The Oriental Wife (16 page)

“Sometimes I do.”

“Come on,” she said, tossing her head. “At least let me think I’m the only virtuous one around this joint.”

He wished he could think of some breezy joke to make in return, but he never could; he could never manage the banter that came to Americans so naturally. He gave her an apologetic smile. “Don’t let me disturb you.”

“You’re not disturbing me, Mr. Furchgott.”

“Please,” he said. “Call me Rolf.”

“Okay, Rolf. And you call me Connie. That’s short for Constanzia. Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, no. I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”

“You’re not interrupting. Would you know how to spell
subsequent
? When I was taking dictation I put it down
s-u-b-s-i-q-u-e-n-t
, but now that looks funny to me, and some joker has walked off with my dictionary.”

“I believe it has two
e
’s,” he said, clearing his throat. “But don’t take my word for it. My English is far from perfect.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your English I can see,” she said. “Hey, you’re blushing.” He stammered a denial and was about to walk into his office when he remembered that he had to talk to Mr. Starin about money, something he had been putting off for weeks. Already the bank loan to cover the expenses of Louisa’s surgery was running out; he would need to borrow more to pay Mrs. Sprague’s wages.

“Can you tell me if Mr. Starin is free any time this morning?” he asked her, and she got out the leather-bound book in which his appointments were kept.

“Nine o’clock looks good,” she said. “Before he meets with the sales reps. Should I tell him you want to see him?”

“Yes, if you would.” She looked at him expectantly, but he could not think of a plausible reason. So once again he smiled apologetically before retreating to his office.

At nine exactly—by that time the other secretaries, including the one he shared with the general manager, were hanging up their coats and settling down at their desks, calling out greetings to each other—he came back and asked her if Mr. Starin was expecting him.

“Sure,” she said, typing away. “I told him it was something mysterious, you wouldn’t say what.” Then, looking up and seeing his face, she took her hands off the keyboard. “You don’t think I really said that, do you? I’m just kidding. Me and my big mouth.”

“It’s all right.”

“You look like you’re going up against the firing squad or something. He’s not that bad.”

He was spared having to reply by Mr. Starin calling out to him to come in.

They said good morning, Mr. Starin pointed to the red leather chair opposite his desk, where Rolf always sat when they were conferring, and by the time Rolf was seated it seemed as though the silence had already gone on too long. Mr. Starin looked even more dyspeptic than usual; he folded his hands on the blotter and waited with an air of barely contained wrath for Rolf to speak. But just as Rolf was about to start, he snapped, “I know what you’re going to say.”

It wasn’t so surprising if he’d figured it out. Everyone in the office knew what had happened to Louisa, though nobody
ever referred to it directly; they asked him about Emma instead, they cooed over the picture of her that sat on his desk in a leather frame. But some of the women gave him compassionate smiles when he greeted them in the halls; they offered to bring him coffee more than they used to, and asked if he wanted anything when they went out for lunch. Mr. Starin was very good with figures; he must have realized that the situation would entail extra expense.

“I’m sorry about this,” Rolf said, and the other man made an impatient noise.

“So where are you going?”

“What?”

“What kind of job have you found yourself?”

It took a minute before Rolf understood.

“I haven’t found any job. I’m not looking for another job.”

Mr. Starin frowned. He popped something into his mouth and swallowed. “You’re not here to tell me you’re quitting?”

“Not at all,” Rolf said. “Nothing like that.”

“Hardworking young man like you,” Mr. Starin said, “all this postwar expansion, there must be plenty of jobs out there now. The big companies are looking for people.”

“I like the job I have,” Rolf said firmly, and took a deep breath, but the man cut him off before he could begin.

“So what are you here for?”

“Well, sir”—he never called him that. “I wondered if you’d be willing to lend me some money.”

Mr. Starin grinned suddenly; he swiveled from side to side in his chair. Rolf could not remember him ever looking so cheerful.

“What do you need it for?”

It seemed harder than ever to mention Louisa with the man smiling like that. Somehow he managed to stumble through it: the bank loan, the monthly repayments, Mrs. Sprague. “The bank won’t allow me to borrow any more. If you can lend me this money, you could deduct a certain amount from my salary every week. I’d expect to pay interest, of course, whatever you thought was fair. You could have papers drawn up, and I’d sign them.”

“How much?”

“I was going to ask for two thousand dollars.”

Mr. Starin stopped swiveling and gave Rolf a speculative look. Then he turned and looked out the window, then back to Rolf again.

“How much would you pay back every week?”

“Say, fifteen dollars?”

“With interest, that could take three years to pay back. What if you leave before three years?”

“I wouldn’t do that. Anyway, I don’t want to leave.”

“You might. Somebody might offer you a better job.”

“I wouldn’t leave owing you money.”

“Okay, okay, don’t get huffy.” Mr. Starin was silent for a moment, puffing out his cheeks and sucking them in again. Then he placed his hands squarely on the blotter and leaned toward Rolf. “How’s about this? You don’t have to sign anything. I give you the money, and you give me your word you stay with the company until it’s paid off. Or five years, because you might pay it off quicker than you think. Mr. Price is about to retire in two years; you could wind up general manager. And then you’ll get a raise, and you could pay it off quicker. But you still have to stay five years. What do you say?”

“You gave me my first job in this country. I’m not going to quit on you. But you can still have papers drawn up.”

The man brushed this aside. “I have a hunch it’s better not to deal like that with someone like you. Then you’ve got to keep your word, I’ll have trusted you. That’s right, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for Rolf to answer. “I’ll call my bank manager; you should have the money in a few days. That good enough for you?”

“Of course. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re going to make me a lot more than two thousand dollars.” He became expansive, leaning back in his chair, talking about his problems with the lumber suppliers; they were raising their prices, they were delaying shipments; they had too many customers right now to care about him. “So I think we should go ahead with buying that yard in Oregon. Guaranteed supply. I think he’d give me a good price. But I need to find out what it would take to run the business. Maybe you could go out there. Check things out. What do you say?”

“Of course,” Rolf said. “If you think I could do it.”

“I know you could do it. The question is just whether you can get away, what with the situation at home right now.” It was the first time he had ever referred to it.

“How long do you think I’d need to spend?” Rolf asked him.

“Say, two weeks.”

He hesitated. He would have to talk to Mrs. Sprague, and Franz; someone would have to look after Emma on Mrs. Sprague’s day off.

“You could go twice if you wanted,” Starin said. “A week at a time.”

“That would be better, I think.”

“The problem is, you’re too good for this place. I’ve been waiting for you to quit ever since the war. You could go work for General Electric, one of the big boys; they love guys like you, smart straitlaced gung-ho types that take work home every night. They’d jump at the chance.”

“Perhaps not with my accent. Have you thought that might be a problem in Oregon? A man with a German accent asking questions?”

“I’ll tell the guy why you had to leave. But you ought to change your name one of these days. Call yourself Ralph First or something like that.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“No, you won’t.” Mr. Starin laughed again; he was positively jovial. “Let me know when you can go to Oregon. The sooner the better. Here”—he opened his top drawer—“here’s the file, with all the projections from October. You’d better refresh your memory.”

“Well, you’re looking more cheerful,” Miss Maggiore said when he stepped out into the corridor again. “Did you get a raise or something?”

“No, no,” he said, “nothing like that.” He was walking down the corridor to his office when she called out to him. “Hey. You were right.”

He turned around. “About what?”

“It has two
e
’s. I got my dictionary back.”

“I’m glad,” he said absently. His thoughts were on backward integration, pricing models, the difficulties of selling wood to their competitors. But somewhere at the back of his mind was an image of the plane flying west, over the Rocky Mountains. He would visit the redwood forests, the Pacific
Ocean; he would be surrounded by the light-filled vistas he had dreamed of as a child.

Maybe, after all, America was not lost to him for good, though for the past few months he had been thrust back into the Old World, or that was how it felt, with all its weight of helpless suffering. And this time there were no visas out, no papers to submit that could restore Louisa to what she had been. What was happening to them could have no part in an American life.

I
love this one like she was my own baby,” Mrs. Sprague announced, which Sophie wasn’t sure was in good taste. She wasn’t sure, either, that Emma’s face was any cleaner than it had been when Katy was in charge, but the child was obviously happy, almost aggressively so, banging lustily with a serving spoon on the little tray of her high chair. Meanwhile Mrs. Sprague was putting away the fruits of their recent excursion to Dyckman Street: brightly colored packets and tins, Wonder Bread in shiny red-white-and-blue wrapping, pressed turkey, and other things that Sophie had never seen before.

As she moved around, chatting animatedly, she paused frequently to make little noises at Emma, who became agitated and held up her hands. “How’s Aunt May going to get her work done with you on her shoulder, you little devil?” Mrs. Sprague cried, but she picked her up nonetheless. When Sophie offered to take her from her to free up her hands she surrendered her reluctantly, laughing in admiration as the baby grabbed a lock of Sophie’s hair and pulled at it. “She’s such a smart little thing, isn’t she,” she said proudly, and then took her back uninvited, Emma squirming toward her in her excitement.

“Yes, you want your Aunt May, don’t you,” she said with satisfaction. She shook some frosted cookies from a packet
onto a plate. Since Sophie’s last visit, the kitchen table had acquired an oilcloth covered with red and orange squares; a sampler hung on the wall that said, in shaky cross-stitches,
Hope springs eternal
.

“Where is Louisa?” Sophie asked her; it was Louisa she had spoken to on the phone earlier, to ask about coming.

“Oh, she’s in her room,” Mrs. Sprague said. “I thought she needed a little rest. She’s got herself a typewriter now, she says she’s going to learn to type, although what she wants to do that for I really couldn’t say.” Then, when Sophie was silent, she asked her in a not entirely friendly voice how she liked America.

“I like it very much,” Sophie said levelly. “It is a wonderful country.”

“Because I guess you had to get out of your own country, didn’t you,” Mrs. Sprague said. “Mr. Furchgott was telling me about it. Oh, the wicked things that man Hitler did, I’ve read about them in the papers. You can’t believe there are such wicked people in the world, can you?”

No, Sophie said, it was hard to believe. They sat in silence for a moment. The baby’s cotton shirt had worked its way up her chest, leaving her little stomach exposed; suddenly Sophie remembered her children’s small bodies, how she had kissed their stomachs and their pudgy legs while they squealed with joy.

Well, she for one couldn’t understand taking against people that way, Mrs. Sprague said. “Look at Mr. Furchgott, nobody could be more of a gentleman. It’s a real pleasure to work for him, I can tell you.” She sat down, bouncing Emma on her knee, and reached for a cookie: one of her grandsons
always loved that kind, she said, and so Sophie asked about her grandchildren, and Mrs. Sprague explained about her three sons, and the girls they had married back home, and the mischief her grandchildren got up to. Several of her stories, which set her laughing, were about her laconic neighbors back in Maine: where she came from, she said, nobody used two words when one would do. Yet she herself seemed the most loquacious of women; it was hardly necessary to contribute anything beyond an occasional murmur.

Finally Sophie managed to excuse herself and went to knock on Louisa’s door. “Who is it?” Louisa asked, in a wary voice, and then told her to come in. She was sitting at a small desk in the corner. In front of her was the typewriter Mrs. Sprague had mentioned, a heavy old Remington with a sheet of paper in it; another sheet, covered with typing, lay beside it.

“How are you coming along, Louisa?” It seemed more tactful than asking, “How are you?”—it couched the question in terms of progress, of moving into the future. Things were bad and then, however slowly, they got better; they came along.

But Louisa brushed the question away with her good hand, as though it weren’t worth discussing. She seemed different from when Sophie had last seen her, not huddled and slow but with an air of nervous defiance that Sophie found disquieting. “I’m finding new ways to amuse myself. One-handed typing. Not that I was ever much good at the two-handed kind. Do you know how to type, Sophie?” No, Sophie said, she didn’t. “It’s quite satisfying in its way. You ought to try it.”

“What is it you type?”