“Did you get the cough syrup and Vicks VapoRub?” she asked him, but he had to admit he’d forgotten.
Around midnight, he was awakened by a noise. There was Edith, with her red sweater over her pajamas, coughing into tissues and admonishing him in a nasal voice that he wasn’t anything but a star giver — that was all he had ever been for her, a sad little star giver who had brought her to live in this horrendous place where she’d not remain one day longer. If he wanted to stay that was up to him; if he cared more about the company than his family, then so be it, but neither she nor the boy would stay one more day in this catastrophic place in which any day tragedy could befall them.
“You’re delirious from the fever. Calm down, Edith; get back in bed. You have a fever, and you can’t leave me just because I forgot the Vicks VapoRub.”
Rose had insisted, and even had looked for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the phone book and ordered cough syrup and cold tablets to be delivered. But she did not stop packing until she had filled four suitcases and two carry-ons.
The next day, he found himself taking her and the boy, who would have been ten then, to the airport. They said good-bye in front of the Avianca jet for what Ian Rose thought would be a few months while he finished out his contract commitment with the company before returning to Chicago to join them. But it turned out to be forever, because shortly after their parting, Edith had begun seeing an anthropologist named Ned and had gone with him and the boy to live in Sri Lanka.
“Sri Lanka, if you can believe it,” Rose tells me. “She left me because she felt unsafe in Colombia, and she moved to Sri Lanka…”
His initial reaction had been one of surprise and disbelief. To a large extent that had not changed. During those same years Edith and Cleve had lived with Ned in Sri Lanka while Rose moved into the house in the Catskills with the three dogs; during the summers Edith and Ned had brought him the boy and they too had spent their summer vacations at his house, with Rose’s approval. They’d all lived together amicably, Rose suppressing his jealousy or any sign that he wasn’t having a good time. As a token of gratitude for his hospitality, Edith and Ned had sent him a magnifying glass with an ebony handle from Sri Lanka, which he put atop his desk, where it remained as a testament that his marriage had in fact ended and there was no going back.
Rose had always believed that he’d be married to Edith until the day of his death, or her death. And yet, something happened at some point, he wasn’t exactly sure when, and things turned out differently. Rose had been thinking about Edith that morning when the package arrived in the mail, and he left it unopened in the attic.
He’d rarely gone up to the attic when Cleve was alive, because he wanted to respect the boy’s need for solitude. Although truth be told, Rose wasn’t even sure how alone his son had been up there; perhaps not that much, according to Empera, the Dominican who came to clean twice a week, who had tried to insinuate that Cleve shut himself up there with a girlfriend whom he didn’t want to introduce to his father. But Rose had stopped Empera midsentence.
“That’s the last thing I need to hear,” he had said. “Cleve’s private life is his business and no one else’s. In this house, no one meddles into the affairs of others, and you should follow suit.”
“It’s true, neither of you meddle into my private life,” Empera, not one to mince words, had responded. “Not out of respect, but because you couldn’t care less.”
“And she was right,” Rose tells me. “Empera knew everything about me, down to the color of my underwear, and yet I knew little or nothing about her, except that she was Dominican, that she didn’t have her papers, and that she’d entered the United States illegally not once or twice but seventeen times, basically any time she felt like it. I never had the heart to ask her how she had accomplished that feat worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.”
After Cleve’s death, Rose began to suffer horribly, not knowing more about his son, not having been closer to him when he had been alive, not having supported him or met his lovers; eventually, he asked Empera about what he had not wanted to hear before.
“Tell me, Empera,” he asked her. “Did you get to meet that woman who, according to you, visited Cleve secretly?”
But Empera, who had learned her lesson, wasn’t about to let that door slam in her face twice.
“What woman, sir?” she responded dryly as she walked toward the kitchen, her sandals snapping loudly.
On the day the package arrived, Rose spent the rest of the day out of the house doing errands, but he had not stopped thinking about the package he’d left unopened on his son’s bed. When he returned, he had the urge to go up and examine it, but some scruple about meddling in his son’s private matters stopped him. If there was something his son detested it was for anyone to invade his space, so Rose resisted the urge to open the package and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But immediately he was hounded by a completely opposite sensation. Would he not be betraying his son by ignoring such a sign? As he downed his sandwich with a glass of lactose-free milk by the fireplace, he began to think that it would not be so absurd or disrespectful to open the package, which perhaps would be the last sign Cleve sent.
“Alright, Cleve,” he said aloud, “just let me finish eating this and we’ll open it, see what this is about. You want me to do it, right? You’re giving me permission to open your private correspondence? Of course you do; at this point why would you care?”
The package contained 140 pages of rose-colored stationery of the kind that adolescent girls used for letters. The manuscript was handwritten, in what Rose was fairly certain was feminine script. The pages had writing on both sides, tighter as it went on, as if the author had calculated that she might run out of paper.
“Well, Cleve,” Rose said, “it seems as if a girl has sent you a very long love letter.”
The person who had written it wasn’t the one on the return address, a Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon, from Staten Island, but a young woman who wanted to remain anonymous and who declared that she’d use the pseudonym María Paz. This María Paz wrote in the first person to confess something to Cleve, referring to him as Mr. Rose. The following dawn, Ian Rose was still awake reading the one hundred forty rose-colored pages in the attic, sitting up on Cleve’s bed under the blanket, still dressed, the two big dogs lying on the floor, and the small one, Skunko, beside him.
“It’s his thing, that dog,” Ian Rose tells me, “I don’t allow him to go up on my bed, always been very strict about that, but not Cleve. And now without Cleve, his bed has basically become Skunko’s bed, so I didn’t tell him to get down. After all, if there was an intruder, it was me.”
Whoever the real author was, she had placed all her hopes on Cleve, had entrusted him with the story of her life. Rose asks me if I agree, because maybe these are just his own speculations, he doesn’t know much about these things, but he can’t get out of his head the feeling that the story of a life is that life, precisely that life, which in the long run can only exist to the extent that there is someone who tells its tale and someone who listens to it.
“Alexander the Great, who brought historians along to all his missions and battles, knew this welclass="underline" what is not narrated might as well not have occurred,” Rose tells me, adding that the fact that he is an engineer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like to read. “I’d say that the recipient of a testimony of a life becomes a kind of conscience before which the other unravels his deeds so that he may be condemned or acquitted. Or at least that’s what happens to me when I read a novel or an autobiography, fiction or something based on fact. A strange thing happened as I was reading it. I felt as if the life of that young woman, María Paz, was literally in my hands. She had chosen my son, Cleve, for that task, or I should say Mr. Rose. And it so happens that I too am a Mr. Rose, and as I read the manuscript I fell under the impression that this woman was also addressing me, and that by telling me her troubles, she was putting herself in my hands, because of the two Mr. Roses, I was the only one still alive. It should have been the other way around, me dead in the accident, while my son lived out what was left of his life. But that’s not how it happened. And at that moment, I was the only Mr. Rose who could read what that woman had written, revealing to me things not only about herself, but also about her son.”