Other People’s Houses (16 page)

Albert backed away, muttering about trying to have a little joke, God damn it.

“And don’t you swear in this house!” Mrs. Hooper said. She shepherded us tenderly downstairs, where we paraded our tear-stained faces before Albert. Albert was
walking around the scullery. Afterward, he went out and came back with a new card game for everyone to play, but we said we were too upset, for goodness’ sake, to play games, and to put that thing away.

I remember the shelf on the bottom right-hand side of the kitchen dresser, where all Albert’s games were kept. I had half an expectation that the family would sit down one evening around the table
and all play together, but always Mr. Hooper removed to his chair and his paper, and Mrs. Hooper wandered between the kitchen and the scullery, fixing things and worrying. Gwenda and I drew at the table, Dawn quarreled with Albert, and Albert fiddled with the wireless, following the programs of dance music around the dial. Albert’s wireless was a real pain to me. Except for one tune that had
no lyrics and was called “In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room.” I once waited a whole Thursday afternoon when my parents were visiting to have it come on for my mother to hear. “Don’t you like that?” I said. “Listen to this one. Do you like it?”

“
Mein Gott!
” said my mother. “That’s a Mozart piano sonata. In C major. I used to play it! What have they done!”

“Isn’t it terrible!” I said, thankful
that I had been saved from confessing how pretty, how marvelously orderly and sweet it sounded in my ears.

Albert had come in to take his tea with us; he sat with his shy, sulky eyes lowered, not saying a word so long as my parents were there, but afterward he danced around the table, singing my tune in a facetious falsetto. I removed my eyes from stocky Albert with his hunched shoulders and
slightly bowed legs mincing a minuet, to spare him and myself, as one looks away from a person in an embarrassing predicament.

I usually tried to not see Albert. I used to watch Gwenda, who would talk to him and look at the permanent redness about his nostrils and the virulent pink-and-purple eruptions on his adolescent skin without appearing to be revolted. This puzzled me about her.

Once,
Albert and I happened to arrive at the front gate simultaneously, and there was nothing for it but to walk up the narrow alley to the back door together. I kept hard to my side of the wall to avoid contact with his person, from which, as he moved beside me, there came a body warmth. All the while, I kept up a mindless conversation, which, out of my confusion, sounded like flirtation. “Listen to that
dog,” I said. “He knows we are coming. I wonder if he knows it’s you and me.” Albert said not a word. There was a moment’s confusion over the matter of the back-door handle, to which each of us had raised a hand, and our eyes accidentally met. Before I could avert mine, I had seen, with surprise, where I had expected pure hatred—for had I not turned him out of his bed and room?—a mere surface of
blue, an insult. I walked into the kitchen ahead of him. The house was silent. There was no one home, and, terrified at finding myself alone in a room with Albert, I murmured that I had drawers to clean and ran upstairs to my room.

Downstairs, the wireless shouted. I sat on my bed. I dreamed a daydream: I was looking Albert in the face. I was saying, “Don’t you know that everyone would like you
better if you were nicer and better behaved?” In my dream, Albert was converted and became a good boy and a gentleman, all due to me.

I stayed upstairs till I heard Mr. Hooper come home, and then I went down to the kitchen. I looked surreptitiously at Mr. Hooper’s eyes. He had brown eyes, not alien, chilly, Christian eyes like Albert. I knew that Mr. Hooper was Christian, too, but not a blue-eyed
Christian. To all intents, Mr. Hooper and Gwenda were Jewish; I adopted them.

Gwenda I liked awfully. The only quarrel I remember having with her resulted from our drawing together, and was the occasion of my first political insight. Gwenda now had her own crayons, and they were a different combination of colors from mine, so we figured out a system of exchange: If she borrowed my pink, I would
borrow, say, her sky-blue. However, if my pink, which I never used, was long and her sky-blue, which was much in demand, was short, I would also borrow her green, to make up for the difference in length. The complication arose if she needed her sky-blue back while I was still using her green, because then she would have to make amends for the blue with another crayon of equal length, and we forgot
which was whose and there were words. I don’t know to which one of us was given the revelation that we should pool our resources and each use out of the common property according to need. We got a big box and put all our crayons in it. For the rest of the evening, we went about with our arms around each other. Next day came the counter-revelation: both of us wanted to do our skies at the same
time, and there were words. Still, it seems to me that Gwenda and I were tender and decent with each other, and as the weeks went on, we were friends. If one cried, the other cried, too.

Once, on the day before a Sunday visit to my parents, Albert spoiled the village I had done to take to them as a present. It had houses, streets, church spires, a church square, and even people walking in it,
and I had left it upside down, wanting the Hoopers to admire it without wanting to seem to want it, so that it was just possibly an accident that Albert took it to use for a shoe wiper. I was momentarily pained at the loss and started to cry. Gwenda came running to see what was the matter, and, on being told, she cried so sincerely that I wondered if the situation were really as sad as all that.
That was the day Albert brought home Monopoly.

Toward the end of the summer, Mrs. Hooper took Dawn and Gwenda and me downtown to the Air Raid Precaution headquarters to be fitted for gas masks. We put on the black, ugly masks with their flat snouts; we looked strange and monstrous to each other. For the little children there were Mickey Mouse masks with blue snouts and pink, floppy ears, which
didn’t fool them. They howled in terror at the close, evil-smelling rubber over their faces. The experience jarred Mrs. Hooper, and on the way home she kept asking me if I thought there was really going to be a war. I said no, there was not; Hitler would never go to war once he realized the Allies meant business. Mrs. Hooper was relieved. I must know—after all, I came from over there.

War was
declared on September 3rd; we heard of it over the wireless, and Mrs. Hooper had hysterics and began to tremble and sent Gwenda and me to fetch Mr. Hooper quickly from his allotment down by the river. We ran all the way. “War!” we shouted, coming in sight of Mr. Hooper squatting near the little corrugated-iron tool shed on his length of land, which was striped with rows of tomato plants, carrots,
lettuce, and beans. “Mum says you got to come home, it’s war!” cried Gwenda, arriving breathless and in terror.

Mr. Hooper straightened up. “Charlie!” he yelled across to a fellow weeding at the far end of the neighboring allotment. “War!”

“Which?” shouted Charlie, putting his hand behind his ear in a pantomime of not having heard.

“WAR!” yelled Mr. Hooper, with his hands cupped into a megaphone
before his mouth.

“OH!” Charlie shouted back, and nodded his head in pantomime of having understood and went back to his weeding.

Mr. Hooper sent us home, saying he wanted to get his beans picked before it started raining and he’d be along in a little bit.

But it didn’t look to us as if it were going to rain. It was marvelous how the sky continued blue in spite of the war. The sun was high
and hot, and we walked back slowly. Albert had got home, and there was dance music coming out of the wireless, as usual. I was comforted. Wartime seemed much like any other time, except that we carried our gas masks in cardboard boxes on a string around the neck wherever we went.

School had begun. Gwenda and I came and went together, though she was two classes ahead of me. On the first morning,
we had louse inspection. I presented my head graciously; it must be clear to everyone that this was not meant for me. There was one teacher who taught all subjects, and I remember feeling that she had nothing new to tell me. I turned to reading. I read under the desk all day. I read all evening and in bed at night and brought my book to breakfast. “Whose is this?” Albert would ask, without looking
at me and holding the book between forefinger and thumb as if it were some unpleasant object he had found on his chair.

Shortly before the Christmas holidays, a yearly examination was held at the Central School and both Gwenda and I won scholarships to the County School. My parents welcomed this change in my fortunes with enthusiastic pride—my father cried tears; my mother went in and told Mrs.
Willoughby. The Hoopers reacted with a different sort of pride. They weren’t going to have any kid of theirs, they said, going to school along with a class of girls she didn’t belong to.

Full of indignation, I commiserated with Gwenda, but, to my surprise, she shared her parents’ view. “Ma and Dawn, they went to the Central School,” said Gwenda.

“But don’t you want to go to a better school,”
I said, “where they teach Latin and you can go to the university? My Uncle Paul went to the University of Vienna until the Nazis threw him out. He was going to be a doctor. I’m going to the university.”

“I’m going to get married,” said Gwenda. “Dad and Albert didn’t go, and Albert works in the gasworks, and my dad got elected secretary to the union.”

“Do you like Albert?” I asked parenthetically.

“Yes,” Gwenda said. “He belongs in our house.”

We were sitting together in a hole we had made in the privet hedge at the bottom of the garden. I looked out over the grounds of my new school—at the playing fields, the tennis courts, the trees grouped around the outdoor stage, and the ample building along the top of the hill. I would not believe that Gwenda could really feel different from me about
things, and I said, “Don’t you think that’s nice?” and watched her face with curiosity.

“It’s wicked,” said Gwenda. “All that for just a few girls.”

“But it’s nice,” I said. “And the girls in their green uniforms, don’t you think they look nice?”

“They’re stuck-up,” said Gwenda. “I like the girls at the Central School. They’re my friends.”

“I’m going to be friends with the girls at the County
School,” I said. Gwenda and I sat close, comparing our snobberies. “What are you going to be, then, if you don’t go to the university?”

“I’m going to take typing in my last year,” Gwenda said, “and I’m going to be a secretary.”

“I’m going to be a painter,” I said. “And I’m going to travel. My Uncle Paul used to travel in Italy with his friends before Hitler. I’m going to have lots of friends.
Poets, and people like that.” Gwenda listened with all her heart; her eyes glowed with enthusiasm while I roamed in my delicious future and picked and chose, like a child let loose in a sweetshop, until Mrs. Hooper yelled to us from the scullery to come and wash our hands and have our suppers.

“So who is going to get your new uniform?” Mrs. Hooper said. “I’m sure I don’t know what all they need
up at that fancy school.”

Next day, I took my gas mask and went to see the lady of the Refugee Committee and told her, and she closed up the office and went shopping with me. She got me the green princesse-style tunic and green beret with the school emblem, and I never knew who paid for it.

“Yah!” said Albert. “Here comes Miss La-di-da.”

Albert loathed me. At Christmas, he gave me a game—a
small one. For the rest of the family he had bought a collapsible snooker table, with balls and cues and chalk, which he played by himself throughout the holidays.

Christmas Day also happened to be Dawn’s seventeenth birthday, and Albert gave her a ring. After tea, he turned on the wireless really loud and stood behind Dawn’s chair and drummed out “A Tisket, a Tasket” with a flat palm on each
of Dawn’s breasts. Mrs. Hooper began to carry the tea dishes into the scullery, and Gwenda left the room. I pretended to be drawing, but I looked in fascination at what Albert’s hands dared, and at Dawn, who allowed it. Her hands lay loosely in her lap, the right one cradling the left, which wore the ring. Dawn’s eyes stared straight before her with a look of patience.

With the beginning of the
new term, I was inducted into the fourth form at the school on the hill, behind the Hoopers’ house. “Will you take care of Lore, here? She’s new,” said the teacher to a girl sitting in the front row. “Katherine will show you around. You sit here, and, Daisy, will you move to the empty desk in the back?”

“Ah, no!” said this Katherine. “Why does Daisy have to go?” She looked at me with a cold and
insolent blue eye.

I talked to Katherine. I told her how I had come to the County School on a scholarship. Katherine looked back at Daisy and put her thumb to her nose. I decided she couldn’t have meant me, not with me standing there. I said, “I’m from abroad, and when I came to England I went to a Hebrew school, and after the first term I was top of the class.”

“Don’t you like it in the new
school?” my mother asked the next Thursday.

“I do like it,” I lied. “I love it.” I spoke with enthusiasm about the courts and lawns and trees and a special room for art classes, with easels.

“It always takes a while in a new school to make friends,” said my mother.

“I’ve got plenty of friends,” I said, for I could not bear my mother to know that I was the kind of person who didn’t have. I had
sneaked into Dawn’s and Gwenda’s room, where there was a small mirror on the wall, to try to understand what people saw when they looked at me. My eyes looked back, critical, anxious, and overeager. My nose had lost its baby roundness and was growing sharp, like my father’s. My face was small, made narrower by a mass of high-standing, tight light curls. (My mother wanted me to have my hair cut
short, but I would not. I thought once it grew long enough it would also turn black and fine and silky and would fall in a tragic way about my face. Then I would look interesting and sad, and even Albert would feel sorry for me.)