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.
She must look dismayed, because Uncle George says, “Better to be a Jew than a murderer. They murdered six million, over there.”
“Five,” says Uncle Joe. “The rest was other things. Gypsies and homos.”
“Five, six, who’s counting?”
“Six what?” says Roz.
“Jews,” says Uncle George. “They burnt them in ovens, they piled them up in heaps. Little Rozzie-lind, you wouldn’t want to know. If they got their hands on you, back over there, they’d make you into a lampshade.”
He doesn’t explain to Roz that it would just be the skin. She has a picture of her entire body turned into a lampshade, with a lightbulb inside it and the light beaming out from her eyes and nostrils and ears and mouth. She must look terrified, because Uncle Joe says, “Don’t scare the kid. All of that, it’s over.
‘
“Why?” says Roz. “Why would they?” But neither of them answers.
“It’s not over till it’s over,” says Uncle George gloomily.
Roz has the feeling that someone has been lying to her. Not just about her father: about the war too, and about God. The starving orphans were bad enough but they weren’t the whole story. What else has been going on, with the ovens and the heaps and the lampshades, and why has God allowed it?
She doesn’t want to think about any of it any more because it’s too sad and confusing. Instead she takes to reading murder mysteries. She borrows them from Miss Hines and reads them at night, beside the streetlight coming through her attic window. She likes the furniture, and the outfits of the people in them, and the butlers and the maids. But mostly she likes the fact that there’s a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.
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.