The Rose Garden (5 page)

“I
lunch
at twelve-thirty,” Tom said. “You're losing your sense of proportion, Liza. Why can't you send this woman a bus schedule. Or rent a car for her. Or tell her to take a taxi out. Or tell her to sit in Schrafft's or someplace, and I'll pick her up at five. You can't expect me to interrupt my day like this! I'm always at lunch at one o'clock!” Tears of chagrin filled his eyes.

Liza turned back to her desk, on which two tall piles of square white envelopes stood neatly stacked. “Now, that's settled,” she said. “I want you to take these out and post them at once. If Clara still has any idea of trying to give a benevolent little party for me, this should fix her. I wish I could see her face when she opens this in the morning. ‘To celebrate our first anachronism, Miss Betty Trim, of White's Hotel.' She'll be the one they'll laugh at now, not me. She'll never dare make fun of me again.”

The day of Betty's arrival turned out cold and desolate, with a raw wind. Tom drove in to town, rushed into his club, rustled busily
through the morning papers, and stood for a minute at his window, his arm embracing the back of his chair. Then, sighing profoundly, he dashed outside into the taxi the doorman was holding for him. The shop windows, brilliantly lighted against the gray day, looked cheerless and efficient without their recent Christmas decorations. The wind swept mercilessly along the pavements, carrying shuddering, cowering human beings before it. Traffic across town was locked, and drivers of trucks, taxis, and private cars glared satanically into one another's eyes and breathed plumes of vapor with the invective that issued from their lips. Tom's driver, cursing, inched his way to the pier. Tom contemptuously ignored this hurly-burly. Slumped in the corner of his seat, warm in his gloves and muffler and his fur-lined coat, with enormous galoshes on his feet, he let his mind roam sulkily ahead through his spoiled day.

He recognized Betty with no difficulty. She was all in black, and very small—not more than five feet tall. About forty-five, Tom thought morosely, and she's no beauty. He could hardly bear to look at her, he hated her so much, but at his garage he motioned politely toward the front seat of his car, only to find her already fitted into the middle of the back seat between her two bulging pieces of luggage, neither one of which was a suitcase. She acknowledged his gesture with a flickering, uninterested glance, and then she fixed her eyes on the street ahead and waited, without impatience, to be driven into her new life.

The city streets seemed to interest Betty as little as they did Tom, and as the car left the city, she cast no glance at the wintry Hudson. The countryside, forlorn, cracked and bitten with frost, got no sign from her. She stared stonily ahead. She might have been a member of royalty, forced to ride in the state funeral procession of some detested relative. The truth is that inside Betty's head there was only a small blackboard, on which she added
and subtracted diligently, using a piece of chalk, as she had been taught to do in school. The problems she solved were not large, for her brain was tiny, but she was thorough, and she went over each exercise at least ten times, proceeding slowly, using cunning, persistence, and inhuman concentration. She never put a figure down on paper. Only a fool would do that—someone willing to broadcast his private affairs to the world. She trusted no one. She knew that poor people's savings were often stolen. She had never taken a risk in her life, nor had she ever loaned a penny. Or borrowed one. In the car, she added the dollars she had in her purse now, shielding herself against the sudden misery that had come on her at the thought of her little hoard of money far away in London. Tom's voice interrupted her. He had turned off the highway onto a narrow country road, hardly more than a pathway, that appeared to have been cut at random through a wild wood. “Welcome to Herbert's Retreat,” he said stiffly.

Betty turned her head to the right, and then to the left. Her eyes belittled all they saw. Beyond the irregular wall of trees and hedge, leafless now, that lined the road, houses, standing solitary, glimmered white in the dull winter air. Between the houses, a wilderness flourished—trees, bushes, remnants of old hedge, dry yellow weeds, and tangled undergrowth. Coming to his own fine house, Tom stopped the car with a jerk and scrambled out. He opened the rear door and lifted out the two pieces of luggage. Then he turned to give Betty a hand, but again she was before him, with both feet firmly on the ground. The front door opened and Liza stood there. Tom brushed rudely past her, dumped the luggage in the hall, and went into the living room, where he sat down and sulked.

“I hope you will he happy here, Betty,” Liza said when her treasure was safely inside the front door.

“Thank you, m'lady,” Betty replied, and bobbed up and down.

She really curtsies, Liza thought deliriously.

Betty's mean little eyes surveyed Liza. I could buy you and sell you, m'lady, she thought. She was satisfied that she knew all that was to be known of human nature. “I can sum them up in one glance, no matter who they are,” she would say to herself—and the sum was always the same. Liza, not knowing she had been judged and dismissed, proceeded to show Betty through the house. The walls of all the rooms were clay-colored. The furniture was constructed of silvery piping. The chairs had white tweed sling seats. The tabletops were of thick plate glass. Upstairs, Liza paused with an air of extra importance before a closed door and smiled at Betty before she opened it. Then they were looking into Betty's own room, which was furnished like the rest of the house and contained a narrow bed. The window looked out on the nearest houses, and on the withered jungle that separated them.

“No river view here, I'm afraid,” Liza said in a tone of bright apology.

Betty walked to the window and looked out. “I'm not much for looking at the water, m'lady,” she said.

“My mother's room is just down the hall,” Liza said. “She's resting now, so we won't disturb her. Your bathroom is downstairs next to the kitchen, as you saw. There's only one on this floor, and my mother shares it with us. These old houses—all fireplaces and no bathrooms, you know.” She waved her hand in a gesture that was friendly but not, she felt, familiar.

“Thank you, m'lady,” Betty said.

Alone, Betty moved first her arms, to lift her hat from her head, then her legs, to walk to the closet, which she opened, displaying no curiosity about it. She hung her hat by its elastic from a hook on the closet door. She then hung her coat on a hanger, sat down in her sling chair, tested it a minute, and, satisfied, bent over to
unbutton her boots. Her house slippers were downstairs, locked up in one of her bundles, so, with the boots open and flapping, she clumped down the back stairs to the kitchen and set about making tea. When the kettle was on, she built a fire in the huge open fireplace, using paper towels and three logs from a beautifully geometrical pile that lay in a white basket against the wall. She was sitting in front of the fire having her cup of tea when the door opened and Mrs. Conroy shuffled in. Mrs. Conroy's face was immensely lined, but whether the lines had been put there by a life of goodness or by a life of badness it would have been hard to say. She simply looked very old. Her manner would have been called obsequious in a younger person, and her hands were gathered nervously around a large white handkerchief, which from time to time she pressed against her mouth, perhaps to hide a tremor—of age, or of amusement, or of malice.

Betty regarded the intruder bleakly. I could buy you and sell you, she thought as she got up.

“I'm Mrs. Conroy,” the old woman said beseechingly, “Mrs. Frye's mother you know. I see you have the fire going. I dearly love a fire, but Mrs. Frye won't permit them in the house, although she won't object to you having one, I'm sure. She doesn't approve of open fires. She tries to keep me in my room. I dislike my room. I hate the furniture. I expect you do, too, coming from England. My room is exactly like yours, except that I have that unwholesome view of the river. I like to watch a street and see what the people are up to. I thought, being English, you might be having a cup of tea, and I thought perhaps you might permit me to join you here. Mrs. Frye won't permit me to have tea.”

“I'm sorry, m'lady, but I don't permit ladies in my kitchen,” Betty said.

“Only for a minute, to get the heat of the fire on my legs.”

“It's out of the question, m'lady. I must ask you to leave my
kitchen at once.”

“I'm not let have tea, and I'm not let have a fire,” Mrs. Conroy said. “I notice you give yourself tea and a fire, though. I notice you have a fire and a nice cup of tea there beside you.”

“What I do for myself and what I do for other people are two entirely different things, m'lady,” Betty said.

“I only wanted to get the heat of the fire on my legs a minute,” Mrs. Conroy beseeched. “Radiators aren't the same thing at all. Don't you think I'm right? Radiators are no good, are they? . . . Well, you might at least answer me.” In the doorway, she paused and said, without looking back, “You're just the same sort she is! Just the same!”

When the door closed, Betty sat down by the fire to finish her tea. As she brought the cup to her lips, she raised her eyes and saw Mrs. Conroy's handkerchief lying crumpled on the floor. She rose, picked up the handkerchief, and, boots still loose and flapping, went up the stairs and knocked on the door next to her own. A voice answered faintly. When Betty opened the door, Mrs. Conroy was sitting in her wing chair, which she had turned so that her back was to the window. One of her account books lay open on her lap. “Oh,” she said. “I was hoping it was my daughter. She hates me to turn this chair around, but I'd rather look at a dry door than at that wet view any day of the week. She hates to have anything in the house changed, you know. You'd better remember that. She's very set in her ways.”

“I'm returning your handkerchief, m'lady,” Betty said rudely, and dropped it on the bed.

She was about to leave when she saw the shabby books on their shelves. The word “Accounts,” inked on the back of each volume, sprang out at her. “Excuse me, m'lady,” she said. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course you may ask me a question, Betty.”

“What sort of books are they you have, m'lady?”

“They belonged to my poor husband, Mr. Conroy. That's all he left me in the world, what you see there. He kept them himself; every stroke is in his own handwriting. He ran a little stationery shop in Brooklyn the last nineteen years of his life. We lived behind the shop. We didn't make a fortune out of it, but we got along. He had no head for business, but he enjoyed keeping his books. I look into them when I'm in the dumps. They remind me of so much; it's like as if I was reading his diary. He put down everything pertaining to the shop. Ah, it brings it all back, reading these old books.”

“Might I see one of them, m'lady? I enjoy sums.”

“Indeed you may,
indeed
you may!” Mrs. Conroy cried. Betty made a step toward the case, but the old lady was there before her, and lifted out a volume, dated Nov. 1899–May 1900, and handed it to her.

“The first year we were in the shop,” she said. “Liza wasn't born then. She appeared in 1913, the only one we had.”

Betty turned the pages of the book. “I always had a fancy for a little shop of my own somewhere,” she said. “If I ever got enough money saved. Ah, I suppose I'll never have it, but it does no harm to think of it. I'd like to look at these, Mrs. Conroy. It's not hard, he has it all down nice and easy.”

“Oh, it wasn't mathematics that interested my poor Alfred,” Mrs. Conroy said. “Only, he liked to feel he was being businesslike. He loved marking things down. ‘My simple arithmetic,' he used to call it. ‘I'm doing my simple arithmetic,' he'd say when I asked him what he was up to.”

“I do like working sums, m'lady,” Betty said. “I was always a great hand at addition and subtraction. I often thought I'd have been good in a bank, only I never got the chance. Would you let me borrow this for a day or two? I'll bring you up a cup of tea, if
you like.”

Mrs. Conroy regarded her for a moment. “Of course I'll let you borrow it,” she said at last. “But I'll come down for the tea, if you don't mind.”

Betty touched the bookcase. “Maybe I'd better take the first two or three, m'lady,” she said. “That way I wouldn't have to be disturbing you so often.”

A strong old arm came up and knocked her hand away. “One at a time, Betty. This room isn't going to feel the same with even that one missing. Mr. Conroy spent six months of his life on every one of these books. There's two to a year. It's going to take you a month anyway to get through that one. Now we'll go down and have our tea, nice and cozy by the fire. I won't bother you. I'll just enjoy the tea and you can enjoy your book, but mind you make no marks on it. And maybe you'd better make a fresh pot of tea. It'll have got cold, standing there all this time.”

They had been sitting in the kitchen for some time when Betty looked up from her book. “You opened the shop November 15th, m'lady. That's the day Mr. Conroy starts here. And on December 22nd, m'lady, you went into the shop, went through all the Christmas numbers of the magazines, and left blue marks all over them.”

“Indeed, I remember the day,” Mrs. Conroy said cheerfully. “I had just finished making a blueberry pie for his dinner, and I didn't take the time to wash my hands. Oh, he was angry when he came to sell one of those magazines and had to mark down the price!”