Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold (17 page)

Bear chuckled. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

Forty-five minutes later, Bear was driving him back out to the woods to retrieve his car. “So can I ask how all this happened?” he queried, rubbing his eyes.

Fish heaved a sigh. “I saw Freet at the hearing today.”

“Ah,” Bear said. “You didn’t tell me that was going to happen.”

“And it was tougher than I expected.”

Bear frowned. “You should have let me go with you. I could have taken off work.”

“I know. I was just trying to be tough, that’s all. But apparently I’m not healthy enough for that.”

The brothers drove in silence for a few minutes.

“You ever talked to anyone about this?” Bear asked at last. “Besides me?”

“Oh, a couple of priests, in confession. And that blasted counselor, although I barely told him anything. I quit after the first session.”

“I didn’t mean professionally. I meant someone like a friend,” Bear said. “Have you tried talking to Rose about it?”

Fish blew out his breath. “That’s the last person I’d tell. She probably doesn’t even know evil like that exists in the world. I don’t want to be the one to disturb her universe.”

Bear shook his head. “But she was down there with you.”

“Yes, after the worst had happened—thankfully.”

“So she might understand better than most people.”

Fish glanced at his older brother. He had always suspected Bear of trying to set him up with Rose, and wondered if this was another ploy. But Bear looked completely serious.

“Just consider it,” Bear said.

Hers

Saturday, Fish seemed to be in better spirits. Rose and Jean came to help Blanche and Bear do work on the house in the morning. In the afternoon, they all took a lazy ramble over the property.

“So what’s this Blanche told me about you becoming ‘Sacra Cor Lady Rose’ or something?” Bear said humorously as they started off. “I didn’t know they awarded titles like that at Mercy College.”

“I’ve become an honorary female member of the ‘knights of Sacra Cor,’” Rose said solemnly. “Don’t laugh! They really are a lot like knights—well, warriors of some kind. They’re all very different from one another.” She chattered on about Paul, Alex, James, Leroy, and the other various characters who inhabited Sacra Cor dormitory. She recounted with delight the battle between Lumen Christi and the smaller dorm, not mincing her part in it.

“So I’m now one of their ‘ladies’ they’ve sworn allegiance to protect,” she finished.

“Good. Then make sure one of them walks you home from play rehearsal from now on,” Fish put in, a bit shortly. Rose hadn’t realized he had been listening—he had been lagging behind the party.

“That’s not a bad idea,” she said.

“I remember telling you before to have someone walk you home after rehearsal,” Fish said, cocking his head at her. “Have you ever done that?”

“Well, I made sure I always left with someone else, even though I haven’t had to ask anyone specifically,” Rose said. “I haven’t walked alone since that one night I called you.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Rose resented his nearly-parental attitude, but Bear, who seemed to understand better than she did what was bothering his brother, smoothly asked her another question about college, and the conversation continued.

After dinner, Fish consented to join their weekend tournament of Scrabble, and proceeded to crush Rose’s lead soundly and vie with Bear for the winning title. Rose was resentful when people beat her too easily at games, and was deciding that, rescuer or not, Fish was too annoying to put up with. She curled up in an armchair with a cup of herbal tea and resolved to ignore him and talk with her sister. Then he and Bear started talking literature and lost interest in the game (which Bear won), and they both started to pull books from the shelf and read passages aloud. When Fish began, somewhat reluctantly, to read poetry, Rose’s heart started to melt within her again.

The poetry of earth is never dead

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead...

As he read from Keats’s sonnet to the grasshopper, Rose put her hand on her chin and forgot what she had been saying to Blanche. He was as elusive to her as Shakespeare, as unreachable as William Butler Yeats. By the time he started reading, “Terence, this is stupid stuff,” by A. E. Houseman, Rose was laughing so hard that she coughed up part of her drink at his expressions. She had never realized what a funny poem it was before, and how true:

And malt does more than Milton can

to justify God’s ways to man.

Poetry so fine was like a harp being stroked by a dozing musician, with a careless beauty that made her insides ache. It made her want to seize a pen and write and have verses dance out of her fingers, but she knew that when the fever was off of her, they would only be dull words. In the same way, the dancing, itching pleasure of his company made her think, eagerly, that he was actually within her reach, that perhaps someday... It was cruel to tantalize herself with thoughts like that.

Because I liked you better

than it suits a girl to say

it irked you and I promised

to throw the thought away.

To put the world between us,

we parted, stiff and dry;

“Good-bye,” and you, “Forget me.”

“I will, no fear,” said I.

If here, where clover whitens

the dead man’s knoll you pass

and now tall flower to meet you

starts in the trefoiled grass,

halt by the headstone naming

the heart no longer stirred,

and say the girl that loved you

was one that kept her word.

Last night she had recast some of Houseman’s verse into feminine form to fit her own situation. Now as she leaned against the car window, aware that she had the next several hours to spend alone with Fish, she tried to remain self-composed.

Now that she had tasted home again, part of her longed to stay here in New Jersey with Blanche, Bear, and her mother, but part of her couldn’t wait to start out on this journey away, and she said her goodbyes to her family after Sunday Mass with only the appearance of regret.

She looked out the window at the trefoiled grass (what a lovely phrase) they passed in the fields bordering the highway, not knowing how to break out of poetry into prose. But she couldn’t remain in a car alone with someone and say nothing, any more than she could hold her breath longer than five minutes.

Searching for something normal to say (despite the poetry, she was not going to bare her heart to him again), she at last remembered something she had been wondering about.

“What did you have to come back here for this weekend?” she asked. “Did it go well?”

His lips parted in a wry smile, but he said nothing.

“With all the excitement on Thursday night I never thought to ask you what it was you were coming back for,” she explained.

“If you had asked, I wouldn’t have told you,” he said.

Oh
. She was silent.

He glanced at her, and apparently picked up on how his remark had sounded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” He sighed and frowned. “I had a court case.”

“For what?”

“There was a hearing to decide if Mr. Freet would be allowed to transfer to a lesser-security prison for health reasons, and Charles Russell, my lawyer, wanted me to go.”

 “Oh,” Rose was startled. “So that’s where you went?”

“Yes.”

She paused. “Did you actually see Mr. Freet?” 

“I did.”

“That must have been awful.”

“It was.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that’s what you were doing? I would have gone with you.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” he said, rolling down his window to grab his turnpike ticket and turning onto the highway. “I wouldn’t have let you.”

“Why didn’t you have Bear go with you?”

“I didn’t think I needed the help.”

“You don’t let people help you, do you?” she asked. “Why is that?”

 “Various reasons,” he said. Then he glanced at her. “It’s difficult for me to become close to people. And there’s a reason for that. It’s something I don’t think you’ve noticed.” He had that faint smile on his face, the smile that had always irked her, that meant he was feeling older than she was.

“What is it I’ve overlooked now?” she demanded.

“Rose, I don’t blame you for not noticing. It’s part of your charm, your innocence. You’re a good person, Rose, and you don’t know all the evil that’s in the world.”

This was the way he always spoke, as if he were sad and amused at the same time. As though he were a much older person.

“So what is it that I don’t know?” she asked, attempting to remain calm.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he inquired, glancing over at her.

“Yes. If that’s what it takes to be your friend.” 

For a long moment, he was silent, looking at the road ahead. “All right,” he said, seeming to decide something. “Rose, as you know, I’ve been beaten up quite a few times in my life. Have you ever wondered why that is?”

“You’ve been in a lot of dangerous situations,” she said.

“But so has Bear.”

“Bear is bigger,” she said carefully.

“That’s right. I’m smaller, aren’t I? And thinner. And when I was younger, my voice used to be higher. Haven’t you noticed that some guys like that tend to be treated differently? Especially in school. Particularly if they don’t like sports and are more interested in things like books, and poetry. Things start getting said about them.”

She began to comprehend what he was saying. “Nasty things,” she said at last.

“Yes, very nasty things,” he agreed mildly. “When you’re born with a certain physique and characteristics in a certain environment, you can be put into circumstances, early on in life, which can start to change you, that can cause you to struggle in ways that other people never have to. You understand what I mean?”

“I think so.”

His voice was quiet. “People who don’t understand think of it as a compulsion. It’s deeper than that. It’s a doubt. A guy with this particular struggle doubts his capabilities. I don’t mean physical abilities. It’s a struggle in the soul. Things that come naturally to other guys—to most other guys—you can’t do, without feeling a constant and persistent, and sometimes, fatal doubt. That’s what it’s like, to live with this. You’re constantly doubting yourself. And that can be, as I said, fatal.”

He paused, then went on, “I’ve come to realize that a lot of girls don’t sense this in a guy. But other guys can sense it. They know there’s something different about you. And some of them have a problem with it, and will avoid you because of it. And other guys will try to take advantage of you.” His voice was calm, as though he were discussing something he had read in a textbook that was faintly interesting.

“And that’s happened to you?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t see that in you,” was all she could think to say.

“I knew you wouldn’t. But think about it. I have the profile for it—the usual psychological aberrations. I had a weak relationship with my father. My parents had a bad marriage. I had emotional trauma in the early teenage years with my mom dying. Bear’s the only real family I’ve had for a long time.”

“Has Bear struggled with this too?” Rose asked.

Fish shook his head. “No. It’s different for every personality, definitely not genetic. This was never his particular cross, although he’s had other ones. I try not to bother him with my struggles, but he knows about them and understands. You know what a great heart he has.”

A darker thought had occurred to Rose, who was rapidly starting to see how all the pieces fit together, in a new and ominous light. “He saved you from a gang when you were in prison.”

A wry smile passed over Fish’s face. “Yes, he did. And if you’re thinking that my problem had something to do with my getting singled out by a gang for drowning, then you’re right.”

“And Mr. Freet—” she said softly, not daring to ask.

“Yes. Freet.”  He paused again, and looked out the window for a moment, then looked back at the road. “When I was a freshman at St. Catherine’s, he used to hang out by my locker and say things to me every morning. You know how it is when you’re a young teenager. You’re changing, you have acne—you’re terribly self-conscious anyhow. And Freet would needle me in the worst ways, asking me things, making evil suggestions. You see, I knew what he was, and I was afraid of him. Because I was afraid of myself, and he knew it. And so I let myself hate him.

“I was also a new Catholic at the time, and I had begun to be around religious people for the first time. I’ve found that’s one of the few things that even some otherwise very good Catholics feel free to ridicule—men who have the kind of struggles I have. It’s ugly to see that. Still, I can’t blame them too much—I used to do it myself, all the time, particularly to Freet. But looking back, I know I did it because I was ruled by my fear. It was wrong—it’s a sin against charity. And in treating Freet the way I treated him, I made Freet hate me. I hated him, and he hated me right back. You see how these little sins can multiply.”