XLII

Roz’s father, the Great Unknown. Great to others, unknown to her. Or let’s just say—thinks Roz, in her orange bathrobe, in the cellar, finishing off the crumbs of the Nanaimo bar, hungrily licking the plate—that he had nine lives, and she herself was only aware of three or four of them. You never knew when someone from one of her father’s previous lives might reappear.

Once upon a time Roz was not Roz. Instead she was Rosalind;—and her middle name was Agnes, after Saint Agnes and also her mother, though she didn’t. tell the girls at school about that because she didn’t want to be nicknamed Aggie, the way her mother was, behind her back, by the roomers. No one would dare call her mother Aggie to her face. She was far too respectable for that. She was Mrs. Greenwood, to them.

So Roz was Rosalind Greenwood instead of Roz Grunwald, and she lived with her mother in her mother’s rooming house on Huron Street. The house was tall and narrow and made of red brick, with a sagging porch on the front that Roz’s father was going to fix, maybe, sometime. Her father was away. He’d been away as long as Roz could remember. It was because of the war.

Roz could remember the war, although not very well. She remembered the air raid sirens, from before she went to school, because her mother had made her crawl underneath the bed and there was a spider. Her mother had saved up bacon fat and tin cans, though what the soldiers would do with those things Roz couldn’t imagine, and later, at school everyone gave nickels to the Red Cross because of all the orphans. The orphans stood on piles of rubble, and had raggedy clothes and huge, unsmiling eyes, appealing eyes, accusing eyes, because their parents had been killed by bombs. Sister Mary Paul showed pictures of them, in Grade One, and Roz cried because she was so sorry for them and was told to control herself, and couldn’t eat her lunch, and was told she had to finish it because of the orphans, and asked for a second helping because if finishing one lunch was going to help the orphans, then eating a second one would help them even more, although she wasn’t sure how. Maybe God had ways of arranging such things. Maybe the solid, visible food Roz ate got turned into invisible spiritual food and flown through the air, straight into the orphans, sort of like Communion, where the Host looked like a round soda cracker but was really Jesus. In any case, Roz was more than willing to help out.

Somewhere over there, behind the piles of rubble, out of sight among the dark dumps of trees in the distance, was her father. She hoped some of the food she ate would bypass the orphans and get into him. That was how Roz thought when she was in Grade One.

But the war was over, so where was Roz’s father now? “On his way,” said her mother. There was a third chair always placed ready at the kitchen table for him. Roz could hardly wait.

Because Roz’s father was away Roz’s mother had to run the rooming house all by herself. It was wearing her down, as she told Roz, almost every day. Roz could see it: her mother had a stringy look, as if the soft parts of her were being scraped away, as if her bones were getting closer and closer to the surface. She had a long face, grey-streaked brown hair pulled back and pinned, and an apron. She didn’t talk much, and when she did talk it was in short, dense clusters of words. “Least said soonest mended,” she would say. “A stitch in time saves nine. Scarce as hen’s teeth. Blood is thicker than water. Handsome is as handsome does. Safe as houses. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Little pitchers have big ears:” She said Roz was a chatterbox and her tongue wagged at both ends.

She had hard hands with enlarged knuckles, red from washing. “Look at my hands,” she would say, as if her hands proved something. Usually what they proved was that Roz had to help out more. “Your mother is a saint,” said little Miss Hines, who lived on the third floor. But if Roz’s mother was a saint, Roz did not especially want to be one.

When Roz’s father came back he would help out. If Roz was good, he would come back sooner, because God would be pleased with her and would answer her prayers. But sometimes she couldn’t always remember. When that happened, when she did a sin, she would get frightened; she would see her father in a boat, crossing the ocean, and a huge wave washing over him or a bolt of lightning striking him, which would be God’s way of punishing her. Then she needed to pray extra hard, until Sunday when she could go to confession. She would pray on her knees, beside her bed, with the tears running down her face. If it was a bad sin she would also scrub the toilet, even if it had just been done. God liked well-scrubbed toilets.

Roz wondered what her father would be like. She had no real memory of him, and the photo her mother kept on her dark, polished, forbidden bureau was just of a man, a large man in a black coat whose face Roz could scarcely make out because it was in shadow. This photo revealed none of the magic Roz ascribed to her father. He was important, he was doing important, secret things that could not be spoken about. They were war things, even though the war was over.

“Risking his neck,” said her mother. “How?” said Roz.

“Eat up your supper,” said her mother, “there are children starving in Europe.”

What he was doing was so important that he didn’t have much time to write letters, although letters did arrive at intervals, from faraway places: France, Spain, Switzerland, Argentina. Her mother read these letters to herself, turning an odd shade of mottled pink while she did it. Roz saved the stamps.

What Roz’s mother did mostly was cleaning. “This is a clean, respectable house,” she would say, when she was bawling out the roomers for something they’d done wrong, some mess they’d made in the hall or bathtub ring they’d failed to wipe off. She brushed the stair treads and vacuumed the second-floor hall runner, she scrubbed the linoleum in the front vestibule and waxed it and did the same with the kitchen floor. She cleaned the bathroom fixtures with Old Dutch cleanser and the toilets with Sani-Flush, and did the windows with Windex, and washed the lace curtains with Sunlight Soap, scrubbing them carefully by hand on a washboard, although she did the sheets and towels in the wringer-washer that was kept in the back shed adjoining the kitchen; there were a lot of sheets and towels, because of the roomers. She dusted twice a week and put drain cleaner down all the drains, because otherwise the roomers’ hair would clog them up. This hair was an obsession of hers; she acted as if the roomers tore great handfuls of it out of their heads and stuffed it down the drains on purpose.

Sometimes she stuck a crochet hook down the sink drain on the second floor and hauled up a wad of slimy, soap-covered, festering hair. “See?” she would say to Roz. “Riddled with germs.

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She expected Roz to help her with all of this endless cleaning. “I work my fingers to the bone,” she’d say. “For you. Look at my hands,” and it was no good for Roz to say that she didn’t really care whether the second-floor toilet was clean or not because she didn’t use that one. Roz’s mother wanted the house to be decent for her father when he came, and since they never knew when that might be, it had to be decent all the time.

There were three roomers. Roz’s mother had the secondfloor front room, and Roz had one of the two rooms on the third floor—the attic, her mother called it. Little Miss Hines lived in the other attic room, with her woolly slippers and her Viyella plaid bathrobe, which she wore to go down to take her bath because the bathroom on the third floor had only a sink and a toilet. Miss Hines was not young. She worked in a shoe store in the daytime, and played the radio softly in her room at night—dance music—and read a lot of paperback detective novels. “There’s nothing like a good murder,” she would tell Roz. She seemed to find these books comforting. She read them in bed, and also in the bathtub; Roz would find them, opened and face down on the floor, their pages slightly damp. She would carry them back upstairs for Miss Hines, looking at the covers: mansions with storm clouds and lightning, men with felt hats pulled down over their faces, dead people with knives sticking into them, young women with large breasts, in their nightgowns, done in strange colours, dark but lurid, with the blood shiny and thick as molasses in a puddle on the floor.