Her Name Is Rose Read online

  Rowan knew Burdy wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, but he didn’t say so. His gut twisted. He wished he’d been there. Somehow. Had one last putt or something, with his grandfather.

  As if she’d heard his thoughts, Louise pulled back. “Honey, it’s all right. You couldn’t have known. It was too sudden.”

  “I know, but I missed our golf date last week. I had to cancel. I had something on. And … and…”

  She looked up into his tearing eyes, brown, like his father’s, and saw how tired he was. Rowan led his mother though the front door, his arm cupped around her, and into the immaculate white kitchen, its hanging ferns curtaining the window.

  “I tried to reach you.” She looked at her son the way some mothers do, as if his was a story only she could read. “Was your phone off? Did you get my messages? I had to begin the arrangements. Kings’ have already taken the body—”

  “Please, Mother…”

  She sat at the table with a look he knew well. “I worried when I couldn’t reach you.” She forced a pause. “That’s all.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to do that on your own.” They sat in silence for a few minutes. Rowan’s hands lay crossed on the table. He closed his eyes and dropped his head. He was still in his work suit, a dark blue fine wool, his white shirt opened at the neck. The tie stuffed in his pocket. His mother reached for a pack of cigarettes, fished one out, and snapped into flame a silver lighter.

  She hadn’t taken three draws when she stood and said, “Coffee.” She crossed the kitchen to the sink and ran the water. While she did, Rowan left the room.

  * * *

  Pierce Blake, Rowan’s older brother, an entertainment lawyer, was on his way from Los Angeles. Louise had sent a car to the airport for him. After a failed marriage he, too, was a bachelor now.

  Louise planned to make her boys dinner (filet mignon, baked potato, and a citrus salad with Bibb lettuce), “like in the old days,” she told Rowan when he returned to the kitchen. It had been Burdy’s favorite, too. He’d washed his face, his dark hair, smartly cut, was combed, and he’d taken off his jacket. His sleeves were folded midway up his forearms. A large mug of black coffee waited for him on the table.

  “There, that might help. I’ve made a pot.”

  Rowan ignored the pointed tone in her voice, but picked up the coffee. “Mother, what can I do?”

  “Nothing now … dear. I’ve a list of people we need to call. Let’s wait for Pierce.” Her back was to him.

  “Sorry. For earlier, I mean. My phone was on silent. I was entertaining clients—”

  “Yes. I know. When I spoke with your intern”—she paused but didn’t turn around—“he said you weren’t there.” Louise said it like she was leaving a door open for him, even though she knew he wouldn’t walk through it. She knew her son by heart. She was certain he was on his way to becoming an alcoholic, if he wasn’t one already. She’d seen something like this coming for months. She’d seen it in her own mother and sisters and knew the signs well. She stopped fixing the salad and began to thump one small-fisted hand on the counter, muffled but insistent, as if to squash her rising grief into a pulpy mash and dispose of it in the garbage disposal.

  Rowan said nothing. He took the coffee, came toward her, but stopped midway, then walked out. Everything about him was tired. He opened the patio screen door and was soon on the edge of the golf course. He stood on the trimmed rough of the 16th and wished himself back into an earlier time when his life seemed full of promises and innocence.

  “It’s all about balance, Ro,” his grandfather said. “Relax your grip, son. Swing easy. And mind the rough.” It was a spring afternoon. He was twelve years old. Burdy was wearing his gold ochre sweater and linen golf trousers, his silver hair soft like silky milkweed threads, explaining the rules of putting, angles, and imaginary lines and how to read the green. “If you get your putting right, you’re halfway there. Putting is the foundation of building your game. The trick is to focus on the line of the putt. Visualize it moving across the green. View the hole from different aspects, Rowan. You’ve got to feel the move of the green.”

  He stood in behind Rowan. “That’s it, Ro. Line your foot up to the ball. Keep the club square to the line. Now, let your shoulders hang loose. Hands level with the ball. How does that feel?”

  “Okay. I guess?”

  “Good boy.” Burdy laughed and stepped away. “You’re a natural. Remember, a perfect putting stroke resembles a pendulum.”

  Rowan had stopped and turned around to look at his grandfather, puzzled.

  “No. Keep your eyes on the ball. Remember, like a pendulum. Keep your putter on the line, square with the target.”

  Burdy had a special marker, an old Irish coin—a nickel three pence picturing a hare and a harp. That was also his lucky piece. “Here, let me show you.” He picked up Rowan’s ball and put down the coin, dropped his own ball beside it. He stepped up and with his feet in place, he shifted easily back and forth, looked from the hole to his ball, his grip as light as a feather. He pulled back and through, stroking the back of the ball. Soft like a puff, the ball poofed along the imaginary line, following the lay of the land before dropping, plonk, into the hole.

  “It’s all about balance, Ro.”

  It’s all about balance, Ro. But Burdy was dead and balance was the last thing Rowan Blake had in his life.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, another car pulled into 316 Greenview Drive. A man in his late forties got out and paid the driver. He was tall and straight, had a long but handsome nose, full lips, and brown eyes that resembled his brother’s. He carried a bouquet of peonies and a leather suit bag. Louise, seeing him from the kitchen, rushed out to meet him.

  “Honey! Pierce … dear. You’re here.” As she’d done earlier with Rowan, she now clasped onto her eldest son, more like a child than a mother.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right, Mother.” He held her close and patted her back. Both sons were a foot taller than Louise. “It was Burdy’s time. He’d a great life.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. But … it was so … so sudden. I wasn’t ready.” As she partly spoke, partly wept, Rowan appeared at the door and came toward them. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered to Pierce.

  Over the top of her head, Pierce’s deep voice called, “Rowan! Hey! How are you, brother?”

  Louise released her hold and moved aside. The brothers hugged briefly but warmly. Like Rowan, Pierce was wearing a white shirt. It was how the Blake men always dressed. Crisp white shirts. They were the kind of men you’d look at if they passed you in the street—perfectly groomed and full of the quiet self-assurance tall men often have. “It’s just us now against the world, hey?” Pierce said gently and they stood a moment. All three looked in different directions to the hundreds of trees that sheltered them, not touching but close enough so the space between them was as intimate as a whisper.

  “Ah,” Pierce said, coming into the kitchen, “pink grapefruit and blue cheese!” Louise had set the table and placed her famous salad on place mats. “No one does it like you, Mother.” He winked at Rowan and handed her the flowers. “I don’t suppose you’ve prepared the mignon and the Idaho, too?”

  “You’re too much, Pierce. You make me laugh.” She was on the verge of tears.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Pierce said, picking up her hands and holding them in his own. “We could have ordered in—”

  “I needed to do something while I waited for you.… For you both.”

  Pierce “at home” had revived Louise, Rowan observed with some regret as his mother steadied the bouquet into a glass vase. Then she broiled the steaks under the grill. The potatoes, wrapped in tinfoil, waited on the plates. For a few minutes they made small talk like nothing had happened. Both men leaned back on the kitchen counter, side by side, arms folded across their chests. Pierce asked Rowan how the landscaping business was going.

  “In L.A. it seems every other
house has a fancy tree lit up with soft lights and smart water features and minimalist planters. What’s it like in New York? Still doing those brownstone gardens in Brooklyn?” He seemed truly interested. He was, after all, the older brother. Rowan said he was working on a redesign for Paley Park on East Fifty-third, in fact.

  “Dogwoods and box and a few multistem Himalayan birch.”

  “It’s time you came out to Brentwood, buddy, helped me with my ten-by-ten gravel backyard. What would you say to a swimming pool?” Pierce chuckled and gave his brother a soft thump on the back.

  Their conversation seemed to settle Louise. She asked them then to sit down and they held hands across the kitchen table, as was customary in the Blake household. Louise looked to Rowan. “Will you say grace, please?”

  * * *

  After the dinner, which none of them could really eat, some of Louise’s neighbors stopped by; it was late, but Pierce and Rowan pretended it was polite to slip away. They stepped outside onto the deck. Fireflies flashed with silent electricity. A breeze stirred the trees and offered some relief to the hot night.

  “We could take Mother’s car down to Muscoot’s?” said Rowan.

  “That old haunt? Doesn’t have this fresh air, Ro.” Pierce slapped his hands together and laughed his big, deep laugh. “Let’s just walk a bit. We’re past those days, don’t you think? Beer joints?”

  They walked in silence with the crickets sounding. A few stars hung above the 16th fairway. Rowan said nothing, although he ached with emotion. And he wanted a drink. From time to time he glanced over at Pierce and wondered if his brother thought him much altered from his visit last summer.

  “Come on. Cheer up, and tell me, how’s it going down there in the Big Apple? You seem a few bites short? Is it just Burdy, or something else?”

  It wasn’t something else. It was that, and, everything else. Between bidding for projects, executing accepted ones, and training new staff, he was keeping late hours. It left little time for leisure or dating and he ended up exhausted at night but also wired. It was a balancing act but the seesaw of his life catapulted him, more often than not these days, through intoxication, landing him on the flat of his back, inches away from the proverbial gutter. But each day he got up and was back in the game, although each day a little more bruised.

  Rowan leaned nearer. “You wouldn’t say no to a martini, would you? Back at the house?”

  “Once Mother’s in bed I’ve got to phone some clients back in L.A.”

  “Sure,” said Rowan. “I’ve got some calls to make, as well.”

  When the friends had left, Louise found her sons out on the back deck sitting in her Adirondack chairs. “You boys are terrible,” she said, “deserting me,” but her eyes understood. She knew Pierce was assuming his big brother role. She kissed their heads. “Good night.”

  When Louise was in bed, the brothers came inside and Rowan mixed gin and vermouth. (Louise always had a bottle of Bombay and one of Jameson in the cabinet.) He’d finished his second before Pierce returned from his phone calls.

  “So, tell me,” Pierce said, “what’s up?”

  Rowan followed his brother’s eyes, which went to his empty glass, but he looked directly back at Pierce, challengingly, and Pierce shrugged. “Just go easy on that stuff.”

  They talked instead about Pierce’s latest project on a copyright infringement case. And after just one martini Pierce went to bed.

  * * *

  Rowan drifted like a buoy lost of its mooring. The night closed in like a dark ocean, his head barely above water. No land in sight. In which direction he should swim, he’d no idea. Just thinking about it disabled him moment by moment. (And fuck it, he was a good swimmer.)

  It was because of his grandfather, Burdock Emmet, that Rowan had become interested in architecture in the first place. Burdy had taken him under his wing after the boys’ father had left, moved away, and remarried a woman from Singapore who had an export business, leaving Louise embittered for years. The boys had taken it hard and they hardly ever saw him now. Stepping, as best he could, into the hole left by Rowan’s father, Burdy had parceled encouragement in little chunks and had weaved the glory of architecture into Rowan’s mind. Under the tree at Christmas were books like Great Moments in Architecture and Wilde’s Michelangelo: Six Lectures alongside an essential something from Ireland. “You mustn’t forget your Irish roots, Ro. And you know, if I were you,” Burdy had said as they walked along the putting green, “I’d be thinking seriously of becoming an architect when I grew up. Building good buildings is good citizenship. What do you think of that?”

  Rowan thought for a second. “I’d like to be a musician. But Mother says I should listen to you.”

  Burdy laughed. His eyes glistened. “And so you should, lad, so you should. Keep up the saxophone playing, and the golf practice, and your studies, and you’ll be a proper Renaissance Man.” He put a light hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was a hand that felt like a father’s might.

  Now, alone and the only one awake in 316 Greenview, it was that hand he missed. Outside the dark grass sloped away. The crickets, or the peepers as his mother called them, were chirping a very quiet song. In the Bombay there was one measure left. Rowan turned the bottle in the half light. In it was mostly a pale emptiness.

  * * *

  Louise and Pierce, as the executors of Burdy’s affairs, decided on a private cremation with just the three Blakes at the funeral home. Neighbors and close friends were advised of a memorial service being held at the golf club two days later. The Hills, as it was known locally, was a close community and many of Burdock Emmet’s friends, and Louise’s, were expected. And after the service they’d planned to spread Burdy’s ashes on the putting green. Because his mother had asked him to please play, Rowan had taken her car to his apartment in Stamford and spent a few hours practicing his saxophone.

  * * *

  “Early summer,” Pierce said, gazing toward a grove of sugar maples burnishing in the late afternoon, “is a perfect time to celebrate a life well lived.” They were sitting, mother and sons, over iced Arnold Palmers—half lemonade/half iced tea—on the open deck of the golf club while the Healy Room was being set up for the memorial service.

  “The obituary was in the papers this morning,” Louise said. Her shoulders had a slumped look and her grief was palpable. She had changed into a black dress for the service. “People will have read it.… Did we ask the Wilsons? And the Morgans? And his old secretary? Dad had so many friends.” She fingered the string of her pearls. Rowan realized suddenly how hard this was going to be for her, how much she was going to miss her father. He’d been selfish, thinking only about his own sorrow and how Burdy’s death was going to impact his life. He reached over and grabbed her hand. She smiled weakly. “Thank you, dear. I’m all right.” Pierce looked to Rowan and nodded his head.

  The likelihood of there being guests whom Rowan had long forgotten now struck him. Not being an ace at chitchat like Pierce, he thought about it just long enough to shrug it off because in that moment he didn’t care about them. It was Burdy and his mother and the hole opening larger in his life that consumed his attention. That, and how soon he could have a martini. Just one. He’d promised Pierce.

  The Healy Room’s fourth wall opened onto a terrace overlooking the putting green. With the short service completed, the staff mingled with trays of drinks and finger sandwiches among the large crowd who’d come to pay their respects. The Arnold Palmers turned into Leland Palmers (added gin and Limoncello) and the twilight scattered across the course, hitting every blade of grass. Given the occasion, Rowan wasn’t expected to be entertaining. He’d already done his bit. He’d managed to play “Amazing Grace” and his playing had taken the mourners beyond the place Pierce’s moving eulogy had brought them.

  “Thank you,” his mother had said. “It’s all I want for you, you know?” Her eyes stayed fixed on his face long enough for Rowan to feel her meaning. She didn’t need to say the words: amazi
ng grace.

  Rowan leaned alongside the iron balustrade that supported the glass roof of the conservatory and surveyed the gathering. Burdy was there in the faces of all his friends, his aging golfing buddies, his bridge partners, and his fellow hospice volunteers. Rowan recognized many of them, even some of his father’s old business associates. (Because of such short notice, his father was unable to come from Singapore, he’d said, but he told Pierce, who’d telephoned him with the news, that next time he was in New York he’d be sure to be in touch with Louise and Rowan. Living on that side of the world Pierce saw him more than Rowan did, although not regularly. The boys had pretty much dismissed their father and his lackluster attention.)

  The music for the service had been left up to Rowan and as he listened to the violin trio, a woman in her seventies dressed in a pink two-piece suit with black trim weaved her way through the crowd toward him, carrying a silver purse in one hand and a drink in the other.

  “I love that old spiritual,” she said, stopping in front of Rowan. “You played it well.”

  “Thank you.”

  “‘I once was lost and now I’m found.’” She gave her glass a little swirl, ice cubes, lemon, and mint colliding. “It’s a pity we didn’t have the words to sing along with you,” she said. “I love a good old singsong. But that wouldn’t do now, would it? No. Not at all, at all. Not appropriate. What was I thinking?” She pronounced “what” with a breathy H. “Too much Leland and not enough Arnold.” She laughed at herself, her white permed hair bouncing as she did.

  Rowan shifted and looked toward Pierce. Who was this woman? But his brother was deep in conversation with some people Rowan didn’t know. He looked to his mother, but she was surrounded by a group of women, members of her yoga class or creative writing group, or something. They had that intimate posture about them—a posture women of a certain age have who know each other from a “shared experience.” There was no one to help him recall the name of the woman before him. So he went with it, took another sip from his glass, and smiled, hearing Burdy’s voice in his ear saying, This woman is a flibbertigibbet. Rowan watched her thin, disappearing lips move sideways as they opened and closed and made sounds. For a few moments he just watched them. How sweet the soundless, he thought, and laughed. He’d had three martinis and was just beginning to float. He motioned to a waiter.