Roz said, “It’s not black, it’s brown,” and Julia Warden said, “It’s black. Anyways, you’re not a real Catholic, my Mum says,” and Roz told her to shut up or she’d make her, and Julia Warden said, “Where’s your father anyways? My Mum says he’s a DP,” and Roz grabbed Julia Warden’s arm and did the Chinese burn on her, and Julia Warden screamed. Sister Cecilia came rustling up and said what was all the commotion, and Julia Warden ratted, and Sister Cecilia told Roz that this was not the Christmas spirit and she shouldn’t pick on girls smaller than her, and she was lucky Sister Conception wasn’t there because if she was, Roz would get the strap. “Rosalind Greenwood, you just never learn, “ she said sadly.
Walking home from school, Roz spends her time thinking about what she will do to Julia Warden tomorrow, to get even; until the last block, when the two Protestant boys who live on the corner see her and chase her along the sidewalk, yelling “The Pope stinks!” Almost to her house they catch her and rub snow in her face, and Roz kicks their legs. They let her go, laughing and yelling with mock pain, or real pain—“Ouch, ouch, she kicked me”—and then she picks up her snowy books and runs the rest of the way, not crying yet, and scrambles up her front steps onto her porch. “You’re not allowed on my property!” she yells. A snowball whizzes past her. If Roz’s mother were there, she would chase these boys off: “Ragamuffins!” she would say, and they would scatter. She sometimes takes the flat of her hand to Roz, but she won’t let anyone else lay a finger on her. Except the nuns, of course.
Roz brushes off the snow—she’s not supposed to track snow into the house—and goes inside, and down the hall to the kitchen. Two men are sitting at the kitchen table. They’re wearing DP clothes, not shabby ones, not worn out, but DP clothes all the same, Roz can tell because of the shape. On the table is a bottle that Roz knows straight away has liquor in it—she’s seen bottles like that on the sidewalk—and in front of each of the men there’s a glass. Roz’s mother is not in the room. “Where’s my mother?” she says.
“She went to get food,” says one of the men. “She didn’t have nothing to eat:”
The other one says, “We’re your new uncles. Uncle George, Uncle Joe.”
Roz says, “I don’t have any uncles,” and Uncle George says, “Now, you do.” Then both of them laugh. They have loud laughs, and strange voices. DP voices, but with something else, some other accent. Something that’s like the movies.
“Sit,” says Uncle George hospitably, as if it’s his house, as if Roz is a dog. Roz is unsure of the situation—there have never been two men in the kitchen before—but she sits anyway.
Uncle George is the bigger one; he has a high forehead and light wavy hair slicked straight back. Roz can smell his hair goo, sweet, like theatres. He’s smoking a brown cigarette in a black holder. “Ebony,” he says to Roz. “You know what ebony is? It’s a tree.”
“She knows,” says Uncle Joe. “She’s a smart girl.” Uncle Joe is smaller, with hunched-up shoulders and spindly hands, and dark hair, almost black, and huge dark eyes. He has a tooth missing, off to one side. He sees Roz staring, and says, “Once, I had a gold tooth in this place. I keep it in my pocket:” And he does. He takes out a small wooden box, painted red with a design of tiny green flowers, and opens it, and there inside is a gold tooth.
“Why?” says Roz.
“You don’t want to leave a gold tooth lying around in your mouth, people get ideas,” says Uncle Joe.
Roz’s mother comes in, carrying two brown paper grocery bags, which she sets down on the counter. She is flushed, and pleased-looking. She says nothing at all about the drinking, nothing about the smoke. “These are friends of your father’s,” she says. “They were all in the war together. He’s coming, he’ll be here soon.” Then she bustles out again; she needs to go to the butcher’s, she says, because this is an occasion. Occasions call for meat.
“What did you do in the war?” says Roz, eager to find out more about her father.
The two uncles laugh, and look at each other. “We was horse thieves,” says Uncle George.
“The best horse thieves,” says Uncle Joe. “No. Your father, he was the best. He could steal a horse—”
“He could steal a horse from right between your legs, you wouldn’t notice,” says Uncle George. “He could lie—”
“He could lie like God himself:”
“Bite your tongue! God don’t lie.”
“You’re right, God says nothing. But your father, he never blinked. He could walk through a border like it wasn’t there,” says Uncle Joe.
“What’s a border?” asks Roz.
“A border is a line on a map,” says Uncle Joe.
“A border is where it gets dangerous,” says Uncle George. “It’s where you need a passport.”
“Passport. See?” says Uncle Joe. He shows Roz his passport, with his picture in it. Then he shows her another, with the same picture but a different name. He has three of them. He fans them out like a deck of cards. Uncle George has four.
“A man with only one passport is like a man with only one hand,” he says solemnly.
“Your father, he has more passports than anyone. The best, like I said.” They raise their glasses, and drink to Roz’s father.
Roz’s mother makes chicken, with mashed potatoes and gravy, and boiled carrots; she is cheerful, more cheerful than Roz has ever seen her, and urges the uncles to have more. Or maybe she’s not cheerful, maybe she’s nervous. She keeps looking at her watch. Roz is nervous, too: when will her father arrive? “He’ll be here when he’s here,” say the uncles.
Roz’s father comes back in the middle of the night. Her mother wakes her up, and whispers, “Your father’s back,” almost as if she’s apologizing for something, and takes Roz downstairs in her nightgown, and there he is, sitting at the table, in the third chair that was kept for him. He sits easily, filling the space, as if he’s always been there. He’s large and barrel-shaped, bearded, bear-headed. He smiles and holds out his arms. “Come, give Papa a kiss!”
Roz looks around: who is this Papa? Then she understands that he means himself. It’s true, what Julia Warden said: her father is a DP She can tell by the way he talks.
Now Roz’s life has been cut in two. On one side is Roz, and her mother, and the rooming house, and the nuns and the other girls at school. This part seems already in the past, although it’s still going on. That’s the side where there are mostly women, women who have power, which means they have power over Roz, because even though God and Jesus are men it’s her mother and the nuns who have the last word; except for the priests of course, but that’s just on Sundays. On the other side is her father, filling the kitchen with his bulk, his loud voice, his multilayered smell; filling the house with it, filling up all the space in her mother’s gaze so that Roz is pushed off to the edge, because her mother, who is so unbending, bends. She abdicates. She says, “Ask your father.” She looks at—Roz’s father mutely, the same kind of mushy 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.