Other People’s Houses (44 page)

One evening, I brought home a new job and carried it straight to the drawing table,
which was permanently set up in the sitting room. I unrolled the painting and studied the intricate blue and purple roses, of which I would have to forge a dozen more, with such nervous distaste that when I realized my grandmother had followed me in, I said, “Hi, Omama,” without turning around, though I felt the strangeness of her standing there behind me. It was months since she had even come
into the hall to meet me. Presently I knew that she had gone away. I followed her into the bedroom. She was sitting on the chair facing the silent television. “Did you make supper, Omama, or do you want me to make it? Mummy is going to be late.”

“You make it,” my grandmother said.

When I brought in the plates, my grandmother was sitting in the same position, and I said, “Omama, don’t you want
to turn your chair around? Omama?”

She put her right hand on the table edge as if to help herself up, but still she sat.

“Omama!”

My grandmother rose slowly, but remained standing.

“Turn around, Omama.” I moved her chair for her, and she sat down on it. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

She picked up her fork but did not raise it to her mouth.

“Don’t you feel well, Omama?” I asked her.

My grandmother’s
right hand twitched, as if in memory of the old wave of rejection and resignation. I asked her if she would like to go to bed and she said she would. She leaned on my arm, moving so slowly across the room she seemed to be forgetting how to put one foot before the other. I took off her shoes, but she had not the strength to lift her legs onto the bed. I called my mother, and by the time she
arrived my grandmother had lost her speech. My mother called the doctor.

My mother stayed home from work and nursed my grandmother. Her power of speech returned, but she seemed to find nothing worth the trouble of saying, nor anything to eat that tempted her to chew. Yet soon she was sitting up, and in another week she could stand, though she never regained more than the merest shuffle of a walk.

“You won’t be able to stay home from work permanently,” I said to my mother.

“I know,” she said.

“Besides, it isn’t right for you to spend all your life nursing sick people—Daddy, and Professor Schmeidig, and then Opapa, and now Omama …”

“I know,” said my mother. Her face was flushed. The tears that dilated her eyes began to roll down her cheeks.

“Of course, I’m at home most of the time, but
how would I go downtown to collect and deliver work? I mean, she can’t be left even for a moment.”

“No, no,” said my mother. “You can’t live like that. We will have to put her in an old-age home.”

“Mummy, it won’t be so bad,” I said. “They have trained personnel, and there will be other old people. She’ll never have to be alone again.”

“That’s right,” said my mother, and all the time she was
crying and crying.

Once a week, I went to visit my grandmother in the nursing home in a converted brownstone around the corner from Central Park West. My grandmother sat in a chair next to her bed. I sat next to my grandmother and studied the gray wallpaper with the green and yellow chrysanthemums and worm-like leaves, looking for the repeat.

“So? Warm enough for you?” said an obese Negro nurse
to Mrs. Kelly, who sat, on an August dog day, in two sweaters with a coat wrapped about her legs, guarding the closed window. The nurse stuck the last spoonful of applesauce into the baby-pink face on the pillow in the bed next to my grandmother’s and said, “Good as gold. Never any trouble out of her. Not like you, Mrs. Mankjewicz. Now you cover up—aren’t you a terror!” the nurse said to Mrs.
Mankjewicz, who was dying of diabetes, and tucked the sheet around her. “And how are you today?” the nurse asked, and stroked her hand over my grandmother’s hair.

When she had turned her back, my grandmother made a face at her and said, “She doesn’t understand a word I say. But the night nurse is German. America!” said my grandmother, looking all around the room until she came to Mrs. Mankjewicz,
who had thrown her covers off again and was waving her two skinny stumps, amputated at the knee, in the air. “America is no good.”

“Good-by, Omama,” I said. “I have to meet a friend on Riverside Drive.” And because my grandmother asked me. no questions, I said, “His name is David.”

“Come back soon,” she said.

That corner of Seventy-fourth Street still has the power to move me to a dry sort
of tears, like sinuses aching behind the eyes. I walked out of the nursing home with a gasp of joy into the city lying in the exhaustion of the late-afternoon heat. Behind me, lovely Central Park was green, and the young girl crossing at Columbus Avenue swung her meager shoulders and swished her gay skirt, printed with orange, black, and turquoise galleys. It had pyramids in the background, which
hit me familiarly so that I followed her a block uptown to get a clòser look—and yes, no hand but mine could have painted that awkward curl of the prow. It was a “conversation” print of the Egyptian period, which preceded the Roman era and placed the fabric squarely in my year at the Polacek studio.

I turned down Amsterdam Avenue, assailed suddenly by a complexity of misery in which I tasted
the familiar ingredients of loneliness and shame and the beginnings of nausea, and, stopping for the light at the corner of Broadway, I looked inward, wondering what was the matter
now
. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the marquee of the Hotel X and recalled intact the dimly lit dance hall, and myself softening experimentally in the arms of the sad and beastly electrician. New York is as full
of my past as of my old textile designs walking about its streets; on Fifty-seventh Street, for instance, there is a car dealer of the same name as the editor who turned down my first story, and every time the Fifth Avenue bus carries me past his sign, I feel an embarrassment grown so faint by now I hardly bother to diagnose its cause. It is, I think, the way our histories become charged thus upon
the air, the streets, the very houses of New York, that makes the alien into a citizen.

The traffic lights had changed, and I crossed Broadway. At West End Avenue, I caught the warm wind stirring from the river, and saw David waving from a bench under the heavy summer trees.

My grandmother died the night of her eighty-first birthday and was buried in a huge graveyard in New Jersey. My mother
lives alone on 157th Street. David and I were married, and moved to an apartment in midtown. Like the little dog who turns and turns around himself to shape a place in the earth to fit his own proportions, I hunted the antique shops until I found our dining table—drop-leaf, eighteenth-century, and English. David said, “You don’t think Queen Anne might be misplaced on West Seventy-second Street?”
I said, “Yes, but, please, I need it.” And so we made ourselves a home.

I keep looking around me: The war is still cold, and overseas; no one of my people, this moment, is ill; every day there are hours when I can write, and we have our friends. My husband is Jewish too, but he was born in America and accepts without alarm this normal season of our lives; but I, now that I have children and am
about the age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing that it is surrounded on all sides by calamity.

About the Author

Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928, and was educated at the University of London. A finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Segal has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, two PEN/O. Henry Awards, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. A recognized author of children’s books, Segal has also written for the
New Yorker,
the
New York Times Book Review,
the
New Republic,
and
Harper’s Magazine
, among others. She lives in New York City.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Most of the contents of this book originally appeared in the
New Yorker,
in somewhat different form. A portion of Chapter Three appeared in
Commentary
under the title “Game a la Mode, 1938.”

Foreword appeared originally in
Commentary,
March 1965, in slightly
different form. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1958, 1961, 1964, 1994 by Lore Groszmann Segal

Foreword © 1965 by
Commentary

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-4976-5497-6

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EBOOKS BY LORE SEGAL

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Available wherever ebooks are sold