AT HOME, CONRAD tied Rose’s apron around his waist and fried himself three eggs, prodding them with a spatula and listening to the snap and spark of butter in the pan. He considered Lenore’s surprising confession, the image of angels in a fig tree, fitted in among the crooks of the branches, passing the soft fruit from hand to hand, their robes tucked up around their knees. Her story had seemed so unextraordinary, he thought—as though angels were perhaps always present, and it was all a question of looking up at the right moment and seeing them picking their teeth, spitting out skins.
His eggs set, he put the plate on a tray, along with the box of cinnamon rolls and two oranges, and went outside to the garden. He pulled a chair over to the stone wall at the edge of the highest terrace and set the tray down. As he ate he looked out over the gardens. The perennial borders, which Rose had orchestrated for a long season of bloom, had seemed to pause earlier that summer at five feet. Now, though, they were heaving themselves upward, seven feet, eight in places, the lilies blown open, the hardy amaryllis strong as Doric columns, the heads of the alliums persevering into August, as enormous and round as moons.
Everything that summer was, in fact, twice, three times its usual size. Though the season was sloping toward September, the garden still seemed to be horned everywhere with new buds, overlaid with yellow pollen, vines laying a multitude of tiny forked feet along the tree trunks and up over the eaves of the house, exploding into blossom. Conrad reached for an orange, held it in his hand. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he gazed around him. Even when Rose was alive, he thought, the garden had never seemed so lush. In a way, it seemed to be thriving because of his neglect. As he stood up now and looked down the hillside, he felt that he was witnessing an incantation, a strange magic in the milky sap that ran through the leaves, some advance work taking place in the very cells of the trees and flowers, their membranes swelling with bubbles of water, with sweet air, with lively anticipation.
Swarms of bees, wide as the wingspans of planes, tilted back and forth in the indistinct light that fell from the overcast sky. Agitated flocks of birds disturbed the lindens, shaking loose fistfuls of leaves and clouds of the trees’ winged pellets, which spun to earth. The garden seemed to be burning with a green fire, with a spongy, condensing verdancy.
Yet when he left the highest terrace and began descending the steps, a conjurer’s quiet fell over the grass. The crowds of flowers, blossoms that had multiplied that summer by tens and hundreds, slowly folded their petal hands over their bristling black eyes, a thousand averted gazes.
Full of the hush of bewilderment, in grief over Rose’s death and his own inconceivable lingering on without her, Conrad walked across the soft grass. At his approach the swallows fell silent in the trees. His face was brushed by the thousands of tiny new leaves, pale as moonlight, that overran the paths. Pollen rained upon his shoulders, a shower of gold.
Beneath his feet new shoots were coming up everywhere, even raising the flagstones of the terraces. He stood beneath the impossible hollyhocks, giants towering dreamily over his head. He reached toward the sunflowers, which wagged their heads high above him, wide and darkly yellow, crowded against the gray sky. He stood beside the treillage for the wisteria, tangled with explosions of curling vine, beryl green as Fourth of July Catherine wheels. The sky seemed to darken even further, as though the rain would begin at any moment, and the ground—the boiling, violent, joyful, terrifying ground of Rose’s garden—faded into dimness. The preposterous activity at his feet, new growth shouldering up through the dirt, green and yellow and white and furled tight, lost its clarity. The surface of the earth fell into shadow deep as a pool of water.
Conrad walked among the pear trees, his shirt unbuttoned now against a strange heat that had risen into his cheeks. His old man’s soft belly lay draped over his belt, a low breeze brushing the fine white hair there. He stepped carefully, laying his hands, which were mapped with an unfamiliar continent of age spots, on the golden fruits. This was to be an endless summer, he felt, pausing in the Concord grape arbor, the dusky fruits there grown so thick and heavy they rested on his head and shoulders like a dripping bishop’s wig. This was a summer that reached its high bright equinox and then, with a heroic thrust, drove on, drove up and over the tight white glass ceiling of the August sky.
This was the most painful season of his life, he thought, coming to his knees in the fragrant beds, cupping the flowers in his hands. It was the most beautiful and the most painful. And it seemed that it would never end.
BACK INSIDE THE house, Conrad surveyed the mess he had been living in, the litter of clothing, the pile of unwashed dishes. It was as if the garden itself, in its long, exhausting season of bloom, had issued an opiate that filtered into the rooms of the house, made him feel sluggish and drugged. Cleaning wasn’t his strong suit, but it hadn’t really been Rose’s either; she had liked a sense of industry about her. Conrad had thought it a trait inherited from Lemuel, who always seemed to be trailing things untidily from his pockets, paper scraps and lengths of twine. There was something faintly necromantic about Lemuel’s disorder—Rose’s, too. It was as if in their various experiments with plants or instruments they were always on the addictive brink of discovery. Lemuel had once invented an electrical contraption for altering the angle of the interior shutters’ slats so as to provide Rose’s night-blooming cereus with a perpetual, false darkness, day shortened to an arctic winter, brief and bright. Adele, though, had asked him to take it down after Melchior, the monkey, had become entangled in the pulleys and nearly hanged himself in the mechanism’s ropes.
Conrad walked from room to room. The mess of the last four months seemed so deep that his resolve to put things in order failed before it. This was just purgatory, he felt, staring out the window at his garden. It was a long hesitation that would end in the first killing freeze. And then the garden would collapse under its own preposterous weight, overgrown fruits and flowers, barbed seed heads big as grapefruit and freckled pods thick as a man’s finger, all of it cut down. And when that day came, he thought, he would fling out his own arms, would open his mouth, would agree to be taken. He wanted to be taken. Lemuel should have taken him. What did he mean, leaving him here all alone?
Sitting in the kitchen, he emptied Rose’s sewing basket, took out each spool of bright thread, lined them up like a battery of soldiers, the pins and needles a sparkling pile of arms laid down, surrendered. One day, he told himself, the clematis would unwind its arms from around the windows, where its plate-faced blossoms pushed up against the glass and stared at him. The grandiflora ‘Queen Elizabeth’, with its pink vigorous ruff, would tremble at the touch and drop its multitude of petals. The poppies would fall, the phlox would scatter, and the air, now choked with drifting clouds of seed, white thistles with black, driving tips like arrows, would, at last, empty.
WHEN HE CONSIDERED how he might spend the rest of his day, he was overwhelmed by the mass of empty hours ahead of him. He was used to Rose with her brimming agenda. For four months he hadn’t even pretended to be useful. Now, though, since the angel, he felt vaguely that he ought to try. Pacing restlessly, he walked into the living room, glanced out the front window at the street to see if another basket might have been left for him. The eggs and the Smile Market’s cinnamon rolls had helped, but something in him yearned for the strange familiarity of those baskets, their contents always hot, their effect on him like Rose herself—calming, sweet, and filling. But the step was empty and Conrad felt disappointed. He turned away from the window. He wanted his pigeons, wanted their company.
Putting on his hat now, mindful of the sky, which stretched tight and gray above him, he went back outside, brushing away the astral heads of the cleome and the clouds of sweet autumn clematis that crowded the path. Rose would have been amazed at all this, he thought. Even Rose, who was always prepared to be delighted by her garden, would have been amazed—and something cut at his heart then, a little blade like the sharp knife Rose used for grafting. She’s missing all this, he thought.
But as he passed the vegetable garden, he saw a shape flutter there behind the fence. He stopped, his heart seizing as though a finger had reached in and touched the rictus of the chambers. Again, something caught his eye, a white shape, like a hand raised at a distant window.
But when he approached the garden, he saw that it was only the bows of sheeting used for the peas, some strands unwound now and lifting in the wind. Rose had sat in a chair carried out to the garden to do this, one of her last tasks, and Conrad had stood beside her, tearing an old sheet into narrow strips, cutting the lengths for her.
He paused now to close the gate, stood beneath the wrought iron letters that curved in an arc above his head: so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Shakespeare, Lemuel’s choice; he had thought it would please Rose. Lemuel himself had performed the ironwork, and Conrad had gilded the arched filaments, entwined with curling stem and heavy fruit, which were mounted atop the gateposts.
It had been a gift to her, this addition to the garden, meant to make her happy, meant to rouse her. The whole of that summer, the first after Adele Sparks’s death, Rose had seemed unnaturally exhausted. One Saturday afternoon, when he happened to glance from an upstairs window, Conrad had seen Rose trundling the wheelbarrow over the grass; and he had cried out her name when suddenly, with no warning, she had simply dropped to her knees, brought her forehead to her hands, still gripping the handles. He had not moved from the window, though. Frozen there, his fingertips against the glass, Conrad had willed her to rise, to move, to pick up where she had left off. And after a minute she had, leaning into the weight of the wheelbarrow and disappearing behind her toolshed. Later, finding her sitting quietly on the grass in the shade of the oak tree, her eyes closed, he had stopped at her feet. He wanted to say something to her, wanted to know that she was all right. But he could not admit to her that he had seen her from the window and had failed to come to her. By various evasions he was able to pretend to himself that it had never happened, her moment of collapse. But the truth of it—that Rose could sometimes fail, did fail, and that he did not want to know why—never really left him.
He had feared all through that June that she was veering toward one of her spells, the profound shifts in mood that forced her to her bedroom, where she might remain for days behind its locked door. He had known with a terrible certainty that it would eventually come to that. And finally, one morning, Rose simply failed to get out of bed, rolling away from him, her fingers clenched around the sheets.
And so Conrad had called Lemuel. “It’s starting again,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Lemuel had come, disembarking slowly from the train with his battered valise. Meeting him at the station, Conrad had been struck by how old and lonely Lemuel looked without Adele at his side. Back at the house, the two men had paced the kitchen and dining room for a day, leaving trays at Rose’s door, listening to the terrible silence there. Once, sitting on the floor on the landing outside the door, Conrad had spoken aloud, as much to himself as to her: “I wish you wouldn’t do this. I don’t know why you have to do this.” And he had been surprised when he heard, from behind the door, Rose’s voice.
“I’m sorry,” she said, close by as if she had been leaning against the door, waiting for him, listening. “I’m sorry.”
But she would not come out, and so Conrad and Lemuel had taken themselves to the garden, finished digging the vegetable beds and building the gate. They worked quietly, not talking very much, playing with the pigeons in the evenings, leaving trays, which went mostly untouched, at Rose’s door. From time to time they glanced up to the house, to Rose’s bedroom window, looking for her face behind the glass, some sign of life, some recovery of interest on her part.
At last, four days after Lemuel’s arrival, Rose had come downstairs in a fresh yellow dress, her hair clean and pulled back in a long braid. Like a child apologizing for a transgression, she had wept, embraced them both, and wept again when they led her outside and showed her the gate. Conrad had been almost afraid of her, had wanted to jump when she touched him. “I’ll never be good enough for all this,” she’d said.
But she had always loved her gardens. On the rooftop of her family’s home in Brooklyn, she had raised flowers and vegetables with a deft and gentle hand and a chemist’s concern for the soil. Early on she became a purveyor of seed catalogs, and as a child she began a lively correspondence, which was to last until her death, with several nurseries, reporting on the success or failure of various plants. Once she and Conrad had married and moved to Laurel, where she could have her own real garden, not just boxes on the rooftop, she made a modest income by selling plants and dispensing advice to local gardeners, and she was often called upon by area garden clubs to deliver lectures on herbs, her specialty. The first time she’d been paid a fee for her services, she came home with a check made out in her name and handed it proudly to Conrad. “Fifteen dollars,” she said, “and it was easy as pie. Just telling what I know.”
The first winter Conrad had spent at the Sparkses’ tending Lemuel’s flock, he had helped Rose build a set of trellises along Lemuel’s design, a Chinese construction of cleverly interlocking shapes that the following spring bore vines full of sweet peas and moonflowers, their white blossoms fingered with mauve and yellow. Working in coats and hats, scarves knotted around their necks, he and Rose had knelt on the rooftop. Lemuel had posted his drawings to them from Belgium, where his services as a church architect were being employed on a decaying fifteenth-century chapel, and where he was enjoying the company of a Belgian senator who kept a distinguished flock of pigeons at his country estate.
When the idea to construct the trellises had struck Rose, she had sent her father a letter requesting his assistance. And she appeared unfazed by Lemuel’s meticulous instructions, which arrived a few weeks later by mail, and spread the drawings out on the rooftop, weighting them with heavy stones. An accompanying letter had given a precise list of the supplies they would need. Rose had already filled the order and carried the lathe herself to the rooftop one afternoon after school, along with a sack of three-penny nails, two small saws, and two hammers.
Conrad was up on the roof the afternoon she appeared with Lemuel’s drawings rolled into a tight baton. “Here they are,” she said, waving the roll at him. “I have all the stuff already. Look.”
She was wearing a red boiled-wool coat, her hair braided and wound severely into two knots at the back of her head. Her eyes were very bright, but thin blue shadows ran down her temples and neck, as if she had not been eating or sleeping enough. She knelt on the rooftop and unrolled the papers, studying the lines.
“That looks complicated,” Conrad commented, looking over her shoulder.
“You’ll help me?” Rose glanced up at him.
Conrad looked down at her. He frowned at the drawings. He could make no sense of Lemuel’s intricate lines, the puzzling shapes.
“You don’t need my help,” he said, surprised at the bitterness in his voice. He turned away with the push broom. “I have to do this, anyway. I have to get home.” He turned back to the loft, to the pigeons stepping lightly within their boxes.
Behind him, still kneeling on the stones of the roof, Rose was silent. Conrad pushed the broom roughly over the varnished landing board, scattering feathers and seed. He stole a glance at Rose. He realized at that moment that he resented her place in that household, the privilege of her position there. He had met with Lemuel twice before his departure overseas, to learn how Lemuel ex pected his flock to be maintained. Lemuel had shown him how to mix and brew the herbal teas he prescribed as flight-conditioning agents, how to administer the drops. Conrad had been amazed at the refinement of Lemuel’s routine with his pigeons. It made his own former system of crude crates on the fire escape look not only amateurish but cruel. Both times he had visited the Sparkses’, he had passed through the house with its rich overflow of belongings, like a music box playing a tumbling waltz. He had envied the sense of enterprise there—the boys building a tower of shiny metal pieces hinged with paper clips, pots of herbs trained up coiling supports stationed on a long table before a window, Melchior busily wringing his hands and spying on him from some perch.
The first afternoon after Lemuel’s departure, Conrad arrived to fulfill his duties. He sat on the roof in the chilly afternoon air, reading Lemuel’s written instructions for the care of his pigeons. Finally, stiff with cold, he descended to the kitchen for boiled water for the tea. He hoped to see Rose.
Adele Sparks had set the kettle on the stove for him as he stood awkwardly beside the table, surveying the long kitchen with its battery of pots and pans suspended from a welded rack. A tank on a low bench was full of strange, undulating fish throwing a quicksilver light. A lamp was lit on the table, which was scattered with books and papers, the cutlery for the family’s supper already laid out. Adele was cooking something that smelled so good it made the insides of Conrad’s cheeks clench and water. She was trying to put him at ease, he knew, making conversation about the birds, asking questions about school. After a while, waiting for the water to boil, he worked up enough nerve to ask casually, “Is Rose home?”
Adele had paused a moment at the stove, her back to him. “She’s not feeling very well tonight,” she said quietly. And yet the way she said it made Conrad feel it was something else, something more complicated. On his way back upstairs he had passed Rose’s room, the door shut, a faint light showing beneath.
Weeks later, when he glanced at Rose kneeling on the roof, her head dropped to her chest, he remembered that moment, his sense that what had been wrong with Rose that evening was something unlike the childhood illnesses he suffered through restlessly, the occasional fevers and suffocating colds, days when he would stay home from school, his mother returning to their apartment at lunchtime to check on him. Before too much more time was to pass, Conrad would begin to understand the nature of Rose’s illness—if it could be called that, he thought—how it worked upon her like something clandestine, something furtive and mean, a colony of blind ants eating away at the scaffolding of her personality, rendering her mute and withdrawn, a child who lay upon her bed, her face turned to the wall, to the detailed drawing of the Acropolis pinned there, its yellowed edges curling.
Kneeling on the roof, Rose did not move, and Conrad felt suddenly alarmed, worried that his remark might have hurt her, that he might be blamed for having been unkind. What he’d said, his rebuff—“You don’t need my help”—might have compounded whatever it was that troubled her, that thing that forced her to hide away sometimes for days at a stretch in her bedroom.
He returned to her side, touched Lemuel’s drawings with his foot. “So. Where do you start?” he said.
Rose did not answer.
He knelt at her side. “Show me,” he said.
Rose dropped her head lower on her chest.
Conrad looked at her hands, clenched white at the knuckles, gripped together. He reached out, hesitating, then touched her hand. She flinched.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
And when she neither moved nor answered, he reached for her hands again, began to unlace her fingers one at a time, until he held one of her hands in his own.
They did not look at each other, the two children kneeling on the rooftop, bowed under the setting sun, but Conrad felt then, holding Rose’s small, cold hand, that in prying apart her fingers, in releasing them, he had taken some liberty, some liberty that brought responsibility. He had not touched anyone before, not a girl. He had not expected it to be like that.
“Here,” she said then, pointing with her free hand to a line on one of the drawings. She picked up a saw, turned it so that the blade faced away from him—serious, civil, like a fencer observing the rules of the duel—and handed it to him. And when she ducked her head and lightly kissed his knuckle, releasing his hand then and turning her face aside, Conrad felt both desire and fear rising up into his mouth. It would always be hard, after that, for him to separate those feelings. It was as if the world made no allowance for a simple joy. Guarding every cave, he felt, is a serpent. For every bird I send aloft, he thought, there is the danger that it will not return.
He lifted the saw and cut where Rose told him to.
SO MANY YEARS later, leaving the vegetable garden and his reverie beneath the golden gate that overcast morning, Conrad looked down at the curved-tile roof of his loft, glowing in the weak light. He never failed, looking at the small building, to appreciate Lemuel’s gifts as an architect. Conrad had sometimes thought, in fact, that he could under the right circumstances be perfectly happy living in the loft himself. Lemuel had sited Conrad’s workshop area on the first story so that it overlooked the meadow and the river beyond. Conrad had furnished the room with a long table, on which he worked at his gilding equipment, and Rose had covered a small sofa and armchair for him, which he set at angles before the double doors. In a back room, where he stored grain and pigeon paraphernalia, were a camp stove and a sink.
Entering the loft, he hung his hat on the hook by the door, tucked away a barbed spray of pyracantha that had crept around the door frame, and wandered around to the open roost boxes facing the hillside. Inside he discovered one of his pigeons, a male, sitting on a nest. Conrad leaned forward and smiled in at him. The pigeon’s eyes were closed, his wings drawn up close to his body. Conrad had always liked this about pigeons—that they took turns, the male and the female, incubating the eggs. It was, as Rose had pointed out, a liberated arrangement, the female taking the watch from late afternoon, through the night, until early morning, the male sitting on the nest during the day.
“I think it’s a very nice way to do it,” Rose had said, standing beside Conrad and watching the birds with him. “Very fair.”
Conrad had not had any particular hand in pairing these two. Though Lemuel, who was fanatical about breeding, often mated grandfathers and granddaughters, mothers and sons, in order to ensure a fixed characteristic and reduce variations in the strain, Conrad had never felt quite right about this system. Though he dabbled some with controlled mating during the years he was establishing his flock, over time he grew faintly uncomfortable with the notion of forcing marriages among his birds. After all, they mated for life, barring catastrophe; and so, after a while, he simply allowed his pigeons to choose their own mates. Once a pair had announced itself, he helped out by moving the two birds to a shared coop, feeling pleased that nature had taken its own mysterious course.
Lemuel, on his visits north, had shaken his head over Conrad’s increasingly ragtag flock, pushing his hands through the long white hair that swept back from his forehead; but Conrad had been unmoved by his disapproval.
“It’s the inevitability of love, Lemuel,” he had said to counter his father-in-law’s exasperated exclamations over his birds. And jabbing Lemuel in the ribs with his elbow, Conrad had chided him. “How would you have liked to be mated off to someone you hadn’t chosen?”
But Lemuel, his bearing offended and erect, had shaken his head, harrumphed like a man who has failed to impress some obtuse student and so packs up his compass and calipers, his tools and instruments of exact science, and gives up. “You’re going to have rats, Connie,” he said. “That’s where romance will get you with pigeons. Nothing but rats.”
But these two birds, rock doves, had already successfully raised a dozen or more broods, proof of the utilitarian virtue of love, generations ensuing from a spark. Conrad, who had witnessed their original mating ritual early one spring morning several years before, had been charmed by them: the male bird had put on an impressive performance, strutting and pacing around the female, his greenish purple crop swelling. The female, her eyes at half-mast, had opened her beak for the male to dip his own into hers—kissing, Rose had called it. And afterward Conrad had been touched by the birds’ fastidious attention to each other, their joint efforts to feed the young peepers after birth. He referred to them as Pasquale and Evita, Rose’s suggestions, after her fondness for a couple who operated a truck garden near the highway and who each summer produced mountains of chili peppers, their fantastically spirited flavors somehow disguised by their colors, disarmingly innocent, like boiled sweets. The pigeons’ original names, though marked carefully in Conrad’s ledger, had long since been lost to him.
“Well, well, Pasquale,” he said now, looking in on the bird. “Congratulations.”
Evita stood at the corner of the coop, bobbing her head against the wire mesh. Conrad reached inside and raised the door. She waited hardly a moment before taking off into the air, as if her cramped condition on the nest had made her itchy, restless to get away. Pasquale opened one eye to watch his mate leave, and then closed it again.
“Oh, it’s hard work, I know,” Conrad said, wiping the floor of the coop with a rag, scrubbing at a stain.
Stepping back outside the loft, Conrad walked slowly to the bench on the grass. The purple heads of late summer clover floated at his feet. Evita flew around high in the sky with the dipping flight characteristic of pouters, her wings held breathlessly wide. Conrad sighed, leaned back against the bench, and closed his eyes.
And then it occurred to him that the eggs, which hadn’t been there a day or so ago, must have been conceived not long after Rose’s death. He tried to count back, twenty days, twenty-one, but found he couldn’t; he didn’t even know what day it was. The time seemed lost to him, as though he had slept through it. And then he had to squeeze his eyes shut against the realization that the two things were so closely related—these baby peepers, now circling and circling inside the soft, damp orb of their eggs, and Rose’s death.
He had been inattentive to the birds over Rose’s last days. He remembered that much. At night, with the hospice volunteer seated on the slipper chair by Rose’s bed, inclined toward the whispering voice, Conrad had left to hurry down to the loft, taking deep draughts of air as he descended the steps down toward the stony smell of the river. He had filled the pigeons’ pans with grain and then rushed back up to the house, not bothering to sweep out the mess that had accumulated in the coops.
In their shadowy bedroom, Rose had lain in bed, her seed and flower catalogs spread out over the quilt. Her voice had been a whisper, but night after night that last week she had made him sit beside her, paper and pencil at his knee, and take down all the names of the things she wished ordered and planted after her death.
“These anemones,” she said. “These lilies, ‘Enchantment’”—her finger grazed the page—“for by the front fence. To the left of the beech. Don’t plant them too deep. Little bleach mark on the foliage. No deeper.” She tapped at the paper. “These daffodils. One hundred. For the lower terrace, by the loft. Aconitum, larkspur. You know. Fifty. Always needed blue in the border by the kitchen. Glows in the dark. Pretty.”
It was, he had begun to realize, an endless list. He could have sat there for days, and she would never have run out of things she wished done, wished to do, her garden endlessly in need of dividing, rearranging, pruning, sifting; she liked that the garden often surprised her, surprised them both, some flowers migrating of their own accord to spots more suitable for them.
Once, stopping, dropping the pencil on the carpet by the bed, where it fell soundlessly, he had just watched Rose, her voice droning on quietly, whispering flower names. “Montbretia. Nice. Pretty beside the white lupines. Upper terrace. Might have to overwinter in the basement, though.”
She was talking, he realized, as though she was just going away on a short trip.
“Conrad,” she said at last, breathless, glancing over at him. “You’re not taking it down.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He stared at her, but she looked away, picked up where she had left off, her finger trailing over the pages. He retrieved the pencil from the floor but did not write.
Rose looked sidelong at him, then closed her eyes. “Conrad,” she said. “Please.”
“You want to work me to death?” he said, trying to laugh, but his voice cracked. “Is that it?”
And she had wept then, that soundless weeping that seemed to belong to her last days, the terrible pause between each breath, so long that Conrad sometimes held his own, waiting and willing her chest to rise convulsively again. The tears spilled out from under her eyelashes, their sparse fringe.
“I just—” she said, “I just want you to have something to do.”
And Conrad had stopped at that, had looked over the slight rise under the blankets that was Rose’s wasting body. To do? he thought. And suddenly the prospect of life without her beside him became horrifyingly real, as if he had been so concentrated on her illness, on fending off her pain, that he had forgotten what came next, what came afterward. He saw himself surrounded by a dizzying array of bulbs, corms, roots, tubers, and plants, vines growing over his feet, thorny tendrils creeping around his ankles, Rose’s instructions swirling in his mind, the spade heavy in his hand.
EVITA HAD DISAPPEARED into the milky sky. Conrad gazed up the hillside at his garden, its tumbling, frothing mass of leaf and blossom. It seemed to sway there, a cataract of green falling from the sky itself, a voluptuary draped in silken vines and flowers. He could not see the house at all, obscured behind this rising cloud bank of green. Rose had never gone anywhere in the garden without her clippers; she was always pinching things back, ripping out woody undergrowth, pruning the shrubs and trees. But without her attentions, the garden seemed to be subduing the earth itself, wild creepers running over the paths, burrs and brambles over taking Rose’s clean squares of grass. Trumpet vines crawled up the trunks of the dwarf pear trees; purple thistles sprouted in the wildflower meadow. Conrad felt, looking up at it, that the garden was moving toward him, engulfing him. Not burying him exactly, but winding him all around in a cocoon of fragrant green, the arms of vines coiling up his legs and trunk, laying little leaf hands over his mouth, silencing him. A fog rose—columns of vapor, the wavering architecture of air. Thunderheads gathered in the sky.
A man could lose himself here, Conrad thought, and realized it was true. He could enter the overgrown bowers of his garden and never appear again, hemmed in by thorns and vines, impeded by an army of flowers, an ocean of green. At any moment he could take one step from which there would be no turning back. He could be lost, even in his own place.