SOMETIMES, NEAR THE end of his life, he was not sure whether he lived in the past or the present. They could not save his eye—central artery occlusion, they said, caused by a small blockage in his heart, a clot breaking free at last and traveling up to his eye.
Mignon or Hero or May Brown drove him around for weeks until he got used to the sensation of navigating the world with only one eye. Lenore came over and cleaned the house, Burden carrying loads of trash out to the truck, months of rubbish. Conrad taught Hero to feed the pigeons. Eventually he learned to adjust to the feeling of imbalance. He acquired a cane. He started to take the truck out again himself, Mignon sitting placidly beside him for company, but he did not drive once the sun had set. He took the steps down to his pigeon loft slowly, one stair at a time.
Gradually the two states—his life with Rose, his life afterward—lost the line of demarcation between them, a chalk stripe that faded gracefully over time. Sometimes he thought he was on the Sparkses’ rooftop, would see Lemuel spread-eagled beside the balustrade, the city lights below winking in the darkness, the wind in his hair, his pigeons rising around him. Sometimes he saw Adele turning from the stove, a long-handled spoon in her hand, her eyes laughing at him. Sometimes he thought he was with Rose, sitting on the bed in his socks and undershorts while she undressed at night, a brush in her hand. He spoke to her, to Lemuel. He would stop before a plant, reach his fingers toward its petals, and the name of it would come to him, Rose’s voice in his ear. Honesty. Veronica. Forget-me-not. His garden grew wild, more overgrown each season, volunteer wildflowers sowing themselves in the rich earth. Birds did most of his planting now, and deer most of his harvesting.
Sometimes, sitting by Rose’s marker at the cemetery on the long summer afternoons, he would start as Hero’s shadow fell across the grass at his feet. “Come inside,” she would say, leaning down, offering her arm, the sun behind her. Hi Roller, who never liked to be far from her, would circle their heads as they walked across the grass toward Hero’s cottage through the falling light. There on the worn linoleum floor, the little terrier would lie still, watching the pigeon eat from the dog’s supper bowl, and Hero would laugh.
It pleased Conrad to have made her this gift, to have given her a homing pigeon. The cemetery always seemed a lonely place to him, though he felt happier knowing there was a lost pigeon who called it home now along with Hero, a bird who came when she whistled, dipping through the dusk, its wing mended, its single eye fixed on Hero’s roof. Hero might fix Conrad dinner, drive him home later under the domed sky massed with stars. He never confused her with anyone, though. He always seemed to know her.
Sometimes he asked her to tell him again about how she had come to his door the day of the flood. Finding no one there, she had run around to the back of the house, looked down into the meadow, and seen the water crawling toward the loft. She had run down the slick, stony steps, two, three at a time, had flung open all the doors, had urged the pigeons skyward, into the rain, waving her arms. They didn’t want to leave, she told him. Of course, he thought. They’re homing pigeons. Where would they have gone?
What he remembered of the months after the flood was the sound of industry, of Laurel being rebuilt. From high on Paradise Hill, he could hear the grinding sound of the heavy trucks bringing lumber to Laurel, the steady ring of hammers, the buzz of chain saws. He saw facades resurrected, saw new gardens laid out with string, saw bricks laid one atop the next, mortar spread between them. A new flag flew from the pole in the square; a second plaque was added to the wall of the bank, six inches higher than the old one.
One evening he went to the Congregational church for an exhibit of the photographs Toronto had taken from the roof of the bank. He passed before the pictures, amazed at the strangeness of walking now where water had once buckled the pews and submerged the marble altar. Staring with his one eye at a picture of the bandstand, torn loose from its moorings and spinning crazily in the center of the flooded square, he suffered a moment of severe imbalance, staggered back, and found himself supported by Toronto.
“Steady,” he said, and tightened his grip on Conrad’s arm.
The Pleiades planned an after-the-flood party for the town, served up hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken from grills set up on the town square. Some people, the young people, danced, and Conrad took a turn or two inside the bandstand, now resettled on its old foundation, with May Brown.
No one rebuilt Eddie’s, though. Harrison Supplee arranged with the city authorities to have the site turned into a tiny park, with a sundial at its center and two benches and an American flag. The grass there was studded with clover.
There was a wedding held in his own garden, Nolan’s shaking hand placed atop Betty Barteleme’s. Betty wore pale blue, a sequined jacket that made her look, Mignon said, leaning toward Conrad with her hand over her mouth, like the body of a great silver fish. The Pleiades catered the affair from their own kitchens. Betty gave Nolan a bound volume of his columns, “From Peak’s Beak”; Conrad had gilded the lettering on the leather cover. Nolan gave Toronto the Aegis—“Have fun,” he said sarcastically—and Betty a ring with an opal at its center, a tiny, bright eye. He wore violets in his lapel, and Conrad pushed his wheelchair to the makeshift altar set up in the arbor.
Nolan had suffered one stroke after another, four in all, though Betty believed it was the cold that had caused them, not his effort to brace the dam. How very cold he had been that afternoon, carried back to her on the shore where she waited, her own lips growing blue. It was some young man, she never knew who, who had pulled Nolan from the water where he sat, a surprised expression on his face, not three feet from the bank, unable to move. He could talk, though he didn’t much anymore, and when he ate, food dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He wore his bow tie, held Betty’s hand. He smiled in a lopsided way at the well-wishers who came before him and held out their hands to him or touched his knee. He always remembered ringing the bells, the perfect sensation of weightlessness as he’d clung to the ropes.
Sometimes, kneeling in the garden at Mt. Olive, near the double helix of rosebushes planted by the Pleiades in Rose’s name, Conrad thought he saw Rose walking toward him through the flowers, a bouquet in her hands, her white dress fluttering around her.
And he would try to sit up straighter then, try to show her his good side. “How sweet you are, bird boy,” she would say tenderly, coming to stand before him, reaching her hand to his cheek. “How I love you.” And he would try to smile at her through his tears.
“The view,” he would say to her, trying to distract her from his sorrow, seeing the fingernail moon rise early in the still-blue sky. “Look at the sky, the swallows.”
And then he would be home again, just as if a curtain had been pulled aside. He was home in his own garden, flowers pulsing behind his eyelids, home in their bedroom with its silvering mirrors. He would be kneeling by her bed in those final moments, a flutter of wings around them, his pigeons lifting skyward. “What did you say? Rose! What did you say?”
For she would be going, she would be on her way. And he heard her then at last, heard the final words that had eluded him all this time.
“Paradise,” she said, and lifted her hand.
“Look, Conrad,” she said. “Look at the view from Paradise Hill.”