Other People’s Houses (20 page)

“Maybe I will just go up and look at him.”

I set supper on the kitchen table for her, and when she came down I said, “Mrs. Bauer and Mrs. Katz wanted to cook their supper, but Daddy wouldn’t let them have the table.”

“And you had an argument with him about it?”

“How can you even argue with him? Sometimes he doesn’t make sense any more. Sometimes I say something
to him and what he says isn’t an answer to what I said at all. It gets me so angry.”

“Darling, he is ill. Imagine you were afraid you were going to throw up any moment while someone stood there arguing with you.”

“But I get so angry,” I said.

“Well, try not to. He is ill, and you are young and well. Don’t argue with him.”

“I can’t promise.”

“Try,” said my mother.

“I’ve put on coffee. Anybody
want coffee?” asked my mother when we joined the others in the drawing room. “Katzerl, I hear you helped Lore clean up after Igo. You are very good.”

“Oh, well, he was feeling bad tonight, poor man.”

“I’m going to put up a little card table so tomorrow he can work upstairs,” said my mother.

“All right, all right, don’t worry about it. Sit down, will you, and rest yourself. Aren’t you tired?”

My mother sat down and stuck both feet out in front of her and let her arms hang down the sides of the chair. She had pulled her hair over her eyes like a rag doll’s.

“Franzi!” Mrs. Katz cried. “Franzi, you clown, you look horrible. Stop!”

“You wanted to see how tired I am,” said my mother.

“Oh, Mum-my!” I said, and everyone was laughing so that we did not at first hear my father’s terrified
voice calling “Franzi!” from upstairs.

I ran up with my mother. My father was sitting in his bed, and the upper part of his body heaved as if he were having to drag up each breath from some deep source inside himself. “I can’t breathe,” he gasped.

“Swing your feet out and you can sit more comfortably.” She sat down beside him. “You’ll feel better in a minute. You know how these attacks pass.”

Between his heavings, my father said, “That doctor says I don’t have asthma. You see I do.”

“He says it’s nervous asthma. Sit quietly and it will pass.”

“It’s asthma,” said my father. “My mother had asthma; I know what asthma is like.”

“You see you’re already better. A few moments ago you couldn’t even speak. You want to lie down?”

“Yes.”

But as soon as my mother had helped my father back
into bed and covered him, he sat up again and swung his legs over the edge of the bed and gasped in a shocking way. “Open the window,” he said.

“But if it’s asthma, opening the window won’t help,” I said.

“Open the window,” my mother commanded. She put a blanket over my father’s lap, and presently he got better and she helped him back into bed and put a pillow behind him.

He said, “Stay with
me.”

“But you haven’t even had your coffee, Mummy.”

“I will later.”

“But Daddy is better now.”

My mother said, “Darling, didn’t you say you had to get back to Miss Douglas’s at nine? It’s almost half past now.”

While I was getting on my coat, my father was saying, “I wish you would write to Paul about my asthma. These English doctors don’t understand my case.”

“I’ll write tomorrow,” said
my mother.

“You aren’t going down again tonight, are you?”

“I’m going to stay right here and go to bed. Look, I’ll show you how tired I am.” She pulled her hair down over her eyes and stiffened her legs and let her arms hang rag-doll fashion.

When I looked in on my father the next day, Mrs. Bauer was in despair in the kitchen. “He’s laid supper on the kitchen table. He laid it at noon today!”

“It’s for your mother,” said my father when I went upstairs to argue with him. “You said I never think of her, but you see I do.”

“But you can’t monopolize a kitchen table all afternoon and evening in a house where there are five other people.”

“Franzi has as good a right to the table as anybody else,” said my father. “Why are you putting your hat on again? Aren’t you going to stay with me?”

I had turned toward the wardrobe mirror to fix my hair under my school hat.

“Why are you angry with me?”

I did not answer. In the mirror I saw him coming up close behind me.

“Would you like to have my crocodile belt for your own?”

“Mind!” I said, stepping away from the mirror as if to get a better distance, but it was really to force him to back away, and though I knew that his feet were not
quick enough to realign themselves, his failing to move infuriated me so that I turned and put a hand against his chest and pushed him. Astonished, I saw the astonishment on his face as he felt himself keeling over. Falling, it seemed to me, with infinite slowness, he struck the foot of the bed with his shoulder and slid almost gently to the floor. I knelt on the floor. I said, “You fell over.”
We heard footsteps already on the landing. My mother, who had arrived downstairs in time to hear the thump, came running in. “You probably didn’t know he was behind you,” she said.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“And you couldn’t step out of the way fast enough, Igo, could you?”

“I couldn’t,” said my father.

“You think he is well enough to go to work?” my mother asked Dr. Adler when he came to give my
father his weekly checkup.

“Well, how do you feel?” the doctor asked my father and patted him on the knee.

My father sat with his shirt open. He lifted his right shoulder and turned his palm out in a questioning gesture. He smiled embarrassedly and looked at my mother.

“He walks better, don’t you think?” said my mother.

“He does, he does,” said the doctor.

“I just wish he ate more.”

“You
must eat more,” said the doctor to my father. “Eat, eat,” and his right hand made motions of putting food into his mouth while he nodded encouragingly.

My father lifted his right shoulder and turned his hand out.

“You be a good fellow,” said the doctor, and patted my father’s knee. “You’ve got a wonderful little wife to look after you. And I don’t want
you
to get too tired, either,” he said
to my mother at the door. “Get some rest, now.”

“Did you hear what the doctor said? You’re supposed to rest,” I said to my mother.

“I’m going to,” she said. “I’m going to the kitchen right now to have a cup of coffee.”

“I’ll make it. You sit down. Look at the way you’re sitting, as if you’re ready to jump up any moment. Only half of you is on the seat.”

“That’s the only half that’s tired,”
said my mother.

“Oh, Mum-my! Why do you have to play for those singing lessons? Mrs. Dillon says you wouldn’t have to pay the one pound ten a month for my schooling. The Committee would pay it.”

“But I want to pay it. And I like to play the piano.”

“And why did you tell the firewarden you would watch one night for Daddy as well as one night for yourself?”

“Because Daddy can’t get up every
time the siren goes off and walk around the streets at night.”

“But they wouldn’t expect him to. You could get a certificate from Dr. Adler.”

“Darling, that’s not the point. We’re refugees. It’s important for us not to shirk anything we can do. You see, they even suspend our curfew for the nights we are on duty.”

“But the doctor said you are supposed to rest. You’re doing too much.”

“Darling,
would you really like to help me?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t nag me. I promise you if I feel I am getting too tired I will stop playing for the singing lessons. All right?”

But I could no more stop nagging my mother than she could stop jumping, and that week Mrs. Bauer had the flu and my mother volunteered to do her fire watching for her. I remember, on the way back to Adorato I cried about it.

I watched my mother in those days the same way I watched my father, imagining their bodies under the skin, rather like the intricate anatomical drawings I remembered from Paul’s medical books, only with moving parts, all liable, momentarily, to go wrong. Remembering how in Vienna my father had always fallen ill when I was not expecting it, I kept myself in a state of alarm. I kept expecting calamities
as if this would prevent them from happening. While I lay in bed at night, whenever I remembered during the school day, and always on my way over to Clinton Lodge, I invented awful things that might be happening to my father, precisely where, and in every circumstantial detail. In this way I kept up a sort of intimacy with my father’s continuous malaise. I can imagine as if it were a memory out
of my own life the afternoon he spent in the men’s room at the local milk office, afraid to come out in case he had to vomit again. It was his first day there as a file clerk. He told my mother, and my mother must have told me, that by the end of the morning he was feeling very ill. A girl was explaining the filing system to him when he began to retch. He said, “Excuse me,” and stumbled among the
chairs toward the door of the men’s room. The door was locked from inside. My father prayed, Please, don’t let me be sick here, knowing the girl’s surprised eyes were watching at his back, and then toppled backward as the door opened into his face. “Whoa, there!” said the man coming out, and put a hand up to steady my father, who pushed past him into the lavatory and locked the door and vomited.
Afterward, he felt better, though his legs trembled and his body was heaving the way it did when he was going to have an asthma attack, and he quickly pushed up the window. The cold air turned the perspiration icy on the exposed surfaces of his face, neck, and the backs of his hands. He concentrated, as if listening to the complex of violent and terrifying sensations, wondering if he was about to
have another stroke. Someone outside rattled the doorknob; rattled again and again, and went away. My father was breathing more quietly. He washed his hands under cold running water, thinking he could go back into the outside office, when he suddenly retched. All afternoon, people came to the door and went away again. At half past five, when everybody had left, my father let himself out and came
into the street. He was afraid of collapsing there; he wanted to, but instead he kept pushing himself blindly forward. Then he turned a corner and saw my mother and me coming down the hill toward him.

I had met my mother on my way back from school, walking rapidly, with her coat thrown around her shoulders. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing, darling. I’m going for a walk.”

“A walk? Have
you eaten?”

“Not yet. I just thought I might go a little way to meet your father, and, darling, let’s not have an argument about it. Please! It’s his first day at work.”

“But Daddy’s all right. The doctor said he could go to work. You don’t have to worry every minute you don’t see him.”

“I don’t worry. That’s him now.” We stopped, listening to the slurping footsteps and the tapping of a stick
around the corner.

“That’s not Daddy. That’s an old man,” I said, and saw him come into sight—my father, with his cane—and I blushed deeply. “Oh, I thought you meant that old man over there on the other side of the street. That’s who I thought you meant.”

My father had stopped to breathe at the bottom of the hill. His raincoat collar was turned under behind his neck, and his fly was unbuttoned.

“Igo!” my mother called.

He saw us and his one-sided, wasted face beamed. There was egg stuck to his badly razored left cheek.

I turned back with them, up the hill, but my father seemed unable to move his left leg. He stopped.

“Maybe we should take a taxi,” said my mother, “but it’s only two blocks. It seems silly. You see that holly over the wall? We’ll walk that far and then we’ll rest again.
You remember, Igo, in Vienna, Lore always had enough of walking within a block of our house and started crying, ‘I want to be home
now!
’ Here is the holly. Rest, Igo. Are you all right?”

The upper part of my father’s body heaved profoundly with each breath.

“There’s a taxi,” said my mother. “But it’s only a block and a half now. Now let’s make it as far as Miss Douglas’s gate.”

My father worked
in the milk office for a month. One Sunday morning, while I was dusting in Miss Douglas’s drawing room, he had another stroke, in the bathroom at Clinton Lodge, falling against the door, which was locked from the inside—a circumstance I had failed to imagine, and at a moment when I had forgotten to think about him. It was a relief for the next weeks to be able at any moment of the day to think
of him safe in a hospital.

One evening, just as my mother had hung up her coat and taken off her shoes and put the kettle on for a cup of coffee, a man rang the front doorbell and asked for her.

He smiled at my mother. “You Mrs. Groszmann? The doctor wants you to come over to the hospital, Ma’am.”

“Is my husband very bad?” asked my mother, finding her coat to put around her shoulders.

The
man held the door. We hurried alongside. “Lucky you live so near the hospital,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, we are lucky,” said my mother.

“Cold,” said the man. “Only a quarter to nine, and looks like blooming midnight.”

A cruel wind blew across the open courtyard between the porter’s lodge and the huge hospital doors. It whipped the skirts around our legs. Inside, the elevator was on the ground floor,
chained open, and there seemed to be no one in attendance, so we ran up the stairs. The doors of my father’s ward were closed. A nurse, who looked hardly older than I, came out.

“Nurse,” said my mother, “I’m supposed to see my husband.”

“Not now, you can’t. It’s not visiting time now.”

“They sent for me. Where’s Sister?”

“Ooh, I don’t know
where
she is,” said the little nurse, looking up and
down the empty corridor. “She’ll be along, I expect. I have to go to work in this other ward.” She went on her way.

My mother opened the door. The only light came from the faint blue lamps down the center of the ceiling, but we could make out the hump of my father’s knees in his cot. My mother started toward him, but it was a strange man lying in my father’s bed. He opened his eyes, saw us, passed
his tongue over his lips, and closed his eyes again.