The Rose Variations, page 15
Natalie lay on sheets and towels over crackling plastic. Emma unfastened and cast aside the leather belts from the footboard.
“A trip to the olden days,” she said, and beckoned to Rose to make a sling with her, the two of them kneeling either side of the headboard. Natalie was told to sit forward, and Rose and Emma joined arms, hand to elbow, and braced her from behind and then she lay back and Emma and Rose extended, each of them, an elbow around front, over which Natalie was to hook her knees. And when she had each knee in place and, between her legs, gripped their free hands, the human sling went taut, and Natalie was entirely contained in their arms and, at the same time, able to open her thighs. Her nightgown was bunched to her waist. Her under-pants were soaking.
“You can take those off,” said Emma and released Rose and set a lamp low at the foot of the bed for later, when it would be needed. She switched the lamp off. It might be a while yet, she told them. Natalie should rest and Rose might read a book, and Guy—well, Guy would do whatever he pleased.
Emma installed herself with a book in a narrow rocker outside the open door, where she read and hummed. Obediently, Rose went down-stairs to the bookshelf and found a Western with a sunset on the cover and settled herself back upstairs in the dampness of the wicker chair. She read and reread page one, in which a cowboy put a halter on a horse. Emma noticed she was not turning pages and suggested she go down-stairs to nap. Rose gave a fake yawn and stretched but settled back to her page one, seeing not a cowboy, but Doris Atkinson the previous autumn, that terrible afternoon when she had observed Doris enduring Frances and Harold in the same room. She felt a sudden affinity for the pale, shattered woman. But here, in the room under the eaves, the room with the strange odors, something was about to transpire and Rose found herself interested. Something, someone was coming.
Natalie slept and then she was astir. She tried to get up. She lay back down.
“Are you hot?” Emma asked. “Shall we take this off?” She gave the nightgown a tug.
Natalie cast a wild look in Guy’s direction.
“Oh, I wouldn’t spare his feelings,” said Emma.
They lifted off the nightgown and Natalie leaned back, her breasts and nipples bloated above the mound of her belly and her vulva, enormous, exposed between her open knees.
Emma cast an eye on Guy, and, obediently, he looked.
“You’re okay. You’re good,” he told Natalie, his voice unsteady.
Was he turned on by the sight, Rose wondered? Did this fulfill his notion of womanhood? She felt a prickling of remorse. No matter what Natalie had done, she was in childbirth now. This was, undeniably, womanhood, a grand, momentous thing.
Natalie smiled wanly up at him. “We could name him Guy, Junior.”
“Oh?” he croaked. He leaned back and his shadow seemed to fall over backwards.
She yelped and bore down.
“I’m not sure you should be pushing yet,” said Emma.
Natalie lifted her chin sharply toward the spot between her legs. They saw a slight bulge.
Emma and Rose knelt and made their sling, and Natalie gripped and the bulge vanished.
“Not so hard yet,” said Emma. “Try to hold back.”
Natalie was thirsty. Emma went to crack ice. The grandeur of birth, was it? The roiling mass of legs and belly seemed to yield up nothing but chaos and stink.
Natalie again lay against Rose and Emma, her hair matted, her skin very pale. A freckle by her ear seemed as dark as ink. She tensed and Emma and Rose tensed with her, cradling her. And they stood and stretched and then she tensed again and then again so soon after the previous time that they had to stay kneeling in place.
The clock read 3:30. The bulge between Natalie’s legs was enlarging by degrees.
“His head,” said Natalie.
Between her legs, between the lips, a dark something showed, partly hairy, partly smooth, perhaps a head. A little dent and a slit in it—per-haps a wrinkled eye.
“Push now,” said Emma, and swung Natalie’s knee to Guy and moved to crouch between Natalie’s legs, reaching in with her hands. “And now.” Natalie bellowed.
“God,” said Guy.
The head came and then the shoulders and the rest, sluicing fishlike into Emma’s hands, and she scooped it up and laid it on Natalie’s heaving chest. A baby. A baby who breathed in a tiny heaving counterpoint.
“It’s a girl,” said Guy.
“Very good,” said Emma, laughing.
“Oh,” said Natalie and closed her eyes.
With sterilized sewing scissors, Emma cut and tied the cord.
“Now, hold her,” she urged Natalie, who, her eyes still closed, allowed Emma to move her arm to curl limply around the baby. “What are you going to call her?”
“She’s a girl, so I don’t know,” said Natalie remotely.
Rose sneaked a hand up and grasped the baby’s foot. Satiny, sticky little foot. Natalie’s arm loosened around the baby and her hand wandered down to the pulsing cord.
“Yes,” said Emma. “Take your daughter, Guy. We’ve got to push that placenta out.”
Guy sat gingerly and held out his hands, eager, uncertain. “She isn’t mine,” he admitted.
“Yes, we all feel that at first,” said Emma and no one enlightened her.
Natalie swayed to her feet and squatted and the placenta spilled out, purple and white, ridged and ruffled and slick with blood. They couldn’t help staring, all but Emma, who was gathering towels and pouring water.
Rose filled a basin and took the baby from Guy, who didn’t protest, and went to the wicker chair, where she sat with her knees together, nestling the baby between her thighs and, no one stopping her, bathed the little thing and, with a clean washcloth and pins, fashioned a diaper.
Swaddled in a towel, the tiny girl frowned and twisted her mouth. A cheek caved in and then rounded out again.
The silence inside Rose had broken out in chanting, a many-voiced tumult. She closed her fingers around the tiny hand. Who are you? This was Natalie’s—Natalie’s baby, she told herself sternly, but it seemed irrelevant.
“What’s your name?” she whispered. Beyond her in the room, Emma helped Natalie into a fresh nightgown and Guy gathered up the soiled bedding.
“What’s your name?” Rose said aloud. “She’s going to tell me,” she informed them.
“Really?” said Natalie dully and lay down again.
Rose knew it was not her right to do this, but no one seemed to be stopping her. In her lap, the tiny, wobbly being opened one dazzling eye and then the other and looked at her.
A name floated up.
“Marguerite,” breathed Rose. “Marguerite MacGregor,” she said aloud.
“After who?” said Natalie.
“After no one but herself.”
Guy stopped. Emma cast a startled glance at Rose and the baby.
“All right,” said Natalie. “We’ll call her Marguerite.”
Chapter FOURTEEN
The Composer’s Guild was housed in an old brick warehouse in downtown St. Paul, in a room whose stark length was interrupted by great pillars, each hewn from a single log and bolted into an iron framework overhead, evidence of the lumber barons and ore magnates who had built the city. The vaulting space dwarfed the Guild filing cabinets, table with phone, and scattering of chairs. A poster-sized portrait of Beethoven floated on a wall, insignificant as a postage stamp.
At a table beneath a huge, arched window, six people were gathered ahead of Rose, who’d had unexpected trouble finding parking. She was never late—she hated to be late—but here she was at grant orientation, slipping into the last chair. Her hands were freezing from her struggle with the pay envelope at the unattended lot next to the freeway, and now she was sweating in her woolens. She’d worn (what else?) the twin set and tweed skirt Frances had correctly termed governessy, and here came the Director in her silks, her auburn hair with its chic white streak.
Rose gripped the small hand and felt the bones crunch. “Sorry,” she said and sat.
The Director turned up the wattage behind her smile. “Rose Mac-Gregor,” she announced to the room. “Rose has just come in from the farm. Lila’s farm.”
“Not quite,” said Rose. She’d come from Emma’s.
“Lila Goldensohn, you know,” the Director purred.
They were already acquainted, Rose and the Director. When Rose had come to town the previous fall to begin her appointment at the college, the Director had hosted a reception for her at the Guild, ostensibly to meet other composers, though wealthy patrons were rather more in evidence. The Director had ferried her from group to group of tanned, expensive people, introducing her and dropping names.
Rose had studied in Philadelphia—she must know George Crumb? Or Rochberg, surely? Richard Wernick?
“Not personally,” Rose had answered, which wasn’t quite true. The famous names had trooped through her grad program; some had even been her teachers and she had known them as students always know their teachers. She knew them, but they didn’t know her. She couldn’t say the same of Lila. She was going to have to admit that she knew Lila. Personally.
The Director handed her a blank name tag and without forethought Rose wrote, “I know Lila Goldensohn,” and slapped it on her chest. Baring her teeth, she surveyed the circle.
“Har, har,” said a white-haired, white-bearded man who shook her hand damply. Beside him sat a kid in big glasses whose grin seemed to split his face, then a bald guy who raised his jaw in her direction as he rocked a motorcycle helmet on the tabletop, and, beside him, in a cape, a gloomy young man with one continuous eyebrow crossing his forehead and a boot placed aggressively on the window sill. Rose took a second name tag, scribbled her name, slapped it up over the first, and turned to the remaining grantee, a thin-lipped, restless person with a ruffle at her throat whose name was actually—she held still a moment and Rose con-firmed it on the name tag—Melody. Rose swallowed and extended her hand. Melody shook her fingertips. My people, Rose told herself grimly. They were not a community but hungry competitors, ranked, no doubt, from first place to sixth in a file somewhere in the room.
The Director, a composer herself who rarely had time for her own work, though that was another subject altogether and none of their concern, declared her pleasure in awarding the grants, speaking of the rareness of talent, a rareness akin to that of unicorns. Rose nearly choked. Unicorns.
The Director got up to take a call. “New York,” she said, winking and beaming.
Rose caught herself sitting up straighter and deliberately slumped back. She would, of course, love to have her music played in New York City, but it was highly doubtful that the Director could, by picking up the phone, hand out fame and fortune. Still, who could say? Melody, with a wriggle of the shoulders, scanned the ceiling, eyes alight. She imagines she’s being discovered, thought Rose—she thinks she’s a unicorn. Maybe the others were unicorns, brilliant and justifiably self-regarding, in contrast to the marginally talented Rose, who had hitch-hiked in on the coattails of a famous musician.
“What’s the matter?” the fellow in the cape asked her. “Or do you always scowl?” He radiated a savage, almost feral smile. “You’re not paying them; they’re paying you,” he told her.
“Right,” she said and rubbed her eyes. She had no excuse for behaving badly. A folder inscribed with her name in gold calligraphy was set at her place at the table. She opened it.
The grant was not large—twenty-five hundred, from which to pay musicians, hall rental, and copyists, and if there was any money left, to pay for her time. If she was extremely frugal—she’d copy her own music and make do with Lila and one or two other musicians; she needn’t hire a whole orchestra—the grant, added to her savings, would cover living expenses through winter and spring. She wouldn’t need much, living at Emma’s. In fact, her life had emptied out so completely, she felt nearly disembodied. There was music and there was Emma.
Guy had packed them up, Natalie and himself and the baby, and gone.
It had been a shock to see them get into the truck. Rose had diapered and bathed Marguerite every day—Natalie was exhausted and having trouble nursing—and had rocked and sung and played music to her. But of course Rose couldn’t nurse her. And had no say over her. The truck’s passenger door, which had once belonged to Rose, gave out its peculiar sound, opening and closing, a screech and then a groan, now merely a noise a truck door made, and the driver was merely someone she’d once known, loading up his woman and his baby.
“It’ll be all right,” said Emma, as the truck pulled out. “You can visit them.”
But would she? She couldn’t imagine missing Guy and Natalie, and she could do without the crying in the night; but, quite unexpectedly, she felt unsure she could do without the baby: the dense, wobbly weight of her, her heat, her firm, tiny grip, the silken nape of her neck, her unfocused, rapt regard of everything around her. Even at a week old, Rose imagined she saw personality. Marguerite seemed eager but deliberate, ready for joy but cautious—sensible, even. Could a baby take after its aunt?
They were gone. Her life was her own again, and she stood there weeping.
“Oh, now,” said Emma.
“No, really,” said Rose. It was time to make a clean breast of things to Emma, however awkward. She admitted that Guy had quite recently been her boyfriend and choked out what had happened with Lila too.
Emma offered a handkerchief, but no reply. They got up and went their separate ways: Rose to her music, and Emma to clean up her gar-dens for winter. When they met in the kitchen to prepare supper, Emma had not yet spoken.
“What you must think of me!” Rose blurted. “Would you like me go?”
“Why, Rose, I’d be bereft.”
“So I can stay?”
There was pain in Emma’s answering smile. “You don’t trust anybody, do you? Not even yourself. Though why should you,” Emma added, gently, “after all the shenanigans?”
“I do trust you, and I want to stay,” said Rose. She’d pay rent; she’d buy the groceries.
Emma laughed. “Not the groceries.” But she’d take rent. She suggested a figure ridiculously low. Rose doubled it.
“If you must,” Emma said, “but what I’d really like is to go with you once in a while when you and Lila play.”
Rose wished she’d thought of it herself. She and Lila, with Josie on piano, practiced every evening in the common room at the Goat Pasture, and, once she began bringing Emma, it went easier. Because Emma was a guest, Peggy brought refreshments, Josie told jokes, and Lila’s silence seemed mere shyness. And if her circumstances there seemed in some way a drab afterlife, Rose was at least able to pursue her music now without distraction. In the steady hours, she finished two long pieces, three short, and a brand new, tiny, jazzy piece dedicated to Marguerite: a concert of ninety minutes, she figured, adding in intermission.
She’d figured wrong, however. She was not to have her own concert. When the Guild Director returned from talking on the phone to New York, she clarified this “minor matter.” The Guild only had the budget to publicize three concerts. The winning composers would be paired. That way they’d split hall rental. They’d each have more money that way, didn’t they see?
Rose realized she was gaping. “More money, but less music,” she said.
The Director turned a corner of her mouth up in Rose’s direction and a dimple sank. Best to be realistic, she said. Pairing up, they’d increase their draw. This was Minnesota, didn’t they know, with its liberal tradition, its populism? The Board liked to spread the money around.
“Two composers for the price of one,” observed Rose.
“New music by unknowns,” the Director said and sighed. Their concerts were central to the Guild’s mission, but not even the Board could be counted on to attend.
“Not even to hear music by unicorns?” said Rose and told herself to shut up. Careers theoretically were launched from this room, reputations made. The Director let out a silvery giggle. They’d have to drag in family and friends and any other unicorns they happened to know and beg their musicians to do the same. The Guild would pay for jug wine, crackers, cheese; and the Board’s bright idea of the season was to mount the con-certs during Winter Carnival to piggyback onto Carnival publicity, though who that might draw, one couldn’t say—ice sculptors or the guys who tromped around in helmets—Vikings? Vulcans. But, oh well, the main thing was to hear one’s music oneself, wasn’t it? And, of course, it would all look dandy on the résumé.
So this was it, Rose thought, her Concert Grant? Her turning point, her luck? But didn’t luck always go this way—a brief sense of arrival, quickly overthrown by strangeness? The Chairman of the Board, the Director was saying, liked to participate hands-on. He’d paired the com-posers for their concerts, drawing names out of a hat. The white-haired man was paired with the grinning kid. Santa and The Elf, thought Rose. The motorcycle man and the young vampire were paired—a Vulcans’ Concert.
Rose realized who was left. Melody adjusted her shoulders.
“And the distaff end,” the Director said sweetly.
“From a random drawing out of a hat?” said Rose. “I want to see that hat.”
The Director threw back her head and laughed. “Aren’t you a breath of fresh air? Now, here’s a thought: Lila Goldensohn will bring in a crowd if we bill your concert as her comeback.”
“Why, yes,” said Melody and tugged at her ruffle.
The Director winked. “Just something to ponder.”
Rose was crushingly tired and baffled by her own unruliness. She wrote down her phone number and passed it to Melody; it seemed they’d be working together. The huge project she had been counting on to fill the winter days had collapsed to nothing. She’d have a mere half-hour to program. She could be ready the next day.
When the meeting ended, she fled to a nearby gas station and, in the restroom, changed out of her sweaty woolens and into the jeans and flannel shirt she had bundled in the car, intending to head back to Emma’s and go straight to bed. In the rearview mirror, she noticed a patch of dried baby spittle on the collar of her flannel shirt and scratched it until it powdered off. She took a detour up the hill to Tangletown. She might sack out on Alan’s couch, her head felt so heavy.
