Goodbye Without Leaving (22 page)

And, of course, I was to my own mother what Buddy was to Gertje. Gertje, who did calligraphy and watercolors, who had grown up under the old order, did not expect to spawn a millionaire, and my mother in her proper, tailored suits, with her mahogany dining room table, her sense of order and propriety, did not expect to raise a daughter who would someday stand on a stage wearing a dress the size of a camisole, jumping up and down and singing with a bunch of Afro-Americans.

“I often wonder what Franklin will turn out to be,” I said to Gertje.

“One can never predict anything,” Gertje said. “This is what a war will teach one. None of us ever believed we would someday live in America, and yet you see how well we do. Look at Hannah Hausknecht. She has come here and made the best of it. Go home and read
An Austrian in Dixie
. You know, Geraldine, if it had not been for the war, life would be very rigid. Things cannot be the old way forever. Even horrible things must happen to make changes. Felix Kindervater had been analyzed by a colleague of Freud. He believed that the events leading up to World War II were like the rebellion in an old-fashioned family in which the whole situation explodes. The Old World was very, very tight, and now it is blown to bits and here we are! My little boy is going to be a mogul. Someday he will buy this agency from his father. And your Little Franklin will step into a world made by people like Buddy. It is hard to think of it.”

It
was
hard to think of it.

“Your Little Franklin is lucky,” Gertje said. “Because you and he speak a common language. You are his American mommy and he is your American boy.”

“No one seems to think that's enough,” I said.

“Geraldine, I will tell you something,” Gertje said. “Americans are very busy and ambitious. They do not rest. Sophie Regenstein describes Colonial mothers at home, always spinning, weaving, sewing. No one ever stopped to relax or think. That is what Americans are like. I look at my own Buddy and there he is, planning and plotting and scheming. He eats his supper and makes little notes on the napkin. He has his lunch on the telephone. Here no one ever thinks that it is enough merely to
be
.”

This seemed right on the money to me, but as I pointed out to Gertje, it probably made it easier to
be
something to begin with in order merely to be it.

“Spoken like an American girl!” said Gertje.

50

For several months the office was turned upside down by what Gertje called the affair of Manfred Kirschbaum, who claimed to be an old friend of Felix Kindervater's and said he had in his possession a hitherto undiscovered novel of Kindervater's which it was his intention to publish. His letters hinted, in the most elegant and polite way, that he intended to do this with or without the permission of the estate.

I had typed dozens of letters regarding this matter: to lawyers, to foreign publishers, to various heirs and editors. Then Manfred Kirschbaum appeared in person. He was accompanied by his mistress, Mrs. Lucia Bonfiglio. They were quite sensational to look at. Ruby, at her most dramatic, paled beside them.

Mrs. Bonfiglio was six feet tall. She wore a coat of dyed orange mink. Her brilliant orange hair was piled up on top of her head and affixed with an enormous green silk ribbon. On her hand she wore a diamond, the size of one of Little Franklin's plastic building blocks, set into an enormous hoop of yellow gold. She wore dark green stockings, alligator shoes and a great deal of green eye shadow.

Manfred Kirschbaum was similarly magnificent, although somewhat miniature: small, rosy-cheeked, with glossy white hair worn a little too long, and cold little blue eyes. His yellow cashmere scarf was long enough to wrap around his neck three or four times. His socks were lavender and his suspenders gray, embroidered with a design of alpine flowers. He wore a yellow and white striped shirt, a hacking jacket and tweed trousers. I greatly admired his shoes, which were a kind of orangy suede. He and Mrs. Bonfiglio smoked little black Sobranie cigarettes with gold tips. I found it hard to take my eyes off them.

Dr. Frechtvogel, who knew everyone in the world, had known Manfred's brother Wolfgang, who had once collaborated on the libretto for an operetta with one of Dr. Frechtvogel's friends.

He shook Kirschbaum's hand cordially. “Your brother is dead, yes?” he barked, spewing ashes.

“Indeed he is not!” said Kirschbaum, whose accent was a mixture of British, Middle European and German. “Very much alive, my dear fellow! And whom have I the pleasure of addressing? My memory is not so keen.”

“I am Frechtvogel,” said Dr. Frechtvogel.

“Ah,” said Manfred Kirschbaum, signifying that the name meant nothing to him.

Gertje greeted them with overpowering formality. It was clear she felt nothing but contempt, yet she sat them down and insisted several times that they have coffee. She provided a number of large glass ashtrays. Her normally girlish voice was pitched ever so slightly lower.

Bernard greeted them with a look of rattled distraction. The
KIRSCHBAUM
/
KINDERVATER
file lay unopened before him. He did not think in personal terms; he thought about strategy and logic. Human emotions, so far as he could tell, played no interesting part in anything.

“Geraldine, come sit,” Gertje said. “And please to take notes. This is important.”

Take
notes
? Her expression said clearly “Write fast and fake it,” and I realized that I was a useful office ornament: the secretary.

Soon the back office was thick with smoke and perfume. Mrs. Lucia Bonfiglio sat without moving a hair, while Kirschbaum reiterated what he had already written to Bernard in countless letters: he and his best friend, Kindervater, had been habitués of the Café des Modernes in Vienna. When Kindervater came back from his American trip, and things began to look bad, he vouchsafed his unpublished novel to Kirschbaum, who was about to flee. According to Kirschbaum, he had said: “Take this with you and do nothing with it until you feel the time is right.”

Bernard cleared his throat. “And why was the time not right before now?”

“Ah,” said Kirschbaum. “This is not a work that would have appealed to Hans and Sonia Regenstein. It is not about war or politics or culture. It is about love … eros. It is lighthearted, almost stupid.”

“His early letters are not exactly lighthearted,” said Bernard. “We must see the manuscript.”

“I have brought with me a faithful reproduction by the most advanced methods.”

Dr. Frechtvogel, like Mrs. Lucia Bonfiglio, had been posing as a wax dummy. Suddenly he sprang up, spraying cigar ashes right and left.

“We must see the original at once!” he shouted, and then sat down.

“My dear fellow,” said Kirschbaum languidly. “This is totally impossible, as it resides in a safety deposit box in Paris, where Mrs. Bonfiglio and I have our flat. I am perfectly willing to endow the Kindervater Trust with it, should you permit me to advance its publication.”

Gertje narrowed her eyes and a look of pure scorn crossed her otherwise mild features.

“And you intend to
sell
this manuscript,” Gertje said.

“My dear lady, of course!” said Kirschbaum. “One must live, must one not? But the heirs, I believe, his sister Mrs. Jacobson, of Toronto, and her three children, will richly benefit. And now, I leave this manuscript and we must go. We are due for lunch.”

Mrs. Bonfiglio spoke for the first time. Her voice was a low, bored drawl. “And with whom do we lunch, Manfredo?” she said.

“Paola and Hugo,” said Kirschbaum.

“Oh, really,” said Mrs. Bonfiglio, snuffing out her cigarette. “I really can't stick them.” Her coat was held out for her. She slipped her arms into it, and then, in a cloud of Guerlain perfume and Sobranie smoke, they were gone.

After they left, Gertje threw the window open.

“They're so beautiful,” I said. “Like figurines.”

“Darling, Europe is littered with people like them. And he says life has been
kind
to him. He means the Bonfiglio has been kind to him. He lives off her. Ask Ludwig. He knows all about her.” She closed the window. “Ludo! Come tell Geraldine about the Bonfiglio.”

“A horrible person,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “First she is married to Hoffheimer, a manufacturer of drainpipes. Then she married Bonfiglio of an Italian pottery fortune, but he then died and now she lives with Kirschbaum off the Bonfiglio money. This man is a total fraud. You will see. He is a swindler and we will never see him again. Now please let us never open the window again. I do not like fresh air.”

51

I had never seen anyone like Mrs. Lucia Bonfiglio or Manfred Kirschbaum before, and now I saw them everywhere. Tall women in mink coats and heavy silk scarves, decorated with tassels or roses or horses or eagles, rushed past me speaking French, Italian or German. Men, wearing lavender socks and enormous silk mufflers, held them by the arm, strolling in and out of very expensive shops. This was not the sort of thing you saw around the Malcolm Sprague School or the Race Music Foundation, or even on the tour, where it was not unknown for a really big star to appear in an oversized Cadillac and a floor-length chinchilla coat. But this was different: these were Europeans.

They made me feel like an American Indian with leather leggings and a papoose on my back. These creatures fluttered and floated in from Vienna, Paris, Chile via Poland, or Berlin. All of them had been through the war. Mrs. Lucia Bonfiglio, according to Dr. Frechtvogel, had lived in a drainpipe—the very same manufactured by Hoffheimer, the man who would later become her husband—in the spring after the war. She had it outfitted with a camp table and had rigged up a clothesline as a closet. And yet here she was, hair ablaze, carrying an ostrich handbag as if nothing more trying than a missed dressmaker appointment had ever vexed her.

As for Kirschbaum, his story was unknown, although he dropped hints, Gertje said, that he had been in the Underground. I asked her if she thought he had been.

“Geraldine, I will tell you something,” she said. “You can never, never tell. Europe was full of charlatans and heroes and fanatics in those days. People did all sorts of things to protect themselves, and the most unlikely people turned up doing the most unlikely things. My own grandmother, to whom servants were expected to
bow
, hid hundreds of Jews. Our land was up at the top of Germany, near Denmark. She ran an underground railroad, I think you call them, but by boat. And the boat that took people across! It was owned by a friend of my mother's who did nothing before the war but have massages and manicures and never cared for another thing. But this woman herself took these people across because her family were accomplished pleasure sailors. She rigged up her sail and pretended to go fishing and hid people under bunks and disguised them as her servants. Now she sits in a chair surrounded by real servants and when I go to see her she says, ‘Look, Gertje dear. So many letters from Israel, where these people went!' And her little hands are always perfect: pink nail polish and a big diamond ring. So who is to know? Great patriots denounced their neighbors, and cleaning women were saints. It is hard to tell anything. Here it is easier. The bad guys are more identifiable. Americans have fewer hiding places, I always think.”

“And,” I said as casually as I could, “what about Leo Rhinehart?”

He had come to the office several times to see Dr. Frechtvogel, always in the morning when I was around. The sight of him seemed to turn me into a nervous wreck. I had learned that he was a nephew of one of the Mrs. Kleins—either Mrs. Charlotte Klein or Mrs. Gusta Klein, I could never remember.

When I looked at him I felt strangely warm and embarrassed, like a thirteen-year-old girl with her first crush. From the moment I first saw him, I had been unable to stop thinking about him. My quest was to ferret out information without seeming to be very interested. At the same time I felt deeply mortified by my interest, but it was easy enough to justify: I worked in an office of Europeans, and Leo, although he had been born in Europe and came from an Old World household, had grown up an American boy. This made him, for my present purposes, irresistible.

“
Ach
, Leo,” said Gertje. “His father was not a Jew. After Leo was born, the father left the mother. He said if she did not divorce him, he would denounce her. So she left with that little baby and went to Shanghai. Many Jews ended up there. Children could go to the Peter Pan Nursery, which was run by Australian ladies, or to the Kaiser Wilhelmschule. Imagine—in
China!
And then they came here, and Leo's father was killed in the war, and his mother, Lilly, is Mrs. Lotte Klein's sister.”

Three weeks later, I found myself sitting across from Leo Rhinehart in a small, dark restaurant called The Coffee Bean attempting to eat a sandwich, unable to concentrate on anything.

He had come to see Dr. Frechtvogel, and after half an hour I was summoned to the back office.

“Take these papers,” Dr. Frechtvogel barked, “and make copies in the machine.”

“Ludwig, please don't,” Leo said.

“Yes, yes, this is her job,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. In his hand were three chapters of Leo's dissertation.

“I'm happy to do it,” I said.

“It isn't right,” said Leo.

“It is entirely right!” shouted Dr. Frechtvogel. “This is what an office girl must do.”

“Ludwig, really …” Leo said.

“I
am
the office girl,” I said sweetly. “Is this your thesis?”

“Well, yes,” said Leo.

“I'm happy to do it,” I said. “I used to be a graduate student.”

I ran the copies happily but without any comprehension. There were a great many graphs and charts and equations. When I was finished, I handed the manuscript back to Leo, who suddenly became shy, as if he had come to pick me up on a first date.