The Rose Garden (39 page)

Mary Ann didn't care. It didn't matter. The room pleased her. She had grown fond of it. It was improbable and impermanent, and anyway it was only a stage designed for dialogue and gestures, with two small rooms right and left that were also full of doors and windows, and that were good only for lingering in, because they were anterooms, and as anterooms they resisted furniture the way a cat will resist a collar. Mary Ann had tried several arrangements, but at the moment both rooms were empty. The room with the mauve floor was empty, and the one with the shining dark-blue floor that led to the kitchen was empty. Anterooms were new in Mary Ann's life, and she wanted to have them always. She had not known that rooms could be so content with themselves. But she wondered what the original caretaker had thought when he first stepped into his brand-new living room, with its operatic humility and its need to be explained and its obvious falseness and its meager fate; because it did not even represent a dream but was only the echo of somebody's memory of romantic escape—to a hunting
lodge, a mountain hideaway in Austria, or a secret place in Switzerland. It was a wistful conceit, and it stood here only because this site had presented itself and a house was needed here, for the caretaker. Someone must have thought, Since I cannot have that place at all, I might as well have it here, where I can at least look at it. The little house was not real. It was only a façade that stood at the end of somebody's lawn, and Mary Ann thought it did wonderfully for a person who wanted to live by the Atlantic Ocean but who only wanted to live there for a while.

Late in the afternoon, Mary Ann went upstairs to sleep for a half hour, and she slept so late that she was awakened by the first of the explosions from the fireworks display. It was dusk outside her window, and a few minutes later, standing on the high ground of the children's lawn, where she had a good view of the aerial lights, she felt that the night was cold. A cool, quick wind blew in from the sea. She would build herself a fire when she went back into the house. Bluebell, dutiful, sat beside her, and stared as she did into the distance, where they saw the sky brighten after explosions they heard but could not see, and then they saw shooting stars, streams of brilliance, and dazzling ribbons of color that turned into balloons and garlands and cornucopias as they ascended, to hang for an instant at their highest point and then vanish in glory.

Nearer to Mary Ann, on the beach below the children's house, some people were having a private display, a very minor one. A few arrows of light shot up, and then again, more arrows. Someone was walking on the beach, throwing sparklers as he went. Lawbreakers, Mary Ann thought, disobedient people; everyone is committing sins today.

It had grown very dark, and she had had enough of the fireworks, the legal ones and the illegal ones. Time to go home and make a fire, but instead she went inside and made a martini. She tasted it. It was delicious, but she had made it too soon, and she left
it in the freezing compartment while she virtuously washed string beans and lettuce and turned up the heat in the oven. All the time she was working, she enjoyed the attention of six pairs of animal eyes, five pairs solemn and the sixth pair, Bluebell's, devotional. Every night, Mary Ann gave her cooking demonstration, providing the cats and Bluebell with their favorite entertainment, and every night, as she chopped and peeled and arranged her saucepans on top of the stove, she wondered if it was better to go to a restaurant and have a plate of food brought to you and know that the vegetables will be dreadful or to cook for yourself. While making up her mind, she had become an expert in very small plain dinners, and it was with some complacency that she left her work in progress, retrieved her martini, and returned through her blue-floored anteroom to her living room, where she proceeded to build a big fire. The flames blazed up, filling the room with shadows, and as she stood back to watch them she heard the fire alarm sound far away. Somebody's house going up, she thought; it always happens on the Fourth of July.

She was quite wrong. It was not
somebody's
house that the alarm was sounding for but the seven children's house, and if Mary Ann had left her front door open, as she often did, even in the winter time, she would have seen the air outside filled with smoke that was billowing down in great clouds from the big house on the dunes. Great excitement was gathering at her windows, and she missed it all. She missed seeing the first engine come hurtling across the flat green and watery landscaped land that stretched from her right all the way back to the sky. On a dark night like this, with all its lights going, the engine must have been a wonderful sight. All lighted up, racing to the rescue, and followed by a second engine and then by a third. Mary Ann missed it all, and she missed seeing the swarm of small cars that flew after the engines
and turned with them into her narrow driveway, which was full of holes and long deep ruts like trenches, so that they were all slowed up, coming along one after the other so close together that they might have been sections of a caterpillar. It was a very long, narrow driveway. At the best of times there was room only for one ordinary car. The driveway turned at a right angle from the road that led to the sea and came straight through the golf course and between the lawns to Mary Ann's house, where it made a sharp right turn and disappeared between two dense walls of trees and bushes that led up to the children's house and the sea. Those trees were full of pheasants, and if you walked up that dark curving avenue on a summer night, the wild beating of indignant wings drowned out the sound of the waves that beat out their slower measure on the beach below the children's house. What the pheasants must have thought on this night on the Fourth of July was unimaginable. First they were enveloped in clouds of thick smoke, and then came the invasion by heavy machinery. And all Mary Ann was thinking about was whether or not to put the screen back in front of the fire she had made, or leave the fireplace open and risk sparks on the rug. She was putting the screen back when she heard the first of the engines come lurching and rumbling past her house, and she thought, What a big oil truck. But then came more rumbling and grinding, and she thought, Armored cars.

She ran to the door and opened it and ran out on her lawn, to find that the lawn had vanished. She was hostess to a long line of cars that had pulled in and parked in a neat row with their noses turned toward the big house, and the driveway was so jammed with fire-fighting cars and apparatus that she could not have crossed over to the children's lawn even if she had wanted to. The smoke was thick, but the children's house was visible, standing up against the night sky with all its lights on. If the lights are on, perhaps things are not so bad, Mary Ann thought, and she saw
the miles of floorboards up there, and the deep shingled roof that would blaze up like a torch if a spark caught it. The smoke now seemed to be coming from behind the house. Perhaps it was only a grass fire.

She walked over to the nearest of the cars that were parked by her house and said foolishly, “What's going on?”

The driver glanced at her and then looked back at the house. “Fire up there,” he said. The car was full of children, and they all stared out at Mary Ann. She walked away from them, and called Bluebell to follow her. She thought, There is that man has driven in here, tripping up the Fire Department, and now he's trapped here with all those children, and they may not get out until morning.

The avenue of trees that hid the approach to the big house ended just short of the house and to the side of it, and out from the shadows up there a small fire car appeared and careered wildly down the children's lawn and across the golf course and was gone. It was followed immediately by another, and then Mary Ann saw that her driveway had been cleared from the pine grove back to the sea road and that the cars lined up in front of her were starting, tentatively, to edge their way back, going out backward. A tall man in a helmet appeared and ordered the cars parked on Mary Ann's lawn to leave. He was very short with them and she was very glad. She would say to him, “But I live here,” she thought, and then she wondered if he would order her to go into her house. Would he be within his rights, ordering her into the house? She began to worry about what she would do if he pointed to her house and said to her, “You get in there and shut that door.” She had the right to stand on her own lawn, she knew that, but on the other hand it was hardly the moment to have an argument with a fireman. His colleagues on wheels were making desperate attempts to extricate themselves from the driveway and from one
another. Backward and forward they went, and none of them moved. It was all the fault of the cars that had joined them for fun, and tied them up. Mary Ann thought of the confusion that must exist on the shrouded avenue leading up to the house. Then, away up at the house, one of the big engines appeared and tore down the lawn and away. The fire was really over. But the cars nearest to her were still stuck, and she thought that in a minute they would all start barking in frustration. The man in the helmet had cleared her lawn, and he did not appear to have seen her. All the same, taking no chances, Mary Ann spoke to Bluebell and they both retreated into the house and shut the door. Then Mary Ann looked out through the smallest diamond-paned window. What with the thickness of the window frame and the darkness outside and the angle she was looking from, she couldn't see much, but she had already seen enough to know what was going on. Another big engine shot into sight and out again, vanishing on the far side of the pine grove. A little more to the left and he would have gone down in one of those deep sand craters on the golf course. He could have struggled all night without getting out. The other cars were getting out as best they could, and then they were all gone, but disorder still hung in the air. Over the well-cut lawns that surrounded the golf course, and over the polite undulations of the course itself, and over the clubhouse that sat in wary hospitality on its eminence high above the dunes—over all of these particular human arrangements, Chaos stirred, and smiled, and went back to sleep. What a Fourth of July, Mary Ann thought, and wondered why the firemen had cut their sirens off.

In the morning she was awakened by the sea gulls, who were making more noise than usual because, she thought, they were coming closer to the house than usual. But when she got to the window she saw that they had already turned and were flying
back to the sea, protesting all the way against everything. There was mist out and they vanished into it. It had rained in the night, and the holes in the driveway were filled with silver water. Last night the fire engines had bumped in and out of those holes, today the birds would bathe in them. She wondered if the lawns had been much damaged by the traffic. There were car marks on her lawn, nothing serious, and the children's lawn, when she got downstairs, looked all right. The house looked all right, too, and there was Linnet in her white nightgown, running wildly down the lawn. “Linnet,” Mary Ann said, “come into the house at once. Put this shawl around you. Do you know what time it is? It's not six o'clock yet. I saw the fire engines. Was there much damage to the house?”

“I called them,” Linnet said. “I was the only one that thought of the telephone.”

“That's wonderful, Linnet.”

“It was only a grass fire,” Linnet said.

“Even so,” Mary Ann said. “You saved the house. That is really marvelous. That's wonderful, Linnet.”

Linnet had been first to the telephone. While the rest of the family stood transfixed with horror, staring at the grass, she had rushed to the phone and called the fire brigade. What had happened was that something, perhaps a spark from the stray fireworks Mary Ann had seen, had caught the brush below the house and suddenly it had all flared up. They had just arrived home from the fireworks, and they had all gone onto their terrace overlooking the sea, and while the others stared at the sheet of flame that suddenly rose up and became a wall and rose higher as they watched it, Linnet called for help. “Then you saved the house,” Mary Ann said. Linnet nodded modestly. “And now you're going to have a glass of milk,” Mary Ann said, “and you're going to go straight home and back to bed, before your mother finds out that
you're gone. You must go home at once.”

“Bluebell has nice paws,” Linnet said.

“I know,” Mary Ann said. “Now don't sit down, Linnet. You really must come outside, and I'll watch you up to the house. Go in the front door, so that I can see you safely home. Keep the shawl around you.”

When they were outside, Mary Ann said, “That's wonderful that you saved the house, Linnet. It's really great.” The hem of her robe was wet from the wet grass, and there was Linnet in her bare feet. “Now you
must
hurry home,” she said.

“May I come back to see you?” Linnet asked.

Mary Ann looked at her. Linnet was small and friendly, and Mary Ann, who feared trustfulness, had often rebuffed her, but now she put her hands out and tightened the shawl around the little shoulders. “Yes,” she said, “but right now, this minute, you must run home. Your mother will be frightened if she finds you not in your bed. Then come back later and tell me everything about the fire. I'll have questions ready. All right?”

“All right,” Linnet said, and she started off. When she had crossed to her own lawn, she turned and waved, and Mary Ann waved back. She watched the child running and walking and then running again. It was a long way up that lawn. Mary Ann thought, I had a chance to do the right thing yesterday and I am very glad I failed, and I hope the same chance does not come my way again for a long time. She thought of a joke. “Never put off till tomorrow what you should have done yesterday,” she said to herself, and she went placidly into the house to put on the water for her coffee.