The Robber Bride (53 page)

Roz has new clothes too, and a new name. She’s no longer Rosalind Greenwood, she’s Roz Grunwald. This, her parents explain, has been her real name all along. “Why wasn’t I called that before, then?” she asks.

“It was the war,” they say. “That name was too Jewish. It wasn’t safe.”

“Is it safe now?” she asks.

Not entirely. Different things are safe, where they are living now. By the same token, different things are dangerous.

Roz goes to a new school. She’s in high school now so she goes to Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. She’s no longer a Catholic: she’s renounced all of that – not without qualms, not without residue – in favour of being a Jew. Since there are so clearly sides, she would rather be on that one. She reads up on it because she wants to do it right; then she asks her father to buy two sets of dishes, and refuses to eat bacon. Her father buys the dishes to humour her, but her mother won’t separate the meat dishes from the milk ones, and gives her a wounded look if she brings it up. Nor will her father join a temple. “I was never religious,” he says. “Like I always said – who owns God? If there was no religions there won’t be all this trouble.”

There are a lot of Jewish kids at Roz’s new school; in fact at this school Jewish is the thing to be. But whereas once Roz was not Catholic enough, now she isn’t Jewish enough. She’s an oddity, a hybrid, a strange half-person. Her clothes, although expensive, are subtly not right. Her accent is not right either. Her enthusiasms are not right, nor her skills: Chinese burns and kicking people in the shins and playing a nifty hand of poker cut no ice here. Added to that, she’s too big; also too loud, too clumsy, too eager to please. She has no smoothness, no boredom, no class.

She finds herself in a foreign country. She’s an immigrant, a displaced person. Her father’s ship has come in, but she’s just off the boat. Or maybe it’s something else: maybe it’s the money. Roz’s money is plentiful, but it needs to be aged, like good wine or cheese. It’s too brash, too shiny, too exclamatory. It’s too brazen.

She is sent off to Jewish summer camp by her father because he’s found out that it’s the right thing to do with your children, here, in this country, in this city, in this neighbourhood, in the summer. He wants Roz to be happy, he wants her to fit in. He equates these things. But at camp she’s even more of an interloper, an obvious
intruder: she has never played tennis, she’s never ridden a horse, she doesn’t know any of the cute folk dances from Israel or any of the mournful minor-key Yiddish songs. She falls off sailboats, into the freezing blue northern water of Georgian Bay, because she’s never been on a boat before; when she tries to water-ski she chickens out at the last minute, just before they gun the motor, and sinks like a stone. The first time she appears in a bathing suit, not that she really knows how to swim, a graceless flail is her basic style, she realizes you’re supposed to shave your armpits. Who could have been expected to tell her? Not her mother, who does not discuss the body. She has never been outside the city in her life. The other kids act as if they were born paddling a canoe and sleeping in smelly tents, but Roz can’t get used to the bugs.

She sits at the breakfast table in the log-cabin dining room, listening in silence while the other girls complain languidly about their mothers. Roz wants to complain about her mother too, but she’s found that her complaints don’t count because her mother isn’t Jewish. When she begins, with her rooming house stories, her stories of toilets and scrubbing, they roll their eyes and yawn delicately, like kittens, and change the subject back to their own mothers. Roz can’t possibly know, they imply. She can’t understand.

In the afternoons they do their hair up in rollers and lacquer their nails, and after the folk dances and singsongs and marshmallow roasts and Beatnik dress-up parties they are walked slowly back to their sleeping cabin by various boys, through the aromatic, painful dark, with its owl sounds and mosquitoes and its smell of pine needles, its flashlights blinking like fireflies, its languorous murmurs. None of these boys saunters over to joke with Roz, none stands with his arm propped on a tree, over her head. Well, not many of them are tall enough to do that, and anyway who wants to be seen with a
part-shiksa
hippo-hips fool? So Roz stays behind, to help clean up. God knows she’s an expert at that.

During arts and crafts, which Roz is no good at – her clay ashtrays look like cow patties, her belt woven on a primitive Inca-type hand loom like the cat got into it – she says she has to go to the bathroom, and wanders off to the kitchen to wheedle a pre-dinner snack. She has befriended the pastry cook, an old man who can make a row of ducks across a cake with butter icing in one burst of calligraphy, without lifting the decorator once. He shows Roz how, and how to make an icing rose too, and a stem with a leaf. “A rose without a leaf is like a woman without honour,” he says, bowing to her in a courtly, old-fashioned, European way, handing her the cake decorator to let her try. He lets her lick out the bowl, and tells her she is the right shape for a woman, not all bones like some here, he can tell she appreciates good food. He has an accent, like her uncles, and a faint blue number on his arm. It’s left over from the war, but Rose doesn’t ask about that, because nobody talks about the war here, not yet. The war is unmentionable.

Roz can see that she will never be prettier, daintier, thinner, sexier, or harder to impress than these girls are. She decides instead to be smarter, funnier, and richer, and once she has managed that they can all kiss her fanny. She takes to making faces; she resorts to the old rudeness of Huron Street, to get attention. Soon she has bulldozed a place for herself in the group: she is the joker. At the same time, she imitates. She picks up their accents, their intonations, their vocabulary; she adds layers of language to herself, sticking them on like posters on a fence, one glued over the top of the next, covering up the bare boards. As for the clothes, as for the accessories, those can be studied.

Roz made it through high school, which was not exactly an abode of bliss, understatement of the year. Much later she’d discovered – at a class reunion she couldn’t resist, because she had a great outfit for it and wanted to show off – that most of the other girls there had been
as miserable as she was. Nor could they credit her own distress. “You were always so cheerful,” they said.

After high school Roz went to university. She took Art and Archaeology, which her father didn’t consider practical but which came in handy later in the renovation business; you never knew which little doodads from the past could be recycled. She arranged to live in residence, even though, as her mother pointed out, she had a perfectly good home to live in. But she wanted out, she wanted out from under, and she got her father to spring for it by threatening to run away to Europe or to some other university a million miles away unless he did. She picked McClung Hall because it was non-denominational. By that time she had dumped her excess Jewishness overboard, along with her excess Catholicism. Or so she thought. She wanted to travel light, and was happiest in a mixed bag.

The day Roz got her degree her father took her out for a treat, along with her mother and her increasingly seedy uncles. They went to a fancy restaurant where the menu was in French, with the English in small print underneath. For dessert there was ice cream, in various French flavours:
cassis, fraise, citron, pistache
.

“French was not one of my passports,” said Uncle Joe. “I’ll have the pastiche.”

That was me, thinks Roz. I was the pastiche.

A
long time later, after Roz was a married woman, after her mother had died – slowly and disapprovingly, since death was immodest, male doctors prying into your body being next door to sin – and after her father had followed, in jerky, painful stages, like a train shunting – after all this had happened and Roz was an orphan, she found out about the money. Not the later money, she knew about that; the first money. The root, the seedling, the stash.

She’d gone to visit Uncle George in the hospital, because he too was dying. He didn’t have a room of his own, or even a semi-private; he was in a ward. Neither of the uncles had done well at all. Both had ended up in rooming houses. After blowing their own money, they’d blown some of Roz’s father’s as well. They’d gambled, they’d borrowed; or they’d called it borrowing, though everyone must have known they would never pay it back. But her father never said no, to any request of theirs.

“It’s the prostrate,” Uncle Joe told her, over the phone. “Better you shouldn’t mention it.” So Roz didn’t, because the uncles too had their areas of modesty. She took flowers, and a vase to put them in because
hospitals never had vases; she put on a bright smile and a bustling, efficient manner, but she dropped both immediately when she saw how terrible Uncle George looked. He was shrivelled away, he was wasted. Already his head was a skull. Roz sat beside him, inwardly mourning. The man in the bed next to him was asleep and snoring.

“That one, he’s not going anyplace,” said Uncle George, as if he himself had plans.

“You want a private room?” said Roz. She could arrange it for him, easy.

“Nah,” said Uncle George. “I like the company. I like to have people. You know? Anyway, it costs a bundle. I never had the talent.”

“The talent for what?” said Roz.

“Not like your father,” said Uncle George. “He could start in the morning with a dollar, end of the day he’d have five. Me, I’d always just take that dollar and put it on a horse. I was more for the good times.”

“Where did he get it?” said Roz.

Uncle George looked at her out of his wizened yellow eyes. “Get what?” he said innocently, craftily.

“The first dollar,” said Roz. “What did the three of you really do, in the war?”

“You don’t need to know that,” said Uncle George.

“I do,” said Roz. “It’s okay, he’s dead now. You can tell me, you’re not going to hurt my feelings.”

Uncle George sighed. “Yeah, well,” he said. “It’s a long time ago.”

“It’s me who’s asking,” said Roz, having heard the uncles use this expression on each other, always with effect.

“Your father was a fixer,” said Uncle George. “He fixed things. He was a fixer before the war, he was a fixer in the war, and after the war he was also a fixer.”

“What did he fix?” said Roz. She took it he didn’t mean broken refrigerators.

“To tell you the truth,” says Uncle George slowly, “your father was a crook. Don’t get me wrong, he was a hero, too. But if he hadn’t of been a crook, he couldn’t of been a hero. That’s how it was.”

“A crook?” said Roz.

“We was all crooks,” said Uncle George patiently. “Everybody was a crook. They was stealing, all kinds of things, you wouldn’t believe – paintings, gold, stuff you could hide and sell later. They could see how it was going, at the end they was grabbing anything. Every time there’s a war, people steal. They steal whatever they can. That’s what a war is – a war is stealing. Why should we be any different? Joe was the inside man, I was the driver, your father, he did the planning. When we would move, who to trust. Without him, nothing.

“So, we’d get it out for them – not legal, with laws like they had I don’t need to tell you – but we’d bribe the guards, everyone was on the take. Hide it somewhere safe, till after the war. But how did they know what was what, how did they know where we were putting it? So we kept some things back, for ourselves. Took it to different places. Picked it up afterwards. Some of them was dead, too, so we got theirs.”

“That’s what he did?” said Roz. “He helped the Nazis?”

“It was dangerous,” said Uncle George reproachfully, as if danger was the main justification. “Sometimes we took out stuff we weren’t supposed to take. We took out Jews. We had to be careful, go through our regulars. They let us do it because if we was caught, it was their neck too. Your father never pushed it too hard though. He knew when it was too dangerous. He knew when to stop.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Roz said.

“Don’t thank me,” Uncle George said. “Like I told you, he was a hero. Only, some wouldn’t understand.” He was tired; he closed his eyes. His eyelids were delicate and crinkled, like wet crepe paper. He raised two thin desiccated fingers, dismissing her.

Roz made her way out through the white tiled maze of the hospital, heading for home and a stiff drink. What was she to conclude from all this, her new, dubious knowledge? That her money is dirty money, or that all money is? It’s not her fault, she didn’t do it, she was just a child. She didn’t make the world. But she still has a sense of hands, bony hands, reaching up from under the earth, tugging at her ankles, wanting back what’s theirs. And how old are those hands? Twenty, thirty years, or a thousand, two thousand? Who knows where money has been?
Wash your hands when you touch it
, her mother used to say.
It’s riddled with germs
.

She didn’t tell Mitch, though. She never told Mitch. It would’ve been one up for him, and he was one up already, him and his old-money fastidiousness, his pretence of legal scruples. Clipping coupons yes, smuggling Jews no. Or that’s what Roz would be willing to bet. He sneered discreetly at her money as it was, though she’d noticed he didn’t mind spending it. But old money made a profit from human desperation too, as long as the desperation and the flesh and the blood were at several removes. Where the heck did people like Mitch think those dividends really came from? And how about the South African gold stocks he’d advised her to buy? In every conversation between the two of them there was a third party present: her money, sitting between them on the sofa like some troll or heavy barely sentient vegetable.

At times it felt like part of her, part of her body, like a hump on her back. She was torn between the urge to cut it off from herself, to give it away, and the urge to make more of it, because wasn’t it her protection? Maybe they were the same urge. As her father said, you couldn’t give without getting first.

Roz got with the left hand and gave away with the right, or was it the other way around? At first she gave to the body items, the hearts because of her father, the cancer because of her mother. She gave to World Hunger, she gave to the United Way, she gave to the Red
Cross. That was in the sixties. But when the women’s movement hit town in the early seventies, Roz was sucked into it like a dust bunny into a vacuum cleaner. She was visible, that was why. She was high-profile, and there weren’t many women then who were, except for movie stars and the Queen of England. But also she was ready for the message, having been sandbagged twice already by Mitch and his
things
. The first time – the first time she found out, anyway – was when she was pregnant with Larry, and lower he couldn’t go.