The White Rose (20 page)

“You went to Brown?” the woman says to Oliver in palpable disbelief. Was it possible to go to Brown and wind up a florist?

“I'm so happy for you,” Oliver improvises. “This is wonderful. It's Mrs. Holland's son, I take it.”

“Davis,” Matilda says and nods. “Thanks. We were in the training program at Morgan Stanley together.”

“Are you still at Morgan?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Davis is being transferred to London. I stopped working last month. You know, to concentrate on the wedding. I'll think about going back sometime, but right now…you know.”

“Well, that's great. And you're looking wonderful.”

Mrs. Holland, if possible, is paying even closer attention.

Her future daughter-in-law blushes. “Thanks. The wedding's on Sunday. This is the rehearsal dinner.”

“Yes, I know,” he says. It is becoming too awkward to continue.

“I don't have a daughter,” Mrs. Holland interjects with a new familiarity. “I'll never get to plan a wedding, so I've just subverted all my mother-of-the-bride frustrations into this.”

“Well, it's going to be lovely,” Oliver says smoothly. “Now, if everything seems all right to you, I've got to go.” He offers his trump. “Oh, I've brought you some extra flowers, just as a gift. I thought…maybe for the powder room.”

“How sweet!” Mrs. Holland lights up. “And what about the bill?”

“It's here.” He takes the envelope from his jacket pocket. “It's been a pleasure. And,” he turns to Matilda, who is now looking as uncomfortable as he feels, “I hope you'll have a wonderful night, and a wonderful wedding. And…,” he shrugs, “well, all of it.”

“Yes,” she says. Then she kisses him on the cheek, one hand briefly touching his shoulder. “It was good to see you, Oliver.”

Oliver leaves. He wonders what they will say once he's gone, back down the service elevator. He feels deflated, another hole punched in his day. He wants Marian, her smell and arms and murmurings. He wants to arrange flowers for his own rehearsal dinner and his own wedding and his own life with the woman he is in love with. He wants to not be alone when he sleeps and to not sit by himself at the Pink Teacup with the newspaper every single morning. He wants to phone her and talk to her whenever he wants, and not only when it is safe to do so. He does not understand why he can't have these things, what is the impediment to them. He does not understand why he has just brought flowers to one woman about to marry, and is soon to bring flowers to another woman about to marry, and yet he can't bring flowers to a woman who is about to marry him.

Though he can at least bring flowers to the woman he wishes would marry him, and so he does, across the transverse and up Park Avenue to her limestone building, where he double-parks and prepares, still morose, to unload the roses.

“Hiya,” says the doorman. Hector. Oliver, aware of the delicacy, gives him a big smile.

“Nice to see you, Hector.”

“You staying long?”

“No. Just dropping off a delivery.” He extracts it from the packing material. The Royal Danes are luscious, verging red to orange. For some reason they make him even sadder, just now. He would give anything to hold Marian in some private place and be reassured, but hardens himself against it. He turns with the flowers in his arms, ready to hand them off to the doorman, and then he sees her across Park Avenue. She is wearing chinos, a turtleneck, an overcoat of brown wool, and her favorite black boots. She is carrying a heavy shopping bag from Eli's and holding one hand over her eyes to shield them from the glare of sunset as she moves west, in the direction of home and Oliver. She does not see him.

Another punch, another hole. Oliver feels himself break up a little, both at the relief of her appearance, and at the wound of it. Then, forgetting himself, he says to Hector, “There she is.” Hector turns. He nods at the obvious. “I'll just give them to her,” Oliver says.

Now Marian is coming down the street. With the building blocking the light, she has dropped her shading hand and sees first the van and then him. Uncertainly, she smiles. “For me?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says formally. “They're from Barton Ochstein.”

This is said for the benefit of Hector, who now retreats to his chair within the lobby.

“Actually, he doesn't know they're going to you. He thinks they're going to Olivia.”

Marian looks puzzled.

“Olivia. Your transvestite assistant?”

“Oh no!” Her eyes widen. “Oliver, you're not serious.”

“Utterly. He's been very insistent. More insistent about this order, by the way, than about the order to Sophie Klein. He wanted everything—phone number, address. And then I couldn't take his money and not deliver flowers, so I thought I'd deliver them to you. Not,” he adds quickly, “that I wouldn't have brought you flowers in any case.”

Marian smiles, and then, for a moment—not long enough—they stand in perfect accord. It is, he can't help but think, like that first time she came rushing to his door, when they stood just this way in the thankfully empty shop, each knowing everything that mattered about the other, until he was able to step away and lock the door and take her upstairs. Now the unease of his meeting with Matilda falls from him and he looks at Marian with open love and only his roses between them, and all he can wish is that they were not here, on the street, in public, with no upstairs except the one where she lives with her husband. Then Marian sets down her shopping bag and takes the roses from his hands.

“I had no idea my cousin had such good taste.”

“He doesn't,” says Oliver. “I miss you.”

She nods. Her smile falters.

“Can I come upstairs?”

“Oh sweetheart,” she shakes her head, “you can't. Marshall's there. We're going to the beach. I just got food,” she nudges the shopping bag with her foot. “I'm sorry.”

“Okay.” But it isn't okay. With mortification, he realizes that he is in danger of crying.

“What does the card say?” Marian asks evenly.

“Oh…I made it out to you, from him. I didn't want you to have to explain Olivia to Marshall.”

“That was smart.” They look at each other. “Oliver…”

“Just tell me when I'm going to see you,” he blurts out. “I don't want to get pathetic, I just want to know.”

Marian nods. “I'll phone you on Monday. We'll plan something next week.”

And the weekend stretches before him. And he wants to grab her.

“All right,” Oliver says, instead.

“So where's Bell?” Marian asks. The crimson petals brush her chin. “Doesn't he usually make deliveries?”

“He got food poisoning. At the Academy of American Poets.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. At the Langston Hughes tribute. If you can believe that.”

“Poor Bell.” They look at each other. There is nothing either can think of to say. It can't be made better, at least not there, or then.

“Have a good weekend,” Oliver finally says. “Bring my flowers.”

“I will.” She takes a step back. “So where are you off to now?”

He sighs. “Ninety-second and Fifth. I'm delivering flowers from Mr. Ochstein, Fiancé, as opposed to Mr. Ochstein, Man on the Make.”

“Ooh,” Marian says. “The Steiner mansion. Take notes. I want to hear all about it. And what are you bringing her?”

He looks into the van, as if he needs reminding. “White roses. Icebergs. It's hard to go wrong with white roses.”

“True.” Another silence. “Monday, then.”

“Monday.” He wants to kiss her but doesn't. She goes into the lobby of her building, holding the roses with one hand, the shopping bag in the other. Oliver edges into southbound traffic, then cuts over to Madison.

Madison is packed now, with packed cars, children in the backseats, shopping bags visible through the windows. Everyone is going to Westchester, Connecticut, the East End, upstate, somewhere that isn't Manhattan, inching toward the exodus by tunnel or bridge. The pace, and the air of anticipated escape, is not doing much to alleviate Oliver's mood, and he is grateful when he reaches Ninety-second and can turn left for the much-anticipated Steiner mansion. The edifice looms high at the corner, a limestone pile reminiscent of a French château and every inch the building a prominent German Jew might build to establish his toehold in turn-of-the-century Manhattan society. How might Julius Steiner react to the news that a descendant of those hordes (those unwashed hordes, who had swarmed the ports in their flight from the Steppes and jammed the Lower East Side) now lived in his home and used his newfangled indoor plumbing? Suddenly, the distance Oliver has just traveled, from the Tenement Museum to the Steiner mansion, seems weighted with history.

Oliver double-parks on Fifth and climbs the steps to the front door, bringing the roses with him. There he hunts for something resembling a doorbell and finds one, finally, against a Gothic iron grating. After a few minutes, he rings again.

A woman's voice comes from a speaker: “Yes?”

Oliver looks around. There is no one.

“I have a delivery,” he says, loudly. “For Sophie Klein.”

“Come to the service entrance, please,” the voice says. It is not an unkind voice, but it is direct. It has an accent, Oliver notes. European.

“The service entrance?” He looks around and sees, finally, the camera trained on him from an overhang. It is attached to a speaker.

“Around the corner. On Ninety-first.”

Oliver walks down the stairs. The white roses are heavy, the frosted glass vase heavy, his heart is heavy. Why has he chosen a profession that consigns him to the service entrance, anyway? And would it have killed the woman with the accent and the camera trained on him to open the door?

He has to descend from street level to reach the service entrance, and when he does he instinctively looks around for another camera, another speaker, which he quickly locates. He is too tired to smile at it. He wants to set down the flowers and go home.

Hoisting the vase into the crook of his left arm, Oliver rings a third time and waits.

No one comes.

Now he is angry. Now the flowers are heavier, the speaker is silent, and the streets are clogged with escaping cars. It will take him an hour to get home now, he thinks. He hates the woman with the accent, and Mrs. Holland for being so controlling and for having his ex-girlfriend as an almost daughter-in-law. He hates Marian for going away with her husband for the weekend, and he hates every family in every car they'll be packed in with on the Long Island Expressway. He hates the Academy of American Poets for serving bad pâté and he hates Bell for being dumb enough to eat it. Mostly, he hates himself for being so intractably sad.

The door is opened, but not by the middle-aged person he imagines attached to that speaker voice. This woman is young, around his own age, with a thick black braid that wags like a tail as she hauls open the door. She also has thick black eyebrows and very pale skin. She is wearing, bizarrely, a green silk skirt, scuffed beige shoes, and a brown plaid flannel shirt, which is buttoned up wrong. Involuntarily, Oliver stares at the buttons.

“You caught me,” the girl says, breathing heavily. “I was just changing.”

He gapes at her.

“It's almost sunset. So I'm late. Yes?”

“Do we know each other?” he says stupidly.

This shuts her up. And then, to Oliver's surprise, she blushes.

“I'm sorry. What was it you wanted? Are you coming to dinner? Why didn't you come to the front door?”

Now he is confused. “I rang at the front door. But someone told me to come to the service entrance. This is the service entrance, right?”

“Right. That was probably Frieda, and I don't know where she is. Can I help?”

He nods. “Look, can I set these down? They're for someone who lives here. Sophie Klein.”

“I'm Sophie,” says the girl, and Oliver nearly drops the flowers. “Hey! You need a hand?”

“Just show me where to put them,” he says, and she points to a long kitchen table, one end of which has served in the recent preparation of dinner and still bears carrot tops and odd spice jars. There is a good smell in the kitchen, Oliver notices. He sets down the vase on the table's opposite end, which is clear, and she steps beside him and leans forward, smelling.

“Oh, they're beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Oliver says automatically.

“Are they yours?” She turns to him. Her braid flicks with the motion.

“My shop. Yes. The White Rose.”

And at this Sophie Klein stands up straight. “You're kidding me.
The White Rose
?”

This is Oliver's cue to feel smug, he supposes, but he is inexplicably numb. “You've heard of us?” is what he can manage.

“No. I mean, yes. Look, do you know what the White Rose is?”

“Well…what?” He stands there, at sea. The fact is, he doesn't really understand the question. He knows what the White Rose is to him, but that is his own meaning, and private. Whatever else it is, he does not know. And she, evidently, does, which has him off balance.

“I'm writing my thesis on the White Rose. Look,” she says, leaning in again to the flowers, this time with her hands, “can I ask who sent them to me?”

“Oh, your…” For some reason he can't say it. He can't say “fiancé.” So he says, “Mr. Barton Ochstein.” He points to the card, which has eluded her.

“Oh!” She laughs, delighted. “So that explains it. He saw the name and he knew how much I'd like that. That's so sweet of him.” She smiles. “Thank you for bringing them.”

“Yes, all right.” But he can't, for some reason, go. “What did you mean? About your thesis.”

She looks at him. The misalignment of her buttons makes a pucker, just below her breasts. He does not understand why this is of more than passing interest to him. She has amazingly dark eyes, with dark circles underneath them. She wears no jewelry, no makeup. Oliver is having trouble getting her to mesh with the reality of her house, and her wealth. Is she certain that she is Sophie Klein?