The Rose Thieves (5 page)

“Will they still be as lovely as this?”

My mother showed some surprise. She looked at each of us for a moment, almost involuntarily, and back to him, smiling. “They may be lovelier. Audie probably won't have that tattoo.”

“I'll always have this tattoo,” Audie said. “I'm gonna have this
really
tattooed on both my arms.”

“And,”
Ma said, “Kate will have a different hairdo. She will have given up the Irish-washerwoman look.”

I was stricken. I had expected the barrette to please her. Jack Cirillo extended his hand and tucked a loose strand of my hair back, running his finger slowly behind my ear.

“I like this look,” he said. “It was very popular when I was in France.” He watched me with such intensity, I could not believe he was really seeing me, and his hand returned to my head. “Remove one pin and her hair will be all over the pillow, they used to say.”

No one spoke. The swans were back on the water, gliding peacefully past one another. The sun was still hot, hot, and I stood in the heavy air under the light press of Jack Cirillo's hand.

“Jack,” my mother said finally, half angrily, “you are absolutely impossible.” Her own smile seemed slowed by the sun.

*   *   *

In the car, my mother seemed older to me. Audie raised her arm, signaling a truck driver to honk, but Ma said the noise was giving her a headache. I smoothed my hands down over the front of my dress and stretched my arms out. From the back of my hair I pulled the one pin. My new green straw hat lay beside me. I arranged it on my head.

“You're going to lose that hat,” Ma said.

“It fits me perfectly,” I told her. “It's very snug on my head.”

She was driving faster than usual, perhaps anxious to get home to my father's wrath. In the back, Audie was quiet, even subdued; she rested her head against the seat, her skin reddening in the wind. Across the dividing strip of lawn, a very few cars headed toward New York against the sun. Connecticut was an expanse of lawn and low trees, hazy and leafy, the light so strong at this slant that I felt its impression surely as if it were a hand on my shoulder. I suppose it seemed that such a force would also keep my hat on in the wind, but at the first curve I felt it lift off my head. I wasn't immediately regretful; as I saw it roll away, its silvery-green straw in the brighter green at the edge of the road, I thought, “Now I know why they call it a bowler.”

Audie yelled, “Katie, your hat!”

“Ma, my hat's gone!” For the first time I wondered if she could hear me over the wind. “It blew away.” How blessed were the drivers across the highway, speeding toward my hat! I felt I would cry.

“We can't get back there,” Ma said. Her voice rose in annoyance. “I
told
you to take it off,” she said. “It's ten miles to the turnoff, and we couldn't just stop on the highway, even if we did find it. It's probably already been run over anyway.” Now I thought she would cry. “
Why
did you have to wear it, all of a sudden? Nobody can see you now.”

“It's your own fault, Katie,” Audie said.

“Well, don't make her feel any worse about it,” Ma said.

I couldn't have felt any worse about it. I knew how childish it would be to cry over a lost hat, so I closed my eyes and tried to forget it. I tried to think of my new car, or of the glorious eve of my birthday, when Ma and Audie and I had felt like three goddesses in our stolen bower. Instead, I thought of Jack Cirillo, until I could remember exactly his slow voice and his slow touch and could feel my own fearful pleasure again. Ma, never a masterful driver, was creeping along in the right lane now, and car after car whipped past us, sounding like scythes. Then I heard a siren.

“I'm only going forty. They can't want
me,
” my mother said. The car pulled up beside us. “My God,” Ma said, “this car
is
hot.”

But the policeman was smiling. “Did any of you ladies lose a hat?” he asked.

“Me!” I said. “I did.” He produced it, perfectly intact. To my mother he said, “You shouldn't drive so slowly on this highway, ma'am. It can cause an accident when you get so many vehicles built up behind you.” He was plump and blue-eyed and cheerfully exasperated, as if he had spent too many days chasing cars full of deciduous women, natural outlaws, who shed their hats and scarves in the wind.

“Officer, I'm sorry,” my mother said. “I'm not used to driving this car yet, and I'm afraid if I step on the gas too hard it'll just shoot out from under us. And I get so nervous driving in traffic, I just think it's better to be on the safe side. But I'll try to drive faster now, because I don't want to cause an accident.”

He stepped back. “Well, it's just a suggestion,” he said. “Have a nice day, now. And keep hold of that hat.”

“I will,” I said, and I felt my mother's smile, suddenly, on my own lips: a smile of fondness and defiance mixed, a tiny challenge. “Thank you so much,” I said to the policeman. My mother stepped on the gas, and we were off like a shot.

“I'd like a pair of driving gloves,” she said to me. “Brown and beige, to match the car.”

“We'll each get a pair,” I told her.

“I'm not sure they make them in children's sizes,” Ma said.

I stretched my hands out in front of me. They were slender, strong, and against the dashboard they showed a pale, almost luminous shade of white. They were not the hands of a child, but I didn't say that to Ma. In a week I would have my driver's license. I pressed the leather of the seat; it was perfectly resilient, rising up against my hand. I could hear the engine shift to a higher gear, and I could feel the smoothness, the power, of the new speed. I wanted to tell someone that this was my car. I wanted to tell my mother that I
loved
my car, but I decided not to. Instead, I tucked a strand of hair slowly behind my ear.

In the back seat Audie crooked her elbow and pulled an imaginary horn, but no truck answered. There were no trucks on the highway.

“Bee-Beep,” I said.

“Honk,
hooonk,
” went my mother, imitating swans. “You were so funny, Audie, running from that swan.” She reached back over the seat, and Audie squeezed her hand.

“We have to make a plan to cheer your father up,” Ma said.

“He'll probably be happy enough to see we aren't in jail,” I told her.

“He should be,” Audie said. “We're incorrigible.”

She was right. We turned off the highway, past the bright, defenseless gardens of Connecticut that lined the road home.

Katie Vanderwald

Where there was a pea pod, Audie saw a pea pod. She seized it, snapped it into her colander, and moved on. Lucky, or there would have been no dinner, because Kate, having picked only one pod, felt she had harvested earthly grace itself, and wasn't this enough? She was satisfied— she was grateful— as long as the dirt was black, the vines lush, and the squashes blooming in the next row.

Now they were homely peas again, a square of butter softening over them while Ma poured milk into the blue pitcher and Chucky perched on the stepstool to wash his hands. He was fair and tousled, a straw angel, but Ma turned his palms up and saw the truth.

“These may be wet,” she said, making a monstrously sour face, for the benefit of the girls, “but they are
not
washed.”

A baffling oracle. Chuck, his head full of beetle lore from the day outside, returned to the sink. He was the youngest, and the boy, at everyone's mercy. Sitting straight, at the head of the table, he searched for an adult topic.

“What's for dessert?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what's for dessert?” Ma said. She plucked the vase of petunias away from his notorious elbow and set it out of reach on the sill. “Do you think we're some kind of ranch-house people who think about food all the time? Pick a peach if you want dessert.”

“Ma-a.”
The peaches were still little green fists on the tree.

“Well … raspberries, then, since you have the courage to eat out of those hands.”

“We have dessert when Pop's home,” he said.

“Then it should be clear enough,” she said, “that there will be no dessert tonight.”

Ma was like the weather. Her children basked or sought shelter, depending on the prevailing wind, and to mention Pop was seeding the clouds. If they were careful, though, they could bring her back to them. It was like coaxing a deer to your hand, and gentle Audie did it best.

“You sit down too, Ma,” she said, patting the chair beside her. Ma wouldn't eat with them, but when Pop was away she would sit and listen to their day's adventures, her attention so perfect that every triumph was exalted and every disaster redeemed in the pleasure of telling the tale. Kate's duty (and glory) was to examine each day in all its detail and present it whole and alive, over dinner, to Ma.

They had all been good days that summer. Kate was sixteen, Audie fourteen, and since Pop had lost all the money, Ma had gone back to work and was paying her daughters to look after the house and garden, and keep an eye on Chucky, who was only six.

They ran free, within the limits of their preserve. When Pop bought the property, he had been riding the futures market like a white wave, and they could have whatever they wanted. They wanted a farm, a castle, a cave, a precipice with lake beneath, an orchard, an arbor, a swamp, and a clear stream. If you looked with a generous eye, you could see they had got it all, and without leaving Connecticut. The formal garden had grown wild among its trellises, the goldfish pond leaked, but the house was properly cavernous, built of stone from the fields where sheep now grazed. It faced south along the Wiscoponomuc Brook, in the shade of a forested hill. Chucky ruled the two tiny islands upstream from the bridge, watched by Audie from the crotch of the red maple, which held her like the palm of a giant hand.

Kate never left the house. Her chores took hours. Ironing, she felt determined as a Chinese laundress striving for the sake of the moon-faced infants who clung to her skirts while she worked. When she dusted the piano, she would sit and, though she had neglected to practice, would imagine her début: wearing a plain black sheath (to shame vanity, before art), she would swoop over the first chord like a lioness on a gazelle, and then—fluid, agile, precise, beginning with the lower, yearning registers and drawing in the upper strands one by one—she would restore the music to its living form. Later, in their bleak, cold-water flat (she pictured a sink with one faucet and a poor ragged towel), her husband would press her to him, searching her face, worried, awed. It would be wonderful to play the piano, she was sure.

Kate was noble, Audie thought, unfathomable, and embarrassing. She might look up from shelling peas, as she had done that afternoon, and say, “What if you had to leave the country, to follow the man you loved. Would you go?”

“You mean, to get married?” Audie asked, feeling squeamish, shaking the bowl to see if they had enough.

“No, I mean
love,
” Kate said, with such force that Audie shrank. And giggled.

“Forget it,” Kate said. “I mean things of the
soul.
”

So she did. Her soul escaped in ways she herself could not hope to follow, and returned to whisper tales of things she would never see. Now, suddenly, she was having a romance, but she had learned, talking to Audie that afternoon, not to chop prodigious feeling into words.

So when Ma was sitting and ready to hear all, Kate had nothing to say. “Well,” she started, and finally turned to Audie, “did we have a good day?”

“Um,” Audie said, “a pretty good day. We had a guest.”

“A guest?” Ma raised an apprehensive eyebrow. The week before, a magazine salesman had found the house somehow and plagued them until Audie went back up her tree, leaving him to pace underneath. Like a frustrated hound, as Kate told it. It was her job to keep the pot boiling! Any secret worth keeping would be cruel to hoard.

“Kate's friend Amir,” Audie said.

“He's a Turk,” Kate explained. “Aunt Elayne brought him back from her trip.”

“Quite a souvenir,” Ma said. She took Kate's chop bone and sucked at the marrow. Elayne was Kate's boyfriend's aunt, a dietitian whose quest for a husband kept Ma well amused.

“He came to see the American countryside,” Audie said.

“Actually,” Kate said, “he came to see
me.
” Ma's eyes widened, for the thickening of plot. “We went for a walk in the woods,” Kate said.

She meant to stop, but their silence made her guilty. “I got a little lost,” she said, “and we came to a place I never saw before. All birch trees and a soft, soft forest floor—you could imagine Indians there.”

What an adventure it had been! Kate knew she was none of the things she imagined, neither delicate nor particularly receptive, and certainly not Chinese: Ma was black-Irish, Pop the palest Dane. She was a pitiful, straggly thing, with a face made mostly of glasses and teeth. When a man as lithe and insinuating as Amir wanted to touch her, it was proof of the power of dreams.

“So I said, ‘I think we're lost,' and then … he
took
me in his arms, and
bent
me back, and kissed me and kissed me, just like Clark Gable.”

“My God, Kate.” The indulgent smile froze on Ma's face. “How old is this boy?”

“Twenty-five.”

Audie was paying terrible attention to her peas, and Chucky said, “Lost? Only a moron could get lost up there.”

Kate had sent something of herself up, kitelike, that afternoon, to meet Amir on his lofty crag, and here it crashed back at her feet and was trampled by the careless throng.

“What about Bobby?” Ma asked.