Other People’s Houses (35 page)

I saw in my inner eye the back room of a shop and furnished it with shelves of boxes and bales of fabric, arranged precisely like the storeroom behind my grandfather’s shop in Fischamend, except that there were three
beds in it; it was winter, dark, at five
A.M.,
the stove unlit—and my mother came in, wearing a sleeveless cotton dress and bringing my grandfather’s supper tray. “I should come down, if you are too busy,” said my grandfather. “I’m feeling much better.”

“You heard the doctor, Vati!” my mother said.

But the next morning when Paul came into the shop to open up, my grandfather, fully dressed, was
standing on a ladder arranging the coffee tins in a tidy pyramid.

Paul was very angry. He helped my grandfather down and led him upstairs, saying, “Now I want you to walk very, very slowly, please.”

After that, we never left my grandfather alone. My mother sat with him in the mornings. She taught him Spanish words out of a grammar book. When my grandmother finished cooking, she would go up.
I remember I stood at the bottom of the steps, listening, because I could not imagine what they might have to say to one another. I heard my grandmother say, “
Setz dich
. Sit up, Joszi. I will plump your pillow.” In the afternoon, when my grandmother was needed downstairs in the shop, I went to sit with my grandfather.

“Tell me a story,” I said. “Why did you need a third person to arrange your
marriage?”

“Because I was busy working in the shop, saving my money so I could open a shop of my own, so I could get married,” said my grandfather.

“Opapa, do you remember the first time you saw Omama?”

“Oh, yes,” said my grandfather. “I remember the day Benedick took me up to the flat. Your Omama was sitting by a window with one of the babies on her lap. And all the time she kept watching
me with her big black eyes. She had black hair, like a gypsy. Your Omama was always a good wife. She is a good businesswoman in the shop.”

“Hey, Opapa!” I cried. “Why are you getting out of bed? Where do your think you are going?”

“I just thought I would open the shutters.”

“Then why don’t you ask me to do it? That’s the Molinas’ yard, isn’t it?” From the window, I could see the neighbors I
knew only from their public
galería
life in the intimacy of their back yard. The yard was square and had a mud floor, with scarlet flowerpots all around the pink walls, and a lemon tree growing in the middle. Under this lovely tree sat Señora Molinas, brushing América Columbina’s hair. Mercedes was sweeping with an outsize broom and doing a silly head-wagging dance to distract the squirming baby.

“Do you remember, Lorle, our yard in Fischamend?” my grandfather asked.

At supper, I asked my grandmother if she remembered the first time she saw Opapa.

“Yes,” said my grandmother. “My father had asked Cousin Benedick to find a husband for me, because I was already twenty-four. I could have married Miklos Gottlieb.” My grandmother pulled her shoulders up and dipped her head, in something between
a shrug and a sidewise nod. “He dressed very well. He was very handsome, always with some girl. Once he said to me, ‘Fräulein Rosa, I am a man who cannot be without a woman, but you see I always come back to you.’ But I wouldn’t speak to him. He didn’t marry till four years after I married Joszi. Her name was Rosa, like mine.”

“Do you remember Opapa in those days?”

“Yes. He had a bad temper.”

“Opapa had a bad temper?”

“Yes. The week after we were married, I told him to borrow some money and stock up properly. He threw an ink bottle at me.
Aber ich hab’ ihm’s Wilde abig’räumt,
” my grandmother said in pure Austrian, meaning, “I stripped the wildness off of him.”

“But Muttilein,” said my mother, “he took poor Ferri in after your mother died, and Ibolya when she got divorced, and he
was good to Grandfather when he came to live with us.”

My grandmother acknowledged her husband’s virtues with her shrugging nod. “He didn’t drink and he didn’t gamble. Miklos Gottlieb, you know, drank. Once I went to see my father in the shop, and he and Miklos were drinking wine together in the back. His wife—that Rosa Frankel—she wasn’t good for him. But then, I wasn’t good for Joszi,” my grandmother
said. “I wouldn’t have been good for any man,” and she made a gesture with the right hand, like the downward half of a wave, that had the effect of someone pushing away a plate of food or an unpalatable condition.

On Wednesday, Señora Rodriguez came for her last piano lesson. They were moving back to the city and would return to Santiago at Christmas. She brought a jar of marmalade made from
her own oranges, for “poor Herr Steiner.”

In the evening, the Grüners came to sit with my grandfather. “What are these bad things we hear of you?” they said to him.

“
Ja so,
” said my grandfather.

“We had a letter from the Freibergs,” said Frau Grüner. “Imagine—poor Erna has broken a leg and Sigi has to nurse her. She says her sister is always busy with the boy, and he is cheeky in return. Sigi
wants us to send him some tortoise-shell pins, to start an import-export business. Sigi has talked to his friends in the glee club about the Nazis, but all they want to talk about is the Russians.”

“And how is Rudi?” asked my grandmother. “He didn’t come with you?”

“He was going to come, but you know young people,” said Frau Grüner. “They don’t like illness.”

“He hasn’t been to see us for weeks,”
said my grandmother, “though we see him all the time on the
galería
with that Juanita Perez, climbing all over one another. He’s become a real native, hasn’t he?”

Frau Grüner rose, bristling. She bent over my grandfather, saying, “Now, we want you to get better soon. You are a good man. We are all very fond of
you,
” and she led her husband downstairs without saying good-by.

My grandmother sat
grinning. She said, “Well, children, on to Ciudad Trujillo. I’ve insulted everyone in Sosua and I’m halfway through Santiago.”

My grandfather seemed to have accepted the fact of his illness and to be actually looking frailer. The fingers that stroked his mustache looked transparent and trembled a little. He no longer asked questions about the shop, but spent the day propped against his pillows,
watching the workday life in the Molinas’ back yard. One day he said to me, “So she is opening a shop next door, just as I always thought.”

“Who? Señora Molinas? Whatever makes you think so? I mean, I know she’s not.”

“Look,” said my grandfather. “They are folding up the linens.”

“Opapa! That’s only Mercedes shaking out the tablecloth.”

My grandfather said, “We always used to display the linens—tablecloths,
dish towels, and handkerchiefs—in the window facing the Fischamend Square, do you remember?”

That weekend the rainy season set in. I had never seen such a furious, inexhaustible descent of water. América Columbina and all the children came out and played in the flooded gutters, but the grownups went inside and closed their doors.

When Paul came downstairs in the morning, he found Manuela, our
new maid, sleeping on the floor. She explained that she couldn’t go home in the rain. She would get her hair wet, and if one got one’s hair wet, one got pneumonia and died.

“She can’t go home in the rain, but she can sleep on the floor,” said my grandmother. “They’re not our kind of people.”

I said, “What’s so great about our people? All
you
ever do is quarrel with them.”

This was rude. My
grandmother went out into the kitchen and didn’t talk to me the rest of the day.

And day after day it rained, at times in a fantastic downpour—as if an immense bucket was being upturned over Santiago—until the water rushed turbulently down the gutters. Then the rain settled back to a steady, muted rustling, without hope of any end. I woke up in the mornings to hear my grandmother in the next
room setting my grandfather’s tray across his bed, saying, “Sit up, Joszi,” and then my mother called us to breakfast.

The shop remained empty. Paul sat in the rocking chair, studying his course in remedial exercises. “This is near criminal,” he said. “The information is laughable, and they propose to teach by correspondence exercises impossible to understand except in practice. But I know all
this. What I need from them is a diploma, so I can get work. Then maybe we can all move to the city.”

The Freibergs wrote my mother. They were so sorry to hear about poor Herr Steiner’s illness. They were coming back to Santiago; Vienna was nothing for our people any more. What with the Russians everywhere and business so poor and stoves having to be lit now that autumn had come and maids not
four dollars a month as in the Dominican Republic but three times that a week—ridiculous! They would be back before the end of the year. They sent their best to everyone in sunny Santiago.

From the bed where my grandfather sat propped against his pillows, he looked across the muddy yard. “Look! Señora Molinas is talking to a salesman in the back room—you see, where the light is on,” said my grandfather.
“He has his sample case with him.”

“But Opapa, that’s Señora Molinas’ policeman friend—don’t you remember?—who always sits on the
galería
and sends Mercedes for five cents’ worth of butter. He brought his suitcase. I suppose he is moving in.”

“
Ja so,
” said my grandfather. “He always likes his butter every evening. You see now he is showing her his tie, shirt, his undershirt, his drawers …”

It was December; the rain had stopped. In the mornings, I woke to the sound of the chicken boy with the goatee singing out his wares and the birds flapping and gurgling as my grandmother tickled them under the wings.

Then it was Christmas. Every house in our street had its papier-mâché tree imported from the United States, decorated with glass tubes filled with a colored liquid that bubbled when
plugged into the electric outlet.

The Rodriguezes were in Santiago for the holidays, and my mother, my grandmother, and I went there for the Christmas Eve celebration. Señora Rodriguez had ordered a yew tree from the mountains. It smelled of the forest and was decorated in German fashion with brown tallow candles smelling of honey, and hung with silver chains and golden glass balls, and chocolates,
candy, and cookies wrapped in colored foil. There was an elderly German gentleman staying in the house. “He is leaving for Germany as soon as he can get his passport,” Señora Rodriguez whispered. “He’s just come out of prison, poor man. He was arrested for spying for Germany near the end of the war—though my husband tried to get him out of the country. Germany was doing so badly already, you
know; one had to do every little thing one could.” Señora Rodriguez asked my mother to play “Silent Night, Holy Night.” She said she could never get used to celebrating Christmas with the sun high, in eighty-nine-degree weather. It didn’t seem right.

That week La Viuda’s brother was pardoned and sent home. He was a little brown man who stood embarrassedly on the
galería
next to his sister. La
Viuda wore a flowered gown as if she were going to a garden party, accepting the congratulations of the neighbors.

Frau Grüner seemed to have forgiven my grandmother and came to the shop. She invited us all to her house on Sunday to welcome the returning Freibergs. My grandmother said she wasn’t going. “It’s you she wants, and Lore,” she said to my mother. “She doesn’t want me.”

“She asked for
you especially,” said my mother. “Frau Freiberg has always been fond of you, Mutti. I’ll do your hair. Go and fetch Omama’s silk dress, Lorle. I’ll stay with Vater, and you and Paul and Lore go, even if it’s just for an hour.”

At the Grüners’, I watched my grandmother sitting with Frau Freiberg, who was saying, “Vienna is nothing any more for our people,” pulling down the corners of her mouth
and shaking her head in dismissal of the Old World.

“But here is no good, either,” said my grandmother. “The climate … Paul has not been well a day since he came to Santo Domingo.”

“He wouldn’t like the cold in Vienna any more,” Frau Freiberg said. “And everyone so—I don’t know—I used to say to my sister-in-law, ‘What would it hurt you to put on a little lipstick? Why don’t you go out somewhere?’
You wouldn’t recognize the old Vienna. No culture. You remember the opera, the theater, the music. Everybody who is anybody has gone to America.”

“We never used to go anywhere,” my grandmother said. “I lived, from the time I was twenty-six till Hitler came, in a village outside Vienna. We were the only Jews. There was nowhere to go, no one to see. Once a month, I came into Vienna to visit the
children.”

“Sigi’s old friends at the glee club kept saying they would invite us, but they never did. Karl Haber was very funny about it. Once he said what did
we
know, living on a tropical island all these years while they had been through hell—first the Germans, then the English and Americans, now the Russians. But the Americans weren’t so bad. I was saying to Herr Paul just now he should wait
till he gets to America and finish his studies.”

“Paul will never finish anything,” said my grandmother, throwing her right hand out in her half wave of resignation and rejection. “He never finished his medical studies. Now he has got his diploma for remedial exercises, and it turns out that a United States diploma doesn’t count in the Dominican Republic.”

“But it’s all different in America,”
said Frau Freiberg. “Sigi’s sister and brother-in-law live in Queens. That’s near New York. He works in a zipper factory—fifty-five dollars a week and the apartment cleans itself, she says. Next year, they are going to get television.”

“America!” said my grandmother. “A friend I know, a certain Miklos Gottlieb, went to America—New York. I will never see America. I will go into the ground in Santiago,”
and my grandmother nodded her body from the waist, like a man praying in the synagogue.

Frau Grüner brought coffee and
Sacher Torte
. My grandmother whispered to Paul not to eat it; it was heavy and would upset his stomach. After that, Paul and I were ready to depart, but my grandmother didn’t want to go home.