Other People’s Houses (25 page)

I saw Herta at Mrs. Dillon’s Nativity play, where she sat near the altar, strangely lighted by the lantern behind the manger,
half in the shadow of the immense round pillar. She looked odd—bloated and fat, and as if her brows had grown together. I waved to her when I went up front to help Mrs. Dillon with the wings and halos, but Herta was deeply absorbed in her prayer book and did not see me.

In the course of the following year my headmistress took a group of sixth-form girls who were thinking about going to the university
on a day’s excursion to Oxford, and I fell in love. Oxford seemed everything that I was not: at ease with itself, at one with its own past—upper class, English.

Mrs. Dillon talked to me in the drawing room, sitting beside me on the sofa. She said, now that I was sixteen, didn’t I think that at the end of the year I should leave school and get a job.

“But I’m going to try for Oxford,” I said.
I explained to her about the stacks in the Bodleian, the sunny High and the students in black gowns riding their bicycles to lectures, about paneled halls, bell towers, and the still, green quadrangles with fretted arches, fanned ceilings, and moldering stone faces. “There’s something Henry James wrote about ‘the ache of antiquity,’” I said, catching myself on the edge of tears.

Mrs. Dillon,
in her blue flowered cotton frock, blinking her eyes in anxiety over me, obviously did not understand about beauty and history. She said, “It’s just that I was thinking, darling, now that your father has passed on, I mean about your mother having to work in that dreadful restaurant kitchen.”

“But Mummy
wants
me to go to college,” I said. “And Herta is going. She got her scholarship to Cambridge.”

I met Herta on the street and told her about my planning to go to Oxford. Herta, in her tweed suit, which she filled out in a new stout, grown-up way, looked through her spectacles and said, “And you think Oxford will make a Christian out of you?” It seemed her parents had turned up in Hong Kong and she was only waiting for passage to be arranged to join them in Palestine on her brother’s
kibbutz
. She said she was very excited.

I think that was the last time I saw Herta, but one day, not long afterward, Mrs. Montgomery came to see Mrs. Dillon at the refugee office. Herta had confessed that she did not want to go to Palestine. She wanted to stay and be baptized into the Church of England. Mrs. Montgomery was disturbed—it seemed unnatural in a girl, she said. After all, they were still
her parents.

I was now engrossed in my own plans, cramming for the exams, waiting for the results, and assumed that Herta had gone up to Cambridge. I didn’t know until a year later, when I came back to Allchester for the Christmas holidays, that Herta had jumped out of her bedroom window on the third floor into Mrs. Montgomery’s garden, and was dead.

I was accepted at Oxford, but for the year
following. It had taken me only minutes to understand that my circumstances would not allow me to wait, but it was years before I overcame the pain of having to accept a second-choice university. I remember my sense of having been maimed for life, and I lay it to Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon, who wielded their influence for five years, when I was impressionable, trying to bring a new soul into the
Church of England, and, instead, turned out a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

London: Frocks, Books, and No
Men

My college was an all-women affair, a member of the University of London. It was housed in a complex of unassuming modern brick, without beauty, but the afternoon I first walked through the little gate in the black iron railing that set off its grounds from the rest of Regents Park, a sudden mild golden light emerged capriciously, unbelievably,
out of the drizzling autumn; the students walking along the paths between the wide lawns, under old plane trees, took off their mackintoshes and shook their hair free from their kerchiefs. I thought, This is me going to college!

The girl who stood next to me in line for registration looked interesting, with her large white face and straight hair drawn severely back. I told her my name was Lore
and that I was Jewish. She said she was glad to meet me. Her name was Monique and she was American. I had thought she was English, and I was quite disappointed.

A good proportion of the students lived in the college dormitories, but for economy’s sake my mother and I had taken a room together. Outside the window were the scrappy grounds of Primrose Hill. Inside, the brownish, tweedy wallpaper
and the heavy, dusty green of the ancient curtains created a khaki drabness—I kept trying to offset it by odd arrangements of the drab furniture—but in the downstairs hall, in front of the table where the lodgers’ mail was laid out, I had seen a young man. He wore a scarf showing the colors of Kings College. He looked around at me, but I had on my unbecoming green blouse and looked away and ran upstairs
where I rapidly changed into my white silk blouse, saw it needed ironing, changed back, combed my hair, wished it were longer and my nose shorter, wished I didn’t wear glasses, and ran back down. By that time, of course, the young man had gone, but on the mail table I found the envelope with my scholarship check.

(I look back to the generosity of this scholarship with amazement: It paid my full
tuition and “maintenance,” inquiring into neither my status as a foreigner nor my future intentions. I was asked to send in a semiannual report as to my continued attendance at the college and a statement of my needs for rent, food, clothing, books, fares, and miscellaneous items, which were totaled and sent me in the form of monthly checks.)

It seems to me that I spent my three college years
walking through London, the elegant shopping districts, the picture galleries, the churches and secondhand bookstores. My state of mind was near euphoria, alternating with a painful sort of desperation because I had no one with whom to be in love, and over all there hung a cloud of guilt because of the studying I was not doing. I loved my lecturers but studied the variety of their performances instead
of the subjects of the lectures. Instead of taking notes, I doodled loose-leaf books full of faces, dancing figures, elaborate houses—whole townships. I read, but nothing to its conclusion and never what had been assigned. In my first term, I decided to ground my present studies in a comparative survey of world literature of the past. Beginning with the orient, I came across a quote from the
diaries of Lady Murasaki. Writing about her school career, she says: “It was not long before I repented having … distinguished myself, for person after person assured me that even boys become very unpopular if it is discovered that they are fond of their books. For a girl, of course, it is worse.… I became careful to conceal the fact … with the result that to this day I am shockingly clumsy with
my brush.” I closed the book, immensely excited: What my own experience had revealed about modern middle-class England appeared to have been true in the court circles of eleventh-century Japan. Lady Murasaki and I were two women with an unfortunate intellectual tendency. Where she had tried to conceal her books, I had tried to take the curse off mine by reading messily. In the beginning, I had had
to work hard to unlearn the disciplined ambition of my early years in the Vienna schools. In my first year at Allchester High School, I had won the prize in penmanship out of sheer habit, but by my Upper-Fourth year I was becoming so clumsy with my pen that my writing was all but illegible, and in the Lower Fifth I was able to boast a “C” in spelling. I was surprised that my classmates did not seem
to like me any the better; somewhere I had miscalculated. My best friend, Margaret, a clever, elegant English girl, kept on getting brilliant marks, yet
she
was always first to be chosen on any team.

I had always assumed that when I got to the university I would
really
start to work. I thought that any moment now I would go on reading Lady Murasaki’s diary, instead of looking out of the library
window to where the trees dipped their dark wet branches into the mist and a big white goose, rising out of the pewter-colored lake, waddled through the iron gate into the college grounds and came up the path toward the library. She started up the steps with a hop and a flap, and came face to face with Dr. Milsom, our professor of Middle English, coming out of the building. Up went the professor’s
arms, black briefcase flying; out went the goose’s white wings. Neck stretched, she turned, half-flying down the steps, and did not stop till she had reached the middle of the wet lawn, where she shook and chatted with herself. The professor, having regained his composure, walked toward the gate, raising his hat to Monique, who came on brilliant red legs like some tropical bird, high-stepping
up the college path. (It is hard to convey what a sudden stroke of color can do to an English townscape. I remember, sometime late that year, coming out of the park into Baker Street and seeing, outside the underground station, a cart piled high with peaches. The peddler, his hands deep in his ragged coat pockets, stared at the circle of rush-hour Londoners collected on the wet pavement, staring at
the fruit that burned in the greenish October dusk with a light absorbed in some other time and place.)

When I came out of the library, Monique called to me to wait for her. “Look at them,” she said, pointing around the grounds full of women in uniform mackintoshes, flat-heeled walking shoes, and kerchiefs tied under their chins. “Who would have thought English women dress as badly as people
always say? Restores your faith in prejudice, doesn’t it? In New York,” she continued in her attractive husky contralto, “we wear raincoats because it’s so British, but
we
keep sending them to the cleaners, whereas now I see they are
supposed
to look filthy.”

“That’s because the English don’t wear mackintoshes to be stylish but to keep dry,” I said, “and it never stops raining long enough to
have them cleaned.”

“There!” said Monique. “There! That’s what I mean! Did you really think it would rain continually in England?”

“I didn’t have the opportunity to form prejudices,” I said. “I came here when I was a child of ten so I’m about fifty per cent English myself.”

“Fifty per cent? Ah!” Monique said. “You’re one hundred and fifty per cent English. It’s just that hundred per cent that
will always elude you and me.”

In our khaki room, my mother met me with the news that she had found a job. She was going to be housekeeper to an old German gentleman, a Professor Schmeidig.

“Mu-mmy! You said you were going to look for a restaurant job. You
promised
you weren’t going back to private service!”

“This is different, Lorle. I’m going to be a sort of companion-housekeeper. The London
restaurants don’t need any more Viennese cooks. And the professor is old and ill and he does need somebody.”

“So, you’re going to start all over again, nursing a sick man!”

“Oh, he’s not sick like that,” my mother said. “It’s not the same thing as with your father. This man is a stranger to me. I go in at eight in the morning, tidy up the flat—which is quite small and easy to clean—do the shopping,
prepare his meals, and at five I’m off. I don’t even have to stay while he eats his supper. He wants to meet you. I told him all about your scholarship.”

I found Professor Schmeidig, in his ancient velvet smoking jacket, perfectly charming. He talked interestingly to me, comparing the English universities with the prewar universities of Germany, and he talked with a warm gallantry about my mother.
He said he was lucky to get someone with a sense of humor, someone with whom one could talk about music. “And she’s going to play the piano for me. Sit down, Frau Groszmann.”

“I wouldn’t be so unkind to you,” said my mother. “I haven’t practiced since the year before Hitler.” But she was persuaded to sit down at the small upright and had apologized her way through half a Chopin étude when I noticed
that the professor’s head had fallen forward onto his chest. In sleep, his old man’s nose and chin looked enormous.

My mother got up and put a pillow behind his back. “It’s his age,” she said as we tiptoed out. “He even falls asleep in the middle of his meals. You go on home, you have to study. I’ll just wait till he wakes up and set his supper on a tray.”

My mother called me at seven o’clock
to say I was not to worry. She was sitting with the professor until his son arrived from the other end of London. The poor professor had awakened feeling far from well, and she didn’t like to leave him.

The next night my mother did not come home till almost eleven o’clock. “And you left the house before six this morning,” I said bitterly.

“That’s only as long as he is feeling so unwell. What
do you want me to do? I can’t leave him there, sitting alone, feeling ill and frightened.”

“He has a son!” I said.

“His son has a wife and three children. He can’t be with his father all the time.”

“You’re too goddam good and nice,” I said, almost in tears, “and it drives me up the wall!”

“It’s nothing to do with being good,” my mother said. “It makes
me
more comfortable to be with him than
to be home worrying about him. Besides, Lorle, you have your studying in the evenings. What am I supposed to do?”

“Go out a bit. Try and meet people. Look at Lizzi!”

Lizzi Bauer, our friend from the old Clinton Lodge days, had been to see us. She had come to London to see if she could hurry her son’s immigration to England, and to see, she said, after all those lonely years in Allchester, if
she couldn’t meet someone. She told us how she had gone to Hyde Park and sat on a bench and noticed this very good-looking man, and how he had come and sat beside her and they had talked. He was a Russian—had been a lawyer back home—a fascinating man. He had been quite taken with her. They had walked around the Serpentine and he had held her hand. He had pleaded with her to come to dinner with him,
but Lizzi had said that she was not the kind of person who goes to dinner with a man she meets on a park bench.