The Rose Garden Read online

  Tom arrived at the club every day at ten o’clock. In the mornings, he sat in the chair by the window, reading the papers. At twelve-thirty, he made his way to the dining room and enjoyed a two-hour lunch, always eating alone, always at the same table. All the imagination and appreciation he was capable of were spent at the luncheon table. In the afternoons, he simply sat and watched the street. At five o’clock, he sent for his car, quartered at a nearby garage, and drove home to Liza.

  Early one October, Liza received a telephone call that disturbed her very much. The call was from Clara Longacre, who invited her to drop over for bridge the same afternoon. Clara, at thirty, was the recognized social leader at the Retreat—merely because, Liza often thought viciously, of having grown up there. Clara’s natural sense of superiority made it impossible for her to doubt herself. She knew she was better than anybody else. She was untouchable. Liza longed more than anything in the world to impress Clara, to deprive her, even if it was only for a minute, of her eternal self-satisfaction. Sometimes she lay awake in bed and gritted her teeth in the struggle to bring forth some scheme that would crack that natural armor. Now she was not disturbed at the invitation to bridge; she had often been to bridge at Clara’s house. It was the tone of the invitation that had unsettled her. Always before, in speaking to her, Clara’s manner and her amused tone of voice had implied an awareness that Liza was a person—a possible adversary, even. This time, she was merely casual, as if she had forgotten that Liza was in any way different from the others. Liza wondered distractedly if perhaps they were all beginning to take her for granted. After all, she had done nothing extraordinary for a year—not since she had torn out the whole riverside wall of her house to install those two outsize picture windows. At night, from the opposite bank of the river, her house appeared to be a glittering sheet of white light—the most spectacular establishment in the community, whether you admired it or not. Even that, which had outraged all the rest of them (they said that, like her furniture, it was alien to the spirit of Herbert’s Retreat), had drawn only an amused smile from Clara. Liza had always felt that Clara’s amusement might mask a touch of chagrin, enough to make a small victory for herself. This time Clara’s voice had been casual and friendly, but that was all. I will not be patronized by her, Liza thought wildly. I must show her.

  She went to the bridge party in a scattered, anxious frame of mind. Clara had also asked Arabelle Burton and Margaret Slade. They all come running when Clara rings the bell, Liza thought.

  As they were adding up their scores at the end of the afternoon, Clara asked, “Aren’t you and Tom having an anniversary soon, Liza?”

  “Not till February,” Liza said.

  “I know it’s February,” Clara said. “How could any of us forget the month of your arrival, Liza? We had all just settled down after Christmas when you charged in to rouse us out of our lethargy. How many years is it?”

  “Seven,” Liza said, and wondered if Clara was laughing at her secretly. They don’t dare laugh at me to my face, she thought. I’m too quick for them.

  “Seven is a very special anniversary in most marriages, isn’t it?” Margaret Slade said indistinctly. As usual, she had a cold in her head. “I mean isn’t it the most crucial year after the first, or something?”

  “Is it?” Clara said. “Look, Liza, I’d like to give a party for you on your anniversary. Seven years is a long time. We should have a celebration. Will you let me?” She sounded perfectly sincere, and friendly, and Liza stared at her, baffled, not knowing what to say. Surely Clara was being patronizing?

  “That’s a wonderful idea—a seventh-anniversary party for Liza!” Margaret Slade cried. “We’ll all bring appropriate presents. What is the seventh anniversary, anyway? Arabelle, you always know about things like that. What’s the seventh anniversary—leather? paper?”

  “Brass and copper,” Arabelle said.

  “Well, then, that’s settled,” Clara said. “It’s a brass-and-copper party. That should be easy enough, but I’m afraid you’re going to find yourself with a lot of ashtrays and hand bells.”

  “You’ll have to tell us what you’d really like, Liza,” Arabelle said. “Your house is so special I’m afraid anything I’d pick out would be an anachronism.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Arabelle,” Margaret said, blowing her nose heartily. “We’re all in the same boat there. It would be hard not to bring an anachronism into Liza’s house. We’ll probably end up settling for the least anachronistic thing we can find, and hope for the best.”

  “Why not bring the most anachronistic thing we can find?” Clara said. “An anachronism party would be much more fun than just sticking to brass or copper. Liza, I think I’ll give you a cobbler’s bench.”

  “Oh, that’s marvelous!” Margaret cried. “I’ll bring a kerosene lamp.”

  “I’ll bring a mustache cup,” Arabelle said.

  Liza smiled stiffly. They were baiting her. They had never dared make fun of her before. Trembling, she decided to meet their challenge.

  “You must have read my mind, Clara,” she said quickly. “As a matter of fact, Tom and I were laughing about anachronisms only the other night. As Tom said, a seventh anniversary is something of an anachronism anyway. The anachronistic lucky seven, and so on. So we decided to celebrate the occasion with our first anachronism. I won’t tell you what I thought of. It’s something quite extraordinary, I promise you.”

  Clara stared at her in astonishment. “You mustn’t take us seriously, Liza. It’s only a joke. We wouldn’t think of defacing your house.” To the maid, who had stalked in bearing the tea tray, she said, “Mattie, you’ll have to take that back. You know I won’t tolerate tea bags in the house. Please go back and make the tea properly, just as I showed you.”

  “They didn’t have nothing but tea bags at the store, Mrs. Longacre,” Mattie replied. “Afraid it’s tea bags or nothing, Ma’am.”

  “Oh, all right!” Clara said, and glanced in exasperation at her friends.

  This maid was new to the community, and probably would not stay long, because she was already complaining about the lack of entertainment around. It was seldom that one of the houses at Herbert’s Retreat was not in an uproar with a maid just gone or about to go, a dinner planned and the hostess frantically phoning her neighbors to discover which of the remaining maids would be available to help out for the evening. All this gave the maids a great sense of power, of course. For some of them, the power was satisfaction enough. Those were the ones who stayed on year after year. The others flew in and out of Herbert’s Retreat like birds, carrying their baggage with them, entering service there with misgiving and leaving with rancor.

  “I forgot to pick up my tea at Vendôme on Thursday,” Clara said when Mattie had left the room, “and I just had to tell that fool to get what she could in the village. Oh, just once, to have a good maid!”

  Liza sat ready to deal with them one by one or all together when they took up the attack where they had left off. But if they were baiting her, as she thought, they seemed to have had enough of it. “Speaking of maids, as we do all the time,” Arabelle said, “Clara, I loved your cute little story in this week’s Flyaway about that maid in White’s Hotel.”

  The Flyaway was the weekly publication circulated at the Retreat. Liza had not yet taken her new copy from its wrapper.

  “The most extraordinary, wonderful caricature of an English maid I’ve ever seen,” Clara said, pleased. “And of course White’s Hotel is the perfect background for her.”

  Travel, hotels in Switzerland, hotels in Cannes, matching embroidery wools in that little shop on the Left Bank, driving through Cornwall on the wrong side of the road, White’s Hotel in London—it was one way of dealing Liza out, and they didn’t even have to do it on purpose. They couldn’t avoid doing it. At such times, Liza sat, silent, with no stories to match with theirs, no recommendations, no frantic experiences. To travel, she and Tom would have to leave the Retreat, and she didn’t dare. A
nd anyway, even if they had picked up and gone to Europe the summer before, like Clara, she still held the trump cards. Liza could stay at White’s Hotel if she chose to, but Clara’s grandparents had stayed there.

  “Even the men hang around in the hall trying to get a look at her,” Clara said. “I simply had to write about her. I’m sending her the article, of course.”

  “Does she really wear high-buttoned boots, Clara?” Margaret Slade asked delightedly.

  “High-buttoned boots, black lisle stockings, long black dress—alpaca, I suppose—apron like an English nanny’s, for God’s sake, not a maid’s apron at all, but it’s just right for Betty Trim, she’s so outrageous anyway, and, to top it all off, a parlormaid’s cap, but worn backwards, and behind it an enormous bun of the most wiggy-looking, coarse gray hair you’ve ever seen, except that it’s not a wig. Oh, and of course she curtsies, and calls everyone ‘m’lady.’ It’s simply killing. I swear she has the coldest, fishiest eyes I’ve ever seen in a human head. She never smiles, and the porter told me she thinks of nothing but money. Nothing. She could tell you the amount she made in tips any day in the last fifteen years, but she won’t talk, of course. She’s very closemouthed. She reads nothing but her savings book. She just simply loves and adores money. I can’t understand why she’s not a cashier, or something. Maybe it would break her heart to have to handle money she couldn’t put away in her bank. I couldn’t say all that in the Flyaway, of course. I want to stay in her good graces.”

  “Oh, Lord, and to think of what we have to put up with in our kitchens,” Margaret said enviously. “Imagine having a pearl like that in the house.”

  “Oh, you can’t imagine, Margaret,” Clara said enthusiastically. “She never makes a mistake. She knows her place to the last millimeter, and your place, too. She used to be a parlormaid, but she’s in the ladies’ room now. She’s a little queen there, of course. And then tips. And she’s independent. You should see the ladies trying to charm her, but she never bats an eye. Isn’t it killing the way we all go down on our knees to curry favor with someone who’s really indifferent to us?”

  “I know,” Arabelle said. “Do you remember that ghastly Miss Vesper at school? Why, we positively crawled.”

  Liza let her mind wander, as she often did when they spoke of their snobbish school days. She was suffocating with a joyful idea, and fearful that Clara might spot her excitement and divine its cause.

  That evening, Liza wrote to Betty Trim, the maid in the ladies’ room of White’s Hotel in London, offering her five times her present salary, describing the lightness of the work she would be expected to do, enjoining secrecy, and enclosing a check for the fare over. Betty replied, demanding ten times her present salary and an additional sum every month to equal the tips she had received during the corresponding month in her best year, which was 1947, and asking for a signed contract guaranteeing her job for three years. She returned the check, saying she would require a ticket on the Queen Mary, complete and paid for, when the date of her departure was set, and she requested a bank draft to cover the amount of her return fare. She also asked for traveling expenses. Liza sent a ticket for the earliest date she could get, which was December 19. For good measure, she made it a first-class ticket, and added a generous check for expenses and a surprise Christmas bonus. She also sent a signed contract, binding on herself and on Betty, with a copy for Betty to sign and return. Betty replied, not enclosing her own signed copy, because, she explained, it was too much to expect a person to sign away her life in a strange land. She did, however, return the ticket, saying that she could not leave her job until after her Christmas and New Year’s tips were in, and suggesting January 2 as the earliest date on which she could be expected to start her journey. She added that a second-class ticket would be more suitable, considering her station in life. Liza sent her the ticket she asked for, and enclosed an additional bank draft for emergencies. She begged Betty to reply by cable. Betty replied by ordinary mail, confirming the arrangement and explaining that to her mind a cable that was not for an emergency was a wasteful extravagance.

  Liza, groveling, was nevertheless triumphant.

  “She needn’t lift a finger unless she wants to, except to serve tea,” Liza said to Tom. “And there’ll be a cleaning woman in every day. What’s more, you’ll meet her at the pier in a taxi, and drive her out here. If the boat docks on schedule, you should have her out here by one, at the very latest.”

  “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.