Rose's Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

strangers in conversation, their heads close together, their words intimate and knowing. A moment before herdeath, as he’d held her hands, she’d said something, and he’d put his ear to her mouth, trying—and failing—to catch the whispered voice.
    But that evening so long ago, when they were both just children: Rose, the young Rose. She smiled at Conrad, and he thought he might faint, for the overpowering recognition was so strong he could practically reach out his hand and touch it, touch the shape of what stood between them.
    â€œI’m a priestess,” she said, as if that explained her ridiculous costume. “Hello, Mr. Pittilio.”
    â€œAnd where’s the high priest himself?” Mr. Pittilio asked, laughing.
    Rose stopped, struck a pose of infinite patience. “Up there,” she said, wagging a shoulder toward the ceiling. “Performing his errands of mercy. And now—” She began to drift archly down the hall, her arms floating, toward a lighted room at the end, from which came the aroma of supper being cooked. Suddenly she turned.
    â€œYou’re the bird boy?” she asked.
    Conrad nodded.
    She smiled again, and a blush rose through her whole face. She drew nearer and peered at Conrad as if there were something under his skin that would explain his presence there. “He’s got a surprise for you,” she said, poking a finger at Conrad’s chest where his heart thudded. “Wait a minute.”
    She ran down the hall and disappeared, returning a moment later, followed by a tall woman wearing a pale pink duster and wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her face was Rose’s face, Conrad saw, matured into adulthood, but with the same classical shape. Her body carried the same long, tapered waist, the same swaying hips.
    â€œFrank,” she said warmly, extending her hand. “Lemuel’s up on the roof.” She turned to Conrad. “You’ll forgive him, won’t you? We’ve been waiting for you.”
    Conrad did not understand what she meant, nor their mutual tone of conspiracy, but he sensed there in that household an agreement that life was meant to be lived in search of miraculousness, in service to a human effort to contrive wonder and delight among the unforgiving surfaces of daily living. While his own household lived within the modest confines of a certain unavoidable drudgery, with a resolution to stand fast against occasional hunger, against certain disappointment, the parties of Mr. Lemuel Sparks’s household were trained on a different sort of existence, one in which the whole matter of being was an exercise in determined joyousness. It took only one evening, that first evening, for Conrad to know that he wanted, though it felt disloyal, to stay there forever, exploring the darkened rooms that opened off the hallway, tasting the supper laid upon the table. He wanted to be initiated into Mr. Lemuel Sparks’s fantastic world of wings and light up on the roof. As much as he was afraid of this man, he wanted to belong there.
    â€œI’m just finishing supper,” the woman said, and Conrad judged her at that moment to be Mrs. Sparks. “We’ll join you up there in a minute.” She smiled, glancing from one to the other. “Go on, go on up. He’ll be delighted.”
    Rose hopped on one foot, her toga slipping off her shoulder.
    â€œGet your coat, Rose,” her mother said, shooing Mr. Pittilio and Conrad with her hands toward the staircase, its heavy newel carved with a globe of the earth balanced in the arching tails of three fish.
    They climbed the stairs. Above them Conrad could see the doors of four rooms opening to a center hall, and within those rooms, an occasional fire burning against the chill of early fall, thetassled sleeve of a canopy over a bed, a slipper chair with articles of clothing strewn across it. At the first landing, two small boys a few years younger than Conrad