as they drew closer. They all walked. The few that flew up descended to the ground at once and started walking again. Some sailed while they walked, showing their wings. They came this way every morning, sometimes more of them and sometimes fewer, and the leaders always stopped at the far edge of the narrow driveway that separated her lawn from the children's. A few steps more would have brought the sea gulls to the walls of her house, but they never took the last few steps, and no matter how close they came they always seemed to be very far away. They walked like emperors, or like
jockeys, or like stoics. They knew the ocean, and kept vigil by it in regimental rows, and they screamed against patience, and walked for their health on expensive grass, and Mary Ann thought they knew themselves and she was baffled by them. They were indomitable. There was no need to fear for them or pity them. In her imagination they were living stones that had found wings to save themselves during some long and drastic fall in forgotten times.

Now the leaders reached the edge of the driveway, the limit of their walk, and paused, and there was a general pause all the way back across the lawn and the golf course, and then they all rose up and flew back to the sea. To watch the sea gulls go was like watching the snow stop falling. You couldn't say when the last flake fell, and you could not mark the last sea gull. Mary Ann turned from the window and looked at her bed, which was very large and took up most of the room. She had closed the bedroom door after her, but Bluebell had slipped in with her and was now curled humbly on a corner of the pink quilt. “All right, Bluebell,” Mary Ann said, “as long as you're here,” and she lay down and pulled the quilt over her and fell asleep, knowing unrepentantly that the sun had risen.

Late in the morning, wide awake and dressed at last, she heard the children on her front lawn, and she went out to wish them a happy Fourth of July. The children were going to the big fireworks display in the evening. Mary Ann was not going. The children teased Bluebell while they talked to Mary Ann, and as they talked they straggled irresolutely toward the driveway. They were on their way to the pond to take a boat out, but they were delaying. They were taking their time. Like Mary Ann, they had all the time in the world today. It was the Fourth of July, and the hours were turning in slow motion. There was nothing to do that had to be done, except wait for the fireworks to begin, and the children were finding time for long farewells to Bluebell, who could not go
in the boat with them because she was too heavy. “Too heavy and too slippery,” the eldest boy said. One time they had taken her in the boat, and she rocked them all around the pond.

The youngest girl, Linnet, spoke up. “Bluebell might have drowned us all,” she said.

Linnet was only six. When the others walked, she dawdled behind them or ran after them, and when they stood as they were standing now, she stood in front of them, or at the side, apart from them. She was kneeling at the moment, in the grass beside Bluebell, who sat with her front feet apart and her gaze fixed worshipfully on the eldest boy, the leader in everything but particularly in this boating expedition from which she understood she was to be excluded. She had heard the ban (Bluebell is to
stay
), and she was determined to shame him into changing his mind. But the eldest boy was looking at Linnet, who had announced that Bluebell might have drowned them all. “Listen to her,” he said scornfully. “She wasn't even there.”

The second boy came out of the reverie in which he spent most of his time. “She's talking through her hat,” he said with finality.

Linnet's elder sister, Alice, who was eight and very responsible, looked tolerantly at Linnet. “She wasn't even there,” Alice said. “I wasn't there, either,” she added sensibly.

“I only said
might
have,” Linnet said, and went on stroking Bluebell's anxious, unresponsive neck.

Mary Ann looked at Bluebell, who might have been a murderess. “Bluebell only wanted to drown you so that she could save you,” she said.

The second boy emerged from his reverie for the second time, this time in a seizure of decisiveness. “Let's go,” he said, so abruptly that Mary Ann thought they would all start running, but they still delayed, moving their feet in anticipation.

Bluebell accepted her fate with dignity. She sank to the ground,
composed her paws, and began to gaze coldly past the children's legs at something they couldn't see even if they tried.

Linnet stood up. “I wish it was time to go to the fireworks now,” she said. “I have matches. I found them in the road.” She put her hand into the pocket of her dress and took out a battered white match folder.

Mary Ann took it from her and opened it. The heads of the matches were crumbling, they had been rained on, and they were quite useless. She handed the folder back to Linnet, who returned it carefully to her pocket. “I hope your mother knows you have those matches, Linnet,” Mary Ann said. “You know matches are forbidden.”

“But they're for the fireworks,” Linnet said, and her face took on the dull expression of one who remembers this argument from other times, and the frustration of it, and sees more frustration ahead.

The boys were moving off, laughing unkindly. “She thinks they're going to run out of matches at the fireworks,” the eldest boy said, and the youngest boy doubled up in noisy mirth.

Even Alice, who was so serious, had to smile. “Linnet, you know those matches were run over by a car and
everything,
” she said.

Linnet's faith in her matches was evident in the bitter look she gave them all. But she had her triumph in her pocket, and she was stubborn. She could afford to wait for vindication, and enjoy the last laugh.

The boys set off backward and gradually turned until they were really walking off. “See you later,” they called to Mary Ann.

One of them called, “Goodbye, Bluebell,” and poor Bluebell betrayed herself, starting to attention and staring after them, so tense and ready that for an instant she looked like the royal hunting dog she might have been and sometimes thought she was, in
her sleep, when she stirred and seemed to run, while her gruff baying showed the course and splendor of her dreams.

“Stay, Bluebell, good dog,” Mary Ann said.

“Come on, Linnet,” Alice said, and ran off after her brothers.

“No, wait a minute, Linnet,” Mary Ann said. She wanted to tell Linnet the truth, that the matches were no good, and to prove to her that they were no good, but instead she said feebly, “You know, you shouldn't have those matches, Linnet.”

“But I found them on the road,” Linnet said.

“All right, well, I hope you have a nice boat ride.”

“I will,” Linnet said, keeping her hand in her precious pocket. “Goodbye, Miss Whitty,” she said politely, and she ran off.

Mary Ann watched her running, going more and more slowly as she drew near to the little group waiting impatiently for her by the edge of the road. The road was busy with cars driving down to the beach and driving away from it. The golf course was dotted with figures that moved gravely and then stood still, gravely considering the next move. It is not a very funny game, Mary Ann thought. She wished she had had the courage to show Linnet that her hopes were not only all false but all wrong, considering that they were based on matches that were strictly forbidden. I should have told her, Mary Ann thought sadly. No matter how you look at it, I should have made her see. I don't think they light fireworks with matches, and even if they do they won't run out of them, and even if they run out, Linnet will be much too far out in the crowd to help and even if she got a chance to offer the matches, the matches are no good. One way or another, she is going to be disappointed. But false hope feels the same as real hope, and she is going to have a nice day dreaming. She's not going to have a chance at the fireworks, but that doesn't alter the fact that I should have given her a lecture on obedience and a demonstration of what happens to matches that have been lying out on the road in the rain.

Mary Ann went into her house and let the screen door bang behind her. Bluebell dreamed of rescuing people from drowning, and Linnet dreamed of saving the fireworks extravaganza from disaster, and Mary Ann dreamed of being able to persuade a proud six-year-old girl that when the choice must be made between being a heroine and being a good child, one always chooses to be a good child. Well, I'll see Linnet again before the display, Mary Ann thought, and I'll tell her about the matches. She'll be so excited by that time that she won't care. I'll make a point of seeing her. But I should have told her. I should never have let her go off like that. Linnet and the matches went out of her mind. What came into her mind was the house she stood in, which seemed now like a beached ship, stuck in the middle of the summer weather that only Bluebell was really at home in. The little house was very quiet. Buttoned up in its diamonds, with its shingled roof pulled down about its ears and its left shoulder turned to the ocean, the house seemed to enjoy the summer sun cautiously, as though it knew it wasn't a summer house, and not a seaside house, and, in fact, not a real house. And it wasn't a real house. It wasn't a bit real. The living room, where Mary Ann stood, had been copied from the set of some opera or operetta—
Hansel and Gretel,
Mary Ann had heard, although she would have guessed
Lilac Time.
Whatever it was, and operetta or not, the performance must have depended on a good deal of coming and going, people appearing and disappearing and hurrying through from right to left and from left to right, or looking in, talking, perhaps singing, through the enormous windows in the back wall. A small flight of steps led up and off to the right and another small flight to the left. The living room had five ways out—five exits. Eight, if you counted the diamond-paned windows, which were big enough for two people to vault, scramble, or leap through at one time. Nine exits, if you allowed
the fireplace, which was roomy enough to walk around in and had a chimney that was as big around as a barrel and went straight up through the roof like a tunnel. Mary Ann thought the chimney probably
was
a tunnel, mislaid from another stage set in another house someplace else.
Journey's End?
As a chimney the tunnel did very well. She had no complaints about the fireplace. As a matter of fact, she had no complaints at all, but she could not help wondering what had been going on in the mind of the architect when he made his scale drawing for this room. He had got in all that the action of the operetta called for. There never was so much big detail in a room. Doors and windows and fireplace all stood out in their full theatrical size, all surrounded with big frames of blackened wood, so that you could see from a mile away what you were looking at. Only, there was no room left for walls. The architect forgot about the walls.