The Oriental Wife (12 page)

“Did you see much of her here in New York?” Rolf asked. His mother had never mentioned Sophie to him.

“No … I invited her many times, for lunch and supper and to come with me to the park, but she rarely agreed to come. So I did not press her any more. But I continued to phone her, every week.”

Meanwhile Jeannette, twisting her hands in her lap, was telling Dr. Joseftal how she had never really cared for her English governess, or developed any love for the language; she had always preferred French, she said fretfully, though Emmy Loeb, her best friend at school—who lived on Indian Road now—used to make fun of her accent. She blamed
Emmy (whose husband had been killed on
Kristallnacht
, whose two sons, hiding in France, had been denounced and deported) for the fact that she had given up her French studies after the second year. But perhaps it was for the best; what good would French have done her here in America, where nobody spoke anything but English? “I have a cousin who emigrated to the Dominican Republic. I am sure that Spanish is a much more
gemütlich
language than English. But it would be too late for me to learn it now.”

Sophie, overhearing this, said briskly that she must show more gratitude to her new country, she must not be so discontented. “You spoke of Emily Loeb,” she said. “We must think of what she has to endure, and not make so much of our small troubles.” Jeannette became agitated; she half rose in her chair, as though propelled upward by her indignation at being addressed this way. The doctor, who up till then had been almost silent, told her gently, “Don’t be offended. My Sophie is a great one for enjoining us to gratitude. And of course she is right. I myself need these reminders, I have a tendency to melancholy. We should not read the newspapers too much, I think.”

“One must naturally keep up with the war news,” Sophie said. “But there is no necessity to read some of the other stories they carry.”

“Like what?” Louisa asked.

Sophie looked at her husband, who sat with his head bowed, still smiling faintly, as though to remove himself from the discussion. “These sad stories about animals that die in the zoo. About old women found dead in their apartments.”

“I didn’t think they carried such stories in the
New York Times
,” Rolf said.

“Yes, they do. On the inside pages. They upset Gustav very much.”

“I am afraid I am not the soldier my Sophie is,” Gustav said, smiling at Jeannette. “But she is right, we must try to be grateful, to America especially. You would not find the Dominican Republic more congenial than New York, I am sure of that.”

Three weeks after Trudl’s funeral, reports began appearing about the
Lager
the Allies had liberated in their march through Europe. The women read the accounts, in German, in the Washington Heights paper, the men in the
New York Times
. But they were afraid to say too much. Did you see the pictures in the
Aufbau
, one woman might ask another, and the other would nod; they would both fall silent for a moment, before telling how the butcher on Dyckman Street had failed, once again, to trim the fat off the stewing meat.

Even husbands and wives could not talk of those things; when they turned off the light, they lay silent, their backs to each other, and did not shut their eyes. The thoughts they had then might be of trivial things, petty squabbles they had had with neighbors, fallings-out with second and third cousins in Stuttgart or Frankfurt that had caused them to cut off contact years before the trouble began—people they had loved once, and now saw that they loved still, whose fate they did not know. They wondered if friends they had lost touch with when they came to America had perished, or if the visas they had been waiting for, to Singapore or South Africa or Argentina, had come through. And some of them thought with shame of scornful remarks they used to make about the
Ostjuden
, the immigrants from Poland whose rusty black jackets, long beards,
and guttural Yiddish had embarrassed them so when they still thought of themselves as good Germans.

In search of their relatives, they went to the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee to look at the lists of the dead, which grew longer every week—another thousand names, another hundred thousand. But still they did not speak of these things to each other; they grieved in the dark, remembering the photographs in the newspapers, the mounds of skeletons, and hoped crazily that maybe Rosa or Gottfried or Friedrich had survived after all.

Shortly after Germany’s surrender, when the whole world reeked of death, the word circulated among the refugee women that Louisa was pregnant—a piece of news that might have seemed just ordinarily cheerful a few months before but now took on almost a holy resonance. In the midst of the horror, the nightmares, the thoughts of what the dead had suffered before their end, here was a new life beginning, an American child would be born from the ashes. It was enough to make them hum the tunes they used to sing to their own children as they went about their chores, enough to make them stop and smile at the children in the playground at Isham Park.

Many of those women had never cared for Louisa: they remembered their first, terrible weeks in the city, when they had looked to her for succor and been disappointed. She had shown up, breathless and late, in their near-empty apartments, with useless gifts of lace doilies or French soap, when what they needed was to be shown where to find brown bread and lightbulbs. They had also needed an audience for the stories they’d brought with them, and she had not provided it; instead she had told them her own stories, amusing little
anecdotes about America they could not quite grasp. They suspected that they bored her; they suspected she preferred her new, American friends, the Park Avenue matrons who worked on the committees with Rolf and invited her to their grand apartments for cocktails. No doubt her frivolous stories, her breathless laughter, went over much better in their drawing rooms; no doubt those rich women were relieved to have found one émigré, at least, who was not grim and reproachful, who did not insist on telling them things they would rather not hear.

But now the refugees drew around her, ready to forgive her everything, even the way she spoke about her baby. For she was no more serious than ever. She joked that the child seemed very bad-tempered, and threatened to knock it out with brandy if it didn’t stop its kicking at night. Whereas they began knitting tiny sweaters—they dug out their embroidery silks too, their fingers, stiffened with arthritis, remembering how to make baby bonnets, how to stitch little flowers and leaf patterns—Louisa had given up on her own knitting after a single attempt. It would be cruel, she said, holding up a tiny red scarf, still on its needles, that was curling into a tube, to inflict such a gruesome object on a helpless child, even one with a vile temper.

It was just a manner she had, Sophie told them, when the others shook their heads and rolled their eyes—something she must have picked up in England, where everybody talked that way. She wasn’t really unfeeling. Look at how much milk she was drinking. Look at how happy she was. But later the women would say she had been
too
happy; that there’d been something feverish about it, as though she’d had a premonition all along.

When the dizziness started, three months before her due date, and the headaches got so bad she was sick to her stomach, they all remembered, for her sake, the cousin of a cousin or a sister-in-law’s sister who had had the most frightening symptoms, and everything had been fine in the end. As she began to look less blooming, as her vision became blurred and her walk unsteady, they told each other she needed to rest more, to eat more meat; she had been a child during the famine; no wonder she wasn’t very strong. One or the other of them, organized by Sophie, brought food to the apartment at lunchtime, schnitzel or sauerbraten, with a slice of plum cake from the bakery on Dyckman Street. Afterward they tucked her up on the living room sofa with a crocheted comforter.

But sometimes she could not keep down the food they brought; sometimes she dropped her knife or bumped into a chair on her way to the table. Then she might press her clenched fists against her temples, rocking back and forth, and ask them to leave the veal dumplings or the liver and onions in the kitchen; she would heat them up later. Whichever of the women had come that day would flutter around her, anxious and frightened, telling her with diminishing conviction about a friend or a neighbor back in Nuremberg who’d been nauseated and dizzy for nine months before miraculously giving birth to a healthy child. When they arrived home they would phone Sophie to report.

Jeannette too had taken to phoning Sophie, always at the most inconvenient times, when Sophie was breading veal cutlets or expecting a call from her son Kurt, now enrolled in Ohio State on the GI Bill. Everyone was lying, Jeannette said, all the women, and Louisa’s fool doctor too. Anybody with half a brain could see that something was wrong.
She, Jeannette, had tried to speak to Rolf, but Louisa was pretending for him, as everybody else was pretending for Louisa. She should have taken to her bed and stayed there throughout her pregnancy; Jeannette had told her as much, but of course she had not listened to her. The stupid American doctor saw no reason why she shouldn’t be climbing mountains. Now look what was happening. Already it might be too late.

“You mustn’t worry her,” Sophie said. “The last thing she needs now is more worry.”

But she herself, Jeannette said, was out of her mind with worry; she could not digest her food properly; the constant acid in her stomach was ruining her health.

“Then you are the one who must see a doctor,” Sophie told her sharply. “I’ve been going to a very pleasant young man, right here in Inwood. I’ll give you his number.”

“It’s all very well for you,” Jeannette said, sniffing. “You’re not her mother.”

“We cannot be telling our children what to do any longer. If she needs another doctor, Rolf will see to it.”

But in the end it was Louisa who saw to it. On a gusty fall morning, after Rolf had left for work, she put on the brown felt hat that she had worn for her wedding, walked unsteadily to the corner of Broadway, and hailed a cab. At the hospital on 168th Street, she tottered down the strip of carpet in her high heels, like a drunken model on a runway, and leaned, trembling, against the reception counter. A plump blond nurse carrying a roll of rubber tubing stopped on her way past and asked if she was all right. She was fine, Louisa said: now that the time had come to say out loud
what she had been thinking for five weeks and three days, that something was wrong with her baby, she had changed her mind. But when the nurse touched her arm she started to cry.

“Hey,” the woman said, shifting the tubing to her left hand. “Hey hey hey. I’m Bonnie. Why don’t we take you into the back there and talk for a sec.” She steered Louisa, blinded now by tears, through some swinging doors and into a cubicle with a white metal table, where she set the tubing down and gently removed the brown hat. After that Louisa became wholly submissive, allowing Bonnie to take her coat and help her up onto the table. When she was down to her underwear, Bonnie tied a gray hospital gown around her and went to fetch a doctor, who spoke hardly a word, but worked his fingers over her scalp the way the girl at the hairdresser did when she was giving her a shampoo and then shone a light into first one eye and then the other. Bonnie tucked Louisa’s hair behind her ear for her before leaving the room. The doctor pinched the skin on her temples and pressed his thumbs, hard, into the back of her neck.

When he too went away, Louisa sat there for a long time, waiting anxiously for Bonnie to return. Instead, two men in rumpled green uniforms arrived, rolling a gurney between them and telling her to hop on and lie down; they had orders to bring her downstairs. In the elevator they had a disagreement about someone named Lena: one of them thought she was just being friendly to Josie’s husband, the other that she was after him. “Come off it,” the taller one said. He looked as though he needed a shave. “The guy’s sixty if he’s a day.”

“Yeah, well, when Lena’s hitting the sauce she don’t care how old they are.”

Down in the basement, they wheeled her down the corridor and inside a musty beige room almost filled by a huge machine with steel arms swiveling out in all directions. Each arm had a different-shaped attachment at its end. A man who’d been sitting at a desk in the corner got up and swiveled a stubby, cone-shaped one toward Louisa until it was pointing at the right side of her head. A light flashed. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just relax. This won’t take a minute.” He pointed the cone at the other side of her head, then at her forehead; again, there was the flash of light. Then he went and opened the door, and the same two men came and wheeled her out into the hall. Without a word, they aligned the gurney carefully with the wall before stepping into the elevator, leaving her there. She began to cry, weak helpless tears, her bare legs cold against the table.

Several times, she heard the elevator descend and then stop; finally the doors opened and a nurse stepped out—older than Bonnie, skinny, with a starched cap. “Now now,” she said, in a neutral voice, handing Louisa a pink pill and a tiny cup of water, and propping up her head so she could swallow. “You mustn’t cry, you know. It’s bad for the baby.” Louisa lay back, both hands on her stomach, and whispered to her child that it was all right, they would be all right, everything would be fine. Then she remembered Phillip, back in London, saying those words to her one wet afternoon: she had not heard from her father for two weeks, the
Manchester Guardian
had run an article that day about the proscription of Jews from the streetcars and parks in Germany. “I promise,”
he had said, kissing her eyelids, “I promise you’ll be fine,” and as he unzipped her dress, “It’ll all be all right. You’ll see. We’ll get them out. We’ll be very happy. Everything will be just fine.” But it had not been all right in Chicago, and she knew, even before the doctor came back, that it was not all right now.