The Rose Variations, page 13
“Natalie,” said Rose sternly, “do you really think your needs should rule the farm?”
“It’s not just my needs, it’s a normal need. Sleep is. People go a little crazy without it. Take a look around.” Natalie cast a sly glance toward the garden where Lila was on her hands and knees, pulling mud-caked car-rots, while Josie struggled up the row with a bushel of squash. Rose fought down the urge to shout at Natalie. Taking a breath, she listened to the distant crush-crush of a cabbage head on the kraut grater. It was a calming pulse.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she told Natalie, “we’ve got work to do and we don’t have much time. There could be a hard freeze tonight.”
“Come on, Rose. No one needs to slave like this. You know how much sauerkraut costs in the store? Ninety-eight cents a quart. And potatoes this time of year? Thirty cents a pound. Nobody has to bake bread any more. Nobody has to leap out of bed at five A.M. to dig potatoes. This is not pioneer America. We are not fucking Giants in the Earth!”
“Uh-huh,” said Rose. “Did you know that I’m the first one up every morning? I’m the one who rings the bell?” Her hands on the rake handle trembled. She was going to lose her temper.
Natalie was genuinely startled. “Oh, really? Why?” she asked. “Can’t you sleep? What’s the matter with you?”
Rose’s anger died. It was the first time since Natalie had come that she’d asked Rose about herself and, for a crazy moment, Rose was tempted to confide in her. But about what? About Lila? About how the farm had seemed in the spring and how it was now, how she had loved it and how she despaired of it now? She did despair of it. If she was the first up every morning, it was only because she was too cold to sleep. She’d imagined it a world apart and a new way of life, but underneath, it was as tangled as anywhere else, the people strange and the work arbitrary. They lived here, nonetheless, she and her sister; it was their home, their shelter of the moment. Rose felt the start of tears.
Natalie waited, her blue eyes sunstruck, her hair a gold corona. “Oh, I forgot,” she said and reached into her pocket. “You got a letter.”
Ursula, Rose thought. She had managed since her downfall with Lila to write one letter—a letter to Ursula, a dread confession, quoting the last written words of Admiral Scott before his death from cold and starvation: “the causes of the expedition’s failure are these. . . .” She’d admitted to Ursula, at least, that the farm hadn’t worked out and that she was stalled there until she could see Natalie though childbirth and figure out what to do with her and the baby. Once she’d sent Ursula the letter, she found she couldn’t wait for a reply and so had driven to the phone booth in Cosmos a couple days later and had hazarded a call.
“I’m on my way out the door,”Ursula had said.“Oh, shit, Rose. Call back?”
“Sure.”
“But you won’t.”
“The phone’s in the middle of the common room, remember? There’s no privacy.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen up. Is she getting prenatal care? Is Natalie seeing a doctor?” Rose had hesitated. “Right. I have to say, I don’t get you, Rose, inviting Natalie.”
“I didn’t really have a choice.”
“Right. Only Natalie has choices. Fucking Natalie,” she growled. Ursula did have some experience of Natalie, who’d visited Rose in grad school and run up the phone bill, alternately cooing to and arguing with some boyfriend back home—the pharmacist, Rose now realized. Once, to Natalie’s wide-eyed astonishment, Ursula had untangled Natalie’s hair from the phone cord and hung up for her, mid-call.
“You hold on,” Ursula had commanded Rose as she stood in the phone booth. “I’m coming.”
“You can’t afford it,” Rose protested. “Not the time off and not the money.”
“You came to me in my time of trial,” declared Ursula. “I’m coming to you in yours.”
“Is this my time of trial?” Rose was beginning to suspect that all her times were of trial, and it touched her that Ursula might come. Maybe friendship wasn’t such a shuck after all.
A letter from Ursula would at least offer further advice on how to manage Natalie.
Rose knew, however, as soon as she closed her hand on it, that the letter was not from Ursula. The paper was heavy and textured, and the envelope’s return address was embossed.
The Minnesota Composer’s Guild. Dear Rose MacGregor,We are pleased to inform you—and Rose read no further. She’d grasped what it meant and was shouting.
The grant she’d applied for—she’d gotten it. She’d won. There’d be money to hire musicians for a whole concert of her music in the Cities. She was going back to the city. She was going to be somebody after all. The charming little farm was about to be a memory. Natalie would give birth soon, but so? A wild young girl gets knocked up—ordinary life, unremarkable. Natalie would need to be settled someplace, but Rose was on her way now. She’d written the sonata for Natalie; she would put her sister’s name in the concert program. Natalie was lucky, really, to have an about-to-be famous sister.
“What is it?” demanded Natalie.
But Rose wouldn’t let Natalie be the first to hear. She ought to rush to Lila, but she didn’t want that either. Anyone could see Lila had let her career go, retiring to a farm way off in the middle of nowhere. She’d be one of those musicians of brief fame. Lila had talent. It was sad. She was probably lucky to have met Rose; maybe she’d be a footnote.
Rose saw herself on Guy’s arm at her concert. What did it matter if they were or were not lovers? He’d be her escort—he owed her that much. They’d be the handsome pair. He’d have to buy a suit. No, a tux. Gripping the letter, she backed away from Natalie, who looked at her strangely and let out a nervous laugh.
Rose didn’t know where she was going, but she couldn’t stand there a minute longer. She turned and ran to her car. The keys were in the ignition. She started up, backed around, and drove out, gazing into the rearview mirror where she saw, with a shivery stab of satisfaction, Natalie standing dumbstruck, exactly where she’d left her.
Chapter TWELVE
The phone booth stood in the bright sun, trapping heat. Rose let her barn jacket slide to the floor and with bemusement studied the mud-encrusted overalls and the frayed sweatshirt under-neath. Who had she been when she’d put on those clothes? It was as if someone else had dressed her. She lifted and let fall each foot, clunking the heavy-soled secondhand Red Wings, breathed in her own sweat smell, and ran a hand through her stubbly hair, picturing herself in a photo: The Composer in Her Brief Farm Phase.
She’d driven off without her wallet or address book, but knew the numbers by heart and would call collect. Bells would ring at her command in Alan’s rooms in St. Paul and Ursula’s in Philadelphia, and from those rooms life surely opened outward. Who could say but she’d have a concert in Philadelphia one day soon?
Soaking in the heat inside the booth, she gazed out at the squat brick and shingle storefronts of the one-block main street of Cosmos, and the towering conveyors of the grain elevator, and the prairie beyond, vast and lost. She could love the prairie and not have to live in it. To the rhythm of a distantly ringing phone, music tumbled inside her. Ursula would shout and Alan would ask a jillion questions. But neither was home.
She thought of Emma Williams. She and Emma had taken to sitting side by side at Quaker Meeting, and one Sunday, invited on the spur of the moment, she’d followed Emma out on the highway from Litchfield halfway to Hutchinson. They’d turned onto a gravel road at a sign in the shape of a winged corncob—she thought she could find it again—and turned again at a round barn and the next place was Emma’s.
Emma’s farmhouse sprawled in a grove of oaks above a pond. The house only seemed in poor repair: she primed and painted one side of it a summer, so it stood in various shades of blue-gray, various stages of fading and cracking. The inside walls had turned brown under years of wood smoke and the furniture was a worn hodgepodge, but the place was full of books and pictures and there was a lamp to turn on at every spot a lamp could be wanted.
On a rise above the pond, two upholstered armchairs, which had been surrendered to the sun and rain, creaked and sent up puffs of dust when the two of them sat down there. Mother of several grown children, grand-mother of many more, Emma was now on her own—no one but herself and the weather—and loved it. A husband had drunk himself out of the picture long ago, she told Rose with a dismissive wave of her hand, and she’d gone to work for the county—no choice, mouths to feed—while studying law at night.
“Law,” said Rose. “Wow.”
Had Emma always looked the part, Justice with Her Scales, or had she grown into it, Rose wondered? Was there something in Rose that would develop so that, years in the future, younger people might say to them-selves that hers was the face of music?
Emma had passed the bar and become a public defender, but no bleeding heart.
“A public defender,” said Rose. “Wow.”
“Wow,” Emma had echoed and had tilted her head back and raised her eyebrows and grinned, no longer ancient but a kid again. In that look, Rose had recognized the offer of friendship but had been too snarled up inside just then to do more than sit silent, and so had gone away without telling Emma a thing about herself.
My friend, Rose allowed herself to say as she turned at the flying corncob.
A dizzy little rhythm in her head changed into something that loped along. She’d never mentioned Emma at the Goat Pasture. This was mis-guided loyalty, she realized, fear that the others would think she was making friends elsewhere, moving on. How had she gotten herself into such a state, inhibited, mistrustful of herself and other people, unable to take the open hand of friendship? Oh, she was moving on.
Emma’s truck was missing, but affixed to the door was a dog-eared note, much punctured by tack pricks: Back soon—Come in.
Rose sat on the steps and took her letter out. She read it closely and then stood up, her heart pounding, and went in and spread the three pages of it on Emma’s table. Here in fine print was her project description in her own words: a concert of her music featuring the cello soloist Lila Goldensohn. She hadn’t remembered proposing that.
“Why, Rose,” Emma called through the screen door and burst in, dumping a chain saw. Embracing Rose swiftly, she spotted the letter. “Why, you clever thing,” she said, scanning it. “You’re a composer! Is this the biggest thrill in maybe a hundred years? And you never breathed a word.”
Rose laughed and blushed. She’d been right to come to Emma.
“I’m going to buy fifteen tickets,” declared Emma. “You sit down here and tell me all about yourself, starting at the beginning.”
Self-consciously, Rose sketched in the peculiar parents and the wild sister and then added a piano, warming to her story of Musician as Lonely Young Girl. But as she approached the present, dread crept in. She was going to have to bring Lila into it.
“My god, Lila Goldensohn! Rumor has it she lives around here, though nobody’s ever seen her. Do you mean to say you know her?”
She admitted she lived on Lila’s farm, at least at present.
Emma was astonished. “No, really? What’s she like?”
Rose didn’t want to say.
“Ah. Shy? I’ve read she’s a hermit nowadays.”
It was a startling thought. Did Lila ever leave the farm? Rose couldn’t think of a time when she had. Except for the defunct Studebaker, dusty and cobwebbed in the barn, Lila had no car. Could she drive, even? Did it matter? Lila kept to her land and the rest of them, Rose included, mostly did the same. Perhaps Lila had sworn off the world for good and would refuse to play Rose’s concert, and that would be that. And that would be best. Could she still cut Lila from her grant proposal? Alan would know.
She said goodbye to Emma, drove back to the farm, told her news, and suffered everyone’s congratulations. They seemed genuinely happy for her—jubilant, even—all but Natalie, who kept to the background with a fixed smile. Even Peggy threw her arms around Rose; Dinah pounded her on the back; and Lila, electrified, tripped over Josie as she thumped upstairs to get her cello.
Rose wanted to call to her to wait, to have caution. Rose was the one who’d started it with Lila, rushing backstage, bursting into tears, begging to write music for her. But she’d tried on Lila’s life and it hadn’t fit. It was an episode and it was over.
Throughout that evening and into the night, well past bedtime, Lila could be heard at her cello up in her room, playing Rose’s music. At a late hour, the music halted and angry voices erupted. Out in the barn, Rose got up and looked down on the house to see Natalie’s light on. The voices died out, the light switched off and, as Rose bundled herself back into her hammock, the cello resumed. Lila did, indeed, expect to play Rose’s con-cert and so was about to have her feelings hurt. Again. As soon as Rose could manage to pack herself and Natalie up, she was out of there.
Or so she thought.
The first obstacle was Natalie, who refused to leave the farm. She was settled there, she told Rose. She would not go to the city. It would be bad for the baby.
Rose couldn’t fathom this. Didn’t Natalie complain about the farm all the time? Didn’t she hate everybody? And, Rose ruthlessly pointed out, didn’t everybody hate her?
Oh, well, Rose could say whatever mean things came into her head; she could strut around in her concert grant britches—Natalie wasn’t budging. Rose could leave her there; Natalie wouldn’t stop her. Why didn’t Rose just do that?
Well, Rose couldn’t. Other people were involved.
Her second obstacle was the grant proposal, what she’d laid out in her own words. She wasn’t sure how to get out of it.
As she backed out of the driveway on her way to Alan in the city, Rose saw Lila striding to the barn, rocking chair hoisted overhead, with Natalie in shouting pursuit. Under Natalie’s weight, one of the runners had come loose. Rose couldn’t just leave Natalie at the farm.
Now she sat at Alan’s table, eating the enormous chicken sandwich he’d made for her and moaning as he told her, gently but firmly, that Lila could not be cut from her program. He’d worked his Composer’s Guild sources, and word was that Rose’s great coup had been to engage Lila to perform again, that Lila’s letter of recommendation had virtually assured the grant.
“Well, then, I’ll just hand the money over to Lila,” said Rose, sinking into gloom.
“It’s no reflection on you. This is politics. It’s marketing. It’s publicity.” His phone was ringing, but he ignored it. “Be strategic, Rose. Use your luck.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she told him. “Lila and me.”
His face darkened.
“I know you warned me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m guilty of my own experiments, as we know.” He knelt beside her chair and put his arms around her, his eyes so unbearably sad that she had to look away across his shoulder. Friendship, mutual solace, whatever it was, she needed him. She needed him to know every agonized detail of what had and had not occurred between her and Lila. That monstrous night, half enacted, half smothered, still clung. She couldn’t see how she’d ever arrive at comfort with Lila the way she and Alan had, able now to put consoling arms around each other. She couldn’t imagine Lila looking at her any way other than with that dead look, the look of someone who’s hopeless but keeps going through the motions, a look she could expect to see the night of her Composer’s Guild concert, the con-cert that Lila was apparently destined to play.
Alan’s phone rang again. “Some student. Some godforsaken committee member. At ten rings, they’ll quit.” At twenty rings, he picked up and handed the receiver to Rose.
“Well, here I am,” said Ursula.
“Ursula! Oh, god, Ursula, I need you,” said Rose, not hiding her tears.
“I’m at the frigging Goat Patch, if you want to know.”
“Where?”
“Where are you? I’ve only got till tomorrow.”
“On my way.”
It dawned on Rose as she drove back out of the city that the hard freeze had come overnight and ended the growing season. The grass had gone papery. Leaves fell in clumps, and whatever remained in vegetable and flower beds was wilted or blackened as though a malevolent hand had passed over.
It was night by the time she reached the Goat Pasture. There were people in the gazebo—Lila, layered in sweaters, playing while Josie held a lantern and turned pages—and Guy’s truck was parked at the barn, beside Ursula’s glossy rental car.
On the front step, Rose glanced in through the window and stopped at the sight of Guy, bent over the wood stove, apparently alone. As he fed a log in, the fire lit his hands and his shirt front and his open collar where his chest disappeared into mossy shadow. In the fire’s glow, his lidded eyes were lively above the stillness of his bones. How long had it been since she’d really looked at him? She wanted to take his face in her hands. However painfully, she was coming alive again. Old hungers were surfacing: hunger for a place in the world, for friendship and for every other possibility. Why not love? Maybe her long penance was over for her sin against Lila, for the earlier trouble she’d gotten into with Alan, and for the misfortune of her pregnancy and how it had undone them, herself and Guy, so near to the beginning of their love.
She stepped inside.
Strangely, a bed sheet was tacked up over the kitchen doorway and, behind it, a light cast huge shadows. A humped form lay on the table and someone stood alongside, poking at it and murmuring. Guy straightened up and put his finger to his lips.
“Ursula?” she called.
“In a minute,” said Ursula from the behind the sheet. Guy led her outside.
“What is it? Is the baby coming?”
“No. It’s an examination. Prenatal care.”
They stood awkwardly in the evening chill. She reached for him but he held her back. “Your grant. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“How could I? You don’t have a phone.”
Across the meadow, Lila’s cello ceased, and in the house, Natalie started to cry. Rose felt her heart contract at the sound, though it was nothing more than what she’d imagined hidden beneath Natalie’s laughter all along—the sound of lonely misery.
