Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

made between his boys, repeated), the one whose talents had to be nurtured, for whom sacrifices had to be made to educate, whose life-center was the great Emerald City of New York. I’m sure she saw how wearing it was, the toll it took in sleep, how it explained my neglect of her and excused my distant crossness. I’m sure she imagined I had something unattainable for her. I’m sure she did not for that reason want it any the less.

      She had become increasingly attached to my mother, in some sense my mother’s refuge. How we hated to see the store consume them, mother and father both, day and night, consume him, especially, who had made us conscious of so many better talents. My mother hated it too. It exhausted her. Things had not always gone as they had wanted, as she had wanted. Dad’s heart was not in his work, she knew that. It might be brutal, degrading work, but no, he had never allowed it to degrade him. It was only the hand that fate had somehow perversely dealt him. Her heart swelled as he spread out paints and fine sable brushes on the dining-room table to letter signs for the store windows like an artist, so they could see out there the artist he really was—so his own children could see it.

      But how hard it was to stay above the blood and stink of slaughter, above the wheedling and whining and carping of customers and the arrogance and greed of vendors whose every chicken-scratched bill for eggs had to be vetted. Always to be playing the master butcher, keeping up the façade, acting as if he had been the misplaced surgeon. It left little energy to spare to love her. And she hungered for love, savored Ann’s willingness to stay close, to be the good girl, to scale back ambition.

      Me she had fought for, not always against my father’s wishes, but against his fears, and had paid the price on both sides. I had fewer rules to obey, yet chafed continually at the ones I had, wanting fewer. I was the Fisherman’s Wife in the fairy-tale, never satisfied, she the fisherman pleading with the Big Fish to be generous, to be kind. He didn’t see all my sulks and storms. Didn’t I understand how she’d fought not to have me trapped as she had been as a girl, as she was now, as Ann was becoming? Nurturing my gifts had seemed so simple, once. But now my future mystified rather than emboldened her. She stood at the last frontier of her expectations. She thought then that she could not follow me into the dark wood.

      But who can completely understand these things? And she had fled from understanding. There was no understanding, when the banked fire of his inner rage once again sublimated into illness, and he sulked down, crippled with sciatica, curled into inanition on the bed, on the couch. He would sit alone, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on television, whole days, transfixed before the flickering screen or prowling sourly about the house, when she would have to deal with the store, when Lou would have to rush from school to help her as soon as he could get away. What could she do but pity and caress him, who seemed so beached in his anger and pain, to forgive him, even when his violence might erupt against Ann because she, poor girl, could not tolerate the unholy beast of red-baiting that somehow salved his soul? When Ann’s innocent objections baited him like filthy words, and he had struck her, taken the golf stick he had been toying with on the living room carpet, taken it with all his fury to her back and legs, as if she were the one who had brought down his world?

      He was a great wounded animal, sensing danger, always sensing the danger of his loss of mastery, the danger in our pushing boundaries. In my pushing them. Didn’t my mother now have to make a show of servility to protect me—to protect us?

      She too had told herself a treacherous lie of the mind—it had become habitual, as her perpetual look of weary grief betrayed. She believed that the old fault somehow was hers, that it was hers now to make it right.

      But she still adored him. So did I, so did Ann, so did we all. There was such solicitude for our well-being even in his tyranny. The promises he made of small, material things we longed for were always fulfilled. So, in spite of the petty codes my mother enforced for his sake, we forgave him, forgave him his rages, rare as earthquakes, as sudden and unaccountable as the cyclonic rainstorms of the desert. And always, otherwise, there was that theater of undying love between them, that illusion of cloudless skies, and she so happily, so proudly, beside him, consoling, softening his pain, making beautiful things to wear for him to see her in, to approve, touching herself behind her fine, shapely ears there, and there, with his favorite perfume.

      The fire that destroyed the store must have started in the back, some faulty electrical circuit overloaded as it struggled against an Indian summer heat wave to cycle the gigantic freezer. All the stuff in the back room—the stored egg cartons, the tightly wrapped and closely stacked rhomboids of brown paper bags, the great rolls of wrapping paper, as thick and round as if someone had cut the columns in front of the library into firewood, the gigantic balls of twine for tying roasts, the full coal scuttle for the stove where the sliced steaks had been seared for a quick lunch, and wolfed down with a piece of Italian bread torn from a loaf the size of an arm and a cup of boiled coffee right off the grate, where hands numbed from holding frozen flesh for hours could be warmed—all of it seemed to have been put there just to feed the smoldering flames. And then the fire had exploded, burst into the flue of a stairwell at the back, and threatened to engulf the apartments and the sleeping families upstairs. But they were able to escape before the firemen came, screaming their alarms through the night, destroying with their hoses what little the fire had spared and carrying off whatever meat had not been already roasted, and some that had.

      The shock first. Then the stunning aftershock, that fire had made the decision they could never have made themselves. The insurance, not enormous, was enough. Enough to think. Enough to make decisions by. Enough, finally, to say no more to this hard business that had put us through life. There was little to salvage—nothing at all from the back room. There were a few fixtures from the front of the store, two faintly wounded oak blocks that had given most of their lives already, every face they could turn scraped raw (my brother, night after night, leaning into the steel sanding brush with his full force lest a single smear of that day’s blood be carried over to the next), a pair of paper-roll dispensers with their wrought cast-iron knots of decorative flowers. One had been for waxed paper, the pristine inner wrapping for folding directly against the meat, the other the finishing wrap, a satin-white coated paper my father had used for hand-lettering his window signs. I had loved this paper. Always it had seemed an infinite blank page for drawing, for writing novel after novel for a lifetime. These became our salvaged treasures, along with the majestically carved, bell-ringing cash register, a delicate spool of red-and-white twine that had stood on the long marble counter behind the glass display cases, their images repeated in the silver mirrors that ran the full length of the wall. The mirrors had been smashed. A fragment of marble remained. A scale. These few things came through, and took on a museum kind of afterlife in the basement of the house on Sickles Avenue.

      I had begun to write again. I had used to tell fanciful stories as a child, and illustrate them myself. At twelve I had started a Brontë-ish Yorkshire moors romance, which my indulgent teachers at Hunter had thought promising. But until my teens I had not written my life—and this life—our lives, never. I couldn’t dare. It would have been the last audacity to tell such stories, to retail all this tangled family misery and inwardness, all this conflagration of the soul. And I couldn’t also because it was too inwardly ravening and full of gross undigested cubes of pain, like raw meat at the grinder.

      My commitment to engineering had lasted about a month into college chemistry. I had of course floundered on, postponing organic, continuing math. Midway through a course in the theory of equations in my sophomore year, I had simply stalled. There had been no question of my somehow going back to making art, slipping such classes past my parents. Apart from the additional cost, studio art was not on Barnard’s educational agenda, considered too “servile” a subject by the John Henry Newman standard of a classical liberal education. The registrar would not even give graduation credit for courses taken in Columbia’s East Hall. One of the professors there saw a bit of my work and invited me to take his sculpture course, free, but I started and dropped it, unable to commute and write papers and study till my eyes stung, and sculpt too. Just the same, I used to go around to East Hall sometimes, at the corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam, to visit Judy, still studying there.

      She was happily painting away. She’d say, “Funny how you’re so good at art and me at writing, and we’re both doing