Read Online The Rose Garden by Maeve Brennan - Free Book Online

him seemed alive. He stood transfixed in the clean, clear spring sunshine and thought, I must not think, I must not remember . . . A taxi loitered near him, and he plunged into it and found he had to recline sidewise on the seat, because he could not sit. He directed the driver to the Altamont, a large commercial hotel on Eighth Avenue, where he could be fairly certain of not running into anyone he knew.
    As he was getting into the taxi, a button popped from his jacket and dropped into the gutter. He felt it pop and saw it fall, but he let it go. Even had he wanted to leave the shelter of the taxi, he could not have bent to retrieve the button. A pity; the buttons for his suit had been specially ordered from Italy. Leona had the same buttons on her suit. Now he would have to go through the whole afternoon watching Leona preen herself in a complete set of his buttons, in a gigantic travesty of his suit—for she was taller than he, and her arms were very long. What a complete fool he had been to allow her to go to his tailor.
    The men’s room at the Altamont was at the foot of a curving flight of stairs immediately to the left of the main entrance. It was a dank, white-tiled vault, occupied, when Charles walked in, only by the attendant, who was sorting the brushes and rags in his shoeshine kit. Charles took off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt, and pulled the papers out and threw them into the wastebasket. Turning his back on them and on his memories of the morning, he sprinkled a few drops of cold water on his chest and rubbed himself dry with his palms, averting his eyes from the paper towels over the washbasin. The attendant, a lanky man whose eyeswere so blinded by boredom that he no longer troubled to focus them, raised his head at the sound of the running water and then lowered it again.
    Refreshed, Charles stepped back from the washbasin and slipped his arms into his shirt. He buttoned the middle buttons first and moved swiftly up to the top. Really, he looked remarkably soigné, considering what he’d been through. The habit of poise, he thought contentedly. He had fastened the top button and was reaching for his tie when he saw that his fingers were smudged with newsprint and had left a track all the way up his front. He snatched a paper towel, dampened it, and rubbed at the smudges, making them worse. Leaning closer to the mirror, he saw that the damage was complete. Now his shirt looked like a used rag. He turned incredulously from the mirror to find the attendant standing behind him.
    â€œThem marks’ll never come out,” he said.
    Charles tore the shirt off and flung it into the wastebasket, on top of the papers. “Here is ten dollars,” he said. “Go upstairs and get me a plain white shirt, size 14½. You can get it at that shop in the lobby. And hurry.”
    The sleeves of the new shirt were much too long, and the collar would have been more appropriate on a secondhand-car salesman, Charles thought. He let the cuffs slip down around his knuckles, just to see how awful they looked, and then pushed them back to his wrists. His pink-and-white striped tie looked like a little ribbon against the sturdy cloth of the new shirt.
    Out in the street again, he hailed a taxi. It was not yet noon. He had just time to get to the Plaza ahead of Leona. He would catch her before she entered the hotel, and tell her of his new plan, which was to drive out into the country and have lunch at some secluded inn. Leona would have no audience to perform for today, he thought with satisfaction.
    As he entered the lobby of the Plaza, he glanced furtivelyaround, putting his hand to his throat as though to adjust his tie. Leona had not yet arrived. He took up his stand by a window and waited to see her come down the street.
    Leona had arrived at the Plaza a few seconds before Charles, and had gone straight through the lobby and down the hall to the flower shop, where she bought two of the glowing