At first it wasn’t clear to Rose why her thoughts turned more and more to the past — to her father who was proud of his house and everything in it, the umbrella stand in the hall and the telephone he approached gravely and spoke to courteously, saying always, ‘Wilson residence …’ with a rising inflection, to her mother’s anxiety over the health of house plants. Her mother dressed more carefully on the day the postman delivered the Ladies Home Journal, as for a holiday; and thanked the postman, as for a gift. Then suddenly, thinking of the postman who brought the Journal and of the house plants, she would recall the curious quiet of certain Sunday afternoons and the sound of the piano next door, the muffled scales and exercises of her closest friend who played duets with her and sometimes brought over a book on the meaning of dreams. Upstairs they would interpret dreams, stifling giggles.
Her mother’s voice: ‘What are you girls up to? I heard you way outside. Hattie Brundage called on the telephone and says she has all the Eastern Stars coming to her house tomorrow, God help her, and will you do the flowers. If people were strangers, I’d think you ought to charge. I swear. I think later on you ought to work in a flower shop. What on earth am I going to give your father for his supper? And he hates leftovers.’
Then high school and the exchange of class pictures and the final passing around of the autograph books and Graduation Day and the smell of cut grass and a few of the girls close to tears, Miss Kirkpatrick of the English staff moving imperiously among them straightening this flounce and that hair ribbon. ‘Now we must everyone look his or her best.’ Miss Kirkpatrick was alert, should some girl cheat and wear rouge. ‘Rose, the flowers are stunning this year.’ Outside in the hall, the boys trooped past carrying slatted folding chairs and the janitor scolded.
She was neither valedictorian nor salutatorian nor even close. She sat at rigid attention in geometry class and drew neat triangles and trapezoids and labeled them in her small, assertive script, but she couldn’t understand the subject. Yet her name, too, appeared on the program, apart.
Flower Arrangements: Miss Rose Wilson
For the past four years, it was she who had arranged the flowers donated by the Elks and the Eagles and the Woodmen.
‘Now, I’m sure all of you here know me,’ the principal began his address. ‘Some of you only too well …’
Nice laughter all around, for some of the young men knew the principal all too well, knew his office, the varnished woodwork, the hissing steam radiator, the bust of Lincoln and dusty American flag. The principal was an old man who believed in things and now talked of Brightness Through Obscurity.
Thus — graduation. ‘That looks stunning on you, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Daddy, you look just like a young man.’
‘Yes, doesn’t he,’ her mother murmured. ‘Do you honestly like this hat? I think it’s simply terrible how they’re using bird feathers on millinery now.’
Her father had laughed. ‘Well, we’ve all got to go sometime. I expect there’s many a man my age who looks a deal younger than me.’
‘I,’ her mother murmured. ‘Than I. Your father wants to know if you can get more of the programs? With your name? He says he’s willing to pay for them, but I said they wouldn’t charge for them, would they.’
‘Why, I’m sure I can get extra ones. And it isn’t really very much, to arrange the flowers.’
Her father said, ‘Bushwah! Why do they put you there on the program, then? I can’t think of a nicer thing for a young woman to do. Plenty of them these days can’t even sew a button on a shirt.’
‘It might be nice to show your own little girl someday,’ her mother said.
‘Now, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ her father announced. ‘We’re all three going to go down to McFadden’s, and we’re going to sit ourselves down and we’re going to order us up any concoction we want. What do you say to that, my ladies?’
‘Pete,’ her mother said, ‘I think that’s just splendid.’
Proud as royalty they sat at McFadden’s on chairs of twisted wire. ‘McFadden has a fine establishment here, in my humble opinion.’
‘When was any opinion of yours ever humble?’ her mother smiled.
‘I see,’ her father said, ‘he’s even got a shaker of nutmeg here on the table.’
‘That’s what the young people are putting in their malted milks,’ her mother said.
‘I should imagine,’ her father said, ‘a man would put on a lot of weight if he ate like this very often. He wouldn’t keep very young looking.’
‘I shouldn’t imagine,’ her mother said, and nodded and arched her brows and her lips distinctly formed the words Good Evening toward some people they knew who then came over. ‘So here’s the girl who arranged those lovely flowers.’
‘For four years,’ her father said. ‘She has a way with flowers.’
The flowers, the flowers, the voices and the flowers. She wondered if others concerned themselves with such fragile recollections, searched among such shadows and dusty voices — and for what? For herself?
For recently it seemed she had lost her identity, and it was precisely to find it that she constructed a flower arrangement of materials bizarre enough to challenge her considerable skill, materials first seen through the binoculars George used to look at the mountains. She saw them against the woven-wire fence that enclosed the horse pasture below the house, nothing in themselves. But what was art (she defended herself) if not the arrangement of trivia? What was Cezanne but line and color, Chopin but sound, perfume but calculated odors, crackle of linen but flax? The arrangement, like her piano playing, her careful dressing for dinner each night and the foolish picnic beside the road, was meant to please George. She meant to surprise him. And she did.
He had never seen such a thing in his life, and he grew a little red in the face, and spoke gravely, choosing words. ‘Why, that’s quite a thing! Why, I — think it’s right pretty.’
‘Pretty? I’m not sure of that, but I hoped you’d like it. I used to do other things like this.’
‘You did? I guess there are all sort of things people used to do. Yes, I certainly do like it, and I think my mother couldn’t have done such a thing. She was more a reader, always reading and bringing up various things, don’t you know.’ To himself he thought, My wife weighs scarcely a hundred pounds. I love to see the side of her face. He thought, The thing is made of weeds, and he anticipated Phil’s reaction to such a thing and it struck him as intolerable that this innocent bit of handiwork would certainly bring down on her Phil’s hooting laughter — if not to her face, then in the bunkhouse, the sort of tearing, hooting laughter Phil had turned on him one Christmas not so long ago when he, to please his mother, had put on over his clothes a dressing gown of blue silk and funny slippers to match — her Christmas gift to him.
Phil had appeared suddenly.
And later, there was that hooting laughter in the bunkhouse, like echoes out of a barrel. Christmas had been an embarrassment since he could remember. The Old Folks expected him to choose the tree which he selected carefully from some spot where the tree had got the sun all around and the branches were nice and even and he brought it down from the mountains in a sleigh, and carried it into the house, and set it in the proper corner and the Old Lady always said, ‘I do love Christmas!’ and began the decorating and the Old Gent reached up high where she couldn’t reach with the shiny glass balls that caught and distorted the image of the room, left it reeling around the reflections of the window that faced the sagebrush hill. The day of Christmas Eve was always long and terrible and had a special smell, or maybe it was how dark the house was, or maybe how strange, because of the furniture that was moved to make room for the tree, and the hours of that day always led to the same thing, the Old Lady bringing out gifts and piling them under the tree. ‘How good the tree smells!’ In her eyes, in her smile he saw a reflection of what she must once have been but — like the room in the shiny balls — distorted. Then the boxes from Back East were opened and the gifts taken out and put under, and then supper, and the men in the back dining room laughing and exclaiming over the gifts of neckties and the checks the Old Lady always distributed out there and George still did (but not wrapped, of course) and then Phil rising from the table and going into the bedroom and closing the door while the presents were opened, and the Old Lady pretending. She had never learned — they had never learned — to accept Phil as he was and to hell with it. She wanted to think — they wanted to think — that the Burbanks at least on that one night were like anybody else. And they were not. Phil saw them as stumbling, fumbling dabblers and wishers and dreamers and except for Phil, that’s what they were. How does one man, how does one man get the power to make the rest see in themselves what he sees in them? Where does he get the authority? But from somewhere he does get it. It wouldn’t have hurt Phil to come in that one night and pretend, even if Christmas did embarrass him, even if he had no more use for the gold watches or hunting knives or the stuff from what he called Abbie, Dabbie and Bitch than George himself did for the blue silk dressing gown and the queer slippers with just a place for the front of your foot. Mules, she called them.
Mules!
What had possessed the Old Lady to buy him such a thing? When would he wear such a thing? Was there a place in the world where such things were worn? Did men, the relatives, the friends Back East dare to cinch themselves into such an outfit and walk without shame through a room?
‘Of course I like it,’ he told her. ‘I like it fine.’ Then, feeling her eyes, he put it on over his clothes because she was his mother and by God, he wasn’t afraid of love. Then there was Phil in the doorway.
‘Well, get a load of the Big Mogul.’ And the ripping laughter.
Well, George thought now, I’ve lost a lot of weight since then.
The Old Gent had said, ‘Phil, there are other worlds besides this one. I have a dressing gown like that myself.’
Phil’s eyes were lazy on the Old Gent. ‘Sure you have. But this is the world we live in. It was you who left the other world. I never figured out why.’ Phil paused. ‘Did you?’
The Old Lady smiled, her mask against everything. When Phil had gone back down the hall she said, ‘I think now it might be nice if you put on the Schumann-Heink. It hardly seems Christmas, without.’
That record on the Victrola really shot the works, because the idea of angels, shepherds and the Holy Virgin and the Son of Man in that room was just plain crazy.
He would buy Rose flowers, flowers and more flowers — real ones, dozens of them. He would buy flowers to make them sit up and take notice, buy every flower in the place! Flowers to take the sting out of the laughter he was sure would come because she tried to make flowers out of something that was not flowers. He half liked what she had done! Proud, even! But, oh, there wasn’t a chance in the world that Phil wouldn’t notice the thing. Not a chance.
And George was right. Phil gave it the old once-over; Phil never missed a trick. Alone in the room, Phil stood over it, his feet wide apart, head cocked. He sniffed, as for an odor. Before him on a flat shingle of shale she had picked up, he looked at a dried tumbleweed twice the size of the human head; the outer tendrils cupped up to describe a perfect sphere and enclosing the network of lesser branches inside. On these, and not at random, the woman had fixed flaming red wings of a material that at first confused him, but then his sharp eye saw beneath the deceit to the shape and color of the original — a dirty, blood-colored plant with flat, sharp leaves that thrived along the fence of the horse pasture and dried in the winter to an even darker color. She must have soaked them in water to lighten their color. He’d heard or read that the Indians used them to make a crimson dye. In drying again, the sharp leaves curled smartly. Pulled apart, they now perched on each branch of tumbleweed alert as scarlet hummingbirds. By God, he thought. The woman might be dangerous after all! He stood back, and squinted. His was a nimble imagination. Often in the rolling clouds he saw smiles and frowns, sometimes the face of terror, and for him the wind hummed tunes. Precisely, it was his gift to arrange the facts of Nature into patterns that would stir the senses; it was this gift that let him see that thing his heart called The Hound on the Hill.
‘By God,’ he murmured, and looked at the thing the woman had made. She must be pretty all-fired proud of herself, he thought, to have made so much out of so little. Why, the thing looked alive. He squinted again. What was it? Caged birds? Was it a puff of smoke, enclosing flames? So much out of so little; and he said to himself something about a silk purse, and a sow’s ear.