The Bubble Reputation (22 page)

“Did Mother find out?” Rosemary asked.

“She never did,” said Aunt Rachel. “It occurs to me now that I must have wanted you to know, or I wouldn't have been so careless.” She put the empty wineglass down beside Rosemary's bottle. “It isn't something I'm proud of, the part where your mother was concerned. And it seems awful to sit here now and discuss this with Jonathan's daughter. With Eleanor's daughter.”
Eleanor.
How long had it been since Rosemary had heard her mother's name spoken? “I guess I didn't want to take that secret with me when I go. Maybe I see you as the only person left that I can explain to. We humans don't always plan for things to happen. We don't always mean to hurt someone.”

“And is taking care of her your way of paying Mother back?” Rosemary asked.

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Aunt Rachel answered. “And then I hate myself for even wondering. I'd like to think the answer is no.”

The moon was now higher, brighter on her face. The swan's neck was gone. That was only a moonlit memory, perhaps a memory of Father's. Aunt Rachel was deathly now, an emissary for Rosemary, as William and Mugs had been. Forerunners, all of them. Aunt Rachel reached a thin hand out in the moonlight. Rosemary found it, glowing white, thin and narrow as a trellis with skin growing on it. They clutched hands and Rosemary finally lay her head on Aunt Rachel's shoulder, a pillow of bone.

“Listen to me,” Aunt Rachel whispered. Her voice was emollient in the darkness. It swept over Rosemary again, the way it did in grade school when her bicycle ended up in Aunt Rachel's yard. The same gravitational pull that had reeled in Father. “I didn't come here to confess. I came here to your silly tent to reprimand. I sit beside you, fifty-nine years old, in a body racked with cancer. I sit beside a healthy young woman with all her life ahead of her, and all I can think of saying is how dare you?”

Rosemary was crying suddenly. “I had always imagined it was a rendezvous in some motel room,” she said. “But I know now he must have been happy, if he had you.”

“Rosemary, listen.” Aunt Rachel's voice was now cautionary. “Jonathan's been gone for more than twenty years, but don't you think he'd expect me to come here and talk some sense into the daughter he treasured? Self-pity doesn't become you. William was weak, but you're the strong one. He was a wonderful young man in many ways, but he was without direction, always in search of some holy grail. William wasn't a very good soldier. You're the one who's tough.”

***

Rosemary spent that last night in the tent. Aquila, the magnificent eagle, was almost ready to roost when she finally drifted off to sleep, almost certain the wild cherry smell had turned to Old Spice and the extra pillow she liked to cradle in her arms was a loving cat. All night long she dreamed of parachutes, tiny as mushrooms, cascading out of the sky, gods descending safely to earth. Astronauts, maybe, safe this time. Or ultralight men whose haggard wives had finally tossed them out.

The next day she packed her things, the books, the lantern, the empty wine bottles, and carried it all back down the hill. A fierce electrical storm broke in the evening, with thunder echoing down the chimney, with lightning lighting up the fields and road and yard. The electricity, competition for the storm, was zapped off. Rosemary let the blown fuse be and instead sat in the dark kitchen to watch the illuminating show that was being staged around her. She was safe again, in the house. “When the earth's crust first formed, Rosemary,” William had said, “a heavy rain fell for sixty thousand years. And lightning snapped continually. This is nothing, this little shower. This is nothing at all.”

An hour into the storm, and at its peak, she heard a scratching at the kitchen door. Her heart thumped.
A cat has nine lives, doesn't it, William? Mugs has eight to go.
It was Winston, the outdoor cat, tortoiseshell and sleek, who frisked past her legs and padded down to the den to make himself a bed on the couch. “It was wonderful to see, William,” Rosemary would've told him, had he been there, had he come back from his last trip to London alive. “It was like a royal succession. One king died and so another took over. Mars was in Sagittarius, William, when Winston ascended the throne.” But William was not there. William would never be there again.

Rosemary put Mugs's dish back out and filled it. She filled the water bowl. But it would be weeks before she ventured back up the hill to dismantle, as though it were a time bomb, the dangerous tent.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads,

rising thro' the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fireflies

tangled in a silver braid.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”

Autumn hit the massive house on Old Airport Road in the form of strong winds laced with the painted leaves of October. Already withered and gone were the lilacs, the violets, and the tiny strawberries that had dotted the hillside like red buttons. Cherries had come out of the wild blossoms and gone to the robins, and the orioles, and into mason jars in the basement. The sown seeds of wild grasses had thrived on Mugs's grave, and died, and now stood above their deadened roots, feeling the first tremor of cold shoot through the earth. Winter was coming to Bixley, Maine. The first snow would take away the final remnants of the things that had grown throughout the summer toward their own self-harvest, toward Nature's thrashing time. It had been a long season, even for Maine, with unusually stifling dog days curling in and out of July and August as Sirius, the dog star, the old scorcher, rose and set with the sun. Now it was over. Snow would soon turn the fields and roads and driveways white again. October was slowly inching into winter and soon icicles would hang from eaves, glassy stalactites. And storm windows would come out of the basements of the older houses, cobwebbed and sleepy-eyed, to be Windexed back, shiny enough to stare out of for months. The migrating birds had gone, remembering their broken images of gulfs, and rain forests, and marshes, pictures slumbering in their heads from a previous year. Halloween came and went, like the pumpkin on its vine, like the witches of folklore, with only a handful of trick-or-treaters venturing out to goblinize Old Airport Road, to tap their chilled hands on Rosemary's front door, kids who lived along the road only, the town children preferring sidewalks of cement. Rambos and Terminators now, these trick-or-treaters carrying toy machine guns, rarely witches or ghosts.

The first light snowflakes fell just as the last Halloween pumpkin withered on Rosemary's porch steps. With Thanksgiving now just a week away, an expectancy engulfed the land, a hurriedness in the animals. Would it be a harsh winter? Rosemary wasn't unnerved. She knew the migrating birds, like little clocks, would be back. And so would the cherries. And she knew that the Bixley River would run again, free of ice, clear. She knew that the winter birds would do their best at the bulging feeders to avoid the mortality rates, so she kept the feeders filled. And she shoveled a path to the mailbox, a source of communication for her again, as it had been in those months following William's death. The first day that the weatherman had threatened snow, she had backed her blue car out of the garage and had driven it slowly down the road and into Bixley, where it could be serviced and dressed with snow tires. She had then covered the bicycle with a sheet of plastic and pushed it into a quiet corner of the garage. Winston settled easily into his role of indoor cat. Uncle Bishop came occasionally to visit, the Datsun's hind feet burdened with chains for Old Airport Road, not one of the best-plowed avenues in Bixley. Sometimes Miriam tagged along with him and talked incessantly of a current boyfriend, who would be, she claimed, the very last man in her life. Lizzie's cards still arrived once in a while.
Things
are
better
with
Charles
and
me. I think Philip is getting married. His secretary. Life is strange, isn't it, Rosie?
Rosemary wished Lizzie and Charles the best, but she would worry about them. Marriages, like cobwebs, were fragile things. Robbie studied hard, sent letters sparsely, called occasionally. Mrs. Abernathy's column ceased to appear in early September. Every day Rosemary planned to inch the car out of the garage and take a spin over to check on her. Every day. But something kept getting in the way. Only the young, and Mrs. Abernathy probably knew this, have the pleasure of such delays. There would be a January opening now at Bixley High School, if Rosemary wanted it. Mary Templeton was taking a year's leave to have her first baby. Rosemary could teach Early American literature. She shuddered to think of Jonathan Edwards, the Mather boys, the Puritan writings. But she needed to give the school board a decision within the month. A month, now, seemed like an eternity to her.

Meals were simple affairs again, as they were in those days after losing William. She made fires in her Schrader fireplace and sat sometimes late at night with a glass of wine, listening to the trees talking in snaps and pops, gossip of the old days when they were still standing in the mother forest. Her dreams were still around. They perched themselves in the black corners of the night, curled beneath the handmade cherry bed, on those particularly long nights, those particularly cruel nights, when she could almost smell the sweet smell of William and of Mugs. That's when the finger of nightmare slid itself out from under the bed, crept up over the blankets, and poked her awake. Those nights.

A few days before Thanksgiving, she went with a handful of flowers from the local florist shop to the white mound of Aunt Rachel's grave. The snow was fluffy, being almost as new as the grave, and it spread evenly over the hillock like a beaten quilt. Like Grandmother's quilt, brought over from the old country. A few headstones away was Father's grave, one-half of his tombstone already sharing Mother's name, and the inscription 1924 to blank. All snowy, these people, and dreamy now, some long gone, some newly gone. Rosemary imagined them, like the cast in
Our
Town
, perching atop their tombstones, wishing she'd round up her foolishness and go away, go back to the living. She placed the deep red carnations on Father's grave, the irises on Aunt Rachel's. The flowers sank into the snow, red as cardinals, blue as blue jays. Like William, they were all color on such a gray day. Aunt Rachel and Father.
They should have a casket like Catherine and Heathcliff
, Rosemary thought. But it was only a romantic notion. She knew that when one ceases to exist above the ground, one ceases to exist anywhere.

Nights were too cold to finally christen the telescope, so it sat in the den and collected dust. Instead, Rosemary watched the timeworn constellations from behind a paned glass. Sometimes, she didn't bother to make the long climb, the fifteen steps, up to her bedroom. Instead, she fell asleep on the sofa, listening to the dying snaps of the fire, cradling Winston against the curve of her stomach.

Two days before Thanksgiving a package arrived from Boston, from William's old friend and travel mate, Michael. With it came a letter. It had taken its time in coming, considering Rosemary had written to Michael in early July, in the middle of Lizzie's visit to Bixley. Over the months that followed since she mailed the letter, over the months that brought her past the warm summer, past the tent days, past Aunt Rachel's fast decline, she had come to realize Michael would have no answers either. There were none. Rosemary knew this weeks before the letter arrived.

I'm seeing a psychiatrist now,
Michael wrote.
I
had
given
him
up
years
ago, but after William's death I came back to him, the prodigal patient, and he scolded me but took me in. He needs the money. I'm looking for answers myself, Rosemary. Dr. Wimmer tells me that sometimes there are no answers as to why people suddenly kill themselves. Not even he knows, sometimes. This is a good sign. Something positive has come out of William's death. I've never heard Dr. Wimmer admit such a thing before. Perhaps, with William's death, we will all turn a tad humble, not knowing.

The letter did not surprise her. It was true. William had his reasons, emotional, chemical, or both. And being
his
reasons, he took them greedily with him. Rosemary had long stopped reading books on suicide for an answer. In one book, she remembered, was a statement she read over and over again, and then underlined in black ink. It was something a Dr. Wilson had said about a certain type of suicidal person characterized by a
lack
of
constructive
plans
for
the
future, high chaotic energy levels, and general isolation.
Rosemary had underlined it and then written
William
in the margin next to it, as though this were something she must remember for a future exam. At least it was a portion of the answer to a multiple-part question. Aunt Rachel had been right when she said that William lived without goals. William had always been running. Much of the blame had to lie in the nooks and corners of all those unhappy foster homes he'd been raised in. And some of it with Rosemary, too, for recognizing the distress signals of birds, instead of the people she loved.

No, Rosemary,
Michael's letter ended.
William
and
I
were
not
lovers. You needn't apologize for asking. Dr. Wimmer will arrive at this thought himself one day, and when he finally asks me, I'll answer quickly. Time is, after all, money.

The letter did not surprise her, but the painting did. It was of her, sitting on the sofa, with Mugs asleep near her leg. Rosemary's face was turned away from the cat, and she appeared about to speak to some person outside the perimeter of the picture. Some ghost, perhaps. She remembered the photograph William had used as his model, one that was in the album of pictures he had taken with him. It was of no particular event, no birthday, no holiday, no important gesture. It was just Rosemary on the sofa, her profile, and Mugs sleeping in an embryonic ball, his throat thrust upward in submission. “The best action,” William liked to say, “is the action you must imagine. There is glory, sometimes, in the things people do not do. Sometimes, Rosemary, there are even heroics.” What surprised her most about the painting was that William was not in it. He had never done an oil of her or Mugs. Sketches with an intent to paint, yes, but they had never come to fruition. The only oil of Rosemary had William beside her in what he called a
Half
Self-Portrait.
It hung in Uncle Bishop's den, a birthday gift.

William had had few personals for Michael to ship home. What he did have had arrived earlier in the summer. Rosemary had unpacked the heavy art books and replaced them on the library shelves, in the parking spaces reserved for them. His clothes she eventually gave to Goodwill, after Robbie had selected a few shirts, sweaters, and two jackets to take away to graduate school. William would like the idea of Robbie taking his clothes back to college. The Civil War sword she sent to William's sister, in Portland, since it was a family heirloom. But she did not know of the existence of the painting until it arrived two days before Thanksgiving, snow piling up quietly on the brown wrapper as it leaned against the front door where the UPS driver had left it.
Oh, by the way, William began this in Amsterdam,
Michael added, in a postscript.
I
wanted
to
keep
it
because
it
was
his
last
work
but
really, Rosemary, it belongs to you.
She had stared at the painting a long time. No work of art this, taken from a photograph of a ponytailed woman, looking away from a sleeping cat.
Rosie
and
Mugs: Life as Usual
was the title he had written in pencil on the back.

Rosemary went up to William's room, with all the light and the enviable consciousness, and found the photo album. There was the picture back in its plastic slot but paint-smeared. “He wants to paint Goyas and El Grecos and Rembrandts,” she had told others, as well as herself. “He wants to set his easel up before some masterpiece and share, stroke by stroke, the artist's genius.” What was there to painting a woman in worn jeans and a flannel shirt—the woman you lived with—and a sleeping cat, if you were on an exodus to the land of the masters? “I told you Michelangelo would be all color,” one postcard had said, “if they only wiped away the smoke.” What was the sense of being in Amsterdam, surrounded by Van Gogh's lifetime of works, if William spent his time before an easel re-creating a thirty-five-millimeter photo processed by Kodak? What could he be thinking of to squander such valuable time in Europe?

She did, however, love the painting. It was large enough that Mugs was lifelike, the soft throat in need of a stroking, the eyes rolled back into sleep, content with the humans, only dreaming now of the terror of being stray. It was Mugs all right, captured in brush strokes. And it was Rosemary too, lackadaisical with the goings-on, staring off, about to say something, then preferring to think it instead.

Rosemary was uncertain as to how she should feel about the painting. It saddened her as well as pleased her. So he was thinking of them, was he, in those final days? The last postcard had come from Brussels.
Today
Brussels
, it read.
Tomorrow?
No cards had arrived from London, the last stop, the elephant's graveyard.
His
last
work
, Michael had said, and Michael would know. He was with him. So William had spent his time in Europe evaluating, stroke by stroke, his relationship with Rosemary.
Rosie
and
Mugs: Life as Usual.

Rosemary took the painting upstairs and leaned it against the wall in William's room, his studio, his haven of light. Then she stood back to view it. Was there an answer in it somewhere? A goddamn
symbol
? It had been such an ordinary day in her life that she couldn't even remember when the picture was taken. Only that it was at least two years old. The blue sweater with the V neck had been gone that long. Had she said something, on that day, that made William realize their time together was fated?