Rose's Garden Read Online Free PDF

remainder into a piece of stained newspaper, returning the whole mess to his pocket. He squinted up toward the roof.
    â€œLook up there,” he said, stepping backward and putting a handto Conrad’s shoulder to draw him back. Conrad craned his neck and looked. On the roof behind a brick balustrade he could see the jagged roofline of a pigeon loft, its peaks and dormers jutting up into the purpling evening sky.
    â€œListen,” Mr. Pittilio said.
    As they stood there, the sound of Lemuel’s pigeons became audible, a distant cooing. The sun was sinking directly behind the brownstone. Conrad squinted into the sun, wondering over the proportions of what he judged must have been an enormous loft, a veritable empire. And then the tall, dark silhouette of a man in a hat and jacket passed slowly into the sun’s glowing circle. Conrad looked up at Mr. Pittilio, who glanced down at Conrad and nodded. And then they heard the sound of the train, its warning whistle. The ground shook under their feet. And as its siren split the air, Conrad saw his enemy’s pigeons rise from the roof in a cloud of white, a twister rotating furiously into the mouth of the sky, a hurricane that unraveled at its spire and opened like a white flower, sparks shooting into the dark. And then they were gone.
    Mr. Pittilio craned back, nearly fell trying to follow the ascent of the birds. He gave a low whistle. “‘Their faces were all living flame;’” he intoned soberly; “‘their wings were gold; and for the rest—’” Mr. Pittilio shut his eyes, “‘—and for the rest, their white was so intense, no snow can match the white they showed.’” He looked down at Conrad and smiled. “Dante,” he said reverently. “The Paradiso. My father knew the whole thing. You know it?”
    â€œNo,” Conrad said humbly, though he saw what Mr. Pittilio meant, the poetry of it all.
    â€œHere’s the rest,” Mr. Pittilio said. “‘When they climbed down into that flowering Rose, from rank to rank, they shared that peace and ardor which they had gained, with wings that fanned their sides.’” He paused, sighing.
    Conrad looked up at the sky. The pigeons were gone.
    â€œCome on,” Mr. Pittilio said, and knocked at the door.
    And that was Conrad’s first look at her. At Rose. She opened the door, and for a moment Conrad thought he was seeing things. She looked to be his own age, but somehow older. Hers was a face he thought he’d seen in his art book at school—the same long nose and high, sad forehead he’d seen in that portrait, the perfectly shaped eye and pursed mouth. She was wearing, incongruously, a makeshift toga, with a headband of scarlet leaves threaded with ivy wreathing her long, yellow hair.
    â€œYes?” she said, drawing out the syllable. And then she swept into a low, formal bow. “Enter,” she said.
    They stepped into the hall, and Mr. Pittilio stifled a chuckle. Conrad stole a glance at him.
    â€œMiss Rose Sparks,” Mr. Pittilio said. “This is Conrad Morrisey. Conrad, meet Rose, leading lady.”
    And Conrad was smitten. There, at that very moment, the reed-like Rose in a toga of sheets, the leaves askew upon her head, he fell in love. Yet it was not just desire, its first vague and alarming stirrings, that he felt. It was something else, too, some feeling of stewardship, as though from that point forward things would be more complicated than he could ever have imagined. From that point forward, he understood, poised between disbelief and faith, he would have some role to play in determining whether Rose had a happy life.
    When she died, so many years later, Conrad saw that her eyes remained open, staring just past his shoulder. As had been the case their whole lives, she saw something there that he could not see, saw the miraculous and the ordinary all mixed up together, some space populated by