The Rose Garden. Maeve Brennan

The narrow strip of ground that surrounded her house on three sides—the fourth side being almost one with the river—was given over to fine white gravel, which was raked and rolled every week by the Retreat gardener. When her neighbors chattered about their bulbs and seeds, Liza enjoyed saying, “I don’t approve of flowers, except in their proper place. They certainly don’t belong in the ground.” Her own cut flowers, always white, were delivered twice a week from a nearby greenhouse by a girl who arranged the new flowers and took the old ones away with her.

      Liza was a rigid housekeeper. Her furniture had all been designed for her, and she hated to see anything out of its appointed place. Her mother, Mrs. Conroy, who lived with her, had been begging for years for an old-fashioned cozy armchair, but Liza was adamant. Liza and Mrs. Conroy detested each other, but it suited them to live together—Liza because she enjoyed showing her power, and Mrs. Conroy because she was waiting for her day of vengeance. They were alike in their admiration for Tom’s money, but Mrs. Conroy felt she should have more say in the spending of it. The old lady’s only treasured possession was a set of nineteen shabby account books, records painstakingly kept by her dead husband, who had run a small stationery shop in Brooklyn. The account books read like a diary to Mrs. Conroy, who liked to pore over them when she was tired of counting up her grievances. Liza allowed her mother to keep the books so that she could threaten to deprive her of them. She had a special set of shelves built for them in her mother’s bedroom, with sliding panels that concealed their ragged backs from view and that were kept locked, the key being retained by Mrs. Conroy, who never let it out of her reach. When her mother became obstreperous, Liza would threaten to have the books destroyed, and the old woman always knuckled under.

      “I’m just a poor, forsaken old woman,” she would wail in a tone of false anguish that hid rage.

      “You’re an invalid,” Liza would say firmly, and if her mother was not already in her bedroom, she would be taken by the arm and conducted there.

      Liza preferred to believe that her mother was an invalid. The fact was that the old lady was as strong as a horse, but Liza maintained that her mother had a delicate stomach and could eat only bland foods. Liza had discovered a preparation, quite expensive, that contained all the vitamins necessary to keep an old woman alive and healthy without putting any weight on her. This food, stirred into a bowl of skim milk, was what Mrs. Conroy got three times a day. It was delicious, with a vague flavor of vichyssoise. Sometimes Liza even took a dish of it herself. But Mrs. Conroy was tired of it. She continued to wolf it down, though, because she was by nature greedy. Liza, with memories of vegetable marrow, turnip, and porridge being squashed into her own rebellious mouth, enjoyed seeing her mother swallow this pap. My turn has come, she thought, congratulating herself on her life in general, because she had been sick with lack of money when she married Tom, having gone all her life without the things she felt were her due. It was not the things she enjoyed, however; it was the position they gave her. She loved the Retreat. She never left it, even for a night.

      Once, years before, when she was only a poor, lovely-looking girl in a flower shop, she had come to the Retreat for a weekend. The assured, amused attitude of the women there, and their indifference to her, infuriated her. She went away hating them. After her marriage to Tom, she had come back determined to make them sit up and take notice of her. She didn’t want to become one of them, she told herself. What she wanted was to keep them from being too pleased with themselves.

      Tom, on the other hand, found the center of his existence in New York. His days were spent sitting in a window in his club there. This club, a massive, majestic building on upper Fifth Avenue, had been in Tom’s heart since the day in his eighth year when his grandfather had brusquely interrupted a peaceful afternoon at home to rush him there in a taxicab. Tom, at eight, was already accustomed to being taken into splendid establishments, and he waited confidently for his grandfather to conduct him up the broad stone steps and through the great iron door, where respectful servants would bow and take their hats and coats. But his grandfather, instead of going forward, grabbed him by the hand and proceeded around to the side of the building, which overlooked a narrow, luxurious street. There on the sidewalk, the old man stood beside his grandson and glared up at the second-floor windows, three of them, each framing a seated, apparently lifeless man. Heavy curtains hung about the windows, and the room within was lighted, but not brightly. It was a towering room. Tom could glimpse the dark, carved, curving ceiling and part of a glimmering chandelier. The men in the windows appeared very old to him, but perhaps they were only elderly. Two of them seemed to be drowsing. The third, a thin-faced, upright man with silver hair, stared icily into the street. Tom’s grandfather raised his stick and pointed upward in choler. “There he is,” he growled. “There’s the rascal who did me out of my rights. This is the only club in New York I’m not admitted to, thanks to him. He’s responsible. He got them to turn me down.” Turning his gaze on Tom, he shouted, “And you’ll never get in there, either, you little rat.” Tom loathed his grandfather, a self-made man who loved his grandson because he was his grandson but despised him because he was a rich little boy. When the old man was in a good humor, he liked to take Tom on his knobby knees and grin balefully into his plump, gloomy little face. “And what are you thinking now, dirty little boy?” he would whisper, and then, with a bellow of glee, he would part his knees and tumble his dejected burden rudely to the floor.

      Years later, Tom’s father became a member of the club his grandfather had been kept out of, and at twenty-one Tom, too, was admitted. The thin-faced old man Tom’s grandfather had pointed out to him no longer sat in the second-story window. Tom quickly appropriated his chair. He felt timid about doing this, but to his astonishment no one else seemed to want it. The elderly men and the middle-aged men had been seduced away, first by the club movie room and then by the new television room, and the younger men darted in and out, having no patience for anything. Tom felt with disappointment that club life had lost its grandeur. There was a rowdiness, unheard but felt, that Tom was sure was not consistent with gentlemanliness. He struck up no friendships with his fellow-members.

      Tom arrived at the club every day at ten o’clock. In the mornings, he sat in the chair by the window, reading the papers. At twelve-thirty, he made his way to the dining room and enjoyed a two-hour lunch, always eating alone, always at the same table. All the imagination and appreciation he was capable of were spent at the luncheon table. In the afternoons, he simply sat and watched the street. At five o’clock, he sent for his car, quartered at a nearby garage, and drove home to Liza.

      Early one October, Liza received a telephone call that disturbed her very much. The call was from Clara Longacre, who invited her to drop over for bridge the same afternoon. Clara, at thirty, was the recognized social leader at the Retreat—merely because, Liza often thought viciously, of having grown up there. Clara’s natural sense of superiority made it impossible for her to doubt herself. She knew she was better than anybody else. She was untouchable. Liza longed more than anything in the world to impress Clara, to deprive her, even if it was only for a minute, of her eternal self-satisfaction. Sometimes she lay awake in bed and gritted her teeth in the struggle to bring forth some scheme that would crack that natural armor. Now she was not disturbed at the invitation to bridge; she had often been to bridge at Clara’s house. It was the tone of the invitation that had unsettled her. Always before, in speaking to her, Clara’s manner and her amused tone of voice had implied an awareness that Liza was a person—a possible adversary, even. This time, she was merely casual, as if she had forgotten that Liza was in any way different from the others. Liza wondered distractedly if perhaps they were all beginning to take her for granted. After all, she had done nothing extraordinary for a year—not since she had torn out the whole riverside wall of her house to install those two outsize picture windows. At night, from the opposite bank of the river, her house appeared to be a glittering sheet of white light—the most spectacular establishment in the community, whether you admired it or not. Even that, which had outraged all the rest of them (they said that, like her furniture, it was alien to the spirit of Herbert’s Retreat), had drawn only an amused smile from Clara. Liza had always felt that Clara’s amusement might mask a touch of chagrin, enough to make a small victory for herself. This time Clara’s voice had been casual and friendly, but that was all. I will not be patronized by her, Liza thought wildly. I must show her.

      She