The Oriental Wife (18 page)

“What did he do?” he asked, with genuine curiosity.

“He was a contractor,” she said proudly. “With thirteen people working for him. How about yours?”

“He had a toy company,” he said. It had been a long time since anyone asked him what his father had done for a living.

“Is he still around?”

He shook his head. They had arrived at their building; he stepped aside to let her go through the revolving door before him. “Gosh,” she said, as they walked through the lobby. “Just imagine how they’ll all talk in the office if they see us come in together.”

“Surely not,” he said, a little shocked at the idea, and she told him she was only teasing.

“It’s hard not to tease you, you’re so serious all the time.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be.”

“You look like you’re carrying the world on your shoulders.” She screwed up her eyes and pursed her mouth into a frown of pure gloom, effecting such a startling transformation that he laughed out loud.

“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you laugh. You should try it more often, it’ll do you good.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Of course I’m right.”

When they got to their floor, she gave him a little wave and headed for the ladies’ room; later that afternoon, when he went into Mr. Starin’s office, armed with his legal pad, to present his projections for the lumberyard revenues, she was sitting at her desk, painting her nails, and gave him another little wave, this time with fingers spread carefully apart, as he passed her.

O
n the Sunday before Rolf left for Oregon, Sophie and Gustav paid a visit to Bogardus Place, bearing a cake chosen by Gustav from the German bakery on Dyckman Street. It must be soft enough, he had said, so that Louisa, as the hostess, could cut it without difficulty. Sophie stood by while he peered into the glass case containing the pastries and questioned the women behind the counter before settling on an elaborate chocolate confection with whipped cream roses.

This fussing over cakes seemed like part of a pattern, another symptom of the softening of his brain.
Meine arme Sophie
, he called her these days, my poor Sophie, sighing; he made her sit in the living room after dinner, when she wanted to be tidying the kitchen, so he could bring her a cup of tea. She looked so tired, he would say anxiously, though she was not the slightest bit tired.

Sometimes she woke in the night to find him gone from their bed; he would be sitting on the chair in the dark, staring out at the streetlights of Seaman Avenue. She was afraid he might be thinking of his time in prison, or of his younger sister, who had died, along with her two children, at Treblinka. But if she asked him, it was always something innocuous—a milking song, in Bavarian dialect, that his old nurse used to sing to
him, or the painting of the Schwarzwald that had hung in his parents’ living room. It was almost worse that he should talk of such banal things with so much sentiment.

The night before, when she’d gone to find him, he’d been thinking about a maid his mother had hired right before she gave up her own household and moved in with them; he had just remembered, he said, that they had found a place for her with Jeannette. “Ilse was her name. She had just moved to Nuremberg from the country.”

“You can ask Louisa,” Sophie said briskly. “Perhaps she will remember.”

He nodded. “Yes, I will ask her.” But he still made no move to come back to bed.

As it turned out, Louisa remembered Ilse very well; she laughed delightedly when Gustav spoke of her, the first time since they had arrived that she showed a flash of her old animation. Before that, she had hung back, looking from one of them to the other; when, trying to stand to take the cake into the kitchen, she fell back down onto the couch, she gave Rolf a cringing, apologetic look before starting over. Everyone was very polite, very concerned to show goodwill. Rolf and Gustav spoke at some length about the political situation, the recent election, in which the Republicans had gained a large majority in Congress; they discussed whether it was better when one party was dominant, if it meant that more could get done. Rolf explained the purpose of his forthcoming trip to Oregon, and they said he must be sure to see the redwood trees while he was out there; all of them had heard about the redwood trees. Sophie said how much she had always wanted to see them. Louisa took them in to see Emma,
who was sleeping peacefully on her stomach. It was the first time Gustav had seen her, and he exclaimed at her thick head of auburn hair, all that was visible of her. Rolf did not come with them. In all the time they had been there, he had not spoken to Louisa once. Sophie wondered what would happen when the child woke up, since there was no sign of Mrs. Sprague.

“Mrs. Sprague is still working for you?” she asked Louisa, who said, with an air of constraint, “Oh, yes, she has just gone out for the day, to see her cousin in New London.”

When they returned to the living room, Rolf was emerging from the kitchen bearing a tray with an embroidered cloth, on which were a teapot and cups and saucers and the cake on a stand. They all exclaimed at how delightful the cake was, and then silence fell. Gustav was looking with melting eyes at Louisa, who lifted her fork awkwardly to her mouth, crumbs falling onto her green dress. Sophie was worried that he would say,
“Arme Louisa,”
if someone else did not speak soon.

“Gustav was just talking of a maid his mother had,” she said, setting down her cup. “He thought you might remember her, Louisa; it was your mother who gave her a place when Irma came to live with us.”

Louisa was chewing solemnly, concentrating hard, her eyes round with effort; she brushed a crumb from her lips and said, “I don’t have any memory of that. What was her name?”

“What did you say her name was, Gustav?” Sophie asked, though she remembered perfectly well.

When he told them, Louisa seemed to tilt sideways in her excitement. “Ilse! Ilse! Oh, my God!”

He beamed at her. “So you remember her.”

“Remember her? She was the heroine of my childhood. I was a supplicant to her, I used to go to her room with my little presents, cakes and almond pretzels I had stolen from the hoard in the kitchen, or chocolates someone gave me for my birthday, and then, if she was in a very good mood, she’d let me come in. Sometimes she’d just take the food and slam the door on me, but other times I’d sit on her bed while she told me stories. Terrible stories, of her drunken father and the beatings she’d had, how her family almost starved to death one snowy winter, she had no shoes to wear to school, but she’d laugh the whole time, as though it were the best joke in the world. I remember how lovely she smelled, and her pink eiderdown from home, and the pictures on her wall, of the Virgin Mary and an angel, and two little ragged children crossing a stream in their bare feet. They all looked like her to me, even the angel, with her blond hair and rosy cheeks. My God! I’d forgotten about those pictures. Ilse was totally faithless, she didn’t love me a bit, but I adored her the way I never did poor old Frau Müller, who would have died for me.”

Gustav was smiling at her as though she were still that child. “She stayed with your family for many years?”

“Oh, yes. Of course she had to leave when Aryans were no longer allowed to work in Jewish households, but that was after I was in England. And she came back once to see my father. She had a Nazi husband then, she looked much more severe, Franz said, in a drab green dress and a braid coiled around her head, like a proper Nazi wife. She didn’t laugh even once, he said. She stood in the hallway, she wouldn’t come in, and told him he must get out, things were going to
get very bad for the Jews. And then she sent me her love and went away again.”

“So she was not so faithless after all,” Gustav said gently.

“No. No, you’re right. I wish I knew what had happened to her. They say nobody in Germany can get sugar now, and she loved sweet things. I would send her Hershey bars. But I don’t even know her married name.”

Then Rolf made a little sign to her to wipe the crumbs from her chin, and she subsided again. Sophie said how much Kurt was enjoying his studies, and Rolf inquired about the classes he was taking. Sophie waited for Gustav to answer this question, but when he didn’t—he was looking fixedly at the teapot—she jumped in quickly and said he was studying every kind of American law, and Gabrielle’s school was very pleased with her, though it had been a little difficult at first. But the headmistress was a very kind, understanding person.

There was another silence. Gustav raised his head, giving Louisa one of his dangerously tender looks. “And how are your parents, my dear?”

She glanced at Rolf before she answered. “Pretty well,” she said uncertainly, and then, her face lighting up in the old way, “Franz is in love with Emma. He’s convinced she is smarter than all of us, she is laughing at us the whole time. You’ll be the same when you have a grandchild, Gustav.”

“Perhaps. I’m not sure this world is any place to bring children into.”

Rolf cleared his throat and started to speak, but just then Emma began crying in the other room. “I’ll go,” he said. Louisa followed him with her eyes as he walked out.

Gustav leaned over and gripped her hand. “It will come right in the end.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Sophie said briskly. “Of course it will come right. And now perhaps Louisa will let me have some more of your lovely cake.”

But Louisa ignored this; she looked at Gustav’s hand where it lay over her own and said in German, “Don’t feel sorry for me, Gustav. If you start feeling sorry for people it never ends. But you could help me by phoning Franz, I’m worried about him.”

“Of course,” he said.

Just then Rolf returned with Emma, who was grizzling and rubbing her eyes. “I’ll go warm up her bottle,” he said. Louisa adjusted her posture and patted her lap, but he ignored this, carrying the child with him into the kitchen.

“Did you see what lovely eyes she has got, Gustav?” Sophie asked, and Gustav nodded. When Rolf came back, settling Emma on his knee with her bottle, they rose to take their leave.

Gustav was silent during the walk home. When they got back to their apartment it was dark, and he took up his post by the window, staring out at the street. “What shall we have for supper?” Sophie asked, hanging up her coat; he had not removed his.

“Whatever you wish,” he said, without turning around. “Whatever is easiest for you.”

She got out the beetroot from luncheon, and some gherkins and cervelat, and sliced up the rest of the bread and made a salad. After they had eaten, with the radio on to mask the silence, he said, “You must talk to him.”

She knew very well whom he meant; there was no point in pretending. “And what would I say? If he wanted my opinion
he would ask for it. Am I supposed to go to him and say, your mother was my girlhood friend, therefore I will tell you how to live your life?”

“But something must be done. You saw how things are there. She is afraid of him.”

“Perhaps she is only afraid of being looked at, of people seeing how she is. She hates to be seen now, just as she loved it before.”

“It’s more than that. She is afraid of his cruelty.”

“He has never been cruel that I know of,” Sophie said.

“And I would say he has never been kind. Only just. He does his duty by others, he doesn’t love them.”

“I am sure he loved her.”

“Yes, in his way. When he could be proud of her. But not any more.”

“Even if that’s true, you said yourself he was just. So he will be just to her also.”

“It’s not justice that is required of him now.”

“He is suffering too, I’m sure. All the more because he knows how he should be.”

He made a little noise of disgust. “Yes, he cannot think well of himself at present. It’s very important to him, to think well of himself.”

“You forget the things he has done for us all. For you, for Kurt, for so many people.”

He pushed away his plate and stood up, looming over her. “That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Nothing at all. Of course you admire him, you always admire those who do their duty. But pity, tenderness, imagination for others, these things mean nothing to you. I think you
even distrust them, you cannot understand why others do not control themselves as you do. You and Rolf. You are more German than the Germans, both of you.”

He was shouting at her now, the spit was flying from his mouth, onto the table, onto the top of her head. In the thirty-two years of her marriage there had never been a scene like this, he had never shouted at her in this vulgar way; she wondered if the people upstairs, immigrants like themselves, though from Bremen, could hear him, if the old lady next door was listening, but thank God she was deaf.

Blindly, she stood up too, and began clearing the table, rattling the plates as she stacked them. “What are you doing?” he cried.

She drew herself up. “You can see perfectly well what I’m doing.”

“That’s your answer? To clear the table?”

“Somebody must. There are no longer servants to do it,” she said, and then stopped, confused, because it sounded as though she were reproaching him for the lack of servants, which would be vulgar in itself.

As she turned away, toward the kitchen, he blocked her path. “Sit down,” he said. He gripped her shoulders. “Listen to me.”

“I’m sorry, Gustav. I have listened enough for one day. Please let me take the plates to the sink.”

“My God, you’re like a stone. I touch you, and you’re like a stone.”

“You think I should cry, you think that would do any good? I should cry because a panda is mourning in the zoo? You think I would help someone that way?”

“Please. I’m pleading with you. Please. For God’s sake.”

“And where is to be the end of it? When the dead come back, when the suffering ends, when everything is as it should be in the world?”

He shook his head; he stumbled to the sofa and sat down heavily; then he put his head in his hands and sat there, rocking back and forth. She went into the kitchen with the plates, she put on the water for coffee, taking deep breaths to steady herself, and then the phone rang, making her jump. It was Kurt, who was getting five days off for Thanksgiving, he said; he had decided to take the bus to New York.