‘No, I don’t,’ she said, and slammed the painting together on itself, like someone closing a book with authority. The old wood upon which the canvas had been stretched snapped. The canvas itself did not so much tear as explode into strips which hung like rags. The paint on these rags was dim and meaningless. ‘No, I don’t. Not anything, if I don’t want to, and I don’t: Those who forget the past — —
‘Fuck the past!’ Rosie cried.
I repay, a voice answered. It whispered; it cajoled. It warned.
‘I don’t hear you,’ Rose said. She pulled the flap of the incinerator open, felt warmth, smelled soot. ‘I don’t hear you, I’m not listening, it’s over.’
She shoved the torn and folded picture through the door, mailing it like a letter intended for someone in hell, then stood on tiptoe to watch it fall toward the flames far below.
EPILOGUE
The Fox-Woman
1
In October, Bill takes her out to the Shoreland picnic area again. This time they go in his car; it’s a pretty fall day, but too chilly for the motorcycle. Once they’re there, with a picnic spread before them and the woods around them flaming with fall color, he asks her what she has known for some time that he means to ask her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘As soon as the decree comes through.’
He hugs her, kisses her, and as she tightens her arms around his neck and closes her eyes, she hears the voice of Rose Madder deep in her head: AH accounts now balance . . . and if you remember the tree, it will never matter, anyway.
What tree, though?
Tree of Life?
Tree of Death?
Tree of Knowledge?
Tree of Good and Evil?
Rosie shudders and hugs her husband-to-be even tighter, and when he cups her left breast in his hand, he marvels at the feel of her heart pounding away so rapidly beneath it.
What tree?
2
They’re married in a civil ceremony which takes place midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, ten days after Rosie’s decree of non-responsive divorce from Norman Daniels becomes final. On her first night as Rosie Steiner, she wakes to her husband’s screams.
‘ I can’t look at her!’ he screams in his sleep. ‘She doesn’t care who she kills! She doesn’t care who she kills! Oh please, can’t you make him stop SCREAMING?’ And then, in a lower voice, trailing off: ‘What’s in your mouth? What are those threads?’
They are in a New York hotel, staying over on their way to St Thomas, where they will honeymoon for two weeks, but although she left the little blue packet behind, still at the bottom of the bag she carried with her out of Egypt, she has brought the ceramic bottle. Some instinct — woman’s intuition will do as well as any other name in this case, she reckons —
has told her to. She has used it on two other occasions following nightmares like this one, and the next morning, while Bill is shaving, she tips the last drop into his coffee.
It’ll have to do, she thinks later as she tosses the tiny bottle into the toilet and flushes it down. And if it doesn’t, it’ll have to do, anyway.
The honeymoon is perfect — lots of sun, lots of good sex, and no bad dreams for either of them.
3
In January, on a day when billows of wind-driven snow come driving across the plains and over the city, Rosie Steiner’s home pregnancy kit tells her what she already knows, that she is going to have a baby. She knows something more, something the kit can’t tell her: it will be a girl.
Caroline is finally coming.
All accounts balance, she thinks in a voice not her own as she stands at the window of their new apartment, looking out at the snow. It reminds her of the fog that night in Bryant Park,
when they came home to discover Norman waiting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she thinks, almost bored with this idea by now; it comes almost with the frequency of a nagging tune that won’t quite leave your head. They balance as long as I remember the tree, right?
No, the madwoman replies, in a voice so deadly clear that Rosie whirls on her heels, heart thudding sickly all the way up in the middle of her forehead, momentarily convinced that Rose Madder is in this room with her. But although the voice is still there, the room is empty.
No . . . as long as you keep your temper. As long as you can do that. But both things come to the same, don’t they?
‘Get out,’ she tells the empty room, and her hoarse voice trembles. ‘Get out, you bitch. Stay away from me. Stay out of my life.’
4
Her baby girl weighs in at eight pounds, nine ounces. And although Caroline is and always will be her secret name, the one that goes on the birth certificate is Pamela Gertrude. At first Rosie objects, saying that, with their last name added to the second, the child’s name becomes a kind of literary pun. She holds out, with no great enthusiasm, for Pamela Anna.
‘Oh, please,’ Bill says, ‘that sounds like a fruit dessert in a snooty California restaurant.’
‘But — ‘
‘And don’t worry about Pamela Gertrude. First of all, she’s never going to let even her best friend know that her middle name is Gert. You can count on it. And second, the writer you’re talking about is the one who said a rose is a rose is a rose. I can’t think of a better reason to stick with a name.’ So they do.
5
Not long before Pammy turns two, her parents decide to buy a home in the suburbs. By then they can well afford it; both have prospered in their jobs. They begin with stacks of brochures, and slowly winnow them down to a dozen possibles, then six, then four, then two.
And this is where they run into trouble. Rose wants one; Bill prefers the other. Discussion becomes debate as their positions polarize, and debate escalates into argument —
unfortunate, but hardly unheard-of; even the sweetest and most harmonious marriage is not immune from a tiff every now and then . . . or the occasional shouting-match, for that matter.
At the end of this one, Rosie stalks out into the kitchen and begins to put supper together, first sticking a chicken in the oven and then putting water on for the corn on the cob she has picked up fresh at a roadside stand. A little while later, while she is scrubbing a couple of potatoes at the counter beside the stove, Bill comes out of the living room, where he has been looking at photographs of the two houses which have caused this unaccustomed (dissension between them . . . except what he has really been doing is brooding over the argument.
She does not turn at his approaching step as she usually does, nor does she when he bends and kisses the nape of her neck.
‘I’m sorry I yelled at you about the house,’ he said quietly. ‘I still think the one in Windsor is better for us, but I’m truly sorry I raised my voice.’
He waits for her reply, and when she makes none, he turns and trudges sorrowfully out, probably thinking she is still angry. She is not, however; anger in no way describes her current state of mind. She is in a black rage, almost a killing rage, and her silence has not been something as childish as ‘giving him the cold shoulder,’ but rather an almost frantic effort to
(remember the tree)
keep from seizing the pot of boiling water on the stove, turning with it in her hands, and throwing it into his face. The vivid picture she sees in her mind is both sickening and blackly compelling: Bill staggering back, screaming, as his skin goes a color she still sometimes sees in her dreams. Bill, clawing at his cheeks as the first blisters begin to push out of his smoking skin.
Her left hand has actually twitched toward the handle of the pot, and that night, as she lies sleepless in her bed, two words play themselves over and over in her mind: I repay.
6
In the days which follow, she begins to look obsessively at her hands and her arms and her face . . . but mostly at her hands, because that is where it will start.
Where what will start? She doesn’t know, exactly . . . but she knows she will recognize (the tree)
it when she sees it.
She discovers a place called Elmo’s Batting Cages on the west side of the city and begins to go there regularly. Most of the clientele are men in early middle age trying to keep their college figures or high-school boys willing to spend five dollars or so for the privilege of pretending for a little while that they are Ken Griffey, Jr or the Big Hurt. Every now and then a girlfriend will hit a few, but mostly they are ornamental, standing outside the batting cages or the slightly more expensive Major League Batting Tunnel and watching. There are few women in their mid-thirties stroking grounders and line drives. Few? None, really, except for this lady with the short brown hair and the pale, solemn face. So the boys joke and snigger and elbow each other and turn their caps around backward to show how bad they are, and she ignores them completely, both their laughter and their careful inventory of her body, which has bounced back nicely from the baby. Nicely? For a chick who is clearly getting up there (they tell each other), she is a knockout, a stone fox.