The Rose Garden (40 page)

The Children Are There, Trying Not to Laugh

F
ar out on Long Island, beside the Atlantic Ocean, there is a famous golf course that stretches for miles alongside the dunes, edging up to them and at some points eddying into them. The golf course has its own turreted clubhouse, which stands up high, a flimsy play-fortress, between the ocean and the sky. Some distance to the east, also high on the dunes, the clubhouse has its nearest big neighbor, a giant's mansion that sits contentedly on its roomy eminence, facing the waves. The mansion has a soft, comfortable outline, like a gingerbread cottage. Its deep shingled roof is pulled down low over the tops of its walls, and it has hundreds of diamond-paned windows that keep their own dark secretive shimmer even when all the lights go on inside and the house comes to life from end to end and from attic to cellar, when the seven children who live there are all at home. The children are not secretive, but they are secret—seven open secrets that can never be unraveled or deciphered or described, any more than you could unravel or decipher or describe a wave in its passage from the distant
horizon to the familiar sandy beach, or find it, once the sand had caught it. The children are restless and inquisitive and remorseless in their pursuit of questions and answers, and they never stop talking, but they change by the minute. You can see time racing away in their friendly, impatient eyes.
What? Where? How? When? Who?
They ask questions. And
Why? Why? Why?
They ask more questions. You might as easily stick pins into the wind as try to keep up with them, but to remain silent, and try to watch them, is just as difficult.

One Saturday afternoon in January, several Januarys ago, the snow began falling, and it continued through the night, falling thickly until about midnight, when there was a brief clear interlude, with moonlight. The moon remained hidden, but her light flowed calmly in all directions, revealing an untenanted fairyland beside a flickering, wandering ocean. The thin line of wind-bent trees that separates the lawn of the giant's mansion from the golf course cast spidery shadows in the moonlight, and, nearer the dunes, the fragment of hedge where pink and white beach roses bloom in summer was a little bundle of darkness in the quiet expanse of snow. Only one light showed in the turreted clubhouse—it was their nightlight—and the giant's mansion was dark. The children were all asleep, and there was no one to notice when the moon withdrew her light and the snow began falling again, not to stop this time until after dawn.

About nine o'clock in the morning, the entrance door of the giant's mansion opened and the seven children hurried carefully down their broad, snow-laden stone steps, between their two tame stone lions, and began racing about the pure and glowing surface of the lawn, which seemed even larger white. It was a big world, in the snow. The children tried to fill it, calling to one another, but their voices sounded thin and small, the way the trees looked, even with a round line of snow along each branch and twig. The
snowy universe looked eternal, as though it might remain as it was forever, sea, sky, and snow, but the whirling children appeared and vanished and reappeared and vanished again, in a dazzling jigsaw of hands and feet and faces and arms and eyes and legs and bodies, running and falling and rolling and tumbling, catching at the air and at the snow, every movement separate and sudden and disconnected, and yet every movement part of one continuous movement, as though they had been playing that game for centuries. It was a Chinese battle, white on white, with porcelain dunes in the background. The children were snow children, except for their red faces and dark hair, and their cries were less fierce than the sea gulls'. They tore about, breaking their lawn into large slabs and then ruffling the slabs into a plowed field of white. The snow yielded softly, here, there, and everywhere, and the battle ended at the finish line, where the driveway was that separated the big lawn from a much smaller lawn, the modest territory of a fat, solitary cottage that has its own deep shingled roof and its own five or six diamond-paned windows. The cottage faced north, keeping its left shoulder to the ocean, and the lawn in front of it was perfectly white and untouched, except for a narrow trench that ran diagonally from the front door to the pine trees that stood halfway down the lawn, where the bird feeder was. And straight across the middle of the lawn, running to their food, the pheasants had left their prints—a frieze of claws. And around the base of the bird feeder, under the biggest pine, thousands of other tiny footmarks had beaten the snow into a great, shallow earthenware bowl of brown, black, and white, streaked with seed. The little black cat who liked to sit under the bird feeder, staring up, waiting for a chance at murder, and who often fled from the feeder with seeds, like retribution, glittering wickedly from the inside corners of her eyes, was not in her place this morning. She was asleep somewhere inside the cottage, and so were the other cats who lived there
asleep, and the house itself seemed to sleep soundly, as though the snow had claimed and sealed it, just for the day.

The children crossed the driveway and paused to survey the small lawn and to consult together. At least, they put their heads together, although the eldest boy did all the talking, and when the talking was over he took the first step. He was wearing huge-footed boots of dull black rubber, and he planted his right foot deeply into the fresh snow of the small lawn and then planted his left foot firmly in front of his right, and proceeded to walk like that, wobbling a little, until he was a good distance across the lawn. Then he turned smartly to face the cottage, and stood at attention with his arms at his sides, and fell backward his full length and lay there stiffly, grinning and calling to the eldest girl, who was next in line, to follow him. She was already making her way, even more unsteadily than he, along his track, and when she was a couple of feet from him she stopped and turned and dropped back as he had done. As she fell, without his athletic confidence, she tumbled, but the snow bed she made for herself was just as neat as his, and she lay stiffly, as he did. The second boy followed and dropped back into his place, in his turn, and very soon all seven children were lying in a row, giggling with excitement and constraint, and raising their heads awkwardly to see if anybody was watching them from the cottage.

The front door of the cottage opened and a black Labrador retriever charged out, looking joyful, because her mouth was open. She was Bluebell, and she was growing old, but she wore her gray hairs very lightly, and nothing could dim her determination to be wherever the people were. She stood beside the eldest boy and stared expectantly along the line of bodies, wagging her tail and waiting for them all to get up. When they didn't get up, she began washing the eldest boy's face with her large pink tongue. The eldest boy squealed and moaned and wriggled but did not break
the mold he lay in, and Bluebell moved from him to the eldest girl, who shrieked while she was being washed but did not wriggle. The second boy was rolling his eyes, and when he saw Bluebell's big face coming close to him he yelled and jumped up and ran out into the driveway, and the others all followed him. But not one mold was broken. The seven molds remained clear and clean in the snow, and the children stood in the driveway and screamed with laughter and looked at the lawn they had conquered without doing it any mischief. Then they turned and raced away up their own rumpled lawn. Since there were seven children, Bluebell transformed herself into seven dogs and ran among them like a lunatic, upsetting them all. When she had made them dodge as much as she pleased, she raced for the big house and flew up the front steps and was at the door before any of them. The smallest girl, who had begun the rush up the lawn, was soon left behind, and so she stopped running and dawdled carelessly along to show that she was last on purpose and that she was in no hurry to get home. But she too reached the house in her own good time, and climbed the steps and walked inside, and the heavy front door closed behind her. The game was all over.

The following morning a thaw had set in, and the outlines left by the children's bodies had begun to blur. The children drove off in their car to their house in the city, not to return till spring, they said. But even before they were out of sight, smiling and waving, as excited to be leaving as they had been to arrive, the place had taken on an aloof, deserted look. The snow was in disgraceful wet rags. The trees looked sad and lonely, and the sea gulls circled and swooped and screamed with exasperation at the sameness of it all. “Every year,” the sea gulls screamed, “
every year.
” By afternoon the country had turned to marshland. Wet, driving snow fell haphazardly, slapped to and fro by a confused, angry wind. The narrow
driveway ran with water like a river, and there was only the long bleak line of the horizon, straight and sharp as a ruler, to show the separate slate-blue darknesses of sea and sky. The children's outlines sank slowly away into the soaking grass, showing almost to the last that there had been seven places of different lengths. Except in a few stubbornly frozen corners, the snow was gone. The children had made their mark, only just in time, but forever. They never came back, not really, not as they were, but their marks remain. In the buried city of a past winter the marks endure, clear as day in that year's snow—seven bodies, raging with life, seven faces, seven ages, seven weights, and seven measurements. The children are there, trying not to laugh. You can see them again, if you have the patience to watch. You have to wait until the snow falls, and then it is simply a matter of waiting for the snow to settle.

Note

The Rose Garden
is a companion volume to
The Springs of Affection,
published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1997. Together these books posthumously collect the complete short stories of Maeve Brennan.

Six of the stories appear here in book form for the first time: “The Anachronism,” “The Bride,” “The Holy Terror,” “The Bohemians,” “The Beginning of a Long Story,” and “The Daughters.” The preface was originally published as Notes and Comment in
The New Yorker
and was reprinted, under the title “A Daydream,” in the second, expanded edition of Brennan's book
The Long-Winded Lady,
published by Houghton Mifflin in 1998. “I See You, Bianca” and the five stories about Bluebell are reprinted from
In and Out of Never-Never Land,
a collection of Brennan's stories published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1969. The remaining stories are reprinted from a subsequent collection,
Christmas Eve,
published by Scribner's in 1974.

All of these stories first appeared in
The New Yorker
except “The Holy Terror,” which appeared in
Harper's Bazaar.
They are listed below in the order of publication.

        
The Holy Terror. December 1950

        
The Joker. December 27, 1952

        
The Bride. August 8, 1953

        
The View from the Kitchen. November 14, 1953

        
The Anachronism. January 30, 1954

        
The Servants' Dance. May 22, 1954

        
The Stone Hot-Water Bottle. November 27, 1954

        
The Gentleman in the Pink-and-White Striped Shirt. May 7, 1955

        
The Daughters. October 29, 1955

        
The Divine Fireplace. April 21, 1956

        
The Rose Garden. March 28, 1959

        
The Beginning of a Long Story. February 4, 1961

        
The Bohemians. June 9, 1962

        
A Large Bee. August 18, 1962

        
The Children Are Very Quiet When They Are Away. January 19, 1963

        
In and Out of Never-Never Land. July 6, 1963

        
I See You, Bianca. June 11, 1966

        
A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street. January 21, 1967

        
The Door on West Tenth Street. October 7, 1967

        
The Children Are There, Trying Not to Laugh. January 13, 1968

        
Preface (A Daydream). September 20, 1976

About the Author

Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin, on January 6, 1916. From the time she was nearly five until she was almost eighteen, she lived in a small house on Cherryfield Avenue, in the area of the city called Ranelagh. This dead-end street, with its fifty-two red-brick houses, their small back gardens separated from one another by low stone walls, was her one true home. She revisited it frequently in her writings.