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WHENEVER ANYONE ASKED QUESTIONS about the orphanage, Pierrot would tell them about the wonderful Rose. He told them nothing about the cold and Sister Elo?se and all the lonely children he had left behind in her care. That just filled him with a guilt impossible for the hardiest heart to withstand. Pierrot continued to send letters to Rose. He sent them every few days, but she never returned them. She must be furious with him for leaving. Perhaps it might be best to let her go. But thinking and obsessing about her allowed him to block out any other memory of the orphanage. It was as though she were the only thing that had ever happened in his childhood. The thought of her climbed and twisted around each of his thoughts like a rosebush.
12
MR. BEAUTY AND MISS BEAST
Despite her entertainment value, Rose wasn’t an especially good governess. She didn’t care that the children were wild, and she seemed to have no intention of disciplining them or training them to be civilized. She was more of a kindred spirit to them than anything. She just played with them and took care of their general needs.
They set fireworks off the back balcony. They were supposed to wait until Christmas, but they couldn’t. They regularly ate dessert three meals a day. Once they ran into the kitchen with their faces covered in green face paint. Hazel stopped for a second and looked at the cook.
“Greetings, Earthling,” she said.
Rose never cleaned up after the children either, only pulling out her small lemon-patterned rag when the lady of the house passed by. One of the maids started screaming when she discovered the bathtub was filled with frogs. Hazel came in and informed her that she and Rose had kissed them but were waiting to give them the opportunity to turn into princes. Maybe it wasn’t something they could do at the drop of a hat.
“Maybe there are naked princes wandering the earth, looking for the damn girls who kissed them and then just took off.”
One night she was up late eating a bowl of whipped cream with the children. The whipped cream suddenly reared into a white stallion on its hind legs. Ernest was so hyperactive when he was finished eating all that cream that he ran down the street in his underwear and threw a baseball through a friend’s window.
On another afternoon, a snowman appeared outside the house with a knife in its chest and red food dye spreading down from its wound. And a large flat stone for a mouth that made him look as though he were screaming at the top of his lungs.
Although Hazel and Ernest were becoming even wilder under Rose’s tutelage, there was no way anyone would fire Rose because the children had clearly decided that she was going to stay. There would be a terrifying uproar if she left, the likes of which the house had never seen.
There were days when Rose decided to be absolutely quiet, as if life itself were a silent film. She would gesture her needs and desires. She rubbed her belly to ask the children whether they were hungry. She scolded them by making an extremely dour expression, stomping her feet and wagging her finger viciously. It was the only time the maid witnessed Rose chastising the young savages. And it was in jest.
She was teaching the children how to do cartwheels and backflips in the nursery one afternoon. Their knees were all bloody from doing front flips and falling. They were bleeding happily at the kitchen table, eating chocolate cake for lunch. The maid thought she might need to have a word with Mrs. McMahon about Rose to save her own neck.
“She keeps them out of my hair, so what do I care if they’re off murdering small animals?”
“I don’t mind myself, Mrs. McMahon. We all quite like the girl. I’m just telling you so that if you see your children running around the backyard buck naked, you don’t get alarmed and blame me.”
“Fine. Fine. I grant you immunity.”
Despite the telescope being off-limits, Rose often found herself looking through it.
She placed her little rag down beside her so that she could pick it up and begin dusting the telescope at a moment’s notice, if need be. She focused the telescope so that she could look at the moon up close. It always startled her, as though she had turned around and there was the moon, following her down the street. Or she opened her bedroom door and there was the moon, lying in her bed, under the sheet.