A few hours after Rose overheard Helen Peale, Helen entered her classroom uncharacteristically boisterous, chatting with Susan Smith about someone who had been on Ed Sullivan the night before. Rose waited for an embarrassed half smile of acknowledgment, a tacit apology of some sort. But nothing. Susan let the door slam shut behind her, and a puff of chalk dust kicked up. Teaching was less about instruction and more about exerting control. “Take out a sheet of paper. We’re having a pop quiz,” Rose decided to say.
“But we had one last week!” Susan said. “That’s not fair, Mrs. Downes.”
“That, Susan, is the nature of a pop quiz. You never know when you’ll get one,” Rose said, still working out what she would test them on.
“Mrs. Downes, I need to go to the bathroom. Can I have a bathroom pass?”
“‘May I have a bathroom pass,’ Linda,” she said wearily. “And no, you may not.”
More groaning, more litanies of “it’s not fair.” It was maddening, really, the number of times these well-fed, well-dressed daughters of privilege complained. Helen was quiet, pencil in hand, readied over paper. She gazed at Rose. Was that a hint of challenge in those solemn, dark eyes?
“You’re in luck, only one question,” Rose said. It came to her in an instant. “We’ve spent a great deal of time on poetic form. Tell me what form our country’s most valuable document is written in.”
“Excuse me?” Susan said, openly annoyed. “What document are you talking about?”
“Well, then, it’s a two-part question, isn’t it? A document that has to do with our country’s founding. There is your clue—a big one. And the form it takes is a poetic one.”
“We haven’t gone over this,” came a mutter from the back row. It was Annie, a voluble girl who rarely passed up a chance to complain.
“No, we have not, but you will be in a great deal of trouble if all you can do is parrot back what I’ve told you.” A few minutes passed: several girls, hunched over their desks, wrote down answers; others, including Helen, stared off in the distance. The lack of trying irritated Rose more than anything else. “Helen, please come up here,” she said.
Moving slowly, Helen complied. “Write down the first line of our founding document,” Rose said.
“I—I don’t know what you mean, exactly.” Helen blinked, her soft mouth open.
“So you didn’t even hazard a guess. You didn’t put in any effort.”
“Well, that wasn’t it—”
“No, I don’t want to hear it,” Rose said. “Listen: ‘We hold | these truths | to be | self-ev | ident.’” She was tired of excuses. She didn’t want to hear any. How could it be that she, the foreigner, was the only one who knew this? “I am quoting the Declaration of Independence. I trust you’ve heard of it?”
A few girls tittered. “Quiet down or you’ll come up here too,” Rose said. “Helen, please write it.”
Helen copied the words in big, flowing letters on the blackboard. She had beautiful penmanship—Rose had to give her that.
“Iambic pentameter, the most popular metrical line in the English language.” Rose said, the quiz wholly forgotten. “It helped form the stately prose of this country’s founding—our country,” she said, though she herself was not yet a citizen. “The least you can do is know it.”
For the first time in what felt like weeks, Thomas was to be home for supper. Rose decided to ignore the pile of papers that she had to grade. She stopped at the butcher on Robertson and picked up a roast. They ate it with potatoes and cream and drank red wine and opened the windows, the faint chlorine smell of the courtyard pool that no one ever swam in wafting in. There was something wonderfully dissonant about their heavy meal in contrast to the tropical warmth eddying about. Rose leaned across the crowded linoleum tabletop and deposited a kiss on Thomas’s lips. “And what did I do to deserve that?” he asked, delighted.
“You married me. Thank God.” It was a sentiment that she thought often, if expressed less. Rose was not given to flights of fancy, but she was convinced if she hadn’t gone into that antique shop on Old Bond, if she hadn’t been searching for The Bellhop, she would still be working for Mr. Marks, still living alone in her tiny Belsize flat, never knowing that she was in fact capable of such happiness.
“Well, Mrs. Downes, it remains my pleasure. Again and again and again.” Thomas kissed her back. “I have you and my beautiful new teacups; what more could I want?”
She laughed a little, shook her head. “Is that your way of saying you’d like a cup?”
“Yes, please,” he said, and she put the kettle on. The week before, Thomas had a cavity filled, and afterward, he and Rose walked back to the car parked on Beverly Drive. Across the street from Nate ’n Al’s, Thomas stopped in front of a tiny antique shop that featured a full suit of armor in the window. “I’ve always wanted one of those,” he said, his words slurry from the Novocain.
“You are not in your right mind,” she had said, but it was with affection. Inside the shop they went. And Thomas was oohing and aahing over everything within reach—the armor, a bronze elephant, a silver tea cart—Rose declaring that the drugs had gone to his head, when he spotted the teacups in a glass-fronted case. Even Rose had to admit they were gorgeous, hand-painted a pale green with a spray of yellow and blue flowers, gold leafing on the delicate handle. “They’re Minton,” Thomas said, reading the tag. “Bone china, from the late 1800s. My mum always wanted a Minton tea service.”
“Let me see,” she said, for the tag also listed the price: one hundred and twenty-five dollars for the set. A ludicrous amount of money for six cups, entirely frivolous. Thomas gave Rose such a solemn look—“I want them,” he said—that all joking about drugs was pushed aside. She nodded in assent and soon he was writing a check.
“We should use them often,” she said now. “That is the only way I can explain away the wild expense.” She might tease him now and again, but they reminded him of his mother. She of all people never would have said no to that.
“Ah, Rosie,” he said. “Every once in a while we can afford something frivolous. They make me happy. What could we buy you to make you happy?”
“More time,” she said as the phone rang.
“Downes residence,” Rose answered, holding the receiver, spotted with grease, away from her ear.
“Is this Rose Downes?” a bubbly voice asked.
“To whom am I speaking?”
“Oh, am I glad to talk to you! I called earlier and got no answer, and I thought, ‘Poor girl, she must be so busy, so terribly busy, and just having moved here and not knowing anyone.’ But now here we are, speaking!”