Her Name Is Rose Page 3

  A fifth ring. A sixth. And then he answers it.

  He opens the door and he goes out into the hall. He actually walks out. Worse, he gives a slight wave of his hand in her direction indicating she should continue playing. The door doesn’t quite shut. It hangs ajar and she can hear him in the hall.

  “Ah. No. Don’t do that. We can meet later. I know. I know. Hey, why don’t you come, it’ll be fun. What? No? We can go for a … no. Please … Victoria?”

  Silence.

  Then, “Fuck!”

  A sharp thud thunks against the door.

  Rose plays on, by now just beginning the third movement, the Siciliana. She plays it slow, emphasizing the dotted rhythms like Roger has shown her. After a few minutes he opens the door and walks behind her to the window without a beat of acknowledgment. She keeps playing. This movement is melodic and Rose is swaying. But suddenly he stops her, puts up his hand, and says, “You’re not moving slowly enough into the strings. Approach it from underneath. And … re-lax … the tension in your left hand.” He checks his watch. “I’ve told you that before.”

  Rose lowers her violin and bow. Her head is turned slightly, her small birthmark fully visible. She’s uncomfortable with him, with the way he’s looking at her. She’s suddenly very self-conscious. They stand facing each other but saying nothing. He turns back to the window. Sounds of buses rise into the stillness of the room.

  “I can’t do this now,” he says, and walks past her. Out. It happens in a second. She hears his footsteps flipping and disappearing down the hall and down the stairs.

  Rose stands, holding her violin and bow at her sides, closing in on herself like she’s a deflated party balloon. She stops breathing and listens. She expects he’ll be turning around, turning around any minute and coming back. Coming back to apologize, or something—to hear her finish the Siciliana at least.

  She waits, waiting to be revived, but he doesn’t return. She stands at the window, bow in one hand, violin in the other. Roger has left the building. She sees him crossing the street and heading down Thayer.

  “Feck!” she says. “Crap!” A wave of bewilderment quickly turns to something else. Part of her feels frozen, part of her feels fuming; her movement is jerky as she starts to pack up her bow and violin. She’s shaking between anger and humiliation.

  Before closing her case she eyes the slip of paper taped to the inside velvet covering, the one Roger had given her the first day she started practicing the sonata with him.

  Rose,

  Practicing Bach for me is like a meditation, even a daily prayer. It connects me with a higher power. May it be the same for you.

  As ever,

  Roger

  She pulls it off the velvet, crumples the note, and throws it down.

  Still shaking, she stands in the corridor outside his office.

  With a little over an hour to pass before the master class, she hopes she’ll run into someone, anyone she can vent to, but the hallway is empty. She thinks about finding the two friends she’s made at the RAM. Leonard and Freya. They’re studying musical theater, but they have their final projects this week, too. There are only the muted notes of string-playing instrumentalists she can hear behind the closed doors of the small practice rooms. Ysaÿe. Kreisler. More Bach. Rose slumps down against the wall. She feels like vomiting. Do they all play better than she does? Today was meant to be a celebration. She was looking forward to performing, to staking out her territory, to claiming her place alongside the other brilliant students in her class, and to ringing her mother with triumphant news. Now she feels cast out, inadequate. An amateur. A craftsperson at best. Not an artist. She makes no sound in the hallway although tears shine in her eyes.

  A door opens and closes somewhere down the hall. What is she going to do now? Hang out here until Roger returns?

  What the hell?

  And who is Victoria?

  In the ladies’, she sees her red face in the mirror. She stares while trying to control her breathing. She’s gulping for air.

  Finally, she takes out her makeup bag. The birthmark is flushed with feeling. She looks closely at it, as if in seeing it, it somehow pulls her back into herself and she begins to calm down.

  “It’s shaped like a rose,” her father said.

  “A tiny tea rose,” her mother said.

  When she was old enough to understand such things, they had told her: “That’s why you were named Rose.”

  She’d thought about that for a moment and then asked: “What if it looked like an elephant? What would I have been called then?”

  “Ellie, of course!”

  They went on like this, making a game of it. The story of the rose always preceded the story of how she arrived in Ashwood on August 23, 1990, when she was eight weeks old. She wasn’t an orphan, but “placed” for adoption following her birth in the month of June. Both stories always worked to make Rose claim her identity. Her father was right, the edges of the birthmark on her right cheek do look like the curved petals of a rose tattoo. But that’s not why they named her Rose. She knows that. But the story always comforts her. She’s grown used to it, just as she’d grown up with the idea of being adopted. Just another way of being in the world. Most of the time she doesn’t even notice. It doesn’t really matter, most of the time.

  When she was sixteen her parents decided to give her the letter from her birth mother. She had cried when she read it. Rose keeps the letter tucked inside a music book that is on the shelf in her bedroom back in Ashwood. Her birth mother hadn’t written much. It was a short, handwritten letter. She wanted Rose to know she was very much loved and it was because of that love she’d been “placed” with a wonderful couple who would give her all the things she couldn’t—a house and home and, most important, two parents who really loved each other. Always remember you are doubly loved. By me, forever, and by your parents.

  She touches her cheek and thinks of her father. What would he do now? She knows her mother would be raging mad at Roger. In fact, now that she thinks about it, she’s sorry she didn’t tell her mother the master class was this week, because if she had, her mother would be on her way to the academy, bursting in without stopping for George, marching right up the stairs to the office of Mr. Roger Ballantyne and waiting for him to come back, to ask him what the hell was he doing walking out on her daughter at a critical moment when she was trying so hard to be perfect. She would be a storm coming at him. And for a moment Rose lightens up just thinking about her impassioned mother.

  But her father, now what would he do?

  Leaving the makeup bag on the edge of the sink, Rose takes out her ensemble for the concert, strips off, and steps quickly into her sleeveless black dress and ballet flats. She returns to her makeup and underlines and overlines her eyes in black. Sultry.

  Feck ’em. Get your Irish up! her father would have said.

  Yes. Feck them.

  She picks up where she left off with the Siciliana. The acoustics in the ladies’ room are amplifying. Her Siciliana is a long, anguished sigh. She leans into the phrases like Roger taught her, goddamn him, giving them room to breathe without letting them fade like petals withering on a stem. The heartbeat in her chest is a metronome, silent to the outside world, but keeping time with the music.

  * * *

  An hour later, she gets her Irish up and goes to the recital hall. Roger returns five minutes before the master class and just nods to her as if nothing has happened. He doesn’t offer any explanation or apology. She opens her case and gets ready. She’s up first. Bowen before Ferguson and Kowowski. She steps to the stage in a sort of half dream. Dust motes swirl in the glare of the stage lights. She doesn’t look out at the audience of fifty or so. She doesn’t want to see the gathered students and their parents and the other professors come to assess the best of the academy’s talent. She settles her chin and begins. She plays her heart out. She keeps the melodic contours without losing the balance. Her phrasing is intense but elegant. She is playing
it beautifully.

  But she is wrong.

  “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong,” Roger Ballantyne says, taking center stage. “Stop moving, Rose. You look like you’re trying to draw pictures with your scroll.” He looks to the audience, as if he’s said something clever. “You are playing too fast between the sections. Wait … until … the sound … comes out and we can hear the change of colors.”

  She continues. Louder. But over her playing, he is calling, “Don’t be so polite. It’s Gypsy music! Play it like it was written.”

  She plays. He is strutting on the stage. “Your vibrato is exaggerated.”

  She tries to exaggerate less.

  “It sounds like you are ironing the strings. Rose!” There’s an actual murmur from the audience. Stifled laughter? “Make them sing like a song. Let them breaaaaathe.”

  Roger crosses the stage and picks up his violin. “How you manage to make Bach sound sterile, I don’t know.” Rose stops as Roger starts into the fugue, to demonstrate. He’s superb, of course, and when his attention is focused on the audience, lost in his own magnificence, Rose grabs her case, violin, and bow and walks out. She doesn’t look back and she squeezes her tears. She hopes for one moment Roger will call after her, she hopes he will stop performing and call her back, that he will feel her humiliation. But he doesn’t. Murmuring from the audience doesn’t stop him. It’s all about him. He has his audience, and plays on.

  The next moment Rose is into the cool corridor. She kneels down and puts her violin in the case, then gets up and keeps walking, pushing out the front doors until she is out onto the rainy, steamy street. Too wet to walk back to Camden.

  * * *

  Five o’clock and the mood of the crowds on the busy night on Baker Street is a clash-and-bang cacophony. Rose jostles her way to the tube platform, barely conscious of where she is. She stands, hollow and waiting. When her train comes she steps inside just as the doors close. They catch her violin case. She tugs it free and loses her balance. A man beside steadies her. Collapsing into a seat, she hoists the case onto her lap and stares at the black mirror of reflected faces and lights as the train whirs through the tunnel. At King’s Cross she gets out to change to the Northern Line. Up the escalator, a hundred bodies judder as one, except for Rose Bowen, who stands immobilized, apart, void of thought or emotion. Euston. Mornington Crescent. Rose gets out at Camden. As the train pulls away, she stands on the platform and looks back into the carriage. The doors close and when the train shudders into motion, she watches her violin topple from where she has left it leaning against the window. It slides down onto the seat. Then off it heads. Chalk Farm, Belsize Park, Hampstead, Golders Green, Brent Cross, Hendon, Colindale, Burnt Oak, Edgware.

  Gone.

  Three

  It had been Luke who’d decided what they should name their baby. When Iris suggested Poppy he’d turned his eyes upward.

  “No, Iris, be serious! Poppy? Come on. Her name should be Rose.”

  After four years of waiting, Iris would be a mother and Luke a father and two would become three. For seventeen years the Bowens were a trio—two flowers and a “fLuke,” Luke had said.

  “Fluke?” Rose asked when she was old enough to wonder what it meant.

  “That’s right,” Luke would say and wink at Iris. “I’m the odd one out. Did you ever hear of a flower named Luke?” He looked at Rose with his eyebrows raised to their highest and she shook her head. “No, then. As I said, we’re two flowers and a fLuke.” And that’s how it was—until the beginning of that wet summer two years ago when three became two again.

  A pain in Luke’s back had become pancreatic cancer.

  They’d sat in the peach office of the oncologist Dr. Conway. The office was on the second floor of the Limerick Regional Hospital and Iris remembers looking out at the traffic, the buses and cars and taxis, and thinking, This is just a bad dream. A bus stopped and two older women helped each other off. One was wearing a red hat and a black-and-white-checked jacket. Everything was so normal. Middle of a Wednesday afternoon in early March. Blue sky. Spring. A few clouds. But at a tidy desk with a brown folder a voice was saying, “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

  When they came out to the car park that day Iris couldn’t find the parking ticket and she pulled everything out of her bag, pulled it all out and let it fall on the ground. Check book, old shopping receipts, wallet, a packet of tissues, lipstick, her hairbrush, sunglasses. Loose coins. Everything. A man came up quickly behind them and said, “Here, take mine,” as though he knew all the people coming and going from that particular car park might have just heard, I’m afraid it’s not good news. Maybe by giving her his ticket his news would be better.

  Next came the treatments and the short spells of hope, the urgings of good cheer, visits from neighbors and friends all wanting her to hope for the best. There’s always room for hope, they’d said. Iris had a mania for feeding Luke green leafy vegetables and juicing arugula with lemon and olive oil—good for the liver and pancreas, Tess said. But that passed when he couldn’t eat anymore, when he lost his appetite and became the thin figure with no strength left. Then she tried to feed him applesauce. They nursed him at home and Sheila, a hospice volunteer, came every afternoon. Every day Iris brought something fresh in from the garden. Petals of forget-me-nots, like blue confetti, lay sprinkled on top of his bedside table. The CD player was playing Bach concertos, and then sometimes Luke would ask Rose to put Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on repeat.

  Luke’s health declined quickly. (He hadn’t been feeling well since early December, but hadn’t let on.) Then, one afternoon in the week before he died, he reached for her hand across the cream candlewick bedspread. Iris had looked at him with fear in her eyes that this was the end. But she was surprised by his sudden strength, and briefly, like a sun ray breaking through a storm cloud, a glimmer of hope eased her face.

  “Luke?”

  He angled himself up in the bed. He took a moment to moisten his throat, as if the words were hard and dry, and yet he had to say them. The green of his eyes had deepened. “Luke? What is it?”

  “Iris … after me. If anything happens to you—”

  “Stop. Nothing is going to happen to me. Lie back.”

  “Iris. Listen … I—”

  “No.”

  The pressure of his fingers on her hand tightened.

  “Listen to me. Please. I don’t want Rose to be alone.”

  Iris turned to look away out the window, tilted back the tears, and held her mouth tightly.

  “You … need to make sure that doesn’t happen. Iris, you … have to explore all possibilities. Without you … there will be no one.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to me,” she said. “Lie back.”

  “Say you understand.”

  She hesitated. “Do you know what you’re asking me?”

  “I do.”

  But did he? Did he really? It pained her to think about what he was asking. This man she’d loved for nearly three decades was dying but he was talking about life. Not his life. He was talking about life after him.

  “I’m going now,” she said. He loosened his grip. “Rose has her French practice exam tomorrow.” Then, to make him laugh (because they all knew she was hopeless at languages), she added, “I promised I’d quiz her on grammar.” But he didn’t laugh.

  “I just wanted to make you smile.”

  There were tears in his eyes; there were always tears in his eyes now, just on the edge of spilling.

  “Iris. Please … she’ll have no one. Do it for me.”

  Iris held her breath.

  Then he spoke the words she didn’t want to hear. “Try to find her … find Hilary.”

  He didn’t know what he was saying. Find Hilary? It was an impossibility. They’d had one meeting with her. The three of them and a social worker. Years ago. It was crazy. Iris rose from the bed and went to the window. Pulling the curtain aside, she saw the poppies needed staking.<
br />
  Iris tidied the bed tray, smoothed the blanket, poured water into a plastic cup, and straightened the pile of magazines—The Economist, Wine Spectator—and the novel Luke was still hoping to read, The Third Policeman. She couldn’t think straight but she pretended calmness. He knew. He knew her inside out. When she came to kiss his forehead, he caught her arm. His voice was hoarse.

  “Iris, we have to keep showing up for each other, for Rose.” He closed his eyes and fell back.

  She kissed him on his forehead and let her cheek linger on the side of his face. The softness of his skin at that moment was extraordinary. As though he was already becoming transparent, already leaving the world.

  She whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this is happening.” She clenched her teeth. She didn’t want to cry. They’d been all through this. The unfairness of it. The sadness. The end.

  “Say you’ll promise.” He held his grip on her arm.

  “I’ll make a phone call this week,” she’d said. Then she held his face between her hands. “I promise.”

  * * *

  Luke died a few days later on a sunny day at the end of May, two weeks before Rose’s Leaving Cert exams, a month before her seventeenth birthday.

  Iris had rallied as best she could. She’d coached their daughter through the exams because there was no other way. She had to take them, but she only had to pass. And somehow they’d got on. Somehow they did. Iris and Rose, with a lot of help from Tess. Then, four months later, Rose entered London’s Royal Academy of Music.

  The surviving pieces, after the center had been blown out their lives, fell into place, as if ordained from on high, as if in compensation. The life insurance benefits were held in trust for Rose, and after paying her rent and school fees she had a monthly stipend for living expenses.

  * * *

  Iris stayed in Ashwood. And in the unyokedness of being a widow she was adrift in the world, like a dandelion when its yellow florets have died and turned to seed, parachuting into the air, like a ruptured cloud burst. She was all over the place. No center to hold on to.