Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 25

"Don't you get cheeky," Roxanne said. "Are you up to cards?"

"I hate cards."

"Well, have you got Chinese checkers in the house?"

Roxanne directed this question at Old Mrs. Crozier, who first said she had no idea, then wondered if there might be a board in a drawer of the dining-room buffet.

So I was sent down to look and came back with the board and a jar of marbles.

Roxanne set the game up over Mr. Crozier's legs, and she and I and Mr. Crozier played, Old Mrs. Crozier saying that she had never understood the game or been able to keep her marbles straight. (To my surprise, she seemed to offer this as a joke.) Roxanne might squeal when she made a move or groan whenever somebody jumped over one of her marbles, but she was careful never to disturb the patient. She held her body still and set her marbles down like feathers. I tried to do the same, because she would widen her eyes warningly at me if I didn't. All without losing her dimple.

I remembered Young Mrs. Crozier, Sylvia, saying to me in the car that her husband did not welcome conversation. It tired him out, she told me, and when he was tired he could become irritable. So I thought, If ever there was a time for him to become irritable, it's now. Being forced to play a silly game on his death-bed, when you could feel his fever in the sheets.

But Sylvia must have been wrong. He had developed greater patience and courtesy than she was perhaps aware of. With inferior people-Roxanne was surely an inferior person-he made himself tolerant, gentle. When likely all he wanted to do was lie there and meditate on the pathways of his life and gear up for his future.

Roxanne patted the sweat off his forehead, saying, "Don't get excited. You haven't won yet!"

"Roxanne," he said. "Roxanne. Do you know whose name that was, Roxanne?"

"Hmm?" she said, and I broke in. I couldn't help it.

"It was Alexander the Great's wife's name." My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright sc.r.a.ps of information.

"Is that so?" Roxanne said. "And who is that supposed to be? Great Alexander?"

I realized something when I looked at Mr. Crozier at that moment. Something shocking, saddening.

He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance was a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

On the first day, she had worn shorts, as I did, but the next time and always after that Roxanne wore a dress of some stiff and shiny light-green material. You could hear it rustle as she ran up the stairs. She brought a fleecy pad for Mr. Crozier, so that he would not develop bedsores. She was dissatisfied with the arrangement of his bedclothes, always had to put them to rights. But however she scolded her movements never irritated him, and she made him admit to feeling more comfortable afterward.

She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would have called s.m.u.tty and would not have allowed around our house, except when they came from certain of my father's relatives, who had practically no other kind of conversation.

These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.

Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?

Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?

The answers always came with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the listener of having a dirty mind.

And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of joke I didn't believe my mother knew existed, often involving s.e.x with sheep or hens or porcupines.

"Isn't that awful?" she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn't know this stuff if her husband didn't bring it home from the garage.

The fact that Old Mrs. Crozier snickered disturbed me as much as the jokes themselves. I wondered if she didn't actually get the jokes but simply enjoyed listening to whatever Roxanne said. She sat there with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face, as if she'd been given a present that she knew she'd like, even though she hadn't got the wrapping off it yet.

Mr. Crozier didn't laugh, but he never laughed, really. He raised his eyebrows, pretending to disapprove, as if he found Roxanne outrageous but endearing all the same. I tried to tell myself that this was just good manners, or grat.i.tude for her efforts, whatever they might be.

I myself made sure to laugh so that Roxanne would not put me down as an innocent prig.

The other thing she did to keep things lively was tell us about her life-how she had come down from some lost little town in northern Ontario to Toronto to visit her older sister, when she was only fourteen, then got a job at Eaton's, first cleaning up in the cafeteria, then being noticed by one of the managers, because she worked fast and was always cheerful, and suddenly finding herself a salesgirl in the glove department. (She made this sound like being discovered by Warner Bros.) And who should have come in one day but Barbara Ann Scott, the skating star, who bought a pair of elbow-length white kid gloves.

Meanwhile, Roxanne's sister had so many boyfriends that she'd flip a coin to see whom she'd go out with almost every night, and she employed Roxanne to meet the rejects regretfully at the front door of the rooming house where they lived, while she herself and her pick of the night sneaked out the back. Roxanne said that maybe that was how she had developed such a gift of gab. And pretty soon some of the boys she had met this way were taking her out, instead of her sister. They did not know her real age.

"I had me a ball," she said.

I began to understand that there were certain talkers-certain girls-whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people-people like me-who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

Mr. Crozier sat propped up on his pillows and looked for all the world as if he were happy. Happy just to close his eyes and let her talk, then open his eyes and find her still there, like a chocolate bunny on Easter morning. And then with his eyes open follow every twitch of her candy lips and sway of her sumptuous bottom.

The time Roxanne spent upstairs was as long as the time she spent downstairs, giving the ma.s.sage. I wondered if she was being paid. If she wasn't, how could she afford to stay so long? And who could be paying her but Old Mrs. Crozier?

Why?

To keep her stepson happy and comfortable? To keep herself entertained in a curious way?

One afternoon, when Roxanne had gone downstairs, Mr. Crozier said that he felt thirstier than usual. I went to get him some more water from the pitcher that was always in the refrigerator. Roxanne was packing up to go home.

"I never meant to stay so late," she said. "I wouldn't want to run into that schoolteacher."

I didn't understand for a moment.

"You know. Syl-vi-a. She's not crazy about me, either, is she? She ever mention me when she drives you home?"

I said that Sylvia had never mentioned Roxanne to me during any of our drives.

"Dorothy says she doesn't know how to handle him. She says I make him a lot happier than what she does. Dorothy says that. I wouldn't be surprised if she even told her that to her face."

I thought of how Sylvia ran upstairs to her husband's room every afternoon when she got home, before even speaking to me or her mother-in-law, her face flushed with eagerness and desperation. I wanted to say something about that-I wanted to defend her-but I didn't know how. And people as confident as Roxanne often seemed to get the better of me.

"You sure she never says anything about me?"

I said again that she didn't. "She's tired when she gets home."

"Yeah. Everybody's tired. Some just learn to act like they aren't."

I did say something then, to balk her. "I quite like her."

"You qwat like her?" Roxanne mocked.

Playfully, sharply, she jerked at a strand of the bangs I had recently cut for myself.

"You ought to do something decent with your hair."

Dorothy says.

If Roxanne wanted admiration, which was her nature, what was it that Old Mrs. Crozier wanted? I had a feeling that there was mischief stirring, but I could not pin it down. Maybe it was just a desire to have Roxanne, her liveliness, in the house, double time?

Midsummer pa.s.sed. Water was low in the wells. The sprinkler truck stopped coming and some stores put up sheets of what looked like yellow cellophane in their windows to keep their goods from fading. Leaves were spotty, the gra.s.s dry.

Old Mrs. Crozier kept her garden man hoeing, day after day. That's what you do in dry weather, hoe and hoe to bring up any moisture that you can find in the ground underneath.

Summer school at the college would end after the second week of August, and then Sylvia Crozier would be home every day.

Mr. Crozier still seemed glad to see Roxanne, but he often fell asleep. He could drift off without letting his head fall back, during one of her jokes or anecdotes. Then after a moment he would wake up again and ask where he was.

"Right here, you sleepy noodle. You're supposed to be paying attention to me. I should bat you one. Or how about I try tickling you instead?"

Anybody could see how he was failing. There were hollows in his cheeks like an old man's, and the light shone through the tops of his ears, as if they were not flesh but plastic. (Though we didn't say plastic then; we said celluloid.) My last day of work, Sylvia's last day of teaching, was a ma.s.sage day. Sylvia had to leave for the college early, because of some ceremony, so I walked across town, arriving when Roxanne was already there. She and Old Mrs. Crozier were in the kitchen, and they both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was coming, as if I had interrupted them.

"I ordered them specially," Old Mrs. Crozier said.

She must have been talking about the macaroons sitting in the baker's box on the table.

"Yeah, but I told you," Roxanne said. "I can't eat that stuff. Not no way no how."

"I sent Hervey down to the bakeshop to get them."

"O.K., let Hervey eat them. I'm not kidding-I break out something awful."

"I thought we'd have a treat," Old Mrs. Crozier said. "Seeing it's the last day we've got before-"

"Last day before she parks her b.u.t.t here permanently? Yeah, I know. Doesn't help to have me breaking out like a spotted hyena."

Who was it whose b.u.t.t was parked permanently?

Sylvia's. Sylvia.

Old Mrs. Crozier was wearing a beautiful black silk wrapper, with water lilies and geese on it. She said, "No chance of having anything special with her around. You'll see. You won't be able to even get to see him with her around."

"So let's get going and get some time today. Don't bother about this stuff. It's not your fault. I know you got it to be nice."

"'I know you got it to be nice,'" Old Mrs. Crozier imitated in a mean, mincing voice, and then they both looked at me, and Roxanne said, "Pitcher's where it always is."

I took Mr. Crozier's water out of the fridge. It occurred to me that they could offer me one of the golden macaroons sitting in the box, but apparently it did not occur to them.

I'd expected Mr. Crozier to be lying back on the pillows with his eyes closed, but he was wide awake.

"I've been waiting," he said, and took a breath. "For you to get here," he said. "I want to ask you-do something for me. Will you?"

I said sure.

"Keep it a secret?"

I had been worried that he might ask me to help him to the commode that had recently appeared in his room, but surely that would not have to be a secret.

He told me to go to the bureau across from his bed and open the left-hand drawer, and see if I could find a key there.

I did so. I found a large, heavy, old-fashioned key.

He wanted me to go out of his room and shut the door and lock it. Then hide the key in a safe place, perhaps in the pocket of my shorts.

I was not to tell anybody what I had done.

I was not to let anybody know I had the key until his wife came home, and then I was to give it to her privately. Did I understand?

O.K.

He thanked me.

O.K.

All the time he was talking to me there was a film of sweat on his face and his eyes were as bright as if Roxanne were in the room.

"n.o.body is to get in."

"n.o.body is to get in," I repeated.

"Not my stepmother or-Roxanne. Just my wife."

I locked the door from the outside and put the key in my pocket. But then I was afraid that it could be seen through the light cotton material, so I went downstairs and into the back parlor and hid it between the pages of "I Promessi Sposi." I knew that Roxanne and Old Mrs. Crozier would not hear me, because the ma.s.sage was going on, and Roxanne was using her professional voice.

"I got my work cut out for me getting these knots out of you today."

And I heard Old Mrs. Crozier's voice, full of her new displeasure.

". . . punching harder than you normally do."

"Well, I gotta."

I was headed upstairs when a further thought came to me.

If he had locked the door himself-which was evidently what he wanted the others to think-and I had been sitting on the top step as usual, I would certainly have heard him and called out and roused the others in the house. So I went back down and sat on the bottom step of the front stairs, a position from which I could conceivably not have heard a thing.

The ma.s.sage seemed to be brisk and businesslike today; Roxanne was evidently not making jokes. Pretty soon I could hear her running up the back stairs.

She stopped. She said, "Hey, Bruce."

Bruce.

She rattled the k.n.o.b of the door.

"Bruce."

Then she must have put her mouth to the keyhole, so that he would hear but n.o.body else would. I could not make out exactly what she was saying, but I could tell that she was pleading. First teasing, then pleading. After a while she sounded as if she were saying her prayers.

When she gave that up, she started pounding on the door with her fists, not too hard but urgently.