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

“He could lie like God himself:”

“Bite your tongue! God don’t lie.”

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

“What’s a border?” asks Roz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She can sure hold her liquor,” says Uncle Joe. “She’s a babe,” says Uncle George.

“What’s a babe?” says Roz.

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

Mr. Carruthers knows about the drinking that’s going on in the cellar, and in the kitchen too. He can smell the smoke. He’s still not supposed to drink or smoke in his own room but he starts doing it, more than he did before. One afternoon he opens his door and corners Roz in the front hall.

“Those men are Jews,” he whispers. Beer fumes fill the air. “We sacrificed our life for this country and they’re handing it over to the Jews!”

Roz is galvanized. She runs to find the uncles, and asks them right away. If they really are Jews she might take a crack at converting them, and astonish Sister Conception.

“Me, I’m a U.S. citizen,” says Uncle George, laughing a little. “I got the passport to prove it. Joe, he’s a Jew”

“I’m a Hungarian, he’s a Pole,” says Uncle Joe. “I’m a Yugoslav, he’s a Dutchman. This other passport says I’m Spanish. Your father now, he’s half a German. The other half, that’s the Jew”

This is a shock to Roz. She feels disappointment—no spiritual triumphs for her, because she could never hope to change her father in any way, she can see that—and then guilt: what if the Sisters find out? Worse, what if they’ve known all along and haven’t told her? She pictures the malicious glee on Julia Warden’s face, the whisperings that will go on behind her back.