The Robber Bride (50 page)

On the ground floor there was one bedroom that used to be the dining room. Mr. Carruthers lived in there. He was an old man with a pension; he’d been in the war, but it was a different one. He’d been wounded in the leg so he walked with a cane, and he still had some of the bullets inside him. “See this leg?” he’d say to Roz. “Full of shrapnel. When they run out of iron they can mine this leg.” It was the one joke he ever made. He read the newspapers a lot. When he went out, he went to the Legion to visit with his pals. He sometimes came back three sheets to the wind, said Roz’s mother. She couldn’t stop that, but she could stop him from drinking in his room.

The roomers were not allowed to eat in their rooms or drink either, except water. They couldn’t have hotplates because they might burn down the house. The other thing they couldn’t do was smoke. Mr. Carruthers did, though. He opened the window and blew the smoke out of it, and then flushed the butts down the toilet. Roz knew this, but she didn’t tell on him. She was a little afraid of him, of his bulgy face and grey bristling moustache and clumping shoes and beery breath, but also she didn’t want to tell, because telling on people was ratting, and the girls who did it at school were despised.

Was Mr. Carruthers a Protestant or a Catholic? Roz didn’t know. According to Roz’s mother, religion didn’t matter so much in a man. Unless he was a priest, of course. Then it mattered.

Miss Hines and Mr. Carruthers had been there as long as Roz could remember, but the third roomer, Mrs. Morley, was more recent. She
lived in the other second-floor bedroom, down the hall from the one where Roz’s mother slept. Mrs. Morley said she was thirty. She had low-slung breasts and a face tanned with pancake makeup, and black eyelashes and red hair. She worked in Eaton’s cosmetics, selling Elizabeth Arden, and she wore nail polish, and was divorced. Divorce was a sin, according to the nuns.

Roz was fascinated by Mrs. Morley. She let herself be lured into Mrs. Morley’s room, where Mrs. Morley gave her samples of cologne and Blue Grass hand lotion and showed her how to put her hair up in pincurls, and told her what a skunk Mr. Morley had been. “Honey, he cheated on me,” she said, “like there was no tomorrow.” She called Roz “honey” and “sweetie,” which Roz’s mother never did. “I wish I’d of had a little girl,” she’d say, “just like you,” and Roz would grin with pleasure.

Mrs. Morley had a silver hand mirror with roses on it and her initials engraved on the back:
G.M
. Her first name was Gladys. Mr. Morley had given her that mirror for their first anniversary. “Not that he meant a word of it,” Mrs. Morley would say as she plucked out her eyebrows. She did this with tweezers, gripping each eyebrow stub and yanking hard. It made her sneeze. She plucked out almost all of them, leaving a thin line in the perfect curved shape of the new moon. It made her look surprised, or else incredulous. Roz would study her own eyebrows in the mirror. They were too dark and bushy, she decided, but she was too young yet to begin pulling them out.

Mrs. Morley still wore her wedding ring and her engagement ring as well, though occasionally she would take them off and put them into her jewel box. “I should just sell them,” she would say, “but I don’t know. Sometimes I still feel married to him, in spite of everything, you know what I mean? You want something to hang onto.” On some weekends she went out on dates, with men who rang the front doorbell and were let inside, grudgingly, by Roz’s
mother, and who then had to stand in the vestibule and wait for Mrs. Morley because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Certainly Roz’s mother would not ask them back to sit in the kitchen. She did not approve of them, or of Mrs. Morley in general; though she sometimes let Roz go to the movies with her. Mrs. Morley preferred films in which women renounced things for the sake of other people, or in which they were loved and then abandoned. She followed these plots with relish, eating popcorn and dabbing at her eyes. “I’m a sucker for a good weepie,” she said to Roz. Roz didn’t understand why the things in the movies happened the ways they did, and would have preferred to have seen
Robin Hood
or else Abbott and Costello, but her mother felt an adult should be present. Things could happen in the flickering, sweet-smelling dark of movie theatres; men could take advantage. This was one subject on which Mrs. Morley and Roz’s mother were in agreement: the advantage men could take.

Roz went through Mrs. Morley’s jewel box when she wasn’t there, although she was careful not to move anything out of its place. It gave her a feeling of pleasure, not just because the things were pretty – they weren’t real jewels, most of them, they were costume jewellery, rhinestones and glass – but because there was something exciting about doing this. Although the brooches and earrings were exactly the same when Mrs. Morley wasn’t there as when she was, they seemed different in her absence – more alluring, secretive. Roz looked into the closet as well: Mrs. Morley had many brightly coloured dresses, and the high-heeled shoes that went with them. When she was feeling more than normally daring Roz would slip on the shoes and hobble around in front of the mirror on Mrs. Morley’s closet door. The pair she liked best had sparkling clips on the toes that looked as if they were made of diamonds. Roz thought they were the height of glamour.

Sometimes there would be a little pile of dirty underwear in the corner of the closet, just thrown in there, not even put into a laundry bag: brassieres, stockings, satin slips. These were the things Mrs. Morley washed out by hand in the bathroom sink and draped over the radiator in her room to dry. But she should have picked them up off the floor first, as Roz had to do. Of course Mrs. Morley was a Protestant, so what could you expect? Roz’s mother would have liked to have had nobody in her rooming house except Catholics, nice clean well-behaved Catholic ladies like Miss Hines, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and in such times you had to take what you could get.

Roz had a round face and dark straight hair and bangs, and she was big for her age. She went to Redemption and Holy Spirit, which used to be two schools but now just had two names, and the nuns in their black-and-white habits taught her to read and write and sing and pray, with white chalk on a black blackboard and a ruler across the knuckles if you got out of line.

Catholics were the best thing because you would go to Heaven when you died. Her mother was a Catholic too, but she didn’t go to church. She would take Roz there and push her towards the door, but she wouldn’t go in. From the set of her face Roz knew better than to ask why.

Some of the other kids on the street were Protestants, or else Jews; whatever you were, the others chased you on your way home from school, though sometimes the boys might play baseball together. Boys would chase you if you were a girl: the religion didn’t matter then. There were a few Chinese kids as well, and there were also DPs.

The DP kids had the worst time of all. There was a DP girl at Roz’s school: she could hardly speak English, and the other girls whispered about her where she could see them, and said mean
things to her, and she would say “What?” Then they would laugh.

DPs meant Displaced Persons. They came from the east, across the ocean; what had displaced them was the war. Roz’s mother said they should consider themselves lucky to be here. The grown-up DPs had odd clothes, dismal and shabby clothes, and strange accents, and a shuffling, defeated look to them. A confused look, as if they didn’t know where they were or what was going on. The children would shout after them on the street: “DP! DP! Go back where you come from!” Some of the older boys would shout “Dog Poop!”

The DPs didn’t understand, but they knew they were being shouted at. They would hurry faster, their heads hunched down into their coat collars; or they would turn around and glare. Roz would join the shouting packs, if she wasn’t near her house. Her mother didn’t like her running around on the street like a ragamuffin, screeching like a pack of hooligans. Afterwards, Roz was ashamed of herself for yelling at the DPs like that; but it was hard to resist when everyone else was doing it.

Sometimes Roz got called a DP herself, because of her dark skin. But it was just a bad name, like “moron,” or – much worse –“bugger.” It didn’t mean you were one. If Roz could get those kids cornered, and if they weren’t too much bigger than she was, she would give them a Chinese burn. That was two hands on the arm and then a twist, like wringing out the wash. It did burn, and it left a red mark. Or else she would kick them, or else she would yell back. She had a temper, said the nuns.

Still, even if Roz wasn’t a DP, there was something. There was something about her that set her apart, an invisible barrier, faint and hardly there, like the surface of water, but strong nevertheless. Roz didn’t know what it was but she could feel it. She wasn’t like the others, she was among them but she wasn’t part of them. So she would push and shove, trying to break her way in.

To school Roz wore a navy tunic and a white blouse, and on the front of the tunic there was a crest with a dove on it. The dove was the Holy Spirit. There was a picture of it in the chapel, coming down from Heaven with its wings outspread, on top of the Virgin Mary’s head, while the Virgin Mary rolled her eyes upwards in a way that Roz’s mother had told her never to do or they might get stuck that way; likewise crossing them. There was a second picture too, the Disciples and Apostles receiving the Holy Spirit at the Feast of Pentecost; this time the dove had red fire around it.

The dove made the Virgin Mary pregnant, but everyone knew that men couldn’t have babies, so the Disciples and Apostles didn’t get pregnant, they only talked in tongues and prophesied. Roz didn’t know what talking in tongues meant, and neither did Sister Conception, because when Roz asked about it Sister Conception told her not to be impertinent.

The Pentecost picture was in the long main corridor of the school, with its creaky wooden floors and smell of goodness, a smell composed of slippery floor wax and plaster dust and incense from the chapel that made a small cool pool of guilty fear collect in Roz’s stomach every time she smelled it, because God could see everything you did and also thought and most of these things annoyed him. He seemed to be angry much of the time, like Sister Conception.

But God was also Jesus, who got nailed to the cross. Who nailed him? Roman soldiers, who wore armour. There they were, three of them, looking brutal and making jokes, while Mary in blue and Mary Magdalene in red wept in the background.

It wasn’t really the Roman soldiers’ fault because they were just doing their job. Really it was the fault of the Jews. One of the prayers in chapel was a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, which meant they would switch over to being Catholic and then get forgiven. In the meantime God was still mad at them and they would have to keep on being punished. That’s what Sister Conception said.

Things were more complicated than that, thought Roz, because Jesus had arranged for himself to be crucified on purpose. It was a sacrifice, and a sacrifice was when you gave your life to save other people. Roz wasn’t sure why getting yourself crucified was such a favour to everyone but apparently it was. So if Jesus did it on purpose, why was it the fault of the Jews? Weren’t they helping him out? A question of Roz’s that went unanswered by Sister Conception, though Sister Cecilia, who was prettier and on the whole nicer to Roz, took a crack at it: a bad deed remained bad, she said, even if the result was good. There were lots of bad deeds that turned out to have good results, because God was a mystery, which meant he switched things around, but humans weren’t in control of that, they were only in control of their own hearts. It was what was in your heart that counted.

Roz knew what a heart looked like. She’d seen lots of pictures of hearts, mostly the heart of Jesus, inside his opened-up chest. They were nothing like Valentines; they were more like the cows’ hearts in the butcher store, brownish red and clotted and rubbery-looking. The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.

Every sin people did was like another nail pounded into the cross. That was what the nuns said, especially at Easter. Roz was less concerned about Jesus, because she knew it would come out all right for him, than she was about the two thieves. One of them believed right away that Jesus was God, so that one would sit on Jesus’s right hand in Heaven. But what about the other one? Roz had a sneaking sympathy for the other thief. He must have been in just as much pain as Jesus and the first thief, but it wasn’t a sacrifice because he didn’t do it on purpose. It was worse to be crucified when you didn’t want to be. And anyway, what had he stolen? Maybe something small. It never said.

Roz felt that he deserved a place in Heaven, too. She knew something about the seating plan: God in the middle, Jesus to the right of him, the good thief to the right of Jesus. The right hand was the
right
hand, and you always had to use it to make the sign of the cross, even if you were left-handed. But who sat on the left hand of God? There must have been someone, because God had a left hand as well as a right hand, and nothing about God could possibly be bad because God was perfect, and Roz couldn’t see that side just being left empty. So the bad thief could sit there; he could feast along with the rest. (And where was the Virgin Mary in all of this? Was it a long dinner table, with maybe God at one end and the Virgin Mary at the other? Roz knew enough not to ask. She knew she would be called wicked and impious. But it was something she would have liked to know.)

Sometimes when Roz asked questions the nuns gave her funny looks. Or they gave each other funny looks, pursing their mouths, shaking their heads. Sister Conception said, “What can you expect?” Sister Cecilia took extra time to pray with Roz, when Roz had been bad and needed to do penance after school. “There is more joy in Heaven over the one lost lamb,” she said to Sister Conception.

Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally. But she was glad to know about them. That meant dogs and cats stood a chance, too. Not that she was allowed to have either; they would have made too much trouble for her mother, who had enough things to do as it was.