“Could be,” Aurora said.
5
In the next months Aurora worked tirelessly—keeping the house clean, keeping the meals cooked, keeping the bed changed and the linen absolutely fresh. Rosie sat propped up in the clean bed or in the airy window nook and watched. When she was feeling well enough to be awed, she was awed. Once in a while she tottered around, inspecting, and was stunned to find that there was no longer a speck of dust to be found behind the curtains, or anywhere else.
“It’s clean,” she said, in surprise. “It’s really clean.”
“I’ve had more than forty years in which to study the work of a master,” Aurora said. “I should hope I’ve learned a little something.”
Back in bed, Rosie thought about all the things she herself hadn’t learned, and became sad. Aurora saw that she was sad and tried to sing to her, but Rosie remained sad through several songs.
“I never learned nothing,” she said. “I never learned how to live and now I don’t know how to die. It’s awful to live your whole life and stay as ignorant as I am.”
Aurora sat down on the bed with her and took her hand.
“It may be that you were deeper than you were smart,” she said. “I’ve had the opposite misfortune, myself. I’ve always been smarter than I am deep.”
“I don’t see what’s deep about marrying two people like Royce and Arthur,” Rosie said. “Now that I’m sitting here looking back on it, it just seems plain stupid to me.”
“I’m not sure that the smart-deep equation applies to mating,” Aurora said. “Mating is something else. In my experience it almost never adds up, but probably one shouldn’t try to add it up. It’s something else.”
“Whatever it is, I wasn’t no good at it,” Rosie said.
6
In the early fall, Melanie’s pilot was on TV. Rosie watched ten minutes of it and burst into tears. There it was, for all to see: she had been a clown, just one more crazy maid who acted weird and got in everybody’s way.
Aurora, for once, didn’t know what to say, and didn’t say anything. There was no point in telling a dying woman that the show was fiction. It was there, Rosie saw it, as far as she was concerned it was totally about her, and she believed that it was absolutely true: she had been a clown.
Though the pilot itself was a success, the sitcom failed to live up to it. After five episodes, it folded. Melanie came home to Houston to help her granny with Rosie, but it didn’t work. Rosie loved Melanie, but her hurt feelings about the sitcom wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t help it—she made it clear that she only wanted Aurora to wait on her. After a week, Melanie, perplexed and in tears, went back to L.A. to look for another acting job. Aurora held her tongue—indeed, held it until Rosie couldn’t stand it.
“I know I hurt her feelings,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I know it was just a dumb TV show. I ought to get over it but I can’t.”
“If you can’t, you can’t,” Aurora said.
7
Rosie became wakeful—she began to be afraid to go to sleep, for fear she’d die in the night. Aurora lay on the bed with her, holding her hand. They watched cable much of the night. When it began to grow light, Rosie would relax and go to sleep. Aurora would retreat to Hector’s old chaise on her patio and nap a little.
Often, sitting in Aurora’s window nook, amid a great pile of clean pillows, watching Aurora run the vacuum, or wash the windows, or mop the tiles in the bathroom, Rosie had a deep, sad urge to turn everything back and make it as it had been. She wanted to get up and take the mop or the vacuum cleaner or the Windex away from Aurora and do the work herself. It had all gotten backwards—Aurora ought to be sitting in the window nook, reading magazines or tormenting her boyfriends on the telephone, while she, Rosie Dunlup, one of Houston’s premier maids, did the housework.
“Sometimes I just wish so that I could get up from here and have my old job back,” Rosie said weakly, one morning.
“Well, honey, you can’t,” Aurora said, inspecting, with some pride, a clean windowpane.
“It don’t seem right that you’re doing everything and I’m doing nothing,” Rosie said.
“It was the other way around for forty years, what’s wrong with you having a rest?” Aurora asked incautiously.
“It’s only because I’m dying, that’s what’s wrong with it,” Rosie said.
“Okay, sorry, I concede the point,” Aurora said sadly.
8
One by one, Rosie’s children came, bringing their families. Bud, the oldest boy, a middle-aged man, ran a body shop in Abilene. Estelle, her oldest girl, had a beauty parlor in Navasota. The next girl, Jolene, was a nurse in Texarkana, and was married to a man who sold lawn statuary. Doak, the one who, to Aurora’s eye, looked the most like Rosie, was in the well-service business in Wink, Texas. Annabelle, the most educated, worked in a pharmacy in Wichita Falls. Dotsie, the flighty one (as her mother described her) was with her fourth husband and was currently employed as a secretary at a high school in Beaumont. Little Buster, the last and most reckless, but also clearly the most prosperous, ran a small stock-car track outside Waxahachie.
The wives of the boys and the husbands of the girls were alike only in that they smoked a lot, were terrified of Aurora, and couldn’t think of much to say to Rosie. The children of all the couples ran around Aurora’s backyard, screaming. Whatever their ages, they seemed to converse in screams.
Aurora drew the blinds, but even so, most of the screams were audible. It was a relief to everyone when the visits ended, but particularly a relief to Rosie. Aurora had done a great deal of cooking, and Rosie’s children, all of whom possessed serious appetites, had done a great deal of eating.
“Thanks for cooking for the kids,” Rosie said, when the painful sequence of visits finally ended.
“Well, that’s quite a brood you raised,” Aurora said.
“My boys done better than my girls, don’t you think?” Rosie asked.
“Yes, but then it’s easier for boys to do better,” Aurora said. “The world’s set up for boys, after all.”
“Now that they’ve come and gone I feel worse than ever,” Rosie commented. “I raised them, but they come here and sit, and they’re like strangers. They don’t seem like my kids, you know what I mean?”
“Not exactly,” Aurora admitted.
“They’re like people I knew a long time ago, when I was young and healthy,” Rosie said. “Now I’m old and sick, and they’re grown up, and it’s like we don’t know one another, we’re just pretending.”
“You take a bleak view,” Aurora said. “Your children are decent people. They seem to me to love you, even if they’re not polished at expressing it. All seven of them drove away in tears, which indicated to me that they certainly think they know you and care about you. What more do you want?”
“I guess just something I used to have, or thought I had,” Rosie said. What Aurora said chastened her a little. After all, her children had made long trips across great stretches of Texas, just to see her for a few hours. Perhaps Aurora was right. Perhaps she expected too much.
“They should have just waited and come for the funeral,” she said. “It’s a burden on them to have to come all this way twice.”
“Rosie, you’re being ridiculous,” Aurora said. “Let your family be grieved in the way they need to be.”
The visits had been very tiring. Rosie mainly dozed for the next few days. She hated to see the night come on, though. To cheer her up as much as possible, Aurora put one hundred and fifty-watt bulbs in all the lamps in the bedroom, doing her best to make the nights as bright as the days.
9
The one visitor Rosie really liked to see was Bump, although he was as wild as her own Little Buster had been when Little Buster was Bump’s age. Despite the vigilance of Aurora, or Jane, or Teddy, or all of them at once, Bump always managed to elude his keepers at some point. He jumped on the bed or he ran into the bedside table and knocked
over all of Rosie’s medicine bottles. Once he crawled under the bed and refused to come out.
“I’m an ogre, I live under this bed,” he told his Big Granny, when she demanded that he come out.
It made Rosie giggle that a tiny little boy could say a word like ogre.
“He reminds me a lot of Emma,” she told Aurora. “Emma was full of mischief when she was that age.”
“Yes, I could never quite manage Emma,” Aurora said. “If I hadn’t had your help I’m sure I would have done worse than I did.”
“I guess kids are what it’s all about,” Rosie said one day, watching Bump, who had captured a spoon and was using it to try to pry open one of the window screens.
“I want to let the birds in,” he said, when told to stop. “The birds want to come in and see Rosie.”
“Well, they’re among the many things it’s all about,” Aurora said, in response to Rosie’s remark.
Then, as Rosie grew more fragile—she could not get up now without assistance—Jane and Teddy grew worried that Bump would get out of control and injure her in some way. They stopped bringing him for a week, but Rosie missed him and protested.
“I’m dying, what can he do?” she said. “I need to get this over with—Aurora’s losing too much weight. About the only thing I got left that’s any fun is seeing Bump. It’s good for an old dying person to see a young person that don’t have nothing on his mind but enjoying life.”
“Bump has things on his mind,” Teddy said. “He has breaking everything in sight on his mind, for example.”
“Yeah, but they’re different things from what I got on my mind,” Rosie said.
Aurora weighed in on Rosie’s side, and Bump continued to be brought upstairs for visits.
10
Soon, though, all visits stopped. One day Rosie told Arthur that she didn’t want him coming across the street anymore.
“I’m sorry about how it all worked out, hon,” she whispered. “I mean our marriage and all.”
Arthur was too numb to answer. He shook his head; he cried. Then he walked slowly back home.
“I just don’t want no emotion, you know what I mean?” Rosie told Aurora. “I just can’t deal with no emotion no more. It wears me out.”
“That’s all right, dear,” Aurora said. “If you can’t, you won’t have to.”
That night, Rosie was afraid to sleep. She began to talk about her early days in Bossier City. She told Aurora about being bitten by a rattlesnake; about the time her little sister had been run over by a car and killed; about looking at her father across the dinner table and thinking he looked a little peculiar, just before he keeled over and died of his heart attack. She talked of Jody White, her first beau—he had died at Iwo Jima—and of the fact that her big sister Louise’s first husband had made a pass at her, Rosie, on the very day her big sister married him.
“Not only then, but every other time he could catch me alone, the skunk,” Rosie said.
“Goodness,” Aurora said. “I suspect I should be focusing my memory project on your life rather than my own. Yours has been a lot more colorful.”
“Yeah, colorful, and hard, too,” Rosie said. “But all I can think about now is that I wish I could have more of it.
“I guess I should have been going to church and praying all these years,” she whispered to Aurora, a little later. “What do you think?”
“Rosie, if it’s eternity you’re talking about, I have to confess I probably haven’t given it the kind of thought I should have given it,” Aurora said. “I’ve had too much to deal with, right here. I’m afraid I’ve just left eternity to sort itself out as best it can.”
“Me too,” Rosie said. “The thing is, Sunday morning’s such a good time to do laundry. All that time I should have been going to church I was washing sheets and pillowcases.”
She smiled a little—her eyes seemed to brighten, for a moment.
“I just hope if I meet up with the General somewhere up in the sky, he’s at least got his britches on,” she whispered.
“Amen to that,” Aurora said.
11
Near the end, a nurse was required, as well as a certain amount of medical apparatus. Rosie submitted to the IV, but she froze out the nurse and looked balefully at the apparatus.
“Your bedroom don’t look like your bedroom, no more,” she said. “You ought to just pack me off to the hospital. I’m just bones anyway.”
“Yes, but you’re beloved bones, and you belong where you are,” Aurora said.
Theo was there at the time. He was allowed to peek in the door. He had brought a few flowers which he held up for Rosie to see.
Late that night, around one, as Theo and Vassily were counting receipts and getting ready to close down the Acropolis Bar, the phone rang.
“She’s gone, my poor girl,” Aurora said.
Though she sounded calm, Theo and Vassily hurried across town anyway. Aurora gave them whiskey, and lots of tea, and the three of them sat around in her kitchen talking about Rosie, or just about this and that, until the sun came up.
12
Rosie’s children didn’t particularly want her to be buried in Bossier City. After all, none of them lived there—none even lived close. When Aurora asked if she might bury Rosie in the Greenway plot, they quickly agreed.
“Perhaps it’s selfish, but her children don’t seem to care, and I do,” Aurora said to Patsy. “If anyone stood by me, it was Rosie Dunlup.”
“You did a certain amount of standing by, yourself,” Patsy told her.
As they stood at the graveside—it was breezy and the great trees were rustling and waving—Aurora noticed a large man short of shuffling around at the rear of the small crowd. It was Willie Cotts, in a very ill-fitting suit.
“Willie, where have you been all these months? We were both worried silly,” Aurora asked, going over to him the moment the service ended.
Where he had been was clerking at a convenience store on Little York Road, scarcely five miles from Aurora’s door, although admittedly in a very different part of town.
“I know I really ort to have called, Miz Greenway,” Willie said. In his bad suit he looked not merely miserable; he looked bereft and pitiable.
“I thought about it a million times, but I couldn’t work up my nerve,” he added. “I felt too guilty about running off and all. What I mean is, I never dreamed she’d die on us,” Willie went on, in tones so hopeless Aurora was glad Rosie wasn’t there to hear them. “I just figured she’d be there in River Oaks, working for you, and I’d get to feeling better and make the call someday.”
“Never mind, Willie,” Aurora said quickly, putting her arms around him. “I’m afraid I was just like you. I never dreamed she’d die.”
V
Last Love, First Loss
1
The night Aurora had her stroke she dreamed that a mad dog bit her. It was a small, savage black dog, and it came at her snapping while she was on her knees in the backyard, weeding a flower bed. In her fear, she couldn’t move—the fierce little black dog flung itself at her, biting her arms and breasts. Even when the dog faded and she realized she was having a nightmare, she was reluctant to wake up. For a time the dream was more convincing than her conviction that it was a dream. When she woke up she would have to go at once to the hospital and start getting painful rabies shots.
Then she became aware of a crashing headache, the worst of her life. She wondered if she were dying. Slowly, the nightmare released her, but the headache wouldn’t. She tried to sit up and found that she couldn’t move—at least, she mostly couldn’t move. One hand still moved—she tried to grasp the receiver of her telephone but dropped it. The headache pounded like surf. Soon the phone began to make the sound it makes when the receiver is left off the book. Aurora couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move.
2
Tommy and Ellen’s baby was born the week Aurora had her stroke. They named him Henry—it was kind of a wry nam
e, and Ellen thought the baby had a wry little face. No one in Ellen’s family had been named Henry, and no one in Tommy’s family, either.
3
By the time Henry was five months old it had become clear that Aurora would never make a full recovery from the stroke. She was, after all, pushing ninety. But she got well enough to be allowed to go home, where she had many visitors. She could read, play cards a little, work a CD player, and even now and then—with the assistance of Maria, the kind, stout Guatemalan woman who had worked for her since Rosie’s death—move to her patio for the afternoon and see a different view.
But, to Ellen’s sorrow particularly, she had not recovered her speech. Aurora was the one person in Tommy’s family that Ellen really longed to talk to. Ellen kept hoping that someday a miracle would happen so that Aurora would be able to talk again.
4
Mainly Ellen wanted to know things about Tommy that no one but Aurora could tell her. Jane, who had been Ellen’s roommate at Bryn Mawr, kept saying that she didn’t really know Tommy well. Teddy obviously knew him pretty well—the two of them worked together in a very successful business, fixing defective computer programs for some of the largest banks and oil companies in the southwest—but Teddy was closemouthed with Ellen. He didn’t seem to trust her entirely, even though Jane, his own mate, assured him over and over again that Ellen was one of the most trustworthy people on earth. Still, Teddy clammed up around her, particularly if Tommy was the subject of the conversation.
5
In a way Ellen figured it didn’t matter too much if Teddy clammed up. Her sense was that if anyone in the family, other than herself, knew much about Tommy, it was probably Aurora. After all, Aurora had raised him. And Ellen could tell just by looking into Aurora’s eyes that she still had her intelligence. In particular Ellen wanted to know if Aurora thought Tommy had killed her former girlfriend on purpose. No one in the family would come near that question, but Ellen had a feeling that Aurora might come near it, if only she could talk.