So, what do you say?” she asked Graham.
He owed her an answer and he hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t she been direct?
“I want another chance with you,” she said, and noticed that her voice had grown mournful.
The straggler reappeared under the streetlight and looked about her.
Rose pulled herself together. “That way,” she called briskly and pointed. “Your friends went that way.” But the girl seemed bewildered and turned instead toward them, stepping high over the rubble. Bare-legged, wearing what seemed to be bedroom slippers, she slid and fell. They staggered down the bank to her.
Rose looked into the girl’s face—an aging, freckled girl. Doris Atkinson. “Doris, what are you doing out here? Where are you going?”
“Someplace,” Doris replied blandly.
“Graham, this is Doris. She’s married to my department Chair. Remember, I told you about Doris?” Alzheimer’s, Rose mouthed, and took Doris by the shoulders.
Rose hadn’t seen Doris up close in years. She looked very much the same, pert and trim. She wore a wool suit, well fitted to her small shape, and though her legs were bare, she looked well tended: the milky, freckled skin moist; the eyes bright.
“Aren’t you freezing?” Rose asked her.
“Of course,” said Doris. “That’s the price for going someplace.” Her fingers agitated, trying to pry Rose’s hands from her shoulders.
Rose gave a short laugh. “I know what you mean.”
She turned to Graham. “I’ll take Doris home,” she said. “I’ve got to see the Chair anyway.” She was going to have to walk away from Graham, back into her grief at missing him.
Doris let her feet slide out from under her and Rose lost her balance.
“I’d better come,” said Graham.
“I can manage,” Rose told him and, squatting, brushed snow from Doris’s legs.
“You need help,” said Graham.
“Please get up,” Rose told Doris. Suddenly furious, she swung around to Graham. If they were done, he should say so. “Just tell me,” she blurted. “Just say there’s no chance, if that’s your answer.”
He glared back at her. She wrestled Doris to her feet and took one arm. Graham took the other, and the three set off.
“I can’t just come when you beckon and go when you change your mind,” he said.
“Not fair,” said Rose. “I have never—not once—changed my mind about you.”
“Slow down,” said Doris. They slowed, Rose unwillingly. The streets were far from empty. A tall shape raised bat wings. A small shape dropped a wand.
“You disappeared for weeks,” he said. “Or you were only technically present.”
“True. But you’ve forbidden me to say I’m sorry.” She turned them down an alley, the shortest way to the duplex, and then they were climbing the back stairs, Rose tugging Doris up each step while Graham blocked her exit from below.
Chairman Atkinson swung the door open. “Good god, Doris,” he cried. “Here she is. Rose found her. Rose MacGregor,” he called over his shoulder. “Come in, one and all. The police are out looking. Call off the police. Pardon our disarray.”
The Atkinsons’ apartment, though changed in ways that Rose did not at first identify, was in no way disarrayed. Lamps glowed; cleanliness and order prevailed; and the smell of fresh baking hung in the air. Now that Doris was home, she seemed pleased to be there and seated herself in a kitchen chair and folded her hands expectantly.
Then the force behind the cleanliness and order walked in—Frances Gilpin. This was natural enough:Frances was the one who lent an extra hand; the Chair would call Frances in an emergency. Despite her enormous belly, Frances knelt easily before Doris and tugged off the snow-caked slippers.
“Rose, thank you,” she said and bid Graham hello.
Rose stood with her back to Graham, waiting for him to excuse him-self and go.
At the sink, Frances filled a basin with warm water. The Chair muttered into the phone. The doorbell chimed, and Max stepped into the room and picked up a basket of candy.
“Don’t let Mrs. Atkinson loose,” he advised and went off to answer the door.
Of her own dishevelment—jeans soaked, hair matted—of her need of a bath, Rose was dimly aware. She heard the hollow clunk of an empty boot and turned to see Graham pulling off his other boot. He pulled off his hood and there was his dear face, entirely revealed to her, his eyes on hers. They were not done.
“Have you two met?” Frances asked, and Rose, for a startled moment, prepared to have Frances introduce her to Graham.
“This is Graham, Rose’s boyfriend,” Frances told the Chair.
“Graham Lowe,” said the Chair. “The piano tuner, I believe?”
“Yes,” said Rose, fiercely proud of Graham. The men shook hands.
Frances lifted Doris’s feet, one by one, and lowered them into the basin.
“And how are you, Rose?” asked Frances.
Rose registered the trick question—how are you?—the sign that all was not well with whomever was asked how.
“I’m fine,” she replied. “Actually, I’m terrific.”
“You’ll tell us all about it?” said Frances. “We’ll have cocoa? Apple-sauce cake?”
“Applesauce cake,” agreed Doris and lifted her feet for Frances to dry. “Rose MacGregor,” said Doris. “We sublet our apartment to her once.”
“Why, that’s right,” said Frances. “Absolutely correct. Good, Doris.”
“This is Frances Gilpin,” said Doris blithely. “She took my husband away.”
“No, no,” murmured Frances. “He’s right here beside you.” Harold leaned and planted a kiss on his wife’s forehead.
The doorbell chimed and chimed. They were running out of candy. Max gave away the last of it, and Frances turned off the porch light.
Around the old mahogany dining-room table that, when she had lived there, Rose had shoved out of sight, they all sat down for cocoa and apple-sauce cake. The table now stood in the living room, however, where the couch was pushed to the wall and a folding screen hid what had been the dining room. Behind the screen, Rose glimpsed a small cot and a familiar satchel of wooden blocks.
Into the middle of the table, upon a tablecloth as snowy as all out-of-doors, Frances placed the cake—an old recipe of Alan’s via his chef boyfriend. Doris crowed at the sight—the crusty, cinnamon-speckled square—and, given the first piece, picked it up in her hands and bit down, squirting applesauce. Frances made quick work of Doris’s face and hands with a napkin. Max nudged a spoon into Doris’s hand. And Rose finished what she’d begun, telling her news about Santa Fe. In the boldest of possible terms, in superlatives, Alan had coached her—as she remembered only after she was done. She forgot to put it in superlatives, and it hadn’t taken long to tell.
Graham, seated next to her, sent her a nod of encouragement. Here he was, her love. She might have known he wouldn’t say yes all at once. But if she had—ahead of time—stopped to think how long he might take to answer, she might have lost her nerve and not come to get him, and then what?
“A symphony premiere. Congratulations are in order.” The Chair hoisted his cocoa mug. “That should fetch a pretty penny,” he added.
“Not really,” said Rose. Large sums rarely came to living composers, unless they wrote for the movies. The Chair would know that. Why mention money?
“You should be very proud,” said Frances, with a show of warmth. She picked up the spoon Doris had chucked aside and began feeding her. As the spoon lifted to Doris’s mouth, Rose felt an odd shiver, half longing, half repugnance, recalling how, with Alan and Frances, she had some-times felt herself to be the child. Still, it had gone both ways, hadn’t it? What of the weeks she’d spent mothering them through their disaster? Was there anything really so wrong with that, with mutual dependence? People seemed to lean on one another if they grew at all close. Trusting entirely in grace and love might not, after all, be servitude, but, instead, how things had to be. She knew she had leaned on Graham. She might be leaning on him now. But she’d give him his turn to lean on her if he let her.
Across the table, Doris dribbled applesauce, and Frances cleaned her up again. Frances seemed to have gone from the worst of luck to peace, and Max was peaceful too. The Chair, at the far end of the table, tousled the boy’s hair.
It struck Rose that this was her world: Frances and Max, old friend and godson; the Chairman and Doris—Harold, rather—colleague and his wife; and Graham, her true love. Some were missing—Alan, though he seemed present in the applesauce cake, in the advice that had brought Rose here, in his twisted example, the damage he’d done in the name of tenure, and also the freedom he’d lately claimed. But it also seemed free there around the table, and she couldn’t help wishing Alan present, and Lila and Emma, and everyone else she could think of, past and present, all sitting together at some great table where her tenure insanity was for-given, with all the insanities of the past.
Rose had learned to trust in music, but perhaps she might also trust these people, to whom her luck had carried her? Even incomplete, it was still a world there around the Atkinsons’ table, all leaned together, one depending on another like the music of a fugue, which, once you heard it and if you loved it, became part of the shelter in your mind.
Max, done with cake, got up. “Would you like to see my room?”
“Not till she’s finished eating, honey,” said Frances.
“It’s only right here,” said Max. Folding back the screen, he revealed the cot made up with his blanket, his toys stowed and his drawings nicely hung.
“Great,” said Rose, beginning to see. If Max lived here, so must Frances. “It’s just wonderful,” Rose told her godson.
“Isn’t it?” said Harold Atkinson. Frances was making the rounds with cocoa, and Harold caught her hand and pressed it. “Isn’t she marvelous?”
Doris piped up, calling for milk, cold milk to cool her cocoa, and Rose got to her feet. Outlandish. In that same room, years before, Doris Atkinson had pronounced Frances outlandish. But Frances had gone from outlandish to marvelous. Rose, having lived in those rooms, stepped to the fridge like a sleepwalker and saw, through an open doorway, in what had been Doris’s study, a new bed, sized for a lone adult, a bed with a railing, where Doris must sleep. While Frances, of course, slept with Harold. There was no other place for her to sleep. The shelter in Rose’s mind quaked a little.
Frances, Rose had always thought, had stuck it out with Alan for pride’s sake, for respectability. In her new situation, however marvelous, she couldn’t marry Harold. She might share his bed but, as long as Doris lived—and Doris was still young—Frances would have to go on this way, mother to Max, to the new baby, and, of course, to Doris, while to Harold she would be not the acknowledged wife, but the secretary about whom things were said, as they’d always been said about Frances, but now this would be even more the case. Frances was outlandish, but now she must know it. Rose was proud of her, and amazed.
Rose poured milk into Doris’s mug. Graham caught her gaze and held it, waiting, glancing from her to Harold. She’d said what she’d come to say? They could go now?
“In regard to tenure, Harold,” she said, the name leaving her lips easily, “I’d like my committee to know of my premiere.”
“Your committee. You haven’t heard yet?”
She shook her head. Should she have?
“The letter must be in your mailbox at school. Isn’t that so, Frances?”
Frances said nothing.
“Tell me,” said Rose.
His eyes, casting down and away, told her. The shelter in her mind collapsed.
“Why, it’s past suppertime,” said Frances, getting up. “How silly— giving you cocoa and cake when it’s time for supper. Sit down, Rose. I’ll get cooking.”
Rose’s godson—her Max—came and tugged at her to sit down. She could see he was alarmed. Something in her face was alarming people. She sat down.
“It’s a crapshoot, really—tenure,” murmured Harold.
They had turned her down. It was too late for any symphony news. Harold rambled on about criteria, about balance on a faculty, about racial diversity.
It was over. Rose knew she could appeal to the college president. She could rally the students. She could muster her friends on the faculty— even now, Alan would be on the phone to the various members of her tenure committee and, startled to find them cool and shifty, would be growing outraged on her behalf. But that sort of thing rarely changed the outcome. Any protest would be too late and would only increase her humiliation, painful especially in front of Graham: she with her big news and her big future and her new self.
What—who had done this to her? Stephen? Certainly Stephen. But had anyone defended her? She doubted Harold had, rambling on so placidly. Who was Rose to him but a résumé that had once come over the transom?
“And, of course, the college is suddenly short of money,” Frances said sharply, looking in from the kitchen. Her eyes flickered in Rose’s direction. Frances was possibly laughing at her.
Ah, but Rose had laughed at Frances at the start, hadn’t she?—those years ago, judging Frances deluded in her passions, willing herself into beauty, into love? And in laughing at Frances, Rose had launched the contest, the long race they’d run to its surprise conclusion: Frances, first at the finish line, settled and beautiful, beloved and secure, no matter how outlandish the arrangement. Hadn’t Rose always underestimated Frances? Frances had been both lucky and crafty and likely deserved her turn to laugh. Hadn’t Rose all along been the one more severely deluded, imagining herself a professor when she’d never been more than that oddity, the Girl Composer?
Frances. Of course it was Frances who had done this to her, by what-ever she’d said from her glass box, whatever damning or belittling thing Frances had said, whatever silence she had let fall, in the recent days when Rose’s fate was being settled.
But the flicker in Frances’s eyes flared. The tone of her voice was angry. “The new mandate on race,” she repeated, glaring at Harold, “and the sudden shortage of money so we can’t have both a woman and a Vietnamese. Isn’t that what you all say?” said Frances and smoothed her tunic over her belly and went back to the kitchen.
It seemed Rose had had a defender after all: Frances. That was astounding. What could it possibly mean? Frances and Rose were not even friends, as Frances had said herself, and yet Frances was her defender. In practical terms, it meant nothing: Frances was, after all, merely the secretary: her opinion, her unofficial vote, could change nothing.
Rose sat trapped in her chair, stupefied in the smell of her own sweat. It would be quite some time before it would occur to her that she and Frances had much else to say to each other. Just then, all she could see was failure. She had undergone a test and failed. Just then, she felt only chagrin to be possessed of a self, a mind and body so capable and so susceptible— she with her delusions of tenure, her applesauce cake-induced fantasies of togetherness.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Graham.
Rose kissed Max and nodded to Frances.
On the back porch, she stopped to catch her breath in the fresh cold while Graham pulled on his boots. She’d wanted the world, and for a moment she’d had it. She’d risen in the world and, given Santa Fe, she might rise again. But now she was falling. Could falling, of its own accord, make her a new self? She didn’t think so. She’d sell her condo as soon as she could. She’d be offered, before severance, a final year of teaching, a one-year contract to give her time to search for a position elsewhere.
She felt her way down the stairs. She’d left the leather mittens behind, just a few steps up and through a doorway. But she couldn’t bring herself to go back for them. Graham pulled up his hood but stuffed his gloves into his pockets. Stepping into stride beside her, his bare hand brushed hers. Overhead, the stars sizzled and the snow seemed to soak up the light from Atkinson’s back windows and from the alley lights and the street-lights, shining brightly into Tangletown, as far as any street could be seen.
She took the hand so discreetly offered and for a time attended to nothing but the warmth of their fingers and the sinking and lifting of her heart as they walked along.
She didn’t want to go anywhere else.