The Rose Garden Read Online Free

women’s enthusiasm for gardening. The narrowstrip 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.
    â€œI’m just a poor, forsaken old woman,” she would wail in a tone of false anguish that hid rage.
    â€œYou’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.