Oliver doesn’t do much growing, either here or even at home in his mother’s garden, but he has acquired a few specific materials—ordained by Joe Murray—in anticipation of this day. Now, clearing an area of his worktable, he assembles them: three seedling trays, Canadian sphagnum peat, medium vermiculite, and silicon sand, as well as captan to prevent mold. In a large bowl, he mixes together equal portions of the peat and the vermiculite, then fills the seedling trays and saturates them with water. He lays seven seeds, the products of his least fertile hybrid (Aimée Vibert, a Victorian English noisette) in the first tray, and spreads the twelve from his slightly more promising cross (with the old French Bourbon Boule de Neige, a favorite of Marian’s) in the second. Twenty-five seeds from the White Bath cross fill the third, and Oliver labels each tray with care. Then he covers the seeds with three quarters of an inch of silicon sand and moistens the sand with captan. Placing the trays at one edge of his worktable, he switches on a four-foot HydroFarm fixture, which promptly floods them with fluorescent light. (On the wall above them, Barton Warburg Ochstein’s double order of white roses is illuminated, too.)
And then, as so often in the world of flowers, there is nothing else to do but wait.
Oliver washes his hands and puts away the bags of soil, peat, and sand. From out in the shop’s front area, the sound of conversation makes a gradual claim on Oliver’s attention: Bell, laughing. Bell is always laughing. He is talking to a customer.
Oliver looks at his sandy trays beneath their bright light. What’s in there? he thinks. Will they grow and then fail? Will they open into stubby, unlovely blooms? Will they be sound but not special? He knows enough about this spectacularly unlikely process not to hope for anything in particular—to be able to report an actual flower to Joe Murray would be an achievement his first time out—but he can’t help himself. Before his eyes the bloom conjures itself: a rose so lovely that it silences him, a rose blindingly white and lushly full, as if entrusted with the passion of its creator. He believes in this possibility, because he has once seen it happen, up close. The White Rose—his White Rose—was named in tribute to that.
Bell speaks. Paper rustles. The front door opens to another greeting, and it occurs to Oliver that much of the day has slipped past him as he worked his fingers in the seeds, water, and dirt. He turns from his trays and rises, stretching, to discover that he is very hungry and it is nearly four. The shop area is not jammed—it is never jammed—but it is unquestionably full, and Oliver is embarrassed to think that he has not offered assistance to Bell. He offers it now, helping a short woman with a tight cap of gray hair to four bunches of yellow tulips and wrapping an unwieldy tangle of curly willow branches for two men in their twenties whose border collie accompanies them. When, quite by chance, he looks at the window display, he notes that the black calla lilies are no longer there.
“What happened to the callas?” Oliver asks.
“You kidding? Sold out by noon. I should have bought twice as many.”
Oliver nods. “Yeah. What were you thinking?”
Bell harrumphs, good-humoredly.
When this group leaves, Oliver goes upstairs to begin dinner. Caroline, unlike her old friend, does not care for artichokes, so he leaves them for another day. He removes the ribs from their wine marinade and dries them, then sears them in oil as he chops onions and garlic. The hum of activity from downstairs dissipates, and the apartment darkens to early evening. After the meat is ready, he cooks the vegetables, some of the wine, a can of chopped tomatoes, and some chicken broth. Then he throws in Worcestershire sauce and a bit of rosemary. When it boils, he puts the seared ribs back in and leaves the whole thing simmering while he takes a bath.
From belowstairs come the sounds of the ending workday. Drawers scrape open as Bell attempts, in his imperfect manner, to put things away. A knock at the street door goes unanswered: it is after five. Oliver hears the refrigerator doors slide open and shut repeatedly as the last flowers are picked over and put back. He hopes Bell isn’t throwing the weak ones away—Oliver likes to bring them upstairs as long as they’ll last. He does not mind being surrounded by dying blooms.
The apartment begins to smell rich with cooking meat. Oliver closes his eyes. All day he has pushed Marian from his mind, but now she returns, and with her their lost possibilities for the hours past and now at hand. It is not that Oliver is sorry to see his mother, but the burden of what he can’t tell Caroline—at Marian’s request—feels heavy. He does not like having to hide from her these serious, wonderful things: the content of his happiness. He does not like having to lie, and having to remember his past lies, in order that the lies to come will not trip over them. He begins a fantasy, relaxed by the heat of the water and the sweet smell from the kitchen, of a sort of intervention, staged by himself and featuring Marian, Caroline, Marshall…even Henry Rosenthal, his stepfather. We’re going to sort this out right now! (This is Oliver himself, strutting through Marian’s living room with his hands on his hips.) I don’t care what the rest of you do, but I am marrying this woman!
Oliver smiles.
Bell bangs on the apartment door, then opens it. “I’m going,” he calls.
“Okay. See you Monday,” Oliver shouts.
“Want to come?” Bell says. “There’s a reading at KGB.”
“No thanks. My mom’s coming to dinner.”
“The lovely Caroline…”
“Shut up, asshole,” Oliver says, chivalrously.
Bell laughs from the bottom of the stairs. “Not my fault your mom’s hot, my man.”
“Good-bye, Bell.”
Oliver hears first his own door shut, then, a moment later, the shop door with its heavy click. He sinks back in the bath, oddly depressed. It has suddenly occurred to him that a man his own age might desire his mother, even as he desires Marian, a notion that fills him with vague distress.
Oliver picks up his watch from the sink ledge. It is nearly six.
He hauls himself out of the bath and dries off. He closes the curtains in his bedroom before turning on the light, then dresses in khakis, a dark tweed jacket, and one of his father’s ties. In the kitchen, Oliver removes the meat with a slotted spoon and places it on a tray, covered with foil, which then goes into the oven to keep warm. Then he begins reducing the cooking liquid over high heat and puts water on the stove for the orzo. He is just spinning dry the frisée when he hears Caroline’s tap on the shop door and then hurries downstairs to meet her.
Caroline lights up through the window, her skin taut over regal cheekbones. He pulls back the door and lets her enfold him in her long arms, indulging her need.
“Sweetie,” his mother says.
“Hi, Mom.”
He brings her inside. Oliver is glad to see that she is letting her silver hair grow out a bit—he thought the buzz cut of last spring a little severe, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. “You look great.”
Her hand goes to her throat. “Henry gave me this.”
It’s a chunky silver necklace, silver like rough stones forged together, and it suits her. “Pretty.”
“Thanks.” She looks around. “How was today?”
“Oh, Bell’s single-handedly starting a craze for black calla lilies.”
Caroline makes a face. “How bizarre.”
“There was a big urn of them in the window this morning, and another bucket in the fridge. All gone.”
“Extraordinary. But it’s Greenwich Village, I suppose.”
“Come on, I’m cooking.”
He brings her upstairs and gets her a glass of wine, opening the second bottle. “It smells so good,” his mother says, taking the glass.
“Short ribs.”
“Yummy. Though I’m sorry to put you to the work.”
“No, it’s fine. I was cooking, anyway.”
“I didn’t ruin a date or anything?” Caroline says, almost hopeful.
“No. Free and clear.”
At this moment, as if to belie the words, Oli
ver’s telephone rings. He dumps orzo into the boiling water and goes to answer it. “Hello?”
“Oliver.” It is Marian. He is abruptly overcome with warmth.
“Hi.”
She pauses. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Hmm.” He is thinking. This particular circumstance is occurring for the first time, and no code exists between them to accommodate it.
“You don’t sound all right. Oliver, I’m really sorry about—”
“Mom?” Oliver says, suddenly and loudly. “Would you mind giving that a stir? You can use the wooden spoon.”
Marian, on the other end of the phone line, collects herself. “Oh. Caroline’s with you.”
“Yeah,” he says in relief.
“I didn’t realize. We can’t talk, then.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “But I’ll get back to you.”
“All right.” But it isn’t all right. The silence sits heavy on the line. Oliver watches his mother stir the orzo, tap the wooden spoon smartly against the pot’s rim, and set it on the counter. She turns to him expectantly. “Oliver,” he hears Marian say, “I love you. Good night.”
“Yes, good-bye,” he says, and puts down the phone.
“Who was it?” his mother says, naturally.
His head swims. “Oh, a client. Kamikaze bride. The wedding’s next week and she wants four extra centerpieces.”
“Why didn’t she call the shop?” Caroline says, annoyed on his behalf.
“Oh, she has my home number, too. It’s my fault, I probably gave her both. They get very frantic, these New York brides. It’s like it’s a big performance for them.”
Caroline sits down at the kitchen table. “Well, I think that’s very rude, calling someone at home on a Saturday night.”
Oliver shrugs. “It’s okay, Mom. Let’s forget about it. I think we’re about ready to eat.”
He goes to the stove, tests the orzo, and drains it, then tosses it with oil and spoons it onto the plates. Oliver takes the platter from the oven and pours the sauce over the ribs. “Should have bought parsley,” Oliver says.
“It smells great,” his mother says ignoring him. “Did you want me to toss that salad?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Oliver, to his distress, thinks of Marian as he watches his mother eat. He wants to steal away downstairs and call her back on the shop phone, but he stays where he is. Caroline leans forward over her plate and makes sounds of appreciation. She is beautiful—a beautiful woman of a certain age. He finds, to his surprise, that she is more intrinsically beautiful than Marian, in almost every way: thinner, more finely drawn, her colors separate and alive. Sitting here, Oliver can easily glean what Bell has so delicately termed the hotness of his mother. Caroline, always lovely, is now a shimmer of elegance.
God, he thinks. Is this all it comes down to, in the end? A thing for older women?
“Sweetie, you’re not eating,” his mother observes.
Oliver takes a bite. The meal is a success.
Oliver can even remember the first time he thought his mother beautiful, on visiting day at Keewaydin Camp, circa 1982, when the cars had filled the parking lot, disgorging mother after mother: the gray and thick, the puffed and colorless. When his family’s station wagon arrived—Oliver remembers now—and Caroline stepped out from behind the wheel, she was thin like a willow with pale yellow hair, and glittering in the Vermont sunlight. Oliver had run to her feeling select: he had no father, it was true, but he had this magical person with her arms open and her face alight, who drew every boy’s attention away from his own parent.
The leers of a camp full of boys could not compensate for his mother’s loneliness. Oliver understood that, even then, though she had not yet introduced him to Henry Rosenthal or to anyone else. Caroline had loved her marriage and family life, and her son already understood that what one loved, and lost, one sought to reclaim. He might have had her to himself, those years, but that passed.
Now, fifteen years later, Caroline had resumed the role of Greenwich wife, though with a husband whose higher profile brought her frequently to the city. Henry, who had a penchant for difficulty and loved to fight, preferably in public, handled a string of ugly divorce cases, most of which featured celebrity participants and vitriol all around. He loved to grapple and rant, and he would play the press without mercy for anyone. Oliver’s teenage years had been dominated by the DiSanto case, with its sullen offspring and obscene assets. This was followed by the fighting Coneys and their labyrinthine real estate trusts (a marital dissolution that reverberated in aftershock lawsuits for years). The early nineties were consumed by the famous film director who ran off with his nearly ex-wife’s sister, all three of whom were ultimately accused of the sexual abuse of the children, and after that Henry took on the Susskind divorce, a pitiable exercise in devastation culminating in the suicide of the thirteen-year-old whose custody was in dispute. (The day after the funeral, Henry filed a civil suit against the mother, on behalf of the father.)
Did Oliver love him? Of course not, but he saw his mother’s contentment. Caroline warmed to her new marriage, and seemed to relish her emergence from suburbia. The Manhattan charity circuit was a homecoming for her, and not a few of the more prominent hostesses she now regularly encountered had been her classmates at Brearley or had taken riding lessons with her at the Claremont Stables. Henry took pleasure in the squeals that would sometimes follow his introduction of his new wife—“But of course I know Caroline! We were in the same bunk at Tripp Lake!”—and always in her beauty, hidden away for long years in widowhood and Greenwich. And yet, although she was meeting (and re-meeting) so many people in Henry’s frenetic world, Caroline’s circle of friends continued to diminish; Marian was only one of many who fell away as Caroline made her new life with a new marriage and a growing son. Her energy was divided between mothering Oliver and mothering Henry, endeavors requiring intense if different effort. She gleaned early on, for example, that the only way Henry could detach himself from work was to have an ocean inserted between himself and his clients, so Caroline plotted with his secretary to create firewalls of vacation time, during which she took him to Europe, Asia, South America. Once home again, she would lose him to the great world and have to content herself with glimpses at breakfast and late dinners, distracted embraces and rushed compliments as he passed through the house. She might have had another child, but didn’t. She might have had a busy life of her own, but for some reason she didn’t, at least until she joined the board of the New York City Ballet Guild. While Oliver lived at home, she perfected a presence that was attentive but unintrusive and took pains to construct a home life in which the three of them operated independently, but with generally benevolent overlap. When Oliver left for Providence, they mysteriously reverted to mother and son without reference to Henry. Oliver hardly saw his stepfather at all now, except on holidays and in the New York Times. In any case, Oliver had long since decided to think of his mother as happily married, mostly because he could not bear to do otherwise.
“How’s Henry?” Oliver asks.
Caroline looks up. “Consumed. Of course.”
“With what’s her name?”
His mother nods. “It just goes on and on.”
“But the trial’s in two weeks, you said.”
“Well,” Caroline says and sighs, “unless the husband’s lawyer asks for another continuance. Or Henry does.” She shrugs. “One of them almost certainly will.”
Oliver takes a sip of wine. “I don’t understand that. I mean, it’s been an age already. What’s the point of dragging it out even more?”
Caroline rubs her forehead absently. “Well, right now she’s got primary custody. And the longer she can hold the line, the better off she’s going to be. Judges don’t like to uproot kids.”
“Possession being nine-tenths of the law,” Oliver says grimly.
She shakes her head. “It’s astonishing how some people behave. You have to remind yourself: the
se are people who stood up in front of their friends and said they loved each other!”
Oliver, despite himself, laughs. “It’s a nasty business.”
“Yes. Is there more orzo? I love the sauce.”
He serves her another helping, then pours more wine. “Mom? Doesn’t it make you cynical about marriage? I mean, it’s none of my business.”
It’s when he says this that Oliver understands he is asking about her marriage, not marriage in general. Immediately, he wishes he could take it back, but Caroline is already looking contemplative.
“No, it’s all right,” she says, her voice quiet. “I think, to be honest, I have to say yes, but not because of what Henry does for a living, necessarily. I have my own experiences to draw from. Though both of my marriages have been good, they’ve been very different. So I have a sense of marriage as something that isn’t necessarily sacred. It’s just a box you put things in. How good it turns out to be is a matter of what you put in the box.” She looks up at Oliver and smiles, suddenly embarrassed. “How profound.”
“Yes,” he says, relieved. “Profoundly profound.”
“I should be hanging around with Bell,” Caroline says. “He could translate my pearls of wisdom into poetry.”
“Bell thinks you’re beautiful,” Oliver hears himself say.
Caroline smiles, shaking her head. “I knew there was a reason I liked that guy. At my age, you don’t get that kind of compliment very often.”
“At your age,” he says, disapprovingly. “What’s the matter with—”
He stops himself. He had been about to say, with the two of you.
There is a silence, more awkward than it should be.
“I mean—” he begins.
“Yes, yes,” Caroline puts up an elegant hand, which bears an Elsa Peretti cuff of silver, “it’s hard for you to get your head around. You’re the kid, so I’ve always been older. But in my own mind I’m always younger. It’s disconcerting to see myself in the mirror.”
The White Rose Page 14
