Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [170]
Now, finally, there’s a messenger, bringing news from that distant country, the country of the past, the country of the war. But why does that messenger have to be Zenia? It grates on Roz that Zenia has this news and Roz does not. It’s as if her father has left something in his will, some treasure, to a perfect stranger, some drifter he’d met in a bar, and nothing for his own daughter. Didn’t he know how much she wanted to know?
Maybe there’s nothing in it. On the other hand, what if there is? It’s at least worth a listen. It’s at least worth a flutter.
“It’s a long story,” says Zenia. “I’d love to tell you about it, when you’ve got the time. If you want to hear it, that is.” She smiles, nods at Mitch, and walks away. She moves confidently, nonchalantly, as if she knows she’s just made the one offer that Roz can’t possibly refuse.
42
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 clumps 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