Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  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.”

  “Hunh.”

  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 really 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.

  The 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.

  “Dor-thee?”

  “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.”

  Old Mrs. Crozier was making little yelps. Sounds of complaint and gratitude. It went on for quite a while, and I got bored. I went back to reading some old Canadian Home Journals that I had found in a cabinet. I read recipes and checked on old-time fashions till I heard Roxanne say, “Now I’ll just clean this stuff up and we’ll go on upstairs, like you said.”

  Upstairs. I slid the magazines back into their place in the cabinet that my mother would have coveted, and went into Mr. Crozier’s room. He was asleep, or at least he had his eyes closed. I moved the fan a few inches and smoothed his cover and went and stood by the window, twiddling with the blind.

  Sure enough, there came a noise on the back stairs, Old Mrs. Crozier with her slow and threatening cane steps, Roxanne running ahead and calling, “Look out, look out, wherever you are. We’re coming to get you, wherever you are.”

  Mr. Crozier had his eyes open now. Behind his usual weariness was a faint expression of alarm. But before he could pretend to be asleep again Roxanne burst into the room.

  “So here’s where you’re hiding. I just told your stepmom I thought it was about time I got introduced to you.”

  Mr. Crozier said, “How do you do, Roxanne?”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “Word gets around.”

  “Fresh fellow you got here,” Roxanne said to Old Mrs. Crozier, who now came stumping into the room.

  “Stop fooling around with that blind,” Old Mrs. Crozier said to me. “Go and fetch me a drink of cool water, if you want something to do. Not cold, just cool.”

  “You’re a mess,” Roxanne said to Mr. Crozier. “Who gave you that shave and when was it?”

  “A few days ago,” he said. “I handle it myself as well as I can.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Roxanne said. And to me, “When you’re getting her water, how’d you like to heat some more up for me and I’ll undertake to give him a decent shave?”

  Shaving him became a regular thing, once a week, following the massage. Roxanne told Mr. Crozier that first day not to worry. “I’m not going to pound on you like you must have heard me doing to Dorothy-doodle downstairs. Before I got my massage training I used to be a nurse. Well, a nurse’s aide. One of the ones who do all the work and then the nurses come around and boss you. Anyway, I learned how to make people comfortable.”

  Dorothy-doodle? Mr. Crozier grinned. But the odd thing was that Old Mrs. Crozier grinned, too.

  Roxanne shaved him deftly. She sponged his face and neck and torso and arms and hands. She pulled his sheets around, somehow managing not to disturb him, and she punched and rearranged his pillows. Talking all the while, pure nonsense.

  “Dorothy, you’re a liar. You said you had a sick man upstairs, and I walk in here and I think, Where’s the sick man? I don’t see a sick man around here. Do I?”

  Mr. Crozier said, “What would you say I am, then?”

  “Recovering. That’s what I would say. I don’t mean you should be up and running around, I’m not so stupid as all that. I know you need your bed rest. But I say recovering. Nobody who was sick like you’re supposed to be ever looked as good as what you do.”

  I thought this flirtatious prattle insulting. Mr. Crozier looked terrible. A tall man whose ribs showed like those of a famine survivor when she sponged him, whose head was partly bald, and whose skin looked as if it had the texture of a plucked chicken’s, his neck corded like an old man’s. Whenever I had waited on him in any way I had avoided looking at him. Though this was not really because he was sick and ugly. It was because he was dying. I would have felt a similar reticence even if he had been angelically handsome. I was aware of an atmosphere of death in the house, which grew thicker as you approached his room, and he was at the center of it, like the Host the Catholics kept in the box so powerfully called the tabernacle. He was the one stricken, marked out from everybody else, and here was Roxanne trespassing on his ground with her jokes and her swagger and her notions of entertainment.

  On her second visit, she asked him what he did all day.

  “Read sometimes. Sleep.”

  And how did he sleep at night?

  “If I can’t sleep I lie awake. Think. Sometimes read.”

  “Doesn’t that disturb your wife?”

  “She sleeps in the back bedroom.”

  “Uh-huh. You need some entertainment.”

  “Are you going to sing and dance for me?”

  I saw Old Mrs. Crozier look aside with her odd involuntary grin.

  “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 Y
oung 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 scraps 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 smutty 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.