Rose Madder Read online

  Now, standing here on this streetcorner, she could still remember how that had made her feel--afraid, because you had to be afraid of a man capable of such extravagance, a man who could choose a ring over a new car, but a little breathless and sexy, too. Because it was romantic. He had bought her a diamond so big that it wasn't safe to flash it on the street. A diamond as big as the Ritz. Because I love you, Rose.

  And perhaps he had ... but that had been fourteen years ago, and the girl he'd loved had possessed clear eyes and high breasts and a flat stomach and long, strong thighs. There had been no blood in that girl's urine when she went to the bathroom.

  Rosie stood on the comer near the storefront with the neon in the window and looked down at her diamond engagement ring. She waited to see what she would feel--an echo of fear or perhaps even romance--and when she felt nothing at all, she turned toward the pawnshop's door. She would be leaving Daughters and Sisters soon, and if there was someone inside this place who would give her a reasonable sum of money for her ring, she could leave clean, owing nothing for her room and board, and maybe even with a few hundred dollars left over.

  Or maybe I just want to be rid of it, she thought. Maybe I don't want to spend even another day carting around the Buick he never bought.

  The sign on the door read LIBERTY CITY LOAN & PAWN. That struck her as momentarily strange--she had heard several nicknames for this city, but all of them had to do either with the lake or the weather. Then she dismissed the thought, opened the door, and went inside.

  2

  She had expected it to be dark, and it was dark, but it was also unexpectedly golden inside the Liberty City Loan & Pawn. The sun was low in the sky now, shining straight down Hitchens, and it fell through the pawnshop's west-facing windows in long, warm beams. One of them turned a hanging saxophone into an instrument which looked as if it were made of fire.

  That's not accidental, either, Rose thought. Someone hung that sax there on purpose. Someone smart. Probably true, but she still felt a little enchanted. Even the smell of the place added to that sense of enchantment--a smell of dust and age and secrets. Very faintly, off to her left, she could hear many clocks ticking softly.

  She walked slowly up the center aisle, past ranks of acoustic guitars strung up by their necks on one side and glass cases filled with appliances and stereo equipment on the other. There seemed to be a great many of those oversized, multi-function sound-systems that were called "boomboxes" on the TV shows.

  At the far end of this aisle was a long counter with another neon sign bent in an arc overhead. GOLD SILVER FINE JEWELRY, it said in blue. Then, below it, in red: WE BUY WE SELL WE TRADE.

  Yes, but do you crawl on your belly like a reptile? Rosie thought with a small ghost of a smile, and approached the counter. A man was sitting on a stool behind it. There was a jeweller's loupe in his eye. He was using it to look at something which lay on a pad in front of him. When she got a little closer, Rosie saw that the item under examination was a pocket-watch with its back off. The man behind the counter was poking into it with a steel probe so thin she could barely see it. He was young, she thought, maybe not even thirty yet. His hair was long, almost to his shoulders, and he was wearing a blue silk vest over a plain white undershirt. She thought the combination unconventional but rather dashing.

  There was movement off to her left. She turned in that direction and saw an older gentleman squatting on the floor and going through piles of paperbacks stacked under a sign reading THE GOOD OLD STUFF. His topcoat was spread out around him in a fan, and his briefcase--black, old-fashioned, and starting to come unsprung at the seams--stood patiently beside him, like a faithful dog.

  "Help you. ma'am?"

  She returned her attention to the man behind the counter, who had removed the loupe and was now looking at her with a friendly grin. His eyes were hazel with a greenish undertint, very pretty, and she wondered briefly if Pam might classify him as someone interesting. She guessed not. Not enough tectonic plates sliding around under the shirt.

  "Maybe you can," she said.

  She slipped off her wedding ring and her engagement ring, then put the plain gold band into her pocket. It felt strange not to be wearing it, but she supposed she could get used to that. A woman capable of walking out of her own house for good without even a change of underwear could probably get used to quite a lot. She laid the diamond down on the velvet pad beside the old watch the jeweller had been working on.

  "How much would you say that's worth?" she asked him. Then, as an afterthought, she added: "And how much could you give me for it?"

  He slipped the ring over the end of his thumb, then held it up into the dusty sunbeam slanting in over his shoulder through the third of the west-facing windows. The stone sent back sparks of multicolored fire into her eyes, and for just a moment she felt a pang of regret. Then the jeweller gave her a quick look, just a glance, really, but it was long enough for her to see something in his hazel eyes she didn't immediately understand--a look that seemed to say Are you joking?

  "What?" she asked. "What is it?"

  "Nothing," he said. "Just a mo'." He screwed the loupe back into his eye and took a good long look at the stone in her engagement ring. When he looked up the second time, his eyes were surer and easier to read. Impossible not to read, really. Suddenly Rosie knew everything, but she felt no surprise, no anger, and no real regret. The best she could do was a weary sort of embarrassment: why had she never realized before? How could she have been such a chump?

  You weren't, that deep voice answered her. You really weren't, Rosie. If you hadn't known on some level that the ring was a fake--known it almost from the start--you would have come into a place like this a lot sooner. Did you ever really believe, once you got past your twenty-second birthday, that is, that Norman Daniels would have given you a ring worth not just hundreds but thousands of dollars? Did you really?

  No, she supposed not. She'd never been worth it to him, for one thing. For another, a man who had three locks on the front door, three on the back, motion-sensor lights in the yard, and a touch-alarm on his new Sentra automobile would never have let his wife do the marketing with a diamond as big as the Ritz on her finger.

  "It's a fake, isn't it?" she asked the jeweller.

  "Well," he said, "it's a perfectly real zirconia, but it's certainly not a diamond, if that's what you mean."

  "Of course it's what I mean," she said. "What else would I mean?"

  "Are you okay?" the jeweller asked. He looked genuinely concerned, and she had an idea, now that she was seeing him up close, that he was closer to twenty-five than thirty.

  "Hell," she said, "I don't know. Probably."

  She took a Kleenex out of her purse, though, just in case of a tearful outburst--these days she never knew when one was coming. Or maybe a good laughing jag; she'd had several of those, as well. It would be nice if she could avoid both extremes, at least for the time being. Nice to leave this place with at least a few shreds of dignity.

  "I hope so," he said, "because you're in good company. Believe me, you are. You'd be surprised how many ladies, ladies just like you--"

  "Oh, stop," she told him. "When I need something uplifting, I'll buy a support bra." She had never in her life said anything remotely like that to a man--it was downright suggestive--but she had never felt like this in her whole life ... as if she were spacewalking, or running giddily across a tightrope with no net beneath. And wasn't it perfect, in a way? Wasn't it the only fitting epilogue to her marriage? I decided on the rock, she heard him say in her mind; his voice had been shaking with sentiment, his gray eyes actually a little moist. Because I love you, Rose.

  For a moment the laughing jag was very close. She held it at arm's length by sheer force of will.

  "Is it worth anything?" she asked. "Anything at all? Or is it just something he got out of a gum-machine somewhere?"

  He didn't bother with the loupe this time, just held the ring up into the sunbeam again. "Actually, it is worth
a bit," he said, sounding relieved to be able to pass on a little good news. "The stone's a ten-buck item, but the setting ... that might have gone as much as two hundred bucks, retail. 'Course, I couldn't give you that," he added hurriedly. "My dad'd read me the riot act. Wouldn't he, Robbie?"

  "Your dad always reads you the riot act," said the old man squatting by the paperbacks. "That's what kids are for." He didn't look up.

  The jeweller glanced at him, glanced back at Rosie, and stuck a finger into his half-open mouth, miming a retch. Rosie hadn't seen that one since high school, and it made her smile. The man in the vest smiled back. "I could give you fifty for it," he said. "Interested?"

  "No, thanks." She picked up the ring, looked at it thoughtfully, then wrapped it in the unused Kleenex she was holding.

  "You check any of the other shops along here," he said. "If anyone says they'll give you more, I'll match the best offer. That's Dad's policy, and it's a good one."

  She dropped the Kleenex into her purse and snapped it shut. "Thanks, but I guess not," she said. "I'll hang onto it."

  She was aware that the man who'd been checking out the paperbacks--the one the jeweller had called Robbie--was now looking at her, and with an odd expression of concentration on his face, but Rosie decided she didn't care. Let him look. It was a free country.

  "The man who gave me that ring said it was worth as much as a brand-new car," she said. "Do you believe that?"

  "Yes." He replied with no hesitation, and she remembered his telling her she was in good company, that lots of ladies came in here and learned unpleasant truths about their treasures. She guessed this man, although still young, must already have heard a great many variations on the same basic theme.

  "I suppose you do," she said. "Well then, you should understand why I want to keep the ring. If I ever start getting woozy about someone else--or even think I am--I can dig it out and look at it while I wait for the fever to pass."

  She was thinking of Pam Haverford, who had long, twisting scars on both forearms. In the summer of '92 her husband had thrown her through a storm door while he was drunk. Pam had raised her arms to protect her face as she went through the glass, and the result had been sixty stitches in one arm and a hundred and five in the other. Yet she still almost melted with happiness if a construction worker or housepainter whistled at her legs when she walked by, and what did you call that? Endurance or stupidity? Resilience or amnesia? Rose had come to think of it as Haverford's Syndrome, and only hoped that she herself could avoid it.

  "Whatever you say, ma'am," the jeweller replied. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, though. Myself, I think it's why pawnshops have such a bad rep. We almost always get the job of telling people that things aren't what they're cracked up to be. Nobody likes that."

  "No," she agreed. "Nobody likes that, Mr.--" "Steiner," he said. "Bill Steiner. My dad's Abe Steiner. Here's our card."

  He held one out, but she shook her head, smiling. "I'd have no use for it. Have a nice day, Mr. Steiner."

  She started back toward the door, this time taking the third aisle because the elderly gentleman had advanced a few steps toward her with his briefcase in one hand and a few of the old paperbacks in the other. She wasn't sure he wanted to talk to her, but she was very sure that she didn't want to talk to him. All she wanted right now was to make a quick exit from Liberty City Loan & Pawn; to climb aboard a bus and get busy forgetting she had ever been here.

  She was only vaguely aware that she was passing through an area of the pawnshop where clusters of small statuary and pictures, both framed and unframed, had been gathered together on the dusty shelves. Her head was up, but she was looking at nothing; she was not in the mood to appreciate art, fine or otherwise. So her sudden, almost skidding stop was all the more remarkable. It was as if she never saw the picture at all, at least on that first occasion.

  It was as if the picture saw her.

  3

  Its powerful attraction was without precedent in her life, but this did not strike Rosie as extraordinary--she had been living an unprecedented life for over a month now. Nor did that attraction strike her (at first, anyway) as abnormal. The reason for this was simple: after fourteen years of marriage to Norman Daniels, years when she had been all but cut off from the rest of the world, she had no tools for judging the normal from the abnormal. Her yardstick for measuring how the world behaved in given situations mostly consisted of TV dramas and the occasional movie he had taken her to (Norman Daniels would go see anything starring Clint Eastwood). Within the framework provided by those media, her reaction to the picture seemed almost normal. In the movies and on TV, people were always getting swept off their feet.

  And really, none of that mattered. What did was how the picture called to her, making her forget what she had just found out about her ring, making her forget that she wanted to get away from the pawnshop, making her forget how glad her sore feet were going to be when she saw the Blue Line bus pulling up in front of the Hot Pot, making her forget everything. She only thought: Look at that! Isn't that the most wonderful picture!

  It was an oil painting in a wooden frame, about three feet long and two feet high, leaning against a stopped clock on the left end and a small naked cherub on the right end. There were pictures all around it (an old tinted photograph of St. Paul's Cathedral, a watercolor of fruit in a bowl, gondolas at dawn on the Grand Canal, a hunting print which showed a pack of the unspeakable chasing a pair of the uneatable across a misty English moor), but she hardly gave them a glance. It was the picture of the woman on the hill she was interested in, and only that. In both subject and execution it was not much different from pictures moldering away in pawnshops, curio shops, and roadside bargain barns all over the country (all over the world, for that matter), but it filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us--the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another's perspective, at least for awhile, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be.

  Her emotional reaction was so sudden, so hot, and so completely without connection to her real, practical life that at first her mind simply floundered, with no idea at all of how to cope with this unexpected burst of fireworks. For that moment or two she was like a transmission that has suddenly popped out of gear and into neutral--although the engine was revving like crazy, nothing was happening. Then the clutch engaged and the transmission slipped smoothly back into place.

  It's what I want for my new place, that's why I'm excited, she thought. It's exactly what I want to make it mine.

  She seized on this thought eagerly and gratefully. It would only be a single room, true enough, but she had been promised it would be a large room, with a little kitchen alcove and an attached bathroom. In any case it would be the first place in her whole life that was hers and hers alone. That made it important, and that made the things she chose for it important, too ... and the first would be the most important of all, because it would set the tone for everything that followed.

  Yes. No matter how nice it might be, the room would be a place where dozens of single, low-income people had lived before her and more dozens would live after her. But it was going to be an important place, all the same. These last five weeks had been an interim period, a hiatus between the old life and the new. When she moved into the room she had been promised, her new life--her single life--would really begin ... and this picture, one Norman had never seen and passed judgement on, one that was just hers, could be the symbol of that new life.

  This was how her mind--sane, reasonable, and quite unprepared to admit or even recognize anything which smacked of the supernatural or paranormal--simultaneously explained, rationalized, and justified her sudden spike reaction to the picture of the woman on the hill.

  4

  It was the only painting in the aisle that was covered with glass (Rosie had an idea t
hat oil paintings usually weren't glassed in, maybe because they had to breathe, or something), and there was a small yellow sticker in the lower lefthand corner. $75 OR ? it said.

  She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and took hold of the frame's sides. She lifted the picture carefully off the shelf and carried it back up the aisle. The old man with the battered briefcase was still there, and still watching her, but Rosie hardly saw him. She went directly to the counter and put the picture carefully down in front of Bill Steiner.

  "Found something you fancy?" he asked her.

  "Yes." She tapped the price-sticker in the comer of the frame. "Seventy-five dollars or question-mark, it says. You told me you could give me fifty for my engagement ring. Would you be willing to trade, even-Steven? My ring for this picture?"

  Steiner walked down his side of the counter, flipped up the pass-through at the end, and came around to Rosie's side. He looked at the picture as carefully as he had looked at her ring ... but this time he looked with a certain amusement.

  "I don't remember this. I don't think I've ever seen it before. Must be something the old man picked up. He's the art-lover of the family; I'm just a glorified Mr. Fixit."

  "Does that mean you can't--"

  "Dicker? Bite your tongue! I'll dicker until the cows come home, if you let me. But this time I don't have to. I'm happy to do it your way--even swapsies. Then I don't have to watch you walk out of here with your face practically dragging on the floor."

  And here was another first; before she knew what she was doing, Rosie had wrapped her arms around Bill Steiner's neck and given him a brief, enthusiastic hug. "Thank you!" she cried. "Thanks so much!"

  Steiner laughed. "Oh boy, you're welcome," he said. "I think that's the first time I've ever been hugged by a customer in these hallowed halls. See any other pictures you really want, lady?"

  The old fellow in the topcoat--the one Steiner had called Robbie--walked over to look at the picture. "Considering what most pawnshop patrons are like, that's probably a blessing," he said.