Other People’s Houses (40 page)

“Sit down,” they said. “Stay with us.”

After that, Janos and I began to go about together. He was very much like me—self-involved, unhappy, and
arrogant—and I could not stand him. He complained a lot about his talents wasted in this uncivilized outpost of the world, but I thought his talents rather minor. It was my social talent, I thought, that was going curiously undiscovered: Doña Piri had seen how I would do for Don Indalecio and Don Indalecio had thought me entertaining enough. I could never figure out why the English colony, or the
Dominicans, or the diplomatic set failed to “take me up.”

Soon even Doña Piri stopped calling me. She never came for another lesson. A month after the dinner party, I met her in the street and started toward her. I was ashamed of the trouble she had taken to set a trap for me, that there had never been the slightest chance I should fall into it. I thought I had made a fool of her. “I’m sorry,”
I said, “I still have that shawl of yours,” and found myself smiling, for a split second, into a look of pure, straight hatred, before she averted her eyes and passed by as if she had not seen me. During the next two years, I ran across her frequently. She must have moved back into town. From the progressive shabbiness of her dress, I judged that she had fallen upon bad times. I’m sure she blamed
me, for she never again gave evidence of our acquaintance.

Don Indalecio’s picture appeared in the papers again. The caption said that Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre, President of United Pictures Cia., was going on an extended business trip, and Señora Ferrati asked if we might have just English conversation. “I have such a thing to tell you. Remember that Don Indalecio and his girl friend? Well, it
seems he went back to her and things went from bad to worse. It seems he has this cottage in the country …”

“I know,” I said.

“And there was a fight and his gun went off, my dear Señorita! And the girl is in the hospital and Don Indalecio has to go away to the United States until it all blows over, can you imagine? Isn’t that terrible? I wouldn’t speak to that man for the world. Do you mind
if we just have half an hour? I have to run. The Lopezes are giving him a good-by dinner. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. You remember how I told you not to get involved!”

“I remember,” I said. I saw in my mind’s eye the violent scene in that place, among the objects where I myself had stood holding my handbag over my bosom and my arms around my handbag, so that nothing had been able to
happen to me. It frightened me that I had not been tempted. I began to fear that I might be incorruptible forever.

CHAPTER TWELVE

New York: My Own House

In 1938, when Austrian Jews understood the meaning of Hitler’s coming, we ran to the American Consulate. Each one was given a number, as customers are in some New York bakeries, to insure their being served in the strict order of arrival. But the “American quota”—as the system was familiarly known—resembled a bakery system gone awry, and issuing a separate
series of numbers to people who came from different streets.

My grandparents’ numbers, on the quota allowed to persons born in Hungary, came through first, in 1949, nearly a year after my grandfather’s death. My grandmother, who was then seventy-five years old, went on to New York alone. She wrote that America was no good. The Jewish Committee had found her lodgings with one Amalie Kruger, an
old witch who couldn’t even cook a proper soup, and when my grandmother had wanted to show her, she had told my grandmother to get out of her kitchen, and my grandmother was never going to speak to her again. God alone knew if she would live to see the day of our coming to America, for she was ill with longing.

Paul’s number came through in 1950, and he followed my grandmother to New York. One
evening, as he was taking her for a walk on Riverside Drive, they happened to run into the Freibergs, who had been in America for over a year and were about to return to Vienna. “The New York summer is nothing for us people. Worse than Santiago. You wait and see! And there is no culture in America,” they said, and they turned down the corners of their mouths in unison and shook their heads. They
offered Paul the remaining lease on their apartment on West 157th Street. It consisted of a narrow hallway leading to a kitchen, with a room for my grandmother on the left side and a room for Paul on the right. When my mother and I arrived in May of 1951, Paul moved his bed into my grandmother’s room and bought two couches for us and a piano for my mother, and the right-hand room became a sitting-dining
room, with a plastic-topped kitchen table for the four of us to eat on. The place was shabbily furnished with a number of large rickety chests of drawers from the Salvation Army, but I was on the whole gratefully surprised—the rooms were of decent size, the ceilings high. In my mind’s eye, I redisposed the furniture, painted it; I could see the couches covered in some rich fabric. The place
had possibilities. Paul promised that some day he would help me rearrange it.

The first evening, Paul walked me one block down to Riverside Drive.

“Why, it’s pretty!” I said. “It’s as pretty as the Thames Embankment. Prettier—if it weren’t for all that horrible advertising.” I pointed beyond the highway with the twin white lights coming, red taillights going in both directions. Road without
end, I thought. (I was pleased with the thought—must remember to put it in a letter to my university friends in London.) The New Jersey shore threw its commercial neon messages in shivering paths of prime color across the water. “So garish,” I said. “The sky is positively purple with it. Look!”

The next morning, my mother and I set out for the employment agencies. My grandmother stood in the
hall door, saying, “Have you your handkerchief? Money? Keys? Have you got your lunch bag?” she asked Paul, who was leaving for work. “Come back soon!” she said to each one.

The sun was shining straight up 157th Street as we walked down, shielding our eyes against the flashing windows of the Republican Club over the Rexall’s at the corner. The sleazy Broadway small-town shops and the green-and-yellow
taxis gleamed, freshly washed by the early May morning sun. We went down into the subway and climbed out at Forty-second Street. I came bringing my London University B.A. Eng. (Hons.), a prize in a short-story contest, and my talent in drawing, “looking,” I told the interviewers, “for an interesting job.” They asked me to fill out a card, and when they had looked it over they told me to go
and learn shorthand and typing, get a year or two of American experience, and to come back again. As Paul put it that evening, “America, the land of unlimited opportunity for people who can work the I.B.M. machine.”

Paul was working in a well-known New York research foundation. He had applied for a laboratory job, where his medical training might be useful, but his degree from the University
of Vienna was not recognized in the U.S. However, the personnel department had expressed interest in his experience with livestock in Sosua, and he got a job as animal attendant. He had asked if there was any chance of being promoted to the laboratory, and they said you could never tell what opportunity might turn up.

My mother found work in the kitchen underneath the Fifth Avenue branch of a
famous restaurant chain, helping prepare hors d’oeuvres. My mother says she did not know most of the house specialties, and even after she had learned how to make them she did not recognize their American names coming distorted down the speaking tube, and the angry Negro woman at the next worktable would not tell her. My mother was afraid she was going to lose her job and came home evenings crying
from nervousness and exhaustion.

I got a job as a file clerk in a shoe factory in Queens at forty dollars a week. I sat with the girls at a long table, transferring incoming orders onto pink cardboard sheets. On my left sat an obese pimply blonde named Charlene. I told her that I had just arrived from the Dominican Republic, where I had taught English, that I was Austrian but had lived ten years
in England. Charlene leveled unblinking blue eyes insultingly at me and said something to her friend about people with accents going back where they came from. It was Charlene’s job to make up the list of lunch orders, which it was my job to fetch from the luncheonette downstairs. She waited till precisely twelve so that I was bound to lose ten minutes of my lunch hour, till I discovered that
by dawdling a little I ran into the crowds from the other floors at the pickup counter and could waste fully twenty minutes of hers. I remember the thrill of my victory, which was short-lived, for she retaliated. We got cleverer each day in mutual meanness.

In my dreams at night, Charlene and I embraced and explained ourselves to one another, but mornings, before I went to work, I vomited. At
lunch time, to avoid the sight of her obscene back turned toward me, I went out. I walked around the factory district, stepping over abandoned railway lines, seeing no one for minutes on end. Then two workmen in blue overalls, sitting on the steps of a rusty railway wagon drinking coffee out of Thermos flasks, waved to me. I felt happy. Presently I found myself at the edge of water, on the far side
of which the huge slab of the United Nations building stood on its reflection. I ran back to the factory writing a mental letter to my London friends.

In the evening, as I came up the street, I saw my grandmother at the kitchen window, and when I stepped off the elevator she was holding the hall door open. I kissed her and said, “Why do you have to stand around waiting for us? You could sit down.”

“Your mother is late!”

“How late? Eleven minutes!”

“What could have happened to her!” my grandmother said in distress.

“Well, let’s see.” I held up my hand and counted the possibilities on my fingers. “Maybe she got into conversation with her supervisor; maybe she walked up Fifth Avenue to look in the shop windows; maybe the subway got stuck between stations—”

“You think something happened
on the subway?” my grandmother asked and went back to the kitchen window. “There she is!” she said. “And there’s Pauli, too,” and she waved to them until they disappeared into the house door below her. Then she went to stand in the hall door to watch the red light of the ascending elevator bringing her children home.

“I made some poppy-seed strudel,” my grandmother said. “The table is all set.”

But Paul said he was going to shower and change and go over to have dinner with Dolf. One of the first things Paul had done when he arrived in New York was to look for Dolf in the Manhattan telephone book. He found him, too. Dolf had married. He was still writing poetry—in German—with no one to read it. Paul went to see him once in a while, to take great draughts of friendship and conversation,
and each time my grandmother was unhappy and tried to dissuade him.

“Your wonderful friend Dolf, thoughtless as ever, making you go out again after a day’s work. You look exhausted.”

“I feel fine, Muttilein.”

“Why don’t you eat here and go afterward? What does his wife know about your delicate stomach?”

“She’s a fine cook. Very good.”

My grandmother took him to the door to see that he had
his handkerchief and everything. “Come back soon,” she said.

“I don’t understand Paul,” my grandmother said when we three women sat down to supper. “How he can keep going to the house of a friend who doesn’t think of inviting his mother, his sister, and his niece.”

“Omama,” I said, “what would you and Dolf have to talk about?”

“Lorle!” my mother said, with a pleading look to me not to be rude
to my grandmother. And she proposed that we should go down and sit in the triangle, the
Dreieck
’, as my grandmother had come to call the traffic island at the corner.

Frau Hohemberg, who lived in the house where my grandmother had had her first lodgings, sat by my grandmother. “So this is the daughter and granddaughter? Why aren’t you out with a boy friend?” she asked me.

“She doesn’t have one,”
said my grandmother. “She is too choosey.”

“I’ll go out. Don’t you worry about me,” I said.

But
I
was worried. There was a picture printed permanently in the back of my mind—I had seen it through a door in the moment it had taken someone to open it and pass inside—a woman sitting on a high stool, swinging a leg; a man supporting himself on an elbow stood leaning toward her. Maybe I had only
read about it in a book. On Saturday evenings, especially, I thought about finding such a door, but some bars, I knew from the movies, did not admit single women, and I didn’t know the names of drinks; no one might come and lean on the bar toward me. I looked at my ankle and doubted if it was the shape for swinging. My mother invited my grandmother and me to come to the triangle.

I said, “Not
me! I’m going out.”

“Where are you going?” asked my grandmother, when she came to the hall door to see me off.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“When will you be back?”

“Since I don’t know where I’m going, it’s hard to say how long it will take.”

“Lorle!” my mother pleaded.

“Why don’t you want to tell me where you are going?” my grandmother asked, very much surprised.

“Because I’m twenty-three years
old, Omama, and might want to go somewhere you wouldn’t approve,” I said, though I think her interest in my affairs would have irritated me less if there had been an affair to scrutinize.

“Thank you,” said my grandmother, her eyes starting angrily out of their sockets. “That will be a good thought with which to lie in bed at night waiting for you to come home.”

“Don’t think about me. I don’t
need you to wait for me.”

“I will never ask where you are going again, I promise you,” said my grandmother. “The best thing I could do would be to die,” she said, and went into the living room.

“Go quick and kiss her,” my mother whispered, but my grandmother was laying out a game of solitaire and would not look at me.

I took the subway to Times Square and walked among the lights of the advertisements
that blinked and ran and jumped, changed colors, and started over. Yah, I thought, yah, “
TIMES SQUARE, CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD,
” indeed! It reminded me of the Viennese fair to which our maid, Poldi, used to take me around Christmas time, where the country people set up their gaudy booths. I walked, self-consciously philosophizing, describing in an imaginary letter to London the fifteen-cent turtles
with “Greetings from New York” in red paint on their tiny backs, the Texan hats on which a woman at a rattling sewing machine would put your initials in rickrack for thirty cents. A fat girl in blue satin, wearing a flowered hat, pointed to the window next to the shooting gallery, where a crowd stood watching a Negro in an outsize chef’s hat broiling frankfurters.