Other People’s Houses (36 page)

In the Dominican Republic, children get their presents from the Three Kings on the
Feast of Epiphany. The street was gay with balls and hoops and new dolls. Mercedes came to the shop for a quarter pound of rice and laid her arm along the counter and put her head on it and rubbed her left ankle with her right instep and said, “
No me dejaron nada,
” which means “They didn’t leave anything for me.”

All morning La Viuda’s brother went up and down the street asking everyone if he
had heard of the accident on the road to Ciudad Trujillo. It was not an accident, he said, but an anti-Trujil-loist friend of his, whose car had been forced over the cliff by Trujillo agents.

The following day, two policemen came walking down the center of the road and fetched away La Viuda’s brother, and she came out on the
galería
and wept in grief and fury.

That night, my grandmother dreamed
about a little child in a black shift leading a baby and beckoning, and so she knew that some calamity would befall us. We said it was only because Mercedes was always in and out with little América Columbina and we were seeing La Viuda in her black weeds again, but one afternoon that week, in agony, my grandfather died. My mother leaned her arms against the wall and put her head in them and cried
with deep, painful sobs.

Paul closed up the shop. Herr and Frau Grüner and Rudi and the Freibergs came bringing food, according to Jewish tradition. They said what a good man my grandfather had been. When they were gone, my grandmother said, “I know what they think. Everyone always thought I mistreated Joszi.”

“No, no, no, no,” said my mother.

“I never told you what he did to me on our wedding
day. He carried the stair carpet my father had given us, so we would save the carrier’s fee. On our wedding day, he took me home carrying a stair carpet! A woman can’t forgive that kind of thing,” said my grandmother, with her angry eyes and her nose standing large and bleak in her white face.

There was no Jewish cemetery nearer than the one in Sosua, so my grandfather’s body was buried in the
Catholic graveyard in Santiago de los Caballeros.

Afterward, the neighbors came to sit with my grandmother—Dr. Perez and his wife and daughter, La Viuda, and Señora Molinas with América Columbina. On the third day, Paul reopened the shop.

One Sunday afternoon, when Paul and I were walking up and down the street, he said, “I sent away for a course in bookkeeping, in which I am getting a certain
amount of practice through the shop, and I might perfect myself and maybe get a job in the city until our American quota comes. Your Omama would be so much happier.”

“In town or in America? You mean she needs more people to quarrel with?”

Paul said, “I wonder if you remember, Lorle, how you used to love coming out to Fischamend for visits.”

“It was lovely,” I said.

“When Franzi and I went
to school in Vienna, there was nothing more wonderful for us than to come home weekends, to fill up the house with our friends. Omama always made a perfect feast of food, and Franzi played the piano, and there were stories. Omama loved to laugh. Opapa used to keep asking what the joke was. It is curious that a woman who is so little capable of happiness herself should have been able to fill her house
with such an immense amount of fun!”

There is a triangular traffic island at Broadway and 157th Street. It has benches, six dusty trees, and pigeons. Every time one of the Fifth Avenue buses lumbers past, the pigeons rise into the air—spreading disease and germs over everyone, my grandmother used to say. Here, in summer, at evening time, the elderly German-speaking population of Washington Heights
comes together; and one day in 1951, my grandmother happened to mention her old friend Miklos Gottlieb to one Hilde Hohemberg, who had a cousin who happened to live in the same house as Herr Gottlieb and knew him and knew that Rosa Gottlieb had died a year ago after a long illness. And Miklos, hearing that my grandmother was in New York, asked to be allowed to pay his respects.

I looked forward
to this meeting that promised to be the very cliché of romance. My grandmother put on her pewter-colored silk dress. She let my mother arrange her hair, but under protest—like a very young girl who doesn’t want to acknowledge wanting to make an impression.

“It was me, you know, he wanted to marry,” my grandmother said.

“Did he ask you, Omama?”

“He spoke to my father. He asked my father what
he would give me for a dowry. But even if he had asked me, I would not have married him. He was flighty.”

The old man to whom I opened the front door did not fill the role of decrepit, doddering, has-been manhood in which I had cast him. He was a very old but dapper little person, in a well-fitting suit with matching vest, and he carried a walking stick. His mustache was of the First World War
Viennese style and suited the style of his face. He turned his tiny, very blue eyes appreciatively on me, with a frank tribute to youth and womanhood not unlike the more vulgar leer that Dr. Perez in Santiago had thought my daily due.

My grandmother came out into the hall.

Miklos Gottlieb hooked the crook of his walking stick over his wrist so as to have both his hands free to take my grandmother’s
right. “
Ja
, Frau Rosa!” he said. “Still those beautiful black eyes!”

My grandmother acknowledged the compliment by pulling her head a little forward and down into her shoulders. My mother said, “Muttilein, take Herr Gottlieb inside. I’m coming with the coffee.”

My grandmother sat down in a chair over by the window while Miklos Gottlieb complimented the room, the persons in it, and, presently,
what he was given to eat and drink, ending with a neat observation on the smallness of the world and the water that had passed under the bridge. “But you,
liebe
Frau Rosa, you have your children here with you. I have lost two sons—my Johann in the First World War fighting the Allies in Caporetto, and my younger one, Franzl, in the second war, in London, in a German raid.” He looked around to have
us appreciate the irony.

“I have lost, too. I have lost,” my grandmother said, nodding the upper part of her body. “My Franzi lost her husband. My Paul lost his wife—twenty years old. I was still in Vienna. The night before I heard, I had my dream about a little child.”

“If you dreamed it the night before you heard,” I said, “it could hardly count as an omen of the event, as she must have died
weeks before you had the news.” I wanted the old people to stop keening over their dead.

“We follow one another across the world, and we leave our dead behind,” my mother said. “My Igo in a huge graveyard in a Jewish slum in London, Paul’s Ilse on a hill in Sosua, and my father in a Catholic graveyard in Santiago.”

“And Ibolya in Auschwitz,” said my grandmother.

“Ah, the lovely Ibolya with
the charming nose,” said Herr Gottlieb.

“And Sari God knows where in Hungary,” said my grandmother. “And Ferri and Kari taken away in Poland.” And my grandmother went down the gallery of her eleven dead brothers and sisters, naming the places where they had been murdered. “And of the three of us alive, Wetterl is in Paraguay, and Hilde in Canada, and I will go into the ground in New York.”

“And my Roserl,” said Miklos Gottlieb, closing his eyes so that they looked like little trembling pebbles set deep in their sockets. Tears pressed out between the lids. “My poor good wife, my golden Roserl—five years she was ill; the last two she couldn’t move out of her chair, and she had to die, and what am I without her?”

“
Ein bisserl Kaffee,
” my mother said and filled up his cup, but my grandmother
got up and walked out of the room. When Herr Gottlieb was leaving, my mother had to fetch her out of the kitchen.

Miklos Gottlieb had perked up and recovered his sprightly gallantry. There was a tear, a shining, perfect sphere, still poised on the ruddy crest of his cheek. He held my grandmother’s hand, saying, “You see, dear Frau Rosa, I told you I would always come back to you.” But my grandmother
would not answer him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ciudad Trujillo: Don Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre and I

After Opapa’s death, and with the “American quota” still off in some indefinite future, I began to wilt. The white sky burned unremittingly over Santiago. Inside the house, I roamed from the shop into the kitchen and upstairs to look out of the window. It is incomprehensible to me, now, that I never acquired any regular duties.
I seem to have fed on great expectations of coming, presently, into some fate worthy of my talents, a faith encouraged by the family, whose eyes I could feel following me around with doting concern. Only my grandmother said, “Lore will never get married.”

“In Santiago I certainly won’t,” I said. “Who is there in Santiago?”

“What’s wrong with Rudi?” asked my grandmother. “Lore is like my sister
Ibolya. No man was ever good enough; this one was not tall enough, that one was not smart enough …”

“But she got married!” I said anxiously.

“At twenty-nine she married the butcher, who was a great brute. She left him after six weeks.”

I was relieved that Ibolya had got married at twenty-nine. It gave me a definite year on which to fix those expectations. However much I quarreled with my grandmother,
I believed in the wisdom of her black predictions. The more they went against my best hopes, the more likely they seemed.

Paul said, “Lorle should go ahead to live in Ciudad Trujillo, where she can meet people and can get an interesting job—drawing, perhaps. There’s nothing for her here,” and he wrote to the Hotel Parisienne, which belonged to a Viennese acquaintance from Sosua, and arranged
for me to travel into town with Otto, but I said I was going by bus. “If I’m going to live in a refugee hotel, I will at least travel like a Dominican. That’s the trouble with us,” I said. “We stick so close together, we never see the country and we never meet the people.”

“What people! You don’t want to meet these people,” said my grandmother. “You remember, Paul, the first maid we had, who
borrowed my good little vegetable knife because she said she had quarreled with a neighbor and the neighbor had a knife and she did not.”

“She brought it back the next morning,” Paul said, “saying she had made up with the neighbor.”

“You see,” I cried, “an honest, peaceable woman.” But my grandmother’s páranoia had infected me, and when I went to the bus stop I saw in a panic moment the dozen
black peasant faces turned on me with a single gap-toothed nightmare smile.

The bus must once have been painted bright blue and orange, but it was so scratched and banged up that it looked like a child’s toy left from some previous Christmas. On the roof was a pyramid of tin suitcases, market baskets, and livestock. A turkey tied by the legs hung over the side of the bus.

I climbed up the rickety
steps and sat down beside the only other woman traveler, an old grandmother in a clean, faded cotton dress, who said to me, “
Qué me pica el pavo!
” I lifted my shoulder in a practiced gesture of nonunderstanding and regret. The old woman giggled and leaned up against me, and when I looked where she pointed I saw the naked, scarlet head of the turkey looking in the open window. The bird had corrected
its upside-down situation by bending its neck into a U, and was regarding the grandmother’s fat black arm with a most human expression of suspicious irascibility before taking another peck.

The bus driver asked the owner of the turkey, “
Este pavo, amigo, es macho o hembra?
” (“This turkey, my friend, is it a male or a female?”)

“
Que va,
” said the owner—to the best of my understanding—“I want
you to take one look at this splendid bird. Can you doubt it is a male?”

“It is a male turkey,” the driver explained to the old grandmother, and he took his seat at the wheel.

The old woman smiled shyly at me and shrugged her shoulders. The driver started up, his foot full on the gas, so that we all fell back in our seats and the gamecocks belonging to a stout man in a loud houndstooth jacket
awoke and began to croak in excited pebbly voices inside their canvas sacks, which lifted for a moment like helium balloons into the air, and settled for the journey, only giving out, once in a while, low pebbly noises, like creatures distressed in their sleep.

The bus rattled on the road—Dominican roads are so cheaply made that every rainy season washes them away—and the heat was intolerable.
The stout man in the houndstooth jacket brought out a bottle of whisky, which he passed among the men. He was organizing a game: Bets were laid, and the first person to catch sight of an oncoming car received the pot. The bottle made the rounds.

We were soon climbing into the mountainous region. The driver turned and said, “
Mira! Accidente por allá abajo!
” (“See the accident down there!”) I could
see, far below us in the bottom of the ravine, the wreck of a navy-blue car. While everyone’s attention was thus diverted, the driver called out, “
Un carro!
” Everyone laughed and clapped him on the back. They passed him the bottle. By now the men were standing up, hands on the seat in front, spurring the driver to go faster to see what was coming around the next hairpin turn, which the vehicle
took on two wheels, skipping the water-filled holes like a Mickey Mouse bus, sending pebbles rolling down the cliffs on our left. The grandmother crossed herself, crying out aloud to Jesús and Mary to have mercy on us, but every time the road straightened below her and she found herself alive she turned her happy face to me with a shy, apologetic smile. But I could neither cry out nor smile back,
for I had my teeth clenched, holding on to myself. By late afternoon, as we descended into the southern plain, within sight of the tall modern buildings of the city’s main street, my jaw and shoulders ached.

Ciudad Trujillo (now renamed Santo Domingo) is the chief port and capital of the Republic. Around its Spanish cathedral of ancient brown stone the houses are painted the same white, pink,
and earth-yellow as the houses in Santiago, with the same wooden
galería
with painted balustrades, and patios with scarlet flowerpots. I gave the driver the address of the Hotel Parisienne and asked him to let me off at the nearest stop, but the community of the bus decided on a small detour to take me to the very door. The gamecock owner, now completely crocked, helped me carry my suitcase up
the steps, his jacket wings flying, and handed me with a profound and unsteady bow to the care of the proprietress.