The Evening Star (74 page)

“Why him? You don’t like my driving?” Vassily asked. Aurora annoyed him. Theo also annoyed him. In fact, he and Theo had quarreled so much lately that they were thinking of selling the bar and going their separate ways. He himself was thinking of going to Nice—lots of French girls had skinny legs. He did not think, however, that it was the proper moment to inform the ladies that there might not always be an Acropolis Bar for them to get drunk in while Rosie died.

“Theo has a gentle spirit,” Aurora said, looking Vassily in the eye. “I’m not sure I can say the same about you.”

Theo had a hard time controlling his emotions. He had come to care for Rosie a lot. In the depths of his heart it might
be Aurora that he coveted still, but Aurora was too much for him, and Rosie was such a nice woman. He would have married her anytime, but he didn’t hold it against her that she had chosen to marry someone rich. He choked back his tears and persuaded her to dance with him a little.

“I guess we’re all just passing through,” he said.

“That’s right,” Rosie said. “I just didn’t expect to get to the back door quite to soon.”

3

Since Arthur pleaded so, Rosie tried chemotherapy and radiation. They slowed the cancer down some, but not much—they slowed Rosie down a great deal more. Aurora crossed the street every day—indeed, several times every day—bringing her the right foods. Often she stayed most of the day and much of the night. Patsy visited, the Petrakis brothers visited, Pascal visited, Rosie’s children and grandchildren visited, but Rosie was only at peace when Aurora was there. Arthur and Aurora between them consumed most of the right foods.

After two weeks, Arthur Cotton crossed the street one morning while Aurora was out watering her flowers. He looked very tired, and had such difficulty lifting his feet that he stumbled over the curb. Even sitting in her kitchen, drinking the tea Aurora made for him, Arthur looked like a man who was tottering; his eyes were red and sad.

“She doesn’t want to die in my house,” Arthur said, looking at Aurora sadly. “She wants to come home.”

“I’ve been wondering if that mightn’t be best,” Aurora said.

“I’m crazy about her but I shouldn’t have married her,” Arthur said. “We should have just gone on being neighbors—having our little talks on the lawn. Those were our best times, really.”

“Yes, the salad’s frequently better than the meal,” Aurora told him. “You didn’t give her cancer, though, and you mustn’t bog yourself down with useless regrets. Let’s just go get Rosie and bring her home.”

“Can I visit a lot?” Arthur asked. He looked, if possible, more bleak than he had looked when he arrived.

“You’re her husband, Arthur—you can visit as much as you like,” Aurora said.

4

Aurora’s bedroom was the nicest, airiest, brightest, most cheerful room in her house. That afternoon she installed Rosie in it, moving herself, for sleeping purposes, to the little room down the hall that had once been Emma’s.

If Rosie moved at all, in the course of the day, it was usually just from Aurora’s bed to Aurora’s window nook, where she sat propped amid the huge, fluffy pillows that Aurora loved, and that she herself had kept cleanly pillowcased for so many years. She could look out the window at the sunny lawn and the flowers; she could look across the street to Arthur’s house, or watch him as he trudged across the street and along the sidewalk, five or six times a day, to pay her the
brief visits that he seemed to feel were all that he should be permitted.

“Arthur’s aged,” Rosie commented, watching him trudge back along the sidewalk and across the street after one such visit.

“Well, his beloved wife is sick,” Aurora said. “That’ll do it.”

“I feel guilty thinking about him being lonely over there in that empty house,” Rosie said. “It ain’t cozy, like our house. Eureka had it decorated sort of too formal, you know.”

“Eureka herself never struck me as being particularly cozy,” Aurora said. “She was always rather stiff.”

“Poor Arthur, his whole life has been like that—sort of formal,” Rosie said. “I think that’s why he can’t do it.”

“Could be,” Aurora said.

5

In the next months Aurora worked tirelessly—keeping the house clean, keeping the meals cooked, keeping the bed changed and the linen absolutely fresh. Rosie sat propped up in the clean bed or in the airy window nook and watched. When she was feeling well enough to be awed, she was awed. Once in a while she tottered around, inspecting, and was stunned to find that there was no longer a speck of dust to be found behind the curtains, or anywhere else.

“It’s clean,” she said, in surprise. “It’s really clean.”

“I’ve had more than forty years in which to study the work
of a master,” Aurora said. “I should hope I’ve learned a little something.”

Back in bed, Rosie thought about all the things she herself hadn’t learned, and became sad. Aurora saw that she was sad and tried to sing to her, but Rosie remained sad through several songs.

“I never learned nothing,” she said. “I never learned how to live and now I don’t know how to die. It’s awful to live your whole life and stay as ignorant as I am.”

Aurora sat down on the bed with her and took her hand.

“It may be that you were deeper than you were smart,” she said. “I’ve had the opposite misfortune, myself. I’ve always been smarter than I am deep.”

“I don’t see what’s deep about marrying two people like Royce and Arthur,” Rosie said. “Now that I’m sitting here looking back on it, it just seems plain stupid to me.”

“I’m not sure that the smart-deep equation applies to mating,” Aurora said. “Mating is something else. In my experience it almost never adds up, but probably one shouldn’t try to add it up. It’s something else.”

“Whatever it is, I wasn’t no good at it,” Rosie said.

6

In the early fall, Melanie’s pilot was on TV. Rosie watched ten minutes of it and burst into tears. There it was, for all to see: she had been a clown, just one more crazy maid who acted weird and got in everybody’s way.

Aurora, for once, didn’t know what to say, and didn’t say
anything. There was no point in telling a dying woman that the show was fiction. It was there, Rosie saw it, as far as she was concerned it was totally about her, and she believed that it was absolutely true: she had been a clown.

Though the pilot itself was a success, the sitcom failed to live up to it. After five episodes, it folded. Melanie came home to Houston to help her granny with Rosie, but it didn’t work. Rosie loved Melanie, but her hurt feelings about the sitcom wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t help it—she made it clear that she only wanted Aurora to wait on her. After a week, Melanie, perplexed and in tears, went back to L.A. to look for another acting job. Aurora held her tongue—indeed, held it until Rosie couldn’t stand it.

“I know I hurt her feelings,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I know it was just a dumb TV show. I ought to get over it but I can’t.”

“If you can’t, you can’t,” Aurora said.

7

Rosie became wakeful—she began to be afraid to go to sleep, for fear she’d die in the night. Aurora lay on the bed with her, holding her hand. They watched cable much of the night. When it began to grow light, Rosie would relax and go to sleep. Aurora would retreat to Hector’s old chaise on her patio and nap a little.

Often, sitting in Aurora’s window nook, amid a great pile of clean pillows, watching Aurora run the vacuum, or wash the windows, or mop the tiles in the bathroom, Rosie had a
deep, sad urge to turn everything back and make it as it had been. She wanted to get up and take the mop or the vacuum cleaner or the Windex away from Aurora and do the work herself. It had all gotten backwards—Aurora ought to be sitting in the window nook, reading magazines or tormenting her boyfriends on the telephone, while she, Rosie Dunlup, one of Houston’s premier maids, did the housework.

“Sometimes I just wish so that I could get up from here and have my old job back,” Rosie said weakly, one morning.

“Well, honey, you can’t,” Aurora said, inspecting, with some pride, a clean windowpane.

“It don’t seem right that you’re doing everything and I’m doing nothing,” Rosie said.

“It was the other way around for forty years, what’s wrong with you having a rest?” Aurora asked incautiously.

“It’s only because I’m dying, that’s what’s wrong with it,” Rosie said.

“Okay, sorry, I concede the point,” Aurora said sadly.

8

One by one, Rosie’s children came, bringing their families. Bud, the oldest boy, a middle-aged man, ran a body shop in Abilene. Estelle, her oldest girl, had a beauty parlor in Navasota. The next girl, Jolene, was a nurse in Texarkana, and was married to a man who sold lawn statuary. Doak, the one who, to Aurora’s eye, looked the most like Rosie, was in the well-service business in Wink, Texas. Annabelle, the most educated, worked in a pharmacy in Wichita Falls. Dotsie, the
flighty one (as her mother described her) was with her fourth husband and was currently employed as a secretary at a high school in Beaumont. Little Buster, the last and most reckless, but also clearly the most prosperous, ran a small stock-car track outside Waxahachie.

The wives of the boys and the husbands of the girls were alike only in that they smoked a lot, were terrified of Aurora, and couldn’t think of much to say to Rosie. The children of all the couples ran around Aurora’s backyard, screaming. Whatever their ages, they seemed to converse in screams.

Aurora drew the blinds, but even so, most of the screams were audible. It was a relief to everyone when the visits ended, but particularly a relief to Rosie. Aurora had done a great deal of cooking, and Rosie’s children, all of whom possessed serious appetites, had done a great deal of eating.

“Thanks for cooking for the kids,” Rosie said, when the painful sequence of visits finally ended.

“Well, that’s quite a brood you raised,” Aurora said.

“My boys done better than my girls, don’t you think?” Rosie asked.

“Yes, but then it’s easier for boys to do better,” Aurora said. “The world’s set up for boys, after all.”

“Now that they’ve come and gone I feel worse than ever,” Rosie commented. “I raised them, but they come here and sit, and they’re like strangers. They don’t seem like my kids, you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly,” Aurora admitted.

“They’re like people I knew a long time ago, when I was young and healthy,” Rosie said. “Now I’m old and sick, and they’re grown up, and it’s like we don’t know one another, we’re just pretending.”

“You take a bleak view,” Aurora said. “Your children are decent people. They seem to me to love you, even if they’re not polished at expressing it. All seven of them drove away in tears, which indicated to me that they certainly think they know you and care about you. What more do you want?”

“I guess just something I used to have, or thought I had,” Rosie said. What Aurora said chastened her a little. After all,
her children had made long trips across great stretches of Texas, just to see her for a few hours. Perhaps Aurora was right. Perhaps she expected too much.

“They should have just waited and come for the funeral,” she said. “It’s a burden on them to have to come all this way twice.”

“Rosie, you’re being ridiculous,” Aurora said. “Let your family be grieved in the way they need to be.”

The visits had been very tiring. Rosie mainly dozed for the next few days. She hated to see the night come on, though. To cheer her up as much as possible, Aurora put one hundred and fifty-watt bulbs in all the lamps in the bedroom, doing her best to make the nights as bright as the days.

9

The one visitor Rosie really liked to see was Bump, although he was as wild as her own Little Buster had been when Little Buster was Bump’s age. Despite the vigilance of Aurora, or Jane, or Teddy, or all of them at once, Bump always managed to elude his keepers at some point. He jumped on the bed or he ran into the bedside table and knocked over all of Rosie’s medicine bottles. Once he crawled under the bed and refused to come out.

“I’m an ogre, I live under this bed,” he told his Big Granny, when she demanded that he come out.

It made Rosie giggle that a tiny little boy could say a word like ogre.

“He reminds me a lot of Emma,” she told Aurora. “Emma was full of mischief when she was that age.”

“Yes, I could never quite manage Emma,” Aurora said. “If I hadn’t had your help I’m sure I would have done worse than I did.”

“I guess kids are what it’s all about,” Rosie said one day, watching Bump, who had captured a spoon and was using it to try to pry open one of the window screens.

“I want to let the birds in,” he said, when told to stop. “The birds want to come in and see Rosie.”

“Well, they’re among the many things it’s all about,” Aurora said, in response to Rosie’s remark.

Then, as Rosie grew more fragile—she could not get up now without assistance—Jane and Teddy grew worried that Bump would get out of control and injure her in some way. They stopped bringing him for a week, but Rosie missed him and protested.

“I’m dying, what can he do?” she said. “I need to get this over with—Aurora’s losing too much weight. About the only thing I got left that’s any fun is seeing Bump. It’s good for an old dying person to see a young person that don’t have nothing on his mind but enjoying life.”

“Bump has things on his mind,” Teddy said. “He has breaking everything in sight on his mind, for example.”

“Yeah, but they’re different things from what I got on my mind,” Rosie said.

Aurora weighed in on Rosie’s side, and Bump continued to be brought upstairs for visits.

10

Soon, though, all visits stopped. One day Rosie told Arthur that she didn’t want him coming across the street anymore.

“I’m sorry about how it all worked out, hon,” she whispered. “I mean our marriage and all.”

Arthur was too numb to answer. He shook his head; he cried. Then he walked slowly back home.