The Robber Bride (51 page)

43

R
oz is late coming home from school. She walks by herself, through the failing light, in the snow that is falling, not very much of it, down through the air like tiny white flakes of soap. She hopes the snow will stay around until Christmas.

She’s late because she’s been rehearsing for the Nativity play, in which she is the chief angel. She wanted to be the Virgin Mary, but she’s the chief angel instead because she’s so tall, and besides that she can remember all the lines. She has a white costume with a sparkly gold halo made out of a coat-hanger, and wings of stiff white cardboard with painted gold feather-tips, held on by straps.

Today was the first day they tried it with the costumes. Roz has to be careful walking or the wings will slip down, and she has to keep her head up and facing straight ahead because of the halo. She has to go up to the shepherds as they keep watch over their flocks by night, with a big tinsel Star of Bethlehem dangling from a string over their heads, and hold her right hand up while they are looking afraid, and say,
Fear not; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people
. Then she has to tell them about going to see the babe
in swaddling clothes, lying in the manger, and then she has to say,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men
, and then she has to point, with her whole arm held out, and guide the shepherds across the stage to where the manger is, while the school choir sings.

Roz is sorry for the girls who play the shepherds, because they have to wear grubby clothes and beards that hook over their ears with wires, like eyeglasses. These are the same beards that get used every year, and they’re dirty. She feels even sorrier for the little kids who play the sheep. Their sheep costumes must have been white, once, but now they are grey, and they must be very hot.

The manger has blue curtains across the front. The shepherds have to stand in front of it until the choir is finished; meanwhile, Roz has gone around behind it and has climbed up on a stepstool, and is standing with both arms spread out. On her right side is Anne-Marie Roy, on her left is Eileen Shea; both of them are blowing trumpets, although they aren’t really blowing them, of course. They have to stand that way the whole time, while two little kids with cherubs’ wings open the curtains, showing stupid Julia Warden with her blonde hair and rosebud mouth and dumb simpering smile dressed up like the Virgin Mary, with a bigger halo than Roz’s and a china-doll Jesus, and Saint Joseph standing behind her leaning on his staff, and a bunch of hay bales. The shepherds kneel on one side, and then along come the Wise Men in glittering robes and turbans, one of them with her face blackened because one of the Wise Men was black, and they kneel on the other side, and the choir sings “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and then the main curtains close and Roz can put her arms down, which is a relief because it really hurts to keep them up in the air like that for so long.

After the rehearsal today Sister Cecilia told Roz she’d done very well. Roz had the only speaking lines in the whole play and it was
important to say them clearly, in a nice loud voice. She was doing excellently and would be a credit to the school. Roz was pleased, because for once her loud voice wasn’t getting her in trouble – mostly when the nuns speak to her in public it’s about her rowdy behaviour. But while they were all taking their costumes off, Julia Warden said, “I think it’s dumb to have an angel with black hair.”

Roz said, “It’s not black, it’s brown,” and Julia Warden said, “It’s black. Anyways, you’re not a real Catholic, my Mum says,” and Roz told her to shut up or she’d make her, and Julia Warden said, “Where’s your father anyways? My Mum says he’s a DP,” and Roz grabbed Julia Warden’s arm and did the Chinese burn on her, and Julia Warden screamed. Sister Cecilia came rustling up and said what was all the commotion, and Julia Warden ratted, and Sister Cecilia told Roz that this was not the Christmas spirit and she shouldn’t pick on girls smaller than her, and she was lucky Sister Conception wasn’t there because if she was, Roz would get the strap. “Rosalind Greenwood, you just never learn,” she said sadly.

Walking home from school, Roz spends her time thinking about what she will do to Julia Warden tomorrow, to get even; until the last block, when the two Protestant boys who live on the corner see her and chase her along the sidewalk, yelling “The Pope stinks!” Almost to her house they catch her and rub snow in her face, and Roz kicks their legs. They let her go, laughing and yelling with mock pain, or real pain – “Ouch, ouch, she kicked me” – and then she picks up her snowy books and runs the rest of the way, not crying yet, and scrambles up her front steps onto her porch. “You’re not allowed on my property!” she yells. A snowball whizzes past her. If Roz’s mother were there, she would chase these boys off. “Ragamuffins!” she would say, and they would scatter. She sometimes takes the flat of her hand to Roz, but she won’t let anyone else lay a finger on her. Except the nuns, of course.

Roz brushes off the snow – she’s not supposed to track snow into the house – and goes inside, and down the hall to the kitchen. Two men are sitting at the kitchen table. They’re wearing DP clothes, not shabby ones, not worn out, but DP clothes all the same, Roz can tell because of the shape. On the table is a bottle that Roz knows straight away has liquor in it – she’s seen bottles like that on the sidewalk – and in front of each of the men there’s a glass. Roz’s mother is not in the room.

“Where’s my mother?” she says.

“She went to get food,” says one of the men. “She didn’t have nothing to eat.”

The other one says, “We’re your new uncles. Uncle George, Uncle Joe.”

Roz says, “I don’t have any uncles,” and Uncle George says, “Now, you do.” Then both of them laugh. They have loud laughs, and strange voices. DP voices, but with something else, some other accent. Something that’s like the movies.

“Sit,” says Uncle George hospitably, as if it’s his house, as if Roz is a dog. Roz is unsure of the situation – there have never been two men in the kitchen before – but she sits anyway.

Uncle George is the bigger one; he has a high forehead and light wavy hair slicked straight back. Roz can smell his hair goo, sweet, like theatres. He’s smoking a brown cigarette in a black holder. “Ebony,” he says to Roz. “You know what ebony is? It’s a tree.”

“She knows,” says Uncle Joe. “She’s a smart girl.” Uncle Joe is smaller, with hunched-up shoulders and spindly hands, and dark hair, almost black, and huge dark eyes. He has a tooth missing, off to one side. He sees Roz staring, and says, “Once, I had a gold tooth in this place. I keep it in my pocket.” And he does. He takes out a small wooden box, painted red with a design of tiny green flowers, and opens it, and there inside is a gold tooth.

“Why?” says Roz.

“You don’t want to leave a gold tooth lying around in your mouth, people get ideas,” says Uncle Joe.

Roz’s mother comes in, carrying two brown paper grocery bags, which she sets down on the counter. She is flushed, and pleased-looking. She says nothing at all about the drinking, nothing about the smoke. “These are friends of your father’s,” she says. “They were all in the war together. He’s coming, he’ll be here soon.” Then she bustles out again; she needs to go to the butcher’s, she says, because this is an occasion. Occasions call for meat.

“What did you do in the war?” says Roz, eager to find out more about her father.

The two uncles laugh, and look at each other. “We was horse thieves,” says Uncle George.

“The best horse thieves,” says Uncle Joe. “No. Your father, he was the best. He could steal a horse –”

“He could steal a horse from right between your legs, you wouldn’t notice,” says Uncle George. “He could lie –”

“He could lie like God himself.”

“Bite your tongue! God don’t lie.”

“You’re right, God says nothing. But your father, he never blinked. He could walk through a border like it wasn’t there,” says Uncle Joe.

“What’s a border?” asks Roz.

“A border is a line on a map,” says Uncle Joe.

“A border is where it gets dangerous,” says Uncle George. “It’s where you need a passport.”

“Passport. See?” says Uncle Joe. He shows Roz his passport, with his picture in it. Then he shows her another, with the same picture but a different name. He has three of them. He fans them out like a deck of cards. Uncle George has four.

“A man with only one passport is like a man with only one hand,” he says solemnly.

“Your father, he has more passports than anyone. The best, like I said.” They raise their glasses, and drink to Roz’s father.

Roz’s mother makes chicken, with mashed potatoes and gravy, and boiled carrots; she is cheerful, more cheerful than Roz has ever seen her, and urges the uncles to have more. Or maybe she’s not cheerful, maybe she’s nervous. She keeps looking at her watch. Roz is nervous, too: when will her father arrive?

“He’ll be here when he’s here,” say the uncles.

Roz’s father comes back in the middle of the night. Her mother wakes her up, and whispers, “Your father’s back,” almost as if she’s apologizing for something, and takes Roz downstairs in her nightgown, and there he is, sitting at the table, in the third chair that was kept for him. He sits easily, filling the space, as if he’s always been there. He’s large and barrel-shaped, bearded, bear-headed. He smiles and holds out his arms. “Come, give Papa a kiss!”

Roz looks around: who is this
Papa?
Then she understands that he means himself. It’s true, what Julia Warden said: her father is a DP. She can tell by the way he talks.

Now Roz’s life has been cut in two. On one side is Roz, and her mother, and the rooming house, and the nuns and the other girls at school. This part seems already in the past, although it’s still going on. That’s the side where there are mostly women, women who have power, which means they have power over Roz, because even though God and Jesus are men it’s her mother and the nuns who have the last word, except for the priests of course, but that’s just on Sundays. On the other side is her father, filling the kitchen with his bulk, his loud voice, his multilayered smell; filling the house with it, filling up all the space in her mother’s gaze so that Roz is pushed off to the edge, because her mother, who is so unbending, bends. She
abdicates. She says, “Ask your father.” She looks at Roz’s father mutely, the same kind of mushy cow-eyed look the Virgin Mary gives the Baby Jesus or the Holy Spirit in the pictures; she dishes up his food and sets the plate before him as if it’s some kind of offering.

And there isn’t less work for her now, there’s more, because there are three plates instead of two, there’s three of everything, and Roz’s father never has to clean up. “Help your mother,” he tells Roz, “in this family we help each other”; but Roz doesn’t see him helping. Roz catches them hugging and kissing in the kitchen, two days after he’s arrived, her father’s big bear arms around her thin angular mother, and is full of disgust at her mother for being so soft, and with sorrow and jealousy and the rage of banishment.

To punish her mother for such betrayals Roz turns away from her. She turns to the uncles, when they are there, and also, and especially, to her father. “Come sit on Papa’s knee,” he says. And she does, and from that safe place she regards her mother, working as hard as ever, hunched over the kitchen sink or kneeling in front of the oven, or scraping the bones off their plates into the pot of soup stock, or wiping the floor. “Make yourself useful,” her mother snaps, and once Roz would have obeyed. But now her father’s arms hold her tight. “I didn’t see her for so long,” he says. And her mother clenches her lips and says nothing, and Roz watches her with gloating triumph and thinks it serves her right.

But when her father isn’t there she has to work, the same as usual. She has to scrub and polish. If she doesn’t, her mother calls her a spoiled brat. “Who was your servant last year?” she jeers. “Look at my hands!”

The uncles move in. They’ve been having dinner every night, but now they move right into the house. They’re living in the cellar. They have two beds down there, two army surplus cots, and two army sleeping bags as well.

“Just till they get on their feet,” says Roz’s father. “Till the ship comes in.”

“What ship?” says Roz’s mother. “It’ll be a frosty Friday when any ship of theirs makes it to land.” But she says this indulgently, and she cooks for them and asks them to have some more, and washes their sheets, and says not a word about the smoking, and the drinking too, which goes on down in the cellar with roars of laughter coming up the stairs. The uncles don’t have to help clean up, either. When Roz asks why, all her mother will say is that they saved her father’s life, during the war.

“We saved each other’s life,” says Uncle George. “I saved Joe’s, Joe saved your father’s, your father saved mine.”

“They never caught us,” says Uncle Joe. “Not once.”

“Dummkopf
, if they did we wouldn’t be here,” says Uncle George.

Aggie’s grip on the roomers is slipping, because it’s no longer the same rules for everyone. It doesn’t help that the uncles don’t pay rent, or that they slam the front door, hurrying in and out. They have places to go, they have things to do. Unnamed places, unspecified things. They have friends to meet, a friend from New York, a friend from Switzerland, a friend from Germany. They have lived in New York, and in London, and in Paris too. Other places. They refer with nostalgia to bars and hotels and racetracks in a dozen cities.

Miss Hines complains about the noise: do they have to shout at each other, and in foreign languages too? But Mrs. Morley jokes around with them, and sometimes joins them for a drink, when Roz’s father is home and they’re all in the kitchen. She comes mincing down the stairs in her high heels, jingling her bracelets, and says she doesn’t mind a drop, now and then.

“She can sure hold her liquor,” says Uncle Joe.

“She’s a babe,” says Uncle George.

“What’s a babe?” says Roz.

“There’s ladies, there’s women, and there’s babes,” says Uncle George. “Your mother is a lady. That one, she’s a babe.”