Other People’s Houses (13 page)

Everybody, my mother wrote, was very good to them. Mr. Willoughby was most polite. He had asked questions about Vienna. He was an accountant
for the government and went to London every morning after breakfast. Besides him and Mrs. Willoughby, there were two daughters. Miss Elizabeth, the elder, worked in a museum in London and she caught the early train to town. My mother brought her tea to the schoolroom upstairs and Miss Elizabeth toasted bread on a small oil stove. My mother wrote that the smell of toast and tea and oil in the sleeping
house, with the dark still outside the windows, was very special and nice. She said that Miss Elizabeth was very nice and spoke gently, though she never said much. The younger daughter was called Joanne. She stayed at home with her mother. She had a pony called Picket. There was a son, Stephen, but he was away at school.

My mother said that she had spoken to Mrs. Willoughby about a sponsor to
bring my grandparents to England. She said Mrs. Willoughby often reminded her of her own mother, which was odd because Mrs. Willoughby looked quite different, very thin, with very blue eyes. She had told Mrs. Willoughby about me, and this morning Mrs. Willoughby had said I could come and spend two weeks of the summer holidays with my parents. As soon as my father came down from resting, she would
have him write to the Levines about it, but for me not to seem too anxious to get away.

My mother said now she must stop writing and start dinner. She was going to make an
Apfelstrudel
for a surprise. She said she wished she could make me one. She said she loved me and that she and my father lived for the day when they could have me with them.

My father’s career as a butler lasted three days.
His first job in the morning was to do the front hall, but my mother says that after she had dusted the dining room and lit the fire and set the table for breakfast, she would sneak around after him and wipe away the excess polish he had left on the red tiles. The evening my father served his first dinner, he stayed so long in the dining room that my mother came to the door to see what had happened
to him. Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby were sitting at the head and foot of the table, with their daughters on either side. Their four heads were turned toward my father, who stood with a napkin over his arm holding a tureen of cabbage. Mrs. Willoughby was saying, “Now try it again, will you, Groszmann, from the left side.” My father looked as if he had stopped listening some while ago. My mother crept
back into the kitchen and wept bitterly out of pity for him, he looked so ridiculous.

Two days later, when guests were expected to dinner, my mother asked Mrs. Willoughby if she might do the waiting at table. She thought she could learn pretty quickly. Mrs. Willoughby was discouraged by my father’s lack of progress, but she hesitated. “I don’t see how you can come into the dining room in your
kitchen apron.”

My mother ran upstairs, got out her good afternoon dress, a classic black wool that she had had made the winter before Hitler. “Why,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “but you look very nice! I’ll go and find you a cap and apron and, yes, I think that will do very nicely.”

“This is our Mrs. Groszmann,” Mrs. Willoughby said to her dinner guests. “She comes from Vienna.” The guests nodded
pleasantly to my mother, who smiled and set the soup down in front of each, neatly, from the left, and so she did very well and everyone was pleased.

My father was demoted from butlering to gardening, about which he knew even less. He had a city man’s tenderness toward things that grow, and he pottered at his own pace in the kitchen garden among the vegetables.

During those first weeks, my mother
developed a small pocket of resistance. One evening Mrs. Willoughby noticed that she was not wearing her white cap and apron. My mother said she had forgotten, and when she brought the second course she had put them on. Next day she had forgotten again. Mrs. Willoughby looked at her but said nothing. After that my mother served in her good black dress and the matter was not mentioned again.

My mother had something else on her mind. It took her a few days to translate it into English. One morning as she stood before Mrs. Willoughby, who was sitting at the dining-room table after breakfast writing out the day’s menu, my mother spoke up. She asked Mrs. Willoughby if it would be possible, since she herself was addressed as “Mrs.” Groszmann, for my father to be called “Mr.” Mrs Willoughby
looked up with her blue, blue eyes and thought a moment. She said that she didn’t know how they could do that. She said that the cook was always “Mrs.” and that the manservant was called by just his last name, and she didn’t see how they could very well change.

My mother, shocked by this refusal of her direct appeal, looked through the window, where, under the sweet, harsh light of the April
morning, Mr. Willoughby and my father walked among the flower beds. She watched their backs side by side. Mr. Willoughby was wearing his black town suit and bowler, ready for his train. My father was two heads taller. Despite his stoop, she thought he looked very well in his tweed knickerbockers. The men were bending to inspect the row of young hyacinths at the end of the path. They turned, and my
mother saw that my father was wearing his green gardener’s pinafore.

On weekdays, when Mrs. Willoughby and Miss Joanne were alone, they took their lunch on trays in the drawing room, and after my mother had cleared up and washed the kitchen, the hour and a half till teatime was her own. My mother tells me that all morning she would plan what she might do with it. She wanted to write to me; she
wanted to write to her parents, and she must get a letter off to the Committee in London to find a sponsor for them; she wanted to take a bath; she wanted to walk in the fresh air; she wanted to study her English, for she found herself too exhausted at night after cooking, serving, and clearing up from dinner; she needed to sleep an hour, but my father had gone to lie down upstairs and what she
needed above all was to be alone. She sat at the kitchen table, aware of her leisure slipping away. She kept looking at the clock, calculating how much time she still had before preparing the tea tray. One afternoon, the door opened and Miss Joanne came through the kitchen, trailing grass and hay from the stables. She dropped a dirty blouse into the scullery sink and went out again, leaving both doors
open. This caused a draft where my mother sat, and my mother got up and slammed the door behind the girl. Then she was sorry. She remembered how she had disliked the ill-natured maids in her mother’s house, who fussed over their clean floors. She remembered that she owed these people her life. She went to the sink and washed Miss Joanne’s blouse and starched it; then, angry at herself for this
servile act, she went to the china closet, took out Mrs. Willoughby’s best Minton, and made herself some powerful Viennese coffee. She tasted the delicate fluted china between her lips, half afraid that Mrs. Willoughby might come in and catch her, half wishing that she would. My mother wanted to make herself known to the other woman.

It was becoming increasingly clear to my mother that there
was much Mrs. Willoughby did not know. “Why didn’t you embark in Austria and come direct?” she asked my mother one day. “Why did you come such an awkward way around?” My father, who had just entered the kitchen, stared in astonishment. “Do you know we had to wait eleven weeks for you and Groszmann?” said Mrs. Willoughby.

My mother tried to tell Mrs. Willoughby some of the things that were happening
to Jews in Austria and Germany.

“Tch, tch, isn’t that incredible?” Mrs. Willoughby said. “Quite, quite incredible.” And her eyes began to wander. Mrs. Willoughby would rather not know what she was being told, and besides, my mother’s conversation, in which Mrs. Willoughby had to be active, supplying the missing words, must have been tiring.

My mother had another weapon; she is a great believer
in laughter. She laughs readily and with abandon until she looks as if she has been crying. She had always been the comedienne of the family, and her routine of funny faces and gestures had caused the uncles and cousins to say that Franzi’s talents were being wasted. She is a true punster and takes equal delight in her cleverest and most terrible wordplays. These she now wanted to share with Mrs.
Willoughby by translating them into English. When Mrs. Willoughby looked puzzled, my mother explained them painfully. Mrs. Willoughby would look tired.

One day Mrs. Willoughby told my mother she thought it would be nice for her to meet some English people. My mother was surprised and gratified. Mrs. Willoughby said she had invited the vicar’s cook to take her tea with my mother and father on
their next Sunday off.

It was a very wet afternoon. Mrs. MacGuire arrived at the back door on the dot of four. She was a stout, decent-looking middle-aged woman, dressed all in black. She let my father take her coat and galoshes but kept her hat on while my mother gave her tea at the kitchen table. She spoke with a heavy Irish brogue; my parents recognized only an occasional word of her conversation.
My mother had baked a Viennese cake for her, which she understood Mrs. MacGuire to say was far too rich. Mrs. MacGuire asked for a piece of paper and pencil, so that she might write down for my mother how to make a good plain sponge. At five o’clock, Mrs. MacGuire put on her coat and galoshes and went home.

After that, my parents always went out of the house on their free afternoons.

On a morning
late in May, my mother fell down the stairs. She was overworked and sleeping badly, and she came through the curtain onto the landing at the head of the back stairs and went headlong with a tremendous clatter. Mr. Willoughby came rushing from the front of the house to the second-floor landing and ran down after her, but by that time my mother had picked herself up and was sitting on a step resting
her head on her arms. She heard Mr. Willoughby’s trembling voice say, “What happened?” My mother raised her head. Mr. Willoughby, in his pajamas, had turned his avenging eyes up to where my father stood, petrified, at the head of the stairs, looking down. “Tell me the truth!” cried Mr. Willoughby. “Was it a fight?”

My mother explained that the fall had been an accident. She has told me how, through
the dizziness and nausea, she wanted to stop talking, as if it were too much trouble—as if it were too late—to explain anything.

And so the Willoughbys had put my parents in their place; the refugees belonged to the class of people who eat in the kitchen, sleep on cheap mattresses, and throw their wives down the stairs in an argument—which goes to show that people have, after all, an innate sense
of justice and cannot with equanimity be served by their fellows when these too closely resemble themselves.

My parents were meanwhile adjusting their image of their masters. “She has no sense of humor,” said my mother. “She doesn’t know any geography,” said my father, “and the naive questions that he asks me about the Nazis!” “They don’t know how to eat,” said my mother. “Do you remember the
time I made them an
Apfelstrudel
and they asked for custard to put over it?” “They don’t understand,” said my parents, and so they put the English in
their
place.

But my mother had a difficulty; she liked Mrs. Willoughby. She liked to see her on her way into the garden, wearing her blue-green wool kerchief that made her eyes more astonishingly blue, and there was about this thin, trim lady a
quiet toughness, a presence, a capability in the firm, easy way she handled the reins of her household that was new to my mother and that she admired.

Even Mrs. Willoughby’s obtuseness was incorruptible. She came into the kitchen on a Sunday when it was raining too hard for my parents to leave the house and said, “Oh, Mrs. Groszmann! Since you are here, maybe you wouldn’t mind bringing in our
tea?”

My mother minded it very much. She acquiesced in silent outrage. At the door, Mrs. Willoughby turned back. “But first why don’t you come up and get the linens to make up your little girl’s bed,” she said. “It’s this Thursday she’s coming, isn’t it?”

My mother followed Mrs. Willoughby to the linen closet, vowing never to think an ungrateful thought about any English person again. “Not these,”
said the lady, laying some folded sheets in my mother’s arms. “These are our good sheets, and you don’t want to get her used to this kind of thing. Set them down on the tallboy.” With my mother’s help, Mrs. Willoughby emptied the linen closet till she came to a pile of rust-stained sheets in the back. “There,” Mrs. Willoughby said, “and you and Groszmann had better take the morning off, too,
and go up to London to fetch the little girl.”

“How good you are,” said my mother, close to tears.

“Then do you think you could catch the 5:15 down from Waterloo and be back in time to get our dinner? We can just have something quick, don’t you know. Maybe cold meat and a nice green salad and a tomato aspic that you can prepare in the morning, before you leave?”

On Thursday morning, my parents
fetched me from Paddington Station. We had lunch at the station restaurant and spent a gay afternoon window-shopping. We met Tante Trude and Onkel Hans, who took us to coffee and music at a Lyons Corner House, and we caught the 5:15 and were in Illford a little after six.

I walked into the kitchen and looked curiously around. It was big and had a red-brick floor. It was papered with bright-green
wallpaper. A fire was burning in the black stove.

My mother laid a cloth on the kitchen table and brought out the Continental breads and
Knackwurst
she had got in London. She cut and spread colorful open-faced sandwiches and urged me to eat. “Eat,” said my father, “go on,” and they both sat and watched me until a rasping buzz sounded through the quiet kitchen. I followed my mother’s eye to the
wall above the door. There was a box with a glass front, showing three rows of three round holes. Each hole had a small red tongue. Under the holes it said: