The Garden of Blue Roses

by Michael Barsa

  It's sacrificed to our ideals, our hopes, our bought

  And paid-for Disney-sense of peace, tranquility.

  But it's a bald-faced lie!

  The beast is always there, just buried far

  Beneath our cultivated souls, machined and razed and tarred

  So we can't see it. Here, Keith said, I'll rip it out

  And show you: wilderness and savagery. I'll flout

  Your laws, your norms, your sense of common decency,

  Your feeling that the world has gone to shambles only recently.

  And here's the thing: you'll love to hate. You can't ever have enough

  Of feeling righteous outrage and disgust.

  But that's your mask, your veil

  Convincing you you might prevail

  Against your own dark devil,

  Your own requited love of evil.

  Chirping birds. Sunlight. Crunching tires and that great wheezing engine I knew to be Marta's station wagon. It was like a dream, except it wasn't—the sun flashed through my window and the digital clock read 10:03. Normally I woke precisely at 7:35 (all primes, hence my little joke: PRIME TIME). My alarm must have failed, or for once hadn't penetrated my sleep. Why not? I realized that I had no memory of going to bed. Between watching the trees at the window and this moment lay a chasm of forgotten hours.

  I shot to my feet. I saw Marta in her faded blue uniform hobbling toward the house. She was carrying a sack of groceries, her left foot encased in a giant blue boot. It was such a relief to see her—this great matronly hope of normalcy—that I failed at first to register the oddity of the boot. I gave a little wave. She didn't see me. The smile fell from my face. I ran a finger across the windowsill, across the chipping brown paint and dusty glass, the little edges where decades of weather had blown in despite every effort to keep them out. I ground the dirt into my skin and made a soiled question mark in the pane, then one in mirror-image to form a heart . . .

  When I looked up again Marta was gone. I panicked, ran to the bathroom to splash water on my face, then back to throw on clothes. By the time I arrived downstairs she was in the kitchen, unpacking the grocery bag. I saw how she winced with the effort of all those cans of my favorite peaches. "Here, allow me," I said, stepping forward. She looked surprised, flashing her heavy-lidded eyes as I plucked a can and slid it into the cupboard.

  "You OK, Milo?" she asked.

  "I should ask you that," I said, wiping my damp forehead. "Whatever happened to your foot?"

  She shrugged her dumb old peasant's shrug. "Oh, it's nothing." Then she made the sign of the cross. In a way I envied her blind faith. Only after the accident did she ever doubt it, when I noticed in her a void, a listlessness, an occasional shuffling gloom—when she left feather dusters on the furniture and the toilets half-cleaned. But like a kayak she soon righted herself and carried on. She had responsibilities that gave her weight, while I—I always felt on the verge of floating away.

  She told a story about her cat tripping her while she carried a box of food to send to her native Philippines. How many times had I told her to get rid of that beast? I explained how cats can transmit plague by a single bite, but then, because I didn't want to seem overly harsh, I softened my face and added: "Of course I can feel your pain."

  Her thick lips trembled. It looked like she was going to cry. I was reminded that empathy seems to be what everyone—even Marta—desires these days. Not advice or moral guidance, only an empty recitation of the most obvious lie: you are not alone.

  "Thank you, Milo," she said.

  I finished putting away the peaches and slouched against the kitchen sink. "They had beautiful lamb chops at the market," she smiled as she began ripping lettuce into a colander with those meaty hands. I nodded and turned to a small potted cactus on the windowsill—a green lump of a thing with spikes like hair—and thought: here's my chance.

  "Did you happen to buy this?" I asked.

  She stopped. "The cactus?"

  "That's right."

  "You want another one?"

  "No, no, I was just wondering"—I gave a short laugh—"whether you happened to buy it or whether Klara did."

  She pushed out her lower lip as if giving the question considerable thought. "Both of us. At one of those fairs in the town. That was two, three years ago."

  "Ah," I said. "Did my sister ever talk to you about a garden, or a gardener, or any of that sort of thing?"

  "Just that she wanted things around the house to be beautiful."

  "Did she ever mention that to Father?"

  She shook her head. But I could see a hesitancy come over. I pressed on: "Did they ever argue about a garden? They seemed to be arguing all the time before the accident."

  She shrugged, but otherwise kept her eyes fixed on the lettuce.

  Klara was sitting on a chaise in her loose white summer dress, the one I'd never liked because it billowed over her breasts and accentuated the slackness of her upper arms. She was gazing out over the grounds and sketching in that rose book, biting her lower lip like a girl trying hard to please. Through the study's window I watched as Marta limped onto the patio with a glass of ice water. Klara drank several glasses of ice water per day, believing, as she'd read in a woman's magazine, that they helped the wrinkles around her eyes.

  Klara shot to her feet and made all sorts of concerned motions as she ushered Marta into a chair. Marta sat heavily, her back to me, while Klara bared her teeth to the incisors like a mad tribeswoman. This is what often passes in her for laughter, this carnivorous expression. Gradually her face sank back into its normal controlled tightness as her lips quivered with speech.

  I put my ear to the glass. I couldn't hear a thing. I didn't dare open the window. Then a solution hit me. I dashed upstairs, through the museum-like dimness of Klara's room. Quietly I slid open her balcony door. It was excruciating to be perched out there with nothing between me and certain death but six inches of uncertain masonry. Still I persevered, closing my eyes to blind myself, to hear their voices better.

  "Please, Marta. You must have an X-ray. Should I bring you there myself? I have an appointment with the gardener, but I can try—"

  "No, no. I will go tomorrow."

  "You need to take care of yourself."

  "Everybody is so worried about me! When I should be worrying about you! This gardener—he the one Milo talked about?"

  "Oh dear, I can only imagine what he must have said. Milo hates what we're doing. He thinks it will interfere with his toy-making. Let me tell you, Henri is very famous, a distinguished member of the American and French Rose Societies and the International Gardener's Guild. He'll breathe new life into our home, which we've desperately needed for ages."

  "Because of the sadness."

  "The sadness, yes, I suppose that's it. Oh, I'm under no illusion that a garden by itself will make us happy. I just don't know what to do with myself anymore. I'm stuck here, you see."

  "You're family."

  "Yes, that's part of it. Milo is all the family I have left in the world. It's also . . . I've always had to take care of him. I have no choice."

  There was a pause, during which I ran my fingers across the balcony floor, distractedly gathering pebbles and other lapidary fragments.

  "I'm sorry, Marta. This is all obviously pent-up inside me. You know Father never let Milo go anywhere. He claimed he was being protective, but really it was terrible. Do you know why he kept Milo here?"

  "Ooh."

  "What's that?"

  "A stone?"

  I must have twitched. It didn't matter. I beat a hasty retreat and opened my Moleskin notebook. I always keep one in my inner blazer pocket because inspiration can never wait. With my tiny spy pen I wrote: "American and French Rose Societies. International Gardener's Guild."

  Then I strode into the kitchen. The teleph
one book. I called a local florist. Annie's Flowers. A grouchy-sounding man answered, and I nearly hung up, but I forced myself to remember what Klara had said: "Do you have the telephone number for the American Rose Society?"

  "What?"

  "The American Rose Society."

  "American Roadside?"

  "Rose Society."

  "Wrong number, mister. Try Triple-A."

  I punched the plastic knob to hang up on this imbecile, then tried another florist in more metropolitan Manchester. Finally I found a woman who gave me exactly what I required, and I dialed again, long-distance, to Shreveport, Louisiana. There was a faintly swamp-like ring before a woman's southern drawl informed me that I'd reached the American Rose Society. After a raspy smoker's cough that shook my earpiece, she asked how she might direct my most important call. I thought of rhinestones and trailer parks, fake eyelashes and gleaming motorcycles and toenails painted with the American flag.

  "I wish to inquire about a membership."

  "I can help you with that myself, sweetie. Is it for one or two years?"

  "Actually it's about a membership that's already active. You see, I lost my card."

  "Totally understand, hon. Now what's the name?"

  "Henri Blanc." I gave a hopeful spelling.

  "Well we've got two here in the computer. I'm guessing you're the one who's still alive?" She chuckled, slow and honey-sweet.

  "It's funny," she continued. "Both have the same membership number. Did you die and come back to life? We'll have to straighten that out. Anyway, I've got good news. You're all set through the end of the year. Do you need a replacement card?"

  "My Vermont address," I managed. "I assume you have it?"

  "Sure do."

  "Could you verify it for me please?"

  "You'll have to give it to me, for security purposes."

  "Of course."

  I hung up. If only I had a cigarette. I wanted one, not physically but metaphorically. Something to pull into my lungs, to spark that little frisson of death that is supposed to lead to contemplation, insight, smoky divination.

  I heard them before I saw them—Henri's Peugeot and a white Ford "Super Duty" truck—grinding to a halt below my bedroom window. I watched a tall hippie with tattoos on his forearms climb out of the truck holding a shovel. The implement looked brand-new, like the spade—even from a distance it had that gleam. Henri muttered a few words to the man before the man disappeared, the shovel over his shoulder like a bat. Still Henri kept standing there, surveying the driveway, the garage, taking it all in like he had on that very first day. At one point he reached up to stroke his neck, leaned into his hand in an almost sensual, feline way. Again I saw Keith in that gesture; again I had the feeling I was witnessing an impossibility. Then Klara emerged, waving and gesticulating. She kissed him twice, once on each cheek, something I'd never seen her do. She did it awkwardly, as if unsure which side to kiss first. Afterwards Henri brushed a stray hair out of his face and said something out of the side of his mouth—something that must have been amusing, because she leaned forward and gave one of her polite twittering laughs. This pleased him; he smiled; he took her hand and led her around the house so fast that she had to skip to keep up.

  I waited until they were gone. Then I fumbled for my spy glass. I trained it on the Peugeot's license plate. Carefully I copied it down. I hurried to the kitchen and called the Department of Motor Vehicles. The woman sighed when I asked who owned the plate. "You know I can't give you that information, sir."

  "Can you at least tell me if he's real?"

  "Excuse me?"

  I hung up and called the police. I pretended I'd lost my car registration. They referred me to an automated line where I could enter the license plate into the keypad to check for outstanding warrants. Our old phone didn't have a keypad, just a rotary dial, so I had to wait for a live person to help. It was one of the few times I've ever longed to speak to a machine. I had to read back the number three times before the gruff old man got it. "Sorry, son," he said. "There's nothing. That license was only issued a few months ago."

  I drifted into the living room. They were outside. Talking. Henri was describing something with one hand while the other hung close behind my sister. How much did she know about him? Could she really suspect the impossible? Meanwhile the workman was digging up our old bushes. Klara clearly wanted to replace those ugly things. That's when it occurred to me that she might want to replace me—that I might be the real weed here. That she might be planning to pull me out and discard me like those old bushes—like Keith's hapless victims.

  And install someone prettier in my place.

  He'd heard it many times: the eye of the beholder

  Determined beauty, truth, and all the bolder

  And finer feelings men might have. The eye!

  The eye! He laughed and with a wry

  Small twist of that red-handled spade,

  He dug it out of Mary Megan McCade's

  Dead face. And dropped it in a clear and plastic ball

  So it could see. Then tied the ball to a small

  Army of balloons and let them go. Should he write a note?

  To say how ugly she had been? But no. Too late.

  At last she saw herself the way she really was,

  A sack of skin, the beholder now beholden to his cause.

  Who vanquished Gothic horror? The Victorian detective. Take The Hound of the Baskervilles. It's stuffed full of Gothic elements—a fiendish hellhound, craggy moors, a crenellated old estate and eerie noises like sobbing women in the night. But Sherlock Holmes isn't afraid. He cuts through it all with science and deductive logic, revealing the cheap machinations behind the terror, and the jealousy and greed driving it. It's a simple story, really. A man is trying to kill a gentleman who has romantic designs on his sister. All the rest is puffery.

  Science, deduction, logic—these were my touchstones now, my antidotes to the horror novel developing all around me. I would have worn a deerstalker cap and injected cocaine except that the cap isn't actually featured in the Holmes stories—it was an invention of the illustrator Sidney Paget—and I was too frightened of losing my mind (not to mention needles) to inject anything psychotropic. So I became Holmes on the inside, imagining myself in that "large airy sitting-room" on Baker Street, wreathed in pipe smoke as my mind worked over the problem of whether a fictional character could actually come to life. There was also something else buried deep within my fears, the nagging question of how much of this plot Klara herself was responsible for. Despite all signs to the contrary I convinced myself that she was just as innocent as I was—that she must know nothing of any darker story here.

  Then I went down for breakfast.

  She was sitting at her usual place, behind her usual newspaper, but I knew at once it wouldn't be a usual day—that we wouldn't have one of those again for ages. She was wearing a blouse I'd never seen—red, silky, dangling from thin straps. I stared at her like I would at an ancient frieze if one of its stone figures had popped to life and was lounging in short-shorts and a low-slung half-ripped tee-shirt. And there was more. With two lazy fingers Klara cradled a burning cigarette. She took a puff. Smoke shot out of her mouth. Suddenly I was in a fog; I could hardly see; I began to cough, my eyes to water, I got down on my knees and . . . No. Wait. She didn't smoke. There was no cigarette, no smoke, I never did those things at all. My memory is playing tricks. Yet there was something smoky-white about her, in her hair—a line of white along the fringe. It looked like a flare of sunlight or a bird dropping. But when I peered more closely I saw it was a deliberately colored white streak, a Bride-of-Frankenstein bolt of lightening shooting down one side of her face.

  "Oh please, Milo, don't look at me like that."

  "What are you doing to yourself?"

  "You make it sound so serious."

  "Since when
are you not a serious person?"

  "Can't I do something different for a change? Something a little rash?"

  "When did you do this? Last night? This morning?"

  "It doesn't matter. It's nothing," she said, flipping it back with a come-what-may jerk. "It's just fashion."

  It is the mark of any civilization's decline when a long swoon into decadence takes on the trappings of fashion. That much is clear from even a cursory reading of Gibbon. But there is a private debasement as well, which Klara displayed with a half-twist of her bare shoulders, a defiant little shrug so garish in a woman of her age. It was like an impersonation of a younger, briefly fashionable version of herself—a self that scared me more than any other memory yet to surface in my mind.

  She'd been a high school senior. The occasion was a school play. This play was directed by her English teacher, Mr. Mann—a greasy old bug-bear with his striped cardigans and his habit of watching girls' gymnastics competitions using opera glasses. That year he was staging a sultry adaptation of The Iceman Cometh. Klara obtained a part as a barmaid. I thought it was a joke until Father made a surprise appearance at supper to congratulate her. He stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets, his lopsided smile showing-off those yellow British teeth. "You know I once dabbled in the theater myself," he murmured.

  "Really?" Klara looked up from her soup. Her barmaid persona—which she'd been flashing all evening long—fell away in an instant.

  "A vampire show. I think I still have the make-up."

  "Could I see?"

  Father shrugged. He never talked about himself, never revealed anything that would make us confuse him with an actual human being. I wondered if any of this was even true. "Well . . . "

  "Don't be silly," Mother said, putting down her spoon. "Klara's playing a serving girl, not a vampire."

  "But I'm interested," Klara pleaded.

  Mother picked up her spoon again. "Another time."

  Father was on the verge of saying something else when he stopped. He must have known he had no authority here, in the house's lower realms. "Anyway I think it's wonderful, Klara," he simply added. "O'Neill has always been my favorite American playwright."