I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinchers and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukemia went to bed, and, after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died.
It was because of such a case that I got my first job, in the summer holidays, when I was thirteen.
Old Mrs. Crozier lived on the other side of town. Her stepson, Bruce, who was usually called Young Mr. Crozier, had come safely home from the war, where he had been a fighter pilot, had gone to college and studied history, and got married, and now he had leukemia. He and his wife were staying with Old Mrs. Crozier. The wife, Sylvia, taught summer school two afternoons a week at the college where they had met, some forty miles away. I was hired to look after Young Mr. Crozier while she wasn’t there. He was in bed in the front-corner bedroom upstairs, and he could still get to the bathroom by himself. All I had to do was bring him fresh water and pull the shades up or down and see what he wanted when he rang the little bell on his bedside table.
Usually what he wanted was to have the fan moved. He liked the breeze it created but was disturbed by the noise. So he’d want the fan in the room for a while and then he’d want it out in the hall, but close to his open door.
When my mother heard about this, she wondered why they hadn’t put him in a bed downstairs, where they surely had high ceilings and he would have been cooler.
I told her that they did not have any bedrooms downstairs.
“Well, my heavens, couldn’t they fix one up? Temporarily?”
That showed how little she knew about the Crozier household and the rule of Old Mrs. Crozier. Old Mrs. Crozier walked with a cane. She made one ominous-sounding journey up the stairs to see her stepson on the afternoons that I was there, and I suppose no more than that on the afternoons when I was not. But the idea of a bedroom downstairs would have outraged her as much as the notion of a toilet in the parlor. Fortunately, there was already a toilet downstairs, behind the kitchen, but I was sure that, if the upstairs one had been the only one, she would have made the laborious climb as often as necessary, rather than pursue a change so radical and unnerving.
My mother was thinking of going into the antique business, so she was very interested in the inside of the Crozier house, which was old and far grander than ours. She did get in, once, my very first afternoon there. I was in the kitchen, and I stood petrified, hearing her yoo-hoo and my own merrily called name. Then her perfunctory knock, her steps on the kitchen stairs. And Old Mrs. Crozier stumping out from the sunroom.
My mother said that she had just dropped by to see how her daughter was getting along. “She’s all right,” Old Mrs. Crozier said, standing in the hall doorway, blocking the view of antiques. My mother made a few more mortifying remarks and took herself off. That night, she said that Old Mrs. Crozier had no manners, because she was only a second wife, picked up on a business trip to Detroit, which was why she smoked and dyed her hair black as tar and put on lipstick like a smear of jam. She was not even the mother of the invalid upstairs. She did not have the brains to be. (We were having one of our fights then, this one relating to her visit, but that is neither here nor there.)
The way Old Mrs. Crozier saw it, I must have seemed just as intrusive as my mother, just as cheerily self-regarding. Shortly after I began working there, I went into the back parlor and opened the bookcase and took stock of the Harvard Classics set out in a perfect row. Most of them discouraged me, but I took out one that looked like it might be fiction, despite its foreign title, “I Promessi Sposi.” It was fiction all right, and it was in English.
I must have had the idea then that all books were free, wherever you found them. Like water from a public tap.
When Old Mrs. Crozier saw me with the book, she asked where I had got it and what I was doing with it. From the bookcase, I said, and I had brought it upstairs to read. The thing that most perplexed her seemed to be that I had got it downstairs but brought it upstairs. The reading part she appeared to let go, as if such an activity were too alien for her to contemplate. Finally, she said that if I wanted a book I should bring one from home.
Of course, there were books in the sickroom. Reading seemed to be acceptable there. But they were mostly open and face down, as if Mr. Crozier just read a little here and there, then put them aside. And their titles did not tempt me. “Civilization on Trial.” “The Great Conspiracy Against Russia.”
My grandmother had warned me that if I could help it I should not touch anything that the patient had touched, because of germs, and I should always keep a cloth between my fingers and his water glass.
My mother said that leukemia did not come from germs.
“So what does it come from?” my grandmother said.
“The medical men don’t know.”
It was Young Mrs. Crozier who picked me up and drove me home, though the distance across town was not far. She was a tall, thin, fair-haired woman with a variable complexion. Sometimes there were patches of red on her cheeks as if she had scratched them. Word had been passed that she was older than her husband, that he had been her student at college. My mother said that nobody seemed to have got around to figuring out that, since he was a war veteran, he could easily have been her student without that making her older. People were just down on her because she had got an education.
Another thing they said was that she should have stayed home and looked after him, as she had promised in the marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach. My mother again defended her, saying that it was only two afternoons a week and she had to keep up her profession, seeing as how she would be on her own soon enough. And if she didn’t get out of the old lady’s way once in a while wouldn’t you think she’d go crazy? My mother always defended women who worked, and my grandmother always got after her for it.
One day I tried a conversation with Young Mrs. Crozier, Sylvia. She was the only college graduate I knew. Except for her husband, of course, and he had stopped counting.
“Did Toynbee write history books?”
“Beg pardon? Oh. Yes.”
None of us mattered to her—not me, or her critics or her defenders. We were no more than bugs on a lampshade.
As for Old Mrs. Crozier, all she re ally cared about was her flower garden. She had a man who came and helped her; he was about her age, but more limber than she was. His name was Hervey. He lived on our street, and, in fact, it was through him that she had heard about me as a possible employee. At home, he only gossiped and grew weeds, but here he plucked and mulched and fussed, while she followed him around, leaning on her stick and shaded by her big straw hat. Sometimes she sat on a bench, still commenting and giving orders, and smoking a cigarette. Early on, I dared to go between the perfect hedges to ask if she or her helper would like a glass of water, and she cried out, “Mind my borders!” before saying no.
Flowers were never brought into the house. Some poppies had escaped and were growing wild beyond the hedge, almost on the road, so I asked if I could pick a bouquet to brighten the sickroom.
“They’d only die,” Mrs. Crozier said, not seeming to realize that this remark had a double edge to it, under the circumstances.
Certain suggestions or notions would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there were a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thornbush.
T he two days a week that I worked were not consecutive. Let us say they were Tuesdays and Thursdays. The first day, I was alone with the sick man and Old Mrs. Crozier. The second day, somebody arrived whom I had not been told about. I was sitting upstairs when I heard a car in the driveway, and someone running briskly up the back steps and entering the kitchen without knocking. Then the person called “Dorothy,” which I had not known was Old Mrs. Crozier’s name. The voice was a woman’s or a girl’s, and it was bold and teasing all at once.
I ran down the back stairs, saying, “I think she’s in the sunroom.”
“Holy Toledo! Who are you?”
I told her who I was and what I was doing there, and the young woman said that her name was Roxanne.
“I’m the masseuse.”
I didn’t like being caught by a word I didn’t know. I didn’t say anything, but she saw how things were.
“Got you stumped, eh? I give massages. You ever heard of that?”
Now she was unpacking the bag she had with her. Various pads and cloths and flat velour-covered brushes appeared.
“I’ll need some hot water to warm these up,” she said. “You can heat me some in the kettle.” (The Crozier house was grand, but there was still only cold water on tap, as in my house at home.)
Roxanne had sized me up, apparently, as somebody who was willing to take orders—especially, perhaps, orders given in such a coaxing voice. And she was right, though she may not have guessed that my willingness had more to do with my own curiosity than with her charm.
She was tanned, although it was still early in the summer, and her pageboy hair had a copper sheen—something that you could get easily from a bottle nowadays but that was unusual and enviable then. Brown eyes, a dimple in one cheek—she did so much smiling and joking that you never got a good enough look at her to say whether she was really pretty, or how old she was.
I was impressed by the way her rump curved out handsomely to the back, instead of spreading to the sides.
I learned quickly that she was new in town, married to the mechanic at the Esso station, and that she had two little boys, one four years old and one three. (“It took me a while to figure out what was causing them,” she said, with one of her conspiratorial twinkles.)
In Hamilton, where they used to live, she had trained to be a masseuse and it had turned out to be just the sort of thing she’d always had a knack for.
“She’s in the sunroom,” I told her again.
“I know, I’m just kidding her. Now, maybe you don’t know about getting a massage, but when you get one you got to take off all your clothes. Not such a problem when you’re young, but when you’re older, you know, you can get all embarrassed.”
She was wrong about one thing, at least as far as I was concerned. About its not being a problem to take off all your clothes when you’re young.
“So maybe you should skedaddle. You’re supposed to be upstairs anyway, aren’t you?”
This time I took the front staircase, while she was busy with the hot water. That way I got a glance in through the open door of the sunroom—which was not much of a sunroom at all, having its windows on three sides all filled up with the fat leaves of catalpa trees. There I saw Old Mrs. Crozier stretched out on a daybed, on her stomach, her face turned away from me, absolutely naked. A skinny streak of pale flesh. The usually covered length of her body didn’t look as old as the parts of her that were daily exposed—her freckled, dark-veined hands and forearms, her brown-blotched cheeks. The skin of her back and legs was yellow-white, like wood freshly stripped of its bark.
I sat on the top step and listened to the sounds of the massage. Thumps and grunts. Roxanne’s voice bossy now, cheerful but full of exhortation.
“Stiff knot here. Oh, brother. I’m going to have to whack you one. Just kidding. Aw, come on, just loosen up for me. You know, you got nice skin here. Small of your back—what do they say? It’s like a baby’s bum. Now I gotta bear down a bit—you’re going to feel it here. Take away the tension. Good girl.”