“She should pull herself together,” Roz’s mother says to Roz’s father at the dinner table. Once Roz would have been the audience for such comments, but now she is just a little pitcher with big ears.
“Have a heart, Aggie,” says Roz’s father. No one else ever calls Roz’s mother Aggie to her face.
“Having a heart is all very well,” says Roz’s mother, “but it won’t put food on the table.”
But there is food on the table. Beef stew, mashed potatoes and gravy, and cooked cabbage. Roz is eating it.
On top of Mrs. Morley being fired, Miss Hines is down with a cold. “Just pray to God she doesn’t catch pneumonia,” says Roz’s mother. “Then we’ll have two useless women on our hands.”
Roz goes into Mrs. Morley’s room. Mrs. Morley is in bed, eating a sandwich; she shoves it under the covers, but smiles when she sees it’s only Roz. “Honey, you should always knock before entering a lady’s chamber,” she says.
“I have an idea,” says Roz. “You could sell your shoes.” The ones Roz means are the red satin ones with the sparkly dips. 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. MissHines 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 maneater.”
“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 whote 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.