The Robber Bride (52 page)

“I have an idea,” says Roz. “You could sell your shoes.” The ones Roz means are the red satin ones with the sparkly clips. 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. Miss Hines 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 man-eater.”

“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 whole 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, screaming 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.