The Rose Garden by Maeve Brennan Read Free Book Online Page A

you’d feel if one of them got her instead. There are plenty of your friends who’d love to have a woman like Betty working for them. And you’d still have to payher for the full term.”
    Liza stared incredulously at Betty for a minute, and then at her mother. “Very well,” she said with difficulty. “Finish your tea. Perhaps it will make you sick. I hope not.”
    The derision in their eyes frightened her, and she started for the door.
    â€œAnd one more thing,” her mother said good-humoredly. “From now on, I’m going to leave my teeth in the bathroom at night.”
    â€œOh, my God,” Liza said, and left the kitchen.
    â€œI cannot abide the sight of those things in the room with me,” Mrs. Conroy went on. “This way, nobody will have to look at them.”
    They were silent for a while, Betty absorbed in her book, Mrs. Conroy peacefully watching the rise and fall of the flames. “I think I’ll get a cat,” she said suddenly. “Liza hates cats.”
    In the living room, sitting in sepulchral silence, Tom and Liza were first startled, then appalled, by the sudden screeches that came at them from the kitchen—screeches of laughter that was rude and unrestrained, and that renewed itself even as it struck and shattered against the walls of the kitchen.

The Gentleman in the Pink-and-White Striped Shirt

    A t one minute before nine on a May morning, Charles Runyon opened drowsy eyes to the high-walled, sunless reaches of the Murray Hill hotel room that had been his home for nearly thirty years. Always, awakening in that room, Charles thought with satisfaction of the legend that had grown up around it. Charles’s room was a mystery to the world. None of his friends—his present friends or those of former years—had ever entered it. There had been a period when columnists had conjectured almost weekly about its shape (it was long and narrow) and about its color (its walls, once pearl gray, had hardened to stone gray and chipped during Charles’s tenancy, but he refused to allow it to be repainted) and its furnishings. The furniture, massive and shabby, contrasted curiously with the almost dainty elegance of Charles’s personal appointments—his silver-backed brushes and hand mirror, his gold-topped bottle of sandalwood cologne, his leopard-skin slippers. His desk held a large pad of thick white paper, a crystal inkwell, and a feathered pen. It also held the porcelain tumbler from which he drank his morning coffee. His bookcase contained twelve copies of each of his own six books, the latest ofwhich was ten years old, and on the lowest, deepest shelf he kept issues of magazines and newspapers in which articles by him had appeared.
    Charles was a critic of the theater and of literature. He confined his efforts, these days, to a weekly column for a string of Midwestern newspapers. He said that this was the only regular writing he wanted to do, since the so-called novelists and so-called playwrights working today had made serious criticism impossible. Let the so-called critics have their little day, Charles said contemptuously. But he read the theater and book-review pages of the daily papers with fierce attention and held secret weekly sessions with Variety at the Quill and Brush Club, of which he was a member.
    Charles’s room had one tall, deep window, shrouded in ancient red brocade, which looked out on an air shaft. In his youth, Charles had been too much ashamed of his room to allow his friends to visit him there. In those years, it angered him that he had to be content with a cheap room hidden away in the back of the hotel, instead of being able to afford one of the splendid apartments in front. But his friends’ curiosity, which at first made him uneasy, with time became flattering, and he grew fond of the room, and increased its mysteriousness by his reticence about it, and then by his arch evasiveness, and finally