"The Robber Bride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atwood Margaret)

XLIV

Roz walks home from school in an expectant mood. There’s something going on; she isn’t sure what, but she knows there’s something. Something is about to happen.

Last week, her mother said at breakfast: Mrs. Morley has been fired. What did that mean? Lost her job, but Roz had a brief vision of Mrs. Morley in flames, like an early martyr. Not that she wanted Mrs. Morley to burn up. She liked her, and also her accoutrements—her face cream samples, her costume jewellery, and especially her shoes.

Ever since then Mrs. Morley has been dragging around the house in her quilted pink satin dressing gown. Her eyelids are puffy, her face bare of makeup; the jingling from her usual festoons of necklaces and bangles has fallen silent. She isn’t supposed to eat in her room but she’s doing it anyway, out of paper bags brought to her by Mr. Carruthers; there are sandwich crusts and apple cores in her wastepaper basket, but although Roz’s mother must be aware of this, she isn’t knocking on Mrs. Morley’s door to issue the commands she’s normally so fond of giving. Sometimes these paper bags contain small flat bottles that don’t turn up in the wastepaper basket. in the late afternoons, still in her dressing gown, she goes down to the kitchen for short, fraught talks with Roz’s mother. What is she going to do? she asks. Roz’s mother purses her lips, and says she doesn’t know.

These talks are about money: without her job, Mrs. Morley won’t be able to pay the rent. Roz feels sorry for her, but at the same time less friendly, because Mrs. Morley is whining and it makes Roz disdainful. If girls whine at school they get poked or slapped by the other children, or stood in a corner by the nuns.

“She should pull herself together,” Roz’s mother says to Roz’s father at the dinner table. Once Roz would have been the audience for such comments, but now she is just a little pitcher with big ears.

“Have a heart, Aggie,” says Roz’s father. No one else ever calls Roz’s mother Aggie to her face.

“Having a heart is all very well,” says Roz’s mother, “but it won’t put food on the table.”

But there is food on the table. Beef stew, mashed potatoes and gravy, and cooked cabbage. Roz is eating it.

On top of Mrs. Morley being fired, Miss Hines is down with a cold. “Just pray to God she doesn’t catch pneumonia,” says Roz’s mother. “Then we’ll have two useless women on our hands.”

Roz goes into Mrs. Morley’s room. Mrs. Morley is in bed, eating a sandwich; she shoves it under the covers, but smiles when she sees it’s only Roz. “Honey, you should always knock before entering a lady’s chamber,” she says.

“I have an idea,” says Roz. “You could sell your shoes.” The ones Roz means are the red satin ones with the sparkly dips. They must be very expensive.

Mrs. Morley’s smile wavers and falls. “Oh, honey,” she says. “If only I could.”

As she rounds the corner to her house Roz sees a strange sight. The front lawn is covered with snow like all the other lawns, but scattered over it there are a number of coloured objects. As she gets closer she sees what they are: Mrs. Morley’s dresses. Mrs. Morley’s stockings, Mrs. Morley’s handbags, Mrs. Morley’s brassieres and underpants. Mrs. Morley’s shoes. A lurid light plays round them.

Roz goes inside, into the kitchen. Her mother is sitting white-faced and bolt upright at the kitchen table; her eyes are still as stone. In front of her is an untouched cup of tea. MissHines is sitting in Roz’s chair, patting her mother’s hand with small fluttery pats. She has a spot in pink in either cheek. She looks nervous, but also elated.

“Your mother’s had a shock,” she says to Roz. “Would you like a glass of milk, dear?”

“What are Mrs. Morley’s things doing on the lawn?” says Roz.

“What could I do?” says Miss Hines, to nobody in particular. “I couldn’t help seeing them. They didn’t even shut the door all the way.”

“Where is she?” asks Roz. “Where’s Mrs. Morley?” Mrs. Morley must have gone away without paying the rent. “Flown the coop,” is how her mother would put it. Roomers have flown the coop in that way before, leaving possessions behind them, though never out on the lawn.

“She won’t be showing her face in this house again,” says her mother.

“Can I have her shoes?” says Roz. She’s sorry she won’t be seeing Mrs. Morley again, but there is no need for the shoes to go to waste.

“Don’t touch her filthy things,” says her mother. “Don’t lay a finger on them! They belong in the garbage, like her. That whore! If all that junk’s not gone by tomorrow I’ll burn it in the incinerator!”

Miss Hines looks shocked by such strong language. “I will pray for her,” she says.

“I won’t,” says Roz’s mother.

Roz connects none of this with her father until he appears, later, in time for dinner. The fact that he’s on time is remarkable: he isn’t usually. He is subdued, and respectful towards Roz’s mother, but he doesn’t hug her or give her a kiss. For the first time since his return he seems almost afraid of her.

“Here’s the rent,” he says. He dumps a little heap of money on the table.

“Don’t think you can buy me off,” says Roz’s mother. “You and that slut! It’s hush money. I’m not touching one dirty cent.”

“It’s not hers,” says Roz’s father. “I won it at poker.”

“How could you?” says Roz’s mother. “After all I gave up for you! Look at my hands!”

“She was crying,” says Roz’s father, as if this explains everything.

“Crying!” says Roz’s mother with scorn, as if she herself would never do such a degrading thing. “Crocodile tears! She’s a maneater.”

“I felt sorry for her,” says Roz’s father. “She threw herself at me. What could I do?”

Roz’s mother turns her back on him. She hunches over the stove and dishes out the stew, hitting the spoon loudly on the side of the pot, and goes through the entire dinner without speaking. At first Roz’s father hardly touches his dinner—Roz knows the feeling, it’s anxiety and guilt—but Roz’s mother shoots him a look of concentrated disgust and points at his plate, meaning that if he doesn’t eat what she’s spent her whote life cooking for him he’ll be in even worse trouble than he is. When her back is turned Roz’s father smiles a little smile at Roz, and winks at her. Then she knows that all of this—his misery, his hangdog air—is an act, or partly an act, and that he’s all right really.

The money stays on the table. Roz eyes it: she has never seen so much money in a pile before. She would like to ask if she could have it, since neither of them seems to want it, but while she’s clearing off the plates—“Help your mother,” says. her father—it disappears. It’s in one of their pockets, she knows, but which one? Her mother’s, she suspects—her apron pocket, because in the following days she softens, and talks more, and life returns to normal.

Mrs. Morley however is never seen again. Neither are her clothes and shoes. Roz misses her; she misses the pet names and hand lotion; but she knows enough not to say so.

“A babe, like I said,” says Uncle George. “Your father has a strong weakness:”

“Better he should close the door,” says Uncle Joe.

A few years later, when she was a teenager and had the benefit of girlfriends, Roz put it together: Mrs. Morley was her father’s mistress. She’d read about mistresses in the murder mysteries. Mistress was the word she preferred, because it was more elevated than the other words available: “floozie,”

“whore,”

“easy lay.” Those other words implied nothing but legs apart, loose flabby legs at that—weak legs, legs that did nothing but lie there, legs for sale—and smells, and random coupling, and sexual goo. Whereas mistress hinted at a certain refinement, an expensive wardrobe, a well-furnished establishment, and also at the power and cunning and beauty it took to get such things.

Mrs. Morley hadn’t had the establishment or the refinement and her beauty had been a matter of opinion, but at least she’d had the clothes, and Roz wanted to give her father some credit: he wouldn’t have gone for just any old easy lay. She wanted to be proud of him. She knew her mother was in the right and her father was in the wrong; she knew her mother had been virtuous and had worked her fingers to the bone and had ruined her hands, and had been treated with ingratitude. But it was an ingratitude Roz shared. Maybe her father was a scoundrel, but he was the one she adored.

Mrs. Morley was not the only mistress. There were others, over the years: kindly, sentimental, soft-bodied women, lazy and fond of a drink or two and of tearful movies. In later life Roz deduced their presence, by her father’s intermittent jauntiness and by his absences; she even bumped into them sometimes on downtown streets, on the arm of her aging but still outrageous father. But such women came and went, whereas her mother was a constant.

What was their arrangement, her mother and her father? Did they love each other? They had a history, of course: they had a story. They met just as the war began. Did he sweep her off her feet? Not exactly. She had the rooming house even then, she’d inherited it from her own mother, who had run it since the father died, at the age of twenty-five, of polio, when Roz’s mother was only two.

Roz’s mother was older than her father. She must have been already an old maid at the time she met him; already taciturn, already acid, already prim.

She had been walking home, carrying a bag of groceries; she had to pass a tavern. It was late afternoon, closing time, when the drinkers were expelled onto the streets so they would be sure to eat their dinners, or so the theory went. Ordinarily Roz’s mother would have crossed over to avoid this tavern, but she saw a fight in progress. Four against one: thugs, was what she called them. The one was Roz’s father. He was roaring like a bear, but one of the thugs came up behind him and hit him over the head with a bottle, and when he fell down they all started kicking him.

There were people on the street, but they just stood there watching. Roz’s mother thought the man on the ground would be killed. She was by habit a silent woman, but she was not particularly timid, not in those days; she was used to telling men what for, because she had honed herself on the roomers, some of whom had tried to take advantage. Usually though she minded her own business and let other people mind theirs; usually she skirted bar fights and looked the other way. But that day was different. She could not just stand there and watch a man be killed. She screamed (for Roz, this was the best part—her laconic mother, screaining her head off, and in public too), and finally she waded in and swung her grocery bag, scattering apples and ‘ carrots, until a policeman came in sight and the thugs ran off.

Roz’s mother picked up her fruits and vegetables. She was quite shaken, but she didn’t want to waste her purchases. Then she helped Roz’s father up off the sidewalk. “There was blood running all over him,” she said. “He looked like something the cat dragged in.” Her house was nearby, and being a devout Christian and familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan, she felt she had to take him to it and clean him off, at least.

Roz could see how it must have been. Who can withstand gratitude? (Although gratitude is a complicated emotion, as she has had reason to learn.) Still, what woman can resist a man she’s rescued? There’s something erotic about bandages, and of course clothing would have had to have been removed: jacket, shirt, undershirt. Then what? Her mother would have swung into her washing mode. And where was this poor man going to spend the night? He was on his way to join the army, he said (although he did not in fact join it, not officially); he was far from home—where was home? Winnipeg—and his money was gone. The thugs had taken it.

For her mother, who’d spent her twenties taking care of her own ailing mother, who’d never seen a man without his shirt on, this must have been the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. The only romantic thing. Whereas for her father it was just an episode. Or was it? Maybe he fell in love with her, this screaming, silent woman who had come to his aid. Maybe he fell in love with her house, a little. Maybe she meant shelter. In her father’s rendition, it was the screaming he always mentioned, with considerable admiration. Whereas her mother mentioned the blood.

Whatever it was, they did end up married, though it was not a Catholic wedding; which meant that in the eyes of the Church they were not married at all. For her father’s sake, her mother had placed herself in an unremitting state of sin. No wonder she felt he owed her something.

Ah, thinks Roz, sitting in the cellar in her orange bathrobe. God, you foxy old joker, you certainly do fool around. Changing—the rules. Giving out contradictory instructions—save people, help people, love people; but don’t touch. God is a good listener. He doesn’t interrupt. Maybe this is why Roz likes talking to him.

Soon after the ejection of Mrs. Morley, Mr. Carruthers vanishes too, leaving his room in a mess, taking only a suitcase, owing a month’s rent. Uncle George moves into his room, and

Uncle Joe into Mrs. Morley’s old room, and then Miss Hines gives notice because the house is no longer respectable. “Where is the money going to come from?” asks Roz’s mother.

“Don’t worry, Aggie,” says her father. And somehow money does appear, not very much money but enough, and out of nowhere, it seems, because her father doesn’t have a job and neither do Uncle George and Uncle Joe. Instead they go to the racetrack. Occasionally they take Roz with them, on Saturdays when she’s not at school, and put a dollar on a horse for her. Roz’s mother never goes, and neither—Roz concludes, looking around at the outfits—do any other mothers. The women there are babes.

In the evenings the uncles sit at the card table in Uncle George’s new room, and drink and smoke and play poker. If Roz’s mother isn’t home her father sometimes joins them. Roz hangs around, looking over their shoulders, and eventually they teach her how to play. “Don’t show what you’re thinking,” they tell her. “Play close to your chest. Know when to fold:”

After she’s learned the game they show her how to gamble. At first it’s just with poker chips; but one day Uncle George gives her five dollars. “That’s your stake,” he tells her. “Never bet more than your stake.” It’s not advice he follows, himself.

Roz gets good. She learns to wait: she counts the drinks they have, she watches the level in the bottle go down. Then she moves in.

“This little lady’s a killer,” says Uncle George admiringly. Roz beams.

It helps that she’s playing seriously, whereas the uncles and her father aren’t, not really. They play as if they’re expecting a phone call. They play as if they’re filling in the time.

All of a sudden there was a lot of money. “I won it at the track,” said Roz’s father, but Roz knew this couldn’t be true because there was too much of it for that. There was enough for dinner at a restaurant, for all of them, her mother too, with ice cream afterwards. Her mother wore her best dress, which was a new best dress, pale green with a white daisy collar. because there was enough money for that as well. There was enough for a car; it was a blue Dodge, and the boys from down the street stood outside Roz’s house for half an hour, gazing at it, while Roz watched them silently from her porch. Her triumph was so complete she didn’t even have to jeer.

Where had the money come from? Out of thin air. It was like magic; her father waved his hand and presto, there it was. “The ship came in,” said Roz’s father. The uncles got some too. It was for all three of them, said her father. Equal shares, because the ship belonged to all.

Roz knew it wasn’t a real ship. Still, she could picture it, an old-fashioned ship like a galleon, a treasure ship, its sails golden in the sunlight, pennants flying from its masts. Or something like that. Something noble.

Her parents sold the rooming house and moved north, away from the streets of narrow cheek-by-jowl old houses and tiny lawns, into an enormous house with a semi-circular driveway in front and a three-car garage. Roz decided that they had become rich, but her mother told her not to use that word. “We’re comfortable,” was what she said.

But she didn’t seem comfortable at all. Instead she seemed afraid. She was afraid of the house, she was afraid of the cleaning lady Roz’s father insisted on, she was afraid of the new furniture that she herself had bought—“Get the best,” said Roz’s father—she was afraid of her new clothes. She wandered around in her housecoat and slippers, from room to room, as if she was looking for something; as if she was lost. She had been much more comfortable back in the old neighbourhood, where things were the right size and she knew her way around.

She said she had nobody to talk to. But when had she ever talked that much, before? And who had she ever talked to? Roz, Roz’s father, the uncles. Now the uncles had places of their own. The roomers? There were no roomers any more, for her to complain about and boss around. When men came to the door delivering things they took one look at her and asked to speak to the lady of the house. But she had to pretend to be happy, because of Roz’s father. “This is what we waited for,” he said.

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 iri-iiriigrant, 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 Roz 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 froin 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? Twenry, 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 parry 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.

Roz loved the consciousness-raising groups, she loved the free-ranging talk. It was like catching up on all the sisters she’d never had, it was like having a great big family in which the members, for once, had something in common; it was like being allowed, finally, into all the groups and cliques she’d never quite been able to crash before. No more mealy-mouth, no more my-hubby-is-better-than-your-hubby, no more beating about the bush! You could say anything!

She loved sitting in a circle, though after a while she noticed that the circle was not quite circular. One woman would tell her problem and admit her pain, and then another one would do it, and then Roz would take her turn, and a sort of disbelieving glaze would come down over their eyes and someone would change the subject.

What was it? Why was Roz’s pain second-rate? It took her a while to figure it out: it was her money. Surely, they thought, anyone with as much money as Roz couldn’t possibly be suffering. She remembered an old expression from her uncles:

My heart bleeds for him. This was always said with extreme sarcasm, about someone who’d got lucky, which meant rich. Roz was expected to do the bleeding for, but she could not expect to be bled over in return.

Still, there was one area in which Roz was in demand. In a movement so perennially cash-starved you could almost say she was indispensable. So it was natural that she was the one they had come to when WiseWomanWorld was about to go under because it couldn’t attract big glossy lipstick-and-booze advertising. It was more than a magazine then, it was a friend; a friend that combined high ideals and hope with the sharing of down-and-dirty secrets. The truth about masturbation! The truth about wanting, sometimes, to shove your kids’ heads into the wall! What to do when men rubbed themselves against you from behind, in the subway, and when your boss chased you around the desk, and when you had those urges to take all the pills in the medicine cabinet, the day before your period! WiseWomanWorld was all the sleepover parties Roz had once felt were going on behind her back, and of course she had to save it.

The others wanted the magazine to be a cooperative, the way it already was. They wanted Roz to just give them the money, period, and no tax write-off either because it was too political. It wasn’t peanuts either, what it ,would take: There was no point in a small cash injection. Not enough would be the same as nothing, she might as well flush it down the toilet.

“I never invest in anything I can’t control,” she told them. “You have to issue shares. Then I’ll buy a majority holding:” They got angry at her for that, but Roz said, “Your leg’s broken, you go to a doctor. You have money troubles, you come to me. You tried it your way and it didn’t work, and frankly your books are a mess. This is something I know. You want me to fix it, or not?” She knew it would still lose money, but that being the case she at least wanted to take the business loss.

They didn’t like it either when Roz put Mitch on the board of directors and stuck on a couple of his legal buddies to keep him company, but it was the only way. If they wanted her help they had to realize what her life conditions were, and if Mitch couldn’t participate, he would sabotage. Her home life would be turned into a maze of snares and booby traps, more than it already was. “It’s just three meetings a year,” she told them. “It’s the price you pay.” As prices went—as prices had gone, here and there in world history—it wasn’t all that high.

“I’m having Zenia over for a drink,” Roz tells Mitch. If she doesn’t tell him, he’s sure to walk in on the two of them and then sulk because he’s been left out of the picture. Being a woman with power doesn’t mean Roz has to tread less softly around Mitch. She has to tread more softly, she has to diminish herself, pretend she’s smaller than she is, apologize for her success, because everything she does is magnified.

“Zenia who?” says Mitch.

“You know, we ran into her in that restaurant,” says Roz. She’s pleased Mitch doesn’t remember.

“Oh yes,” says Mitch. “She’s not like most of your friends:” Mitch isn’t that keen on Roz’s friends. He thinks they’re-a bunch of man-hating hairy-legged whip-toting feminists, because at one point, in his early days on the board of WiseWvmanWorld, they were. In vain does Roz tell him that everyone was then, it was a trend, and the overalls were just a fashion statement—not that Roz ever wore them herself, she would’ve looked like a truck driver. He knows better, he knows it wasn’t just overalls. The women at Wise Woman had put up with him because of Roz, but they hadn’t suffered him gladly. They wouldn’t let him tell them how to be good feminists, much as he tried. Maybe it was because he said they should use humour and charm because otherwise men would be frightened of them, and they weren’t in the mood to be charming, not to him, not just then. He must have been badly traumatized by that whole phase; though he wasn’t above trying a few twists and ploys of his own.

Roz remembers the dinner parry she threw to celebrate the restructuring of WiseWomanWorld, when Mitch was sitting beside Alma the managing editor, and made the mistake of trying to run his hand up and down her leg under the table while carrying on a too-animated theoretical discussion with Edith the designer. Poor lamb, he thought Roz couldn’t guess. But one look at Mitch’s arm position—and his dampening, reddening, braised-looking face, and Alma’s stern frown and the squint lines around her mouth—told all. Roz watched with furious interest as Alma struggled with her dilemma: whether to put up with it because Mitch was Roz’s husband and she didn’t want to jeopardize her job—a thing Mitch had counted on with others, in the past—or whether to call him. on it. Principle won, and also outrage, and Alma said to him sharply, though in an undertone, “I am not a piccolo.”

“Pardon?” said Mitch, distantly, politely, bluffing it out, keeping his hand under the table. The poor baby hadn’t realized yet that women had really changed. In days of yore, Alma would have felt guilty for attracting this kind of attention, but not any longer.

“Get your goddamn hand off my fucking leg or I’ll stab you with my fork,” hissed Alma.

Roz went into coughing mode to cover up that she’d heard, and Mitch’s hand shot up above ground as if he’d been scalded, and after that night he started referring to Alma with pity and concern, as if she were a lost soul. A drug addict or something. “Too bad about that girl,” he would say sadly. “She has such potential, but she has an attitude problem. She’d be quite good-looking if it weren’t for the scowl:’ He hinted that she might be a lesbian; he hadn’t figured out that this was no longer an insult. Roz waited a decent interval and then pulled strings to get Alma a raise.

But that’s how Mitch tends to see Roz’s friends: scowly. And more lately, frumpy. He can’t resist commenting on how their faces are sliding down, as if his isn’t, though it’s true men can get away with looking older. Probably it’s revenge: he suspects Roz and her friends of talking him over behind his back, of analyzing him and providing remedies for him, as if he’s a stomach ailment. This was true once, granted, when Roz still thought she could change him, or when her friends thought she could change herself. When he was a project. Leave him, they’d say. Turf the bugger out! You can afford it! Why do you stay with him?

But Roz had her reasons, among them the children. Also she was still enough of a once-Catholic to be nervous about divorce. Also she didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d made a mistake. Also she was still in love with Mitch. So after a while she stopped discussing him with her friends, because what was left to say? It was an impasse, and chewing over solutions that she knew she would never implement made her feel guilty.

And then her friends gave up wearing overalls, and left the magazine, and went into dress-for-success tailored suits, and lost interest in Mitch, and discussed burnout instead, and Roz could permit herself to feel guilty about other things, such as being more energetic than they were. But Mitch keeps on saying, “Are you having lunch with that frumpy old manhater?” whenever one of the friends from that era turns up again: He knows it gets to her.

He has a little more tolerance for Charis and Tony, maybe because Roz has known them so long and because they’re the twins’ godmothers. But he thinks Tony is a weirdo and Charis is a nut. That’s how he neutralizes them: As far as Roz knows he has never made a pass at either of them. Possibly he doesn’t place them in the category of woman but in some other category, not clearly defined: A sort of sexless gnome.

Roz calls up Tony at her History Department office. “You won’t believe this,” she says.

There is a pause while Tony tries to guess what it is she’s being called upon not to believe. “Probably not,” she says. “Zenia’s back in town,” says Roz.

There’s another pause. “You were talking to her?” says Tony. “I ran into her in a restaurant,” says Roz.

“You never just run into Zenia,” says Tony. “Look out, is my advice. What’s she up to? There must be something.”

“I think she’s changed,” says Roz. “She’s different from the way she used to be:”

“A leopard cannot change its spots,” says Tony. “Different how?”

“Oh, Tony, you’re so pessimistic!” says Roz. “She seemed—well, nicer. More human. She’s a freelance journalist now, she’s writing on women’s issues. Also”—Roz drops her voice—“her tits are bigger.”

“I don’t think tits can grow,” says Tony dubiously, having once looked into it.

“Most likely they didn’t,” says Roz. “They’re doing a lot of artificial ones now. I bet she got them implanted.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” says Tony. “She’s upping her strike capabilitST But tits or no tits, watch your back.”

“I’m just having her over for a drink,” says Roz. “I have to, really. She knew my father, during the war.” The full implications of which Tony could hardly be expected to understand.

So nobody could say, later, that Roz wasn’t warned. And nobody did say it, and nobody said, either, that Roz was warned, because Tony wasn’t one of those intolerable servesyou-right friends and she never reminded Roz of the precautions she had urged. But once the chips were down, Roz reminded herself. You walked into it with your eyes open, she would berate herself. Dimwit! What led you on?

She knows now what it was. It was Pride, deadliest of the Seven Deadlies; the sin of Lucifer, the wellspring of all the others. Vainglory, false courage, bravado. She must have thought she was some kind of a lion-tamer, some kind of a bullfighter; that she could succeed where her two friends had failed. Why not? She knew more than they’d known, because she knew their stories. Forewarned was forearmed. Also she was overconfident. She must have thought she would be guarded and adroit. She must have thought she could handle Zenia. She’d once had pretty much the same attitude towards Mitch, come to think of it.

Not that she’d felt the pride working in her at the time. Not at all. That was the thing about sins—they could dress up, they could disguise themselves so you hardly knew them. She hadn’t thought she was being proud, merely hospitable. Zenia wanted to say thank you, because of Roz’s father, and it would have been very wrong of Roz to deny her the opportunity.

There had been another kind of pride, too. She’d wanted to be proud of her father. Her flawed father, her cunning father, her father the fixer, her father the crook. She’d told little bits of his war story when people were interviewing her for magazine profiles, Roz the Business Whiz, how did you get your start, how do you juggle all your different lives, what do you do about daycare, how does your husband cope, what do you do about the housework, but even while she was telling about him, her father the hero, her father the rescuer, she knew she was sprucing him up, shining a good light on him, pinning posthumous medals onto his chest. He himself had refused to discuss it, this shadowy part of his life. What do you need to know for? he’d say. That time is over. People could get hurt. Waiting for Zenia, she’d been more than a little nervous about what she might find out.

XLVl

When Zenia does come for a drink, finally—she hasn’t rushed it—it’s a Friday and Roz is wiped because it’s been a vile week at the office, input overload times ten, and the twins have chosen this day to give each other haircuts because they want to be punk rockers, even though they’re only seven, and Roz has been intending to parade them for Zenia but now they look as if they have a bad case of mange, and they show no signs of repentance at all, and anyway Roz doesn’t feel she should display anger because girls should not be given the idea that being pretty is the only thing that counts and that other people’s opinions of how they ought to arrange their bodies are more important than their own:

So after her first yelp of surprise and dismay she has tried to act as if everything is normal, which in a way it is, although her tongue is just a stub because she’s bitten it so hard, and she has ,dutifully repressed her strong desire to send them upstairs to take baths or play in their playroom, and when Zenia arrives at the front door, wearing amazing lizard-skin shoes, three hundred bucks at least and—with heels so high her legs are a mile long, and a cunning fuchsia-and-black raw silk suit with a little nipped-in waist and a tight skirt well above the knees—Roz is so disgusted that mini-skirts have come back, what are you supposed to do if you have serious thighs, and she remembers those skirts from the last time around, in the sixties, you had to sit down with your legs glued together or all would be on view, the once-unmentionable, the central item, the foul and disgraceful blot, the priceless treasure, an invitation to male peering, to lustful pinching and leering, to foaming at the mouth, to rape and pillage, just as the nuns always warned—there are the twins, wearing Roz’s cast-off slips from their dress-up box and running down the hall with Mitch’s electric shaver, chasing the cat, because they want it to be a punk rock mascot, although Roz has told them before that the shaver is strictly out of bounds and they will be in deep trouble if Mitch discovers cat fur caught in it, it’s bad enough when Roz can’t find her own shaver and uses Mitch’s on her legs and pits and isn’t careful enough washing the stubble out of it. The twins pay no attention to her because they assume she’ll cover for them, he herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and they’re right, she will.

Zenia sees them, and says, “Are those yours? Did they fall in the food processor?” and it’s just like something Roz might have said herself, or thought at least, and Roz doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She laughs, and they have the drink in the sun room, which Roz refuses to call the conservatory even though she’s always hankered after a conservatory, a conservatory with miniature orange trees in it, or orchids, like the ones in twenties murder mysteries, the kind with the map of the English mansion and an X where the body gets found, in the conservatory quite frequently. But although the sun room is glass and has a Victorian cupola thing on top it’s too small to be a real conservatory, arid the word itself is too highfalutin for the voice of Roz’s mother, which lives on intermittently inside Roz’s head and would sneer, although it’s full of plants, plants with limited lifespans, because whose responsibility are they exactly? Mitch says he doesn’t have the time, although he was the one who ordered all this vegetation; but Roz’s thumb is not green, it’s brown, the brown of withered sedges. It’s not that she doesn’t want the plants to live.

She even likes them, though she can’t tell the difference between a begonia and a rhododendron. But these things should be done by professionals: a plant service. They come, they see, they water, they cart away the dying, they bring fresh troops.

She has a service like that for the office, so why not here? Mitch says he doesn’t want yet more strangers tramping through the house—he’s suffering from decorator burnout—but it’s possible that he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a watering can, just as he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a frying pan, and an apron and a feather duster, even though Roz can’t cook her way out of a paper bag, why did God make restaurants if he intended her to cook, and she has a phobia aboutfeather dusters, having been force-fed on them in childhood. The constant is the apron, the Good Housekeeping guarantee that Roz will always be home whenever Mitch chooses to get back there.

Or there may be another agenda, another nuance to the guilt Roz is supposed to feel, and does feel, over the kaput plants, because Mitch wanted a swinnning pool instead of a sun room, so he could dive into a chlorine purification bath and sterilize his chest hair and kill whatever athlete’s foot and crotch fungus and tongue rot he may have picked up from plucking the ripening floozies; but Roz said an outdoor swimming pool’ was ridiculous in Canada, two months of swelter and ten of freeze-your-buns-off, and she refused to have an indoor one because she knew people who did and their houses smelled like gas refineries on a hot day because of all the chemicals, and there would be complicated machinery that would break down and that Roz would somehow be responsible for getting fixed. The worst thing about swimming pools as far as Roz is concerned is that they are one step too close to the great outdoors. Wildlife falls into them. Ants, moths, and such. Like the lake at summer camp, she’d be flailing along and suddenly there would be a bug, right at nose level. Swimming, in Roz’s opinion, is a major health hazard.

Zenia laughs and says she couldn’t agree more, and Roz talks on, because she’s nervous at seeing Zenia again after all these years, she remembers the reputation, the aura of green poison that encircled Zenia, the invisible incandescence, touch her and you’d get burned; and she remembers history, the stories of Tony and Charis. So she has to step carefully here, it’s no wonder she’s nervous, and when she’s nervous she talks. Talks; and also eats, and also drinks. Zenia takes one olive and chews it daintily, Roz gobbles the lot, and touches up Zenia’s martini, and pours herself another, and offers a cigarette, words pouring out of her like ink from a squid. Camouflage. She’s relieved to note that Zenia smokes. It would be intolerable if she were thin and well-dressed and unwrinkled and a knockout, and a nonsmoker as well.

“So,” says Roz, when she’s made a sufficient fool of herself to consider the ice broken. “My father.” Because this is what she wants, this is the point of the visit. Isn’t it?

“Yes,” says Zenia. She leans forward and sets down her glass, and rests her chin thoughtfully on one hand and frowns slightly. “I was only a baby, of course. So I have no real memories of that time. But my aunt always talked about your father, before she died. About how he got us out. I guess if it weren’t for him I’d just be ashes now.

“It was in Berlin. That’s where my parents lived, in a good neighbourhood, in a respectable apartment—it was one of those old Berlin buildings with the mosaic tiles in the front hall and the oblong staircase with the wooden banister, and the maid’s room and the back balcony overlooking a courtyard, for hanging out the wash. I know, because I saw it—I went back. I was there in the late seventies, I had an assignment in Berlin—the Berlin nightlife, for some travel magazine, you know the sort of thing, sexy cabaret, kinky strip clubs, telephones on the tables. So I took the afternoon off and I found it. I had the address, from some old papers of my aunt’s. The buildings all around were newer, they’d been rebuilt after the bombing, the whole place was practically levelled; it was amazing, but that one old building was still there.

“I rang all the buzzers and someone opened the door, and 1 went in and up the stairs, just as my parents must have done hundreds of times. I touched the same banister, I turned the same corners. I knocked at the door, and when it opened 1 said some relatives of mine had once lived there and could I look around—I speak a little German, because of my aunt, though my accent’s old-fashioned—and the people let me in. They were a young couple with a baby, they were very nice, but I couldn’t stay long. I really couldn’t stand it, the rooms, the light coming through the windows ... they were the same rooms, it was the same light. I think my parents became real to me for the first time. Everything, all of it became real. Before that, it was just a bad story.”

Zenia stops talking. This is what people often do when they come to the hard part, Roz has discovered. “A bad story,” she prompts.

“Yes,” says Zenia. “It was already the war. Things were in short supply. My aunt had never married, there was such a shortage of men after the first war a lot of women couldn’t, so she thought of our family as her family too, and she used to do things for us. Mother us—that’s how she put it. So on this one day, my aunt was going to my parents’ apartment; she was taking them some bread she’d baked. She went up the stairs as usual—there was a lift, one of those lifts like an iron cage, I saw it—but it was out of order. As she was about to knock, the door on the other side of the landing opened and the woman who lived there—my aunt knew her only by sight—this woman came out and grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her inside. ‘Don’t go in, don’t try to go in there,’ she said. ‘They’ve been taken away’

“‘Taken, where?’ said my aunt. She didn’t ask who by, she. didn’t need to ask that.

“‘Don’t try to find out,’ said the woman. ‘Better not: She had me in there with her because my mother had seen them coming, she’d looked out the window and she’d seen them coming along the street, and then when they’d turned in at the doorway and started up the stairs she’d guessed where they were headed and she’d runi out the back door, the maid’s door, and along the back balcony, with me wrapped up in a shawl—the balconies at the back adjoined one another—and she’d pounded at this woman’s kitchen door, and the woman had taken me in. It happened so fast she hardly knew what she was doing, and most likely if she’d had time to think she never would have done anything so dangerous. She was just an ordinary woman, obedient and so on, but I suppose if someone shoves a baby at you, you can’t just step back and let it fall to the ground.

“I was the only one saved, the others were all taken. I had an older brother, and an older sister too. I was much younger, I was a late baby. I have their picture; it’s something my aunt brought with her. See—” Zenia opens her purse, then her wallet, and slides out a snapshot. It’s a square picture with—a wide white border, the figures tiny and fading: a family group, father, mother, two young children, and another older woman, off to one side. The aunt, Roz assumes. Both of the children are ‘blond.

What amazes Roz is how contemporary they look: the knee-high skirts on the women, from the late twenties? the early thirties?—the smart hats, the makeup, it could be the retro look, in some fashion magazine, right now. Only the clothes of the children are archaic; that, and their haircuts. A suit and tie and short back and sides for the boy, and a fussy dress and ringlets for the girl. The smiles are a little tight, but smiles were, in those days. They are dress-up smiles. It must have been a special occasion: a vacation, a religious holiday, somebody’s birthday.

“That was before the war,” says Zenia. “It was before things got really bad. I was never part of that world. I was born right after the war started; I was a war baby. Anyway, that’s all I have, this picture. It’s all that’s left of them. My aunt searched, after the war. There was nothing left:” She slides the photo carefully back into her wallet.

“What about the aunt?” says Roz. “Why didn’t they take her, too?”

“She wasn’t Jewish,” says Zenia. “She was my father’s sister. My father wasn’t Jewish either, but after the Nuremberg laws were passed he was treated as one, because he was married to one. Hell, even my mother wasn’t Jewish! Not by religion. She was Catholic, as a matter of fact. But two of her four grandparents were Jewish, so she was classified as a mischling, first degree. A mixture. Did you know they had degrees?”

“Yes,” says Roz. So Zenia is a mixture, like herself?

“Some of those mischlings survived longer than the real Jews,” says Zenia. “My parents, for instance. I guess they thought it wouldn’t happen to them. They thought of themselves as good Germans. They weren’t in touch with the Jewish community,’—so they didn’t even hear the rumours; or if they did, they didn’t believe them. It’s astonishing what people will refuse to believe.”

“How about your aunt?” says Roz. “Why did she get out? If she wasn’t Jewish at all, wasn’t she safe?” Though come to think of it, safe is a silly word to use in such a context.

“Because of me,” says Zenia. “They would have figured out sooner or later that my parents had three children, not two. Or some neighbour of my aunt’s would have seen or heard me, and turned us in. A baby, in the home of an unmarried woman who just a little while before had no baby at all. People get a huge bang out of denunciation, you know. It makes them feel morally superior. God, how I hate that smug self-righteousness! People patting themselves on the back for murder.

“So my aunt started looking for a way to get me out, and then she found herself in a whole other world—the underground world, the black market world. She’d always lived above ground, but she had to go into that other world in order to protect me. There isn’t a place on earth where that world doesn’t exist; all you have to do is take a few steps off to the side, a few steps down, and there it is, side by side with the world people like to think of as normal. Remember the fifties, remember trying to get an abortion? It only took three phone calls. Provided you could pay, of course. You’d get handed along the line, to somebody who knew someone. It was the same in Germany at that time, for things like passports, only you had to be careful who you asked.

“What my aunt needed was some fake papers saying I was her daughter, by a husband killed in France, and she got some; but they wouldn’t have stood up to much serutiny. I mean, look at me! I’m hardly Aryan. My brother and my sister were both blond, and my father had light hair; my mother too. I must be some kind of throwback. So she knew she had to get me away, she had to get me right out. If they caught her she’d be up for treachery, because she was helping me. Some treachery! Christ, I was only six months old!”

Roz doesn’t—know what to say. “Poor you,” which is what she murmurs to the stories of workplace crises or personal mishap or romantic catastrophe, as told to her by her friends, hardly seems to cover it. “How awful,” she says,

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” says Zenia. “I was hardly conscious. I didn’t know what was going on, so it was no strain on me; though I must have registered that things had changed and my mother wasn’t there any more. Anyway my aunt got in touch with your father, or I should say your father’s friends. It was through the man who arranged the papers for her—that man knew someone who knew someone else, and after they’d checked her out and skimmed some money off her they passed her on. All black markets work that way. Try buying drugs, it’s the same thing: they check you out, they pass you on. Luckily my aunt had some money, and her desperation must have been convincing. As I said, she’d never married, so I became her cause; she risked her life for me. It was for her brother, too. She didn’t know then he’d been killed, she thought he might come back. Then, if he did and if she’d failed, what could she say?

“So your father and his friends got her out, through Denmark and then through Sweden. They told her it was relatively easy. She didn’t have an accent or anything, and she looked as German as they come.

“My aunt was a kind of mother to me. She brought me up, she did her best, but she wasn’t a happy woman. She’d been ruined, destroyed really, by the war. The loss of her brother and his family, and then the guilt also—that she hadn’t been able to stop any of it, that she had somehow participated. She talked about your father a lot—what a hero he was. It gave her back a little bit of faith. So I used to pretend that your father was my father, and that some day he would come to get me, and I’d move into his house. I wasn’t even sure where he lived.”

Roz is practically in tears. She remembers her father, the old rascal; she’s glad to know that his dubious talents were of service, because he’s still her favourite parent and. she welcomes the chance to think well of him. The two martinis aren’t helping, in the get-a-grip department. How lucky she herself has been, with her three children and her husband, her money, her work, her house. How unfair life is! Where was God when all of this was happening, in sordid Europe—the injustice, the merciless brutality, the suffering? In a meeting, is where. Not answering the phone. Guilt wells up out of her eyes. She would like to give Zenia something, just a little something, to make up to her for God’s neglect, but what could possibly be adequate?

Then she hears a small voice, a small voice clear as ice-water, right at the back of her head. It’s the voice of experience. It’s the voice of Tony. Zenia lies, it says.

“Do you remember Tony?” Roz blurts out, before she can stop herself. “Tony Fremont from McClung Hall?” How can she be such a jerk, such a shit, as to question Zenia’s story, even in her head? No one would he about such a thing. It would be too mean, it would be too cynical, it would be virtually sacrilegious!

“Oh yes,” Zenia laughs. “That was a million years ago! Tony and her funny war collection! I see she’s written a couple of books. She was always a bright little thing.”

Bright little thing causes Roz to feel, by comparison, large and dim. But she trudges forward. “Tony told me you were a White Russian,” she says. “A child prostitute, in Paris. And Charis says your mother was a gypsy, and was stoned to death by Roumanian peasants:”

“Charis?” says Zenia.

“She used to be Karen,” says Roz. “You lived with her on the Island. You told her you had cancer,” she adds, pressing relentlessly on.

Zenia looks out the window of the sun room, and sips at the edge of her martini. “Oh yes, Charis,” she says. “I’m afraid I told some awful—I didn’t always tell the truth, when I was younger. I think I was emotionally disturbed. After my aunt died I had some hard times. She had nothing, no money; we lived over storefronts. And when she was gone, nobody would help me. This was in Waterloo, in the fifties. It wasn’t a good time or place for orphans who didn’t fit in.

“So part of what I told Tony was true, I did work as a hooker. And I didn’t want to be Jewish, I didn’t want to be connected with all of that in any way. I guess I was running away from the past. That was then, this is now, right? I even got my nose done, after I’d gone to England and landed a magazine job and could afford it. I suppose I was ashamed. When those things get done to you, you feel more ashamed than if you’d done them yourself to other people. You think maybe you deserved it; or else that you should have been stronger—able to defend yourself, or something. You feel—well, beaten up.

“So I made up a different past for myself—it was better to be a White Russian. Denial, I guess you could call it. I lived with a White Russian; once, when I was sixteen, so I knew something about them.

“With Karen—with Charis—I must have been having some kind of a nervous breakdown. I needed to be mothered; my shrink says it was because my own mother was taken away. I shouldn’t have said I had cancer, because I didn’t. But I was sick, in another kind of way. Karen did wonders for me.

“It wasn’t a good thing—it was terrible, I suppose, to tell those stories. I owe both of them an apology. But I didn’t think I could’ve told them the real story, what really happened to me. They wouldn’t have understood it.”

She gives Roz a long look, straight out of her deep indigo eyes, and Roz is touched. She, Roz—she alone—has been chosen, to understand. And she does, she does.

“After I left Canada,” Zenia says, “things got worse. I had big ideas, but nobody seemed to share them. Looking the way I do doesn’t help, you know. Men don’t see you as a person, they just see the body, and so that’s all you see yourself. You think of your body as a tool, something to use. God, I’m tired of men! They’re so easy to amuse. All you have to do to get their attention is take off your clothes. After a while you want a bit more of a challenge, you know?

“I worked as a stripper for a year or so—that’s when I had my breasts done, this man I was living with paid for it—and I got into some bad habits. Coke first, and then heroin. It’s a wonder I’m not dead. Maybe I was trying to be, because of my family. You’d think that because I didn’t really know them it wouldn’t hurt. But it’s like being born minus a leg. There’s this terrible absence.

“It took me a long time, but I’ve finally come to terms with myself. I’ve worked it through. I was in therapy for years. It was hard, but now I know who I am.”

Roz is impressed. Zenia has not evaded, she hasn’t wriggled or squirmed. She has owned up, she has admitted, she’s confessed. That shows—what? Honesty? Good will? Maturity? Some admirable quality. The nuns used to put a high value on confessing, so much so that Roz once confessed to placing a dog turd in the cloakroom, something she had not actually done. They didn’t let you off punishment for confessing, though—she got the strap, all the same, and when you confessed to the priest you had to do penance—but they thought more highly of you, or so they said.

Also Zenia has been out in the world. The wide world, wider than Toronto; the deep world, deeper than the small pond where Roz is such a large and sheltered frog. Zenia makes Roz feel not only protected, but lax. Her own battles have been so minor.

“You’ve done really well,” Roz says. “I mean—what a story! It’s great material!” She’s thinking of the magazine, because this is the kind of story they like to run: inspirational, a success story. A story about overcoming fears and obstacles, about facing up to yourself and becoming a whole person. It’s like the story they did two months ago, about the woman who fought bulimia to a standstill. Roz finds stories about the one lost sheep who caused more joy in Heaven hard to resist.

There’s a story in the aunt, as well: Wise Woman World appreciates real-life heroines, ordinary women who have been more than ordinarily courageous.

To her amazement, and also to her horror, Zenia begins to cry. Big tears roll from her eyes, which remain open and fixed on Roz. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s all it amounts to. It’s just a story, it’s just material. Something to use:”

Roz, for gosh sake, get your big fat foot out of your mouth, thinks Roz. Miss Tact of 1983. “Oh honey, I didn’t mean it that way,” she says.

“No,” says Zenia. “I know. Nobody does. It’s just, I’m so strung out. I’ve been on the edge, I’ve been out there so long; I’ve had to do it alone. I can’t work it out with men, they all want the same thing from me, I just can’t make those kinds of compromises any more. I mean, you’ve got all this, you’ve got a home, a husband, you’ve got your kids. You’re a family, you’ve got solid ground under your feet. I’ve never had any of that, I’ve never fitted in. I’ve lived out of a suitcase, all my life; even now it’s hand-to-mouth, that’s what freelancing means, and I’m running out of energy, you know? There’s just no base, there’s no permanence!”

How badly Roz has misjudged Zenia! Now she sees her in a new light. It’s a tempestuous light, a bleak light, a lonely, rainy fight; in the midst of it Zenia struggles on, buffeted by men, blown by the winds of fate. She’s not what she appears, a beautiful and successful career woman. She’s a waif, a’ homeless wandering waif, she’s faltering by the wayside, she’s falling. Roz opens her heart, and spreads her wings, her cardboard angel’s wings, her invisible dove’s wings, her warm sheltering wings, and takes her in.

“Don’t you worry” she says, in her most reassuring voice. “We’ll work something out.”