Now, here’s a snapshot that requires some explanation: Red roses in an old wine carafe and a cat with a red bow around her neck peering balefully at the camera. This is a commemorative photo.
On one particular Valentine’s Day, I unexpectedly found myself in possession of a dozen roses, red as a cardinal’s wing, delivered mysteriously in a long white box tied up with a bow of crimson satin. The card said “Happy Valentine’s Day From a Secret Admirer.” It was like dropping into an old Katharine Hepburn movie. Suddenly, I felt just a little bit exceptional.
Naturally, I was wild to find out who sent them.
My husband isn’t the type to have roses delivered. It’s so convenient just to hand them over; who needs a courier? Not that he doesn’t give me flowers. Sometimes in the winter months when I tend to mope around the house, baking too many brownies and watching too much TV, he buys them on impulse to cheer me up. He’ll choose two or three stems out of the supermarket case. He never knows the names of the flowers; he just likes the way they look together-sprays of purple statice and red carnations, ivory chrysanthemums and dark blue iris. Even roses, but never a dozen at a time.
And sometimes in the spring or summer, he stops and picks a bunch of wildflowers on his way home from work-one of the more compelling reasons I married him. They’re already wilting when he gives them to me. Maybe I’ll find a few wild roses mixed in with the daisies and Queen Anne’s Lace. They always begin to drop their petals by nightfall.
So a dozen roses delivered isn’t his style, but it seemed only proper to give him right of first refusal for such an extravagant gesture.
I found him in the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator. “Do you know something about these roses?” I asked him.
“Say, did you happen to see where that leftover pizza went?”
“Second shelf, right in front of you. Now, about these roses . . . .”
He turned around, pizza in hand. “Where’d you get those?”
“If I knew,” I said with extraordinary patience, “I wouldn’t be asking you.”
He read the card and thought a moment. “Probably your father,” he decided. Noticing my fisheye look, he added, “Hey, I got you chocolate-covered cherries, remember?”
Of course. How foolish of me.
So I called my father, wished him a happy Valentine’s Day and gave him a chance to ask me if my roses had arrived. When he didn’t, I dropped an offhand remark about the anonymous rose situation, alert for subtle nuances. He disclaimed any knowledge of them, and no prodding could move him. “I wish I had sent them,” he said, “but I didn’t.”
I hung up the phone and peered into the box, frustrated, but also perversely pleased. Wrapped in layers of waxy green tissue paper, a dozen long-stemmed roses to take your breath away on a bleak winter’s day. And no telling whom they might be from.
So I thought I’d better take a picture. I might never get a dozen roses again.
I arranged them in an empty wine carafe, since we were clean out of Waterford crystal, and set them on a table where they’d be touched by the reluctant February light.
I suppose I ought to wind this up by explaining how I finally found out the identity of my secret admirer. But I never did.
For the longest time, I continued to try. I asked my boss if he had sent them, and he told me not to kid myself. I called both my sisters, and then my mother, who makes no secret of her longtime admiration for me, but none of them knew anything about it. I even confronted a close friend who happens to be a former sweetheart, kind of taking him aback. He became apologetic, as if he thought maybe it was something he should have done. A dozen roses, he told me, were really beyond his means, and glancing around his living room, I found it easy to believe him.
I casually asked my more casual friends. I dropped hints in conversations with distant relatives. Everyone said no.
“Someone,” I told myself, “is lying.”
I assumed that my secret admirer would eventually come forward. But by now, the days that have passed since the advent of the roses have gathered themselves into a good eight or 10 years, and I’ve finally stopped asking. I’ve discovered that I no longer want to know.
From time to time, when I find myself sitting around with the other women, before a baby shower or after a holiday dinner, the talk turns to various touching gestures, from flowers to singing telegrams. I say, “I got a dozen roses once, and I never did find out who sent them.” This never fails to intrigue them. And I feel-just a little bit exceptional.
Only one time in my life have I received a dozen long-stemmed roses, which are inherently a fleeting gift. They’ve long since faded and been thrown away. I have the photograph. I know I saved the card. For the life of me, I can’t find it now.
Who could bear to send roses and never tell?
That’s the second gift. Something given with no reciprocation asked, no strings attached, no pledges, no promises. Nothing but a mystery you can stash away in a shoebox of your heart to summon up on certain rainy days when you’re feeling low. Days when you need to feel secretly admired.
