“That’s another thing that’s gnawing at me,” Rosie informed her, looking anything but positive. “Who are you gonna get to clean? You said you’d start looking for somebody, but here it is my wedding day and you haven’t got nobody yet.”
“Actually, I have a lead on a suitable Guatemalan,” Aurora informed her blithely. It was a lie. What she had been concealing from Rosie was her recently taken decision to do her own housework, once Rosie married. Lately she had begun to feel that her memory project was making her too sedentary—all she did was sit in her garage, drink tea, and think about her life. Sometimes it was interesting to think about her life, but other times it wasn’t. Lately she had begun to think more often about the lives of others, Jerry for one, Rosie for another, than about her own life. Rosie’s continuing and profound anxiety about her upcoming marriage touched her, even though from moment to moment it might irritate her. She was beginning to wonder a little what it might feel like to be Rosie, and had concluded secretly that one way to find out might be to do her own housework. If she found she didn’t like being Rosie she could always seek the suitable Guatemalan.
Also she had become curious about being alone—in her own house, alone. One of the few things that struck her forcibly, just reading through her own desk diaries, was how little of her life had been spent alone. Rosie herself had been in her presence virtually every day for forty-two years; that in itself said something. Hector Scott, as she remembered him, had scarcely seemed to leave the house during the years they lived together, and Rudyard had not been much better. It occurred to her that she had reached her eighth decade without having experienced solitude to any depth. She had always supposed it wouldn’t suit her at all, yet she had never tried it, not really, not long enough to find out. Now, at last, through the advent of Arthur Cotton, she could try it. Far from fearing it, she had begun to suspect that she might rather like it.
“Nobody knows how to clean a house right no more—I don’t care if they’re from Guatemala or where,” Rosie said firmly, as they pulled into their street. She looked out the window at Arthur Cotton’s house, the house she would be moving into as a wife that very day, and felt sad, what her mother called “way down deep sad.” Why had she done it? Why had she said yes when she didn’t feel yes—not a real yes—not really?
“I’m going to be coming over every day, inspecting,” she said, clinging in her sadness to the one thing she felt sure she knew, which was how to tell a house that had been cleaned properly from one that hadn’t.
“You can inspect till you’re blue in the face,” Aurora assured her. “Anything you want to do in my house, do it. Just don’t tell Arthur you’re moonlighting, and I expect things will be fine.
“By the way,” she added, picking up an old question left hanging some while back in the conversation, “what do you think probity means?”
Rosie looked embarrassed. “I shouldn’t have said it,” she said. “I don’t have no idea what it means, really. I guess I could look it up in a dictionary, if I had a dictionary.”
Aurora swung into the driveway, but stopped the car well short of the garage. Three squirrels sat looking at them from the center of her yard.
Aurora looked at Rosie, waiting.
“I thought it had to do with sex—that’s what it sounds like,” Rosie admitted. “But I can’t tell if Arthur’s got much of it, because we still ain’t done it yet.”
“I see,” Aurora said. “He’s still nervous?”
“He’s still nervous,” Rosie confirmed.
“Good lord,” Aurora said. “That man’s had plenty of time to get it up. What do you think’s the matter?”
“Well, he’s out of practice, for one thing,” Rosie said. “He didn’t sleep with Eureka the last fourteen years before she died. That makes nearly fifteen years with no practice, counting all this time we’ve been courtin’.”
“Good lord,” Aurora said again. “No wonder you’re having difficulty thinking positively about this union. You have to try, though. Maybe once you get him off in Cozumel he’ll perk up.”
Rosie and Arthur had decided to honeymoon in Cozumel rather than Paris, because Rosie had become enraptured by a poster she saw at the travel agency.
“Maybe, but what if it don’t happen there either?” Rosie asked.
“Cozumel’s pretty romantic,” Aurora said, watching the three squirrels. “Surely Cozumel won’t fail you.”
“Yeah, but what if it fails me?” Rosie asked. “What do I do then? What if all he knows how to do is spend money? How many fur coats can you wear in a climate like this?”
“Not many,” Aurora admitted. “Probably we should have talked of this sooner. I suppose I assumed there had been progress recently. I thought perhaps the progress was what prompted you to say yes.”
“No, I just broke down,” Rosie said. “He’s sweet to me, you know. I finally just broke down.”
Then, overcome by her sorrows, the deep-down ones and the smaller ones too, Rosie began to cry. At first she was merely crying gently—then she began to sob, deeply and more deeply. For a time Aurora thought it might be a minor cry, a wedding-day cry, but she soon realized it was going to be a major release. She scooted across the seat and put her arms around Rosie, her maid, her oldest friend, and let her cry out her worries and her fears. The squirrels on her lawn had stopped watching—they were going about their business. Rosie’s thin chest heaved—she was very upset. Aurora held her and waited as the sun lifted its bright edge above the houses and touched the green lawns with light.
IV
Rosie’s Problem
1
Four months and a day after Rosie Dunlup married Arthur Cotton she was diagnosed as having cancer of the pancreas. She developed a pain in exercise class, and the pain got worse—within two weeks she was having trouble with exercises that she had excelled at for years.
Patsy Carpenter insisted that she go to the Medical Center and have herself looked at.
“I don’t want to, I’ve never been in a hospital other than to have my kids,” Rosie said. “I’m superstitious about hospitals. Last time I was inside one was when Royce got disemboweled.”
“Rosie, come on,” Patsy said. “It’s probably just something minor. Let’s just go check.”
“If I do, don’t tell Aurora,” Rosie said—the pain was actually pretty bad. “She ain’t even got a housekeeper yet, that place is a mess.”
“Oh, it is not,” Patsy said. “For a woman who’s scarcely lifted a finger her whole life other than to crook one at a man, I think she’s doing pretty well being her own maid.”
“I don’t, there’s dust behind every one of them curtains,” Rosie insisted.
But she went to the hospital, to be told that the cancer in her pancreas was well advanced and that there was really little to be done.
“Unfortunately, we can’t transplant the pancreas,” the young doctor said. “They’re doing some experimental work in Canada on pancreatic cancers—it involves icing you down. If you want to try that, we’ll help set it up.”
“I told you I was superstitious,” Rosie reminded Patsy, as Patsy drove her home. “If I’d never gone and found out, then I wouldn’t know, and maybe it would just go away.”
“A malignancy usually doesn’t go away,” Patsy said. “You go away.”
“They say attitude makes a lot of difference,” Rosie said. “Maybe I could try eating the right foods and stuff.”
“I think you should go to Canada and give this new treatment a try,” Patsy said. “It might just click with your metabolism or something. You might get the cancer stopped for a while. I’d try it, if it was me,” she added. In deference to Rosie’s condition she was driving more carefully than was her custom.
Rosie looked down at her expensive wedding ring and the even more expensive bracelet Arthur had given her right after their honeymoon. Neither looked right on her—neither ever would. She had the impulse to take them both off and throw them out the window, but
she didn’t. It would break Arthur’s heart, and Arthur, after all, was sweet. Now, if what the doctor said was true, Arthur was going to lose her anyway, probably without ever having quite had her. Cozumel hadn’t worked either—her marriage had only been sort of slightly consummated, once, and that once was, from her point of view, so brief and indefinite that she wasn’t quite sure that it counted as a consummation. Arthur was constantly apologizing for his impotence, and now she had to go home and tell him she had cancer. “I wish I’d died already, then at least I wouldn’t have to tell Arthur about this.”
“Rosie, don’t talk that way,” Patsy said.
“Why not?” Rosie asked. “It’s how I feel.”
2
“Well, I knew something was wrong,” Aurora said, later that day, when she had been given the news.
“Why, do I look like I’m dying, or what?” Rosie asked. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Aurora if she could move back in. Even if it did break Arthur’s heart, it was what she really wanted to do.
“You don’t look like you’re dying, but you haven’t been bullying me lately,” Aurora said. “For forty-two years you’ve bullied me virtually every day, but recently you stopped. I knew it meant trouble—I just didn’t know it meant this.”
“You don’t take time to clean behind the curtains, but it’s your life. I figured I’d try to let up,” Rosie said. “You said you’d get a Guatemalan lady, but you didn’t.”
“No, but I still can if I find that I’m faltering seriously,” Aurora said. “I just wanted to try it myself for a bit. Cleaning house gives me something to do.”
“You got the out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude, though,” Rosie said. “You was born with it and you’ve still got it. If you don’t want to see no dust, you just pretend that it isn’t there. That’ll always catch up with you, sooner or later.”
“Let it catch up with me,” Aurora said. “Now we have to deal with you and your problem, which is far more serious than a little dust behind my curtains.”
Rosie shrugged. “It’s got me—there ain’t much I can do,” she said.
“What does your new husband think?” Aurora asked.
“He wants me to have chemo and radiation,” Rosie said. “He says they got real good hospitals here, which I guess they do.”
“What about Canada and the new treatment the doctor mentioned?” Aurora asked. “I’ll go with you, if you want to try it. Arthur can come too, if he likes. We could leave tomorrow if you want to. It sounds as if speed might be of the essence.”
“I ain’t going to Canada, no way,” Rosie said. “I don’t know nobody up there and it’s too far away, anyway. My kids would just get lost trying to visit.
“Thanks, hon,” she said, looking at Aurora. “It’s nice of you to offer to go with me.”
“Of course I’ll go with you,” Aurora said. “What do you think I am?”
“Better in a crunch than Arthur, that’s for sure,” Rosie said. “That man’s been crying constantly, ever since I told him.”
“He just married you—I think he should be permitted some emotional display,” Aurora said. “I’ve come to like him better than I thought I would, if it’s any consolation.”
Rosie shook her head. Unfortunately she herself had not come to like her new husband better than she thought she would. She didn’t dislike him, either—it was just that, disappointingly, her affection had not really increased.
“He thinks it’s because I ain’t gettin’ no sex that I got cancer,” she told Aurora.
“How male,” Aurora said.
“Yeah, ain’t it?” Rosie said. “I told him if not getting any could cause it, half the world would be dead of cancer already, but he didn’t listen.”
“So, are you inclined to try the chemo and the radiation?” Aurora asked.
“I don’t think so,” Rosie said. In fact, she had not quite made up her mind on that score. “I think I’ll just try eating the right foods and stuff.”
“I’ll cook you the right foods,” Aurora assured her. “But it might be that you ought to try the right foods and a little chemo too.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Rosie said. “I guess right now it’s pretty much all I’m thinking about.”
“Sometimes I wish you’d married Theo,” Aurora said. “Then we’d have a Greek around the house. A Greek might be rather convenient at a time like this.”
“Theo was in love with you, not me,” Rosie reminded her. “He just started looking at me that way because you broke his heart.”
“It still might have worked, though,” Aurora said. “You never know what will work until you try.”
“You don’t have to remind me of that, I just tried Arthur and he don’t work,” Rosie said. “Now I’m stuck and I got cancer to boot.”
Later they drove over to the Acropolis Bar to see the Petrakis brothers. On the way they speculated on Vassily’s frustrated courtship of Patsy Carpenter. There had been a flurry of dates. Then Patsy had gone to L.A. for several months. Vassily, as far as anyone knew, had not been invited to visit. But now Patsy was back in Houston and there had been more dates.
“Vas likes women with skinny legs,” Theo explained, but the explanation did not entirely settle the question of whether Vassily and Patsy were, in all the usual respects, a couple.
At the bar Rosie immediately told the Petrakis brothers that she was dying.
“I thought I’d just get the bad news out of the way so we can have some fun,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind coming here and getting drunk every day for the rest of my life.”
“That’s the spirit,” Aurora said. “I’ll come with you. I’ll also get drunk with you. Once we’re drunk, Theo can drive us home.”
“Why him? You don’t like my driving?” Vassily asked. Aurora annoyed him. Theo also annoyed him. In fact, he and Theo had quarreled so much lately that they were thinking of selling the bar and going their separate ways. He himself was thinking of going to Nice—lots of French girls had skinny legs. He did not think, however, that it was the proper moment to inform the ladies that there might not always be an Acropolis Bar for them to get drunk in while Rosie died.
“Theo has a gentle spirit,” Aurora said, looking Vassily in the eye. “I’m not sure I can say the same about you.”
Theo had a hard time controlling his emotions. He had come to care for Rosie a lot. In the depths of his heart it might be Aurora that he coveted still, but Aurora was too much for him, and Rosie was such a nice woman. He would have married her anytime, but he didn’t hold it against her that she had chosen to marry someone rich. He choked back his tears and persuaded her to dance with him a little.
“I guess we’re all just passing through,” he said.
“That’s right,” Rosie said. “I just didn’t expect to get to the back door quite to soon.”
3
Since Arthur pleaded so, Rosie tried chemotherapy and radiation. They slowed the cancer down some, but not much—they slowed Rosie down a great deal more. Aurora crossed the street every day—indeed, several times every day—bringing her the right foods. Often she stayed most of the day and much of the night. Patsy visited, the Petrakis brothers visited, Pascal visited, Rosie’s children and grandchildren visited, but Rosie was only at peace when Aurora was there. Arthur and Aurora between them consumed most of the right foods.
After two weeks, Arthur Cotton crossed the street one morning while Aurora was out watering her flowers. He looked very tired, and had such difficulty lifting his feet that he stumbled over the curb. Even sitting in her kitchen, drinking the tea Aurora made for him, Arthur looked like a man who was tottering; his eyes were red and sad.
“She doesn’t want to die in my house,” Arthur said, looking at Aurora sadly. “She wants to come home.”
“I’ve been wondering if that mightn’t be best,” Aurora said.
“I’m crazy about her but I shouldn’t have married her,” Arthur said. “We should have just gone on being neighbors?
??having our little talks on the lawn. Those were our best times, really.”
“Yes, the salad’s frequently better than the meal,” Aurora told him. “You didn’t give her cancer, though, and you mustn’t bog yourself down with useless regrets. Let’s just go get Rosie and bring her home.”
“Can I visit a lot?” Arthur asked. He looked, if possible, more bleak than he had looked when he arrived.
“You’re her husband, Arthur—you can visit as much as you like,” Aurora said.
4
Aurora’s bedroom was the nicest, airiest, brightest, most cheerful room in her house. That afternoon she installed Rosie in it, moving herself, for sleeping purposes, to the little room down the hall that had once been Emma’s.
If Rosie moved at all, in the course of the day, it was usually just from Aurora’s bed to Aurora’s window nook, where she sat propped amid the huge, fluffy pillows that Aurora loved, and that she herself had kept cleanly pillowcased for so many years. She could look out the window at the sunny lawn and the flowers; she could look across the street to Arthur’s house, or watch him as he trudged across the street and along the sidewalk, five or six times a day, to pay her the brief visits that he seemed to feel were all that he should be permitted.
“Arthur’s aged,” Rosie commented, watching him trudge back along the sidewalk and across the street after one such visit.
“Well, his beloved wife is sick,” Aurora said. “That’ll do it.”
“I feel guilty thinking about him being lonely over there in that empty house,” Rosie said. “It ain’t cozy, like our house. Eureka had it decorated sort of too formal, you know.”
“Eureka herself never struck me as being particularly cozy,” Aurora said. “She was always rather stiff.”
“Poor Arthur, his whole life has been like that—sort of formal,” Rosie said. “I think that’s why he can’t do it.”