The Oriental Wife (6 page)

What the women on the ship had found thrilling were their wedding plans. “How romantic,” they said, and pressed Louisa for more and more details, which she did her best to supply. Phillip’s brother’s wife had written asking if their four-year-old daughter could come along to the justice of the peace and be the flower girl. When Louisa tried to imagine her wedding, the other members of the party, including herself, remained shadowy, but she saw the little girl very clearly, with a satin bow in hair the same ash-blond shade as Phillip’s, and a white dress embroidered with pink roses.

“Look at you,” Otto said in the hotel lobby that evening, holding her away from him so he could take her in. “You’re so glamorous.”

“Wasn’t she always glamorous?” Phillip asked sourly.

“But of course,” Otto said with a wink. “Even as a runny-nosed infant. But now she’s like a film star, don’t you think?” He was smaller than Louisa remembered, disconcertingly Peter Lorre-ish, in a Central European–looking suit with very wide shoulders.

They walked to a smoky bar on Fifty-seventh Street that Phillip had read about, where a tired-looking black man was playing show tunes on a tinkly piano. “So you’re a journalist,” Otto said, after a pause, when they were seated.

“In a manner of speaking.” Phillip snapped his fingers aggressively at the waiter, demanding Scotch. Louisa told Otto about the conference in Chicago; Otto adopted a serious expression and asked respectful questions, as all the passengers on the ship had failed to do. But Phillip’s answers were brief and surly; he jiggled his leg impatiently in time to the music. As soon as Otto turned his attention to Louisa, though, teasing her about things that had happened long ago, Phillip set down his glass.

“What’s happening with the immigration quota for Jews? Is the Congress doing anything about it?”

“Not that I know of,” Otto said politely, transferring his smile from Louisa to Phillip.

“Oh, come now. You must have some rough idea.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, how many applications are outstanding? Approximately.”

Otto’s smile had turned wary. He gave a self-mocking little shrug, his ill-fitting jacket rising slightly from his shoulders. It struck Louisa that he was playing a part, an exaggerated version of himself, for Phillip’s benefit. “Rolf is the one you’d have to ask. He works for all the committees, he knows everything.”

“What sort of committees? What do they do?”

“Whatever is necessary. Find sponsors, jobs, lodgings, raise money, write letters to Congress. All of it.”

“I’d like to talk to this chap Rolf,” Phillip said, in a clipped, commanding voice, like the ship’s captain’s. “Could you arrange that for me?”

“He wasn’t terribly friendly when I spoke to him,” Louisa put in.

“He said you were very charming,” Otto told her.

“Well, he certainly didn’t seem charmed.”

“I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment. He tends to be suspicious of charm.”

“Perhaps I could interview some refugees,” Phillip said. “Do you think he’d help with that?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Splendid. Try to set up a meeting, then.” He got to his feet. “Come and dance,” he said to Louisa, though on the ship he had never wanted to dance with her.

Reluctantly, with an apologetic smile at Otto, she followed him onto the tiny dance floor, where three couples were moving uncertainly to the pianist’s rhythms. The music became slower and slower, until she and Phillip were simply standing there, clutching each other. A man in a black shirt appeared from the back and started shouting at the pianist, who stared at him with a look of intense dislike. “Play faster, goddamnit,” the man said, and the pianist stopped altogether, banging the piano shut.

“Well done,” Phillip said, nodding with satisfaction, and went back to the table and ordered another Scotch. “What’s wrong with you two?” he asked, smiling at them for the first time that evening. “You were supposed to have so much to say to each other.”

At eight the next morning, Otto phoned to report that Rolf would be glad to meet with them if they could come
downtown during his lunch hour. Otto himself could not make it—it was too far from the dry cleaner’s he worked at uptown, where his crazy old boss made his real money taking bets on the horses—but Rolf had given him the address of a coffee shop next to his office. Louisa wrote it down. Phillip, wakened by the phone, groaned and rolled over. They had taken a taxi back the night before, Phillip having drunk four more Scotches after Otto left, and the taxi driver had asked her, in a strong Yiddish accent, why she didn’t find a man who would look after her, instead of the other way around: “Believe me, it’s the secret to happiness for every woman. I’m an old man, I know what I’m talking about.”

Rolf stood when she and Phillip entered—that was how she recognized him. His brown hair was already receding, and there were dark circles under his eyes, visible even behind his glasses. Louisa introduced the two men; Rolf shook hands with them both. “Please sit down,” he said, gesturing to the booth from which he had emerged. They sat facing him. “Would you like to see the menu?” He handed it to Louisa. “I can recommend the Reuben sandwich.” They both said that was what they would have. Then they were silent. Rolf folded his hands on the table. The waitress brought coffee and took their orders. When she had gone, Phillip pushed his cup aside and, as though remembering that Rolf distrusted charm, said brusquely, “So tell me: when do you think the war will start?”

Rolf did not even blink. “I don’t know. Soon. But the Americans will refuse to fight, and who can blame them? It’s not their mess.”

“Well, the English may not fight either,” Phillip said. “The government is handing out gas masks, and they’re building
more airplanes, but people seem to think it’s to stop a war, not fight one. We’re about to run a piece from a fellow who was in Newcastle a fortnight ago. The shipwrights’ union is on double shifts, but nobody tells them why. ‘Hitler wouldn’t dare fight us,’ they told him. It’s what they all believe.”

“What about Churchill?” Rolf asked.

“He’s still seen as a warmonger. Anyone who says war is inevitable they call a warmonger.”

Rolf removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Otto said you wanted to know about the refugee committees.”

“That’s right. I thought I might do a piece on them while I was here.”

“What sort of information are you looking for?”

Phillip took out the handsome little notebook he had bought for the trip and began with the questions he’d asked Otto the night before. In fact, Congress had recently lowered the quotas for German Jews, Rolf told him, without any sign of emotion; he gave the figures for 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1937; he explained the most recent criteria for admission, and described how the committee set about finding sponsors. Louisa remembered her father, back in the old days, when men from the veterans’ organization would come, and they would talk about getting fresh milk to ex-soldiers in the TB clinic. Sometimes there would be other matters under discussion, nothing to do with the veterans; once, half asleep on the sofa, she had heard them make arrangements for somebody’s kitchen maid, who was pregnant with the coalman’s child. There had been something very comforting about it, the sense that all would be put right, the grown-ups were looking after things.

“I think I should meet with some of the refugees themselves,” Phillip said. “Get their personal stories. Can you arrange that for me?”

“If you like. You mean to write about them?”

“People ought to know what’s going on.”

“Nobody wants to hear such stories. Yesterday I met with a woman whose nose had been broken so badly she could pull the cotton wool up through the top as well as down through her nostrils. She showed me.” He looked over at Louisa. “I’m sorry. Your parents are still there, aren’t they?”

She nodded. “But Phillip says he’ll apply to get them out after we’re married.” She turned to Phillip, waiting for him to confirm this, but he was just biting into his sandwich.

“Mine are still there also. My father still thinks it will blow over, the Nazis will come to their senses.”

“It’s strange, my mother was the only one who predicted what would happen. And everyone thought she was crazy.”

“Get them out as soon as you can,” he told her. “But don’t let’s talk about it now. Tell me what you’ve been doing this morning.”

They had gone to the Frick, she said, she had loved the Vermeers, and Sir Thomas More … “But the John Singer Sargents were wonderful too. I’d never seen one before.” Rolf shook his head apologetically; he didn’t know them, he said, he had never been there. It turned out he hadn’t been to Tiffany’s either, or Saks Fifth Avenue, or the jazz clubs on Fifty-seventh Street (but she wished she hadn’t mentioned them).

“Tell me where you go, then,” she said, laughing. “Go on, tell me.”

He had been to the Metropolitan Museum, he said stiffly, several times, and the American Indian Museum, and of course to the Empire State Building; he had walked the whole length of Central Park.

“Do you never do anything frivolous?” she cried, and he turned pink. Phillip was making faces at her, signaling that she should stop, but a peculiar happiness had seized her; the pleasure of teasing him had gone to her head. “Never anything at all?”

“Sometimes I ride the Staten Island Ferry.”

“You like being on the water?”

“Yes. And also …” He stopped.

“What?”

“I like to see the Statue of Liberty.” At first she thought he was joking; she started to laugh again, and then, seeing that he was serious, tried to turn it into a cough. His eyes were so innocent of guile behind his glasses, she felt a sudden falling in her stomach, as though she might start to cry. She and Phillip, of course, had stood on the deck to see the statue as the ship pulled into the harbor. Phillip had quoted, in a mocking voice, the poem the Americans were so proud of, and told her of the signs that used to say
NO IRISH NEED APPLY
; some of them, he said, who had come to escape the famine, had starved to death in New York instead.

Now the cough got stuck in her throat, she was choking, and had to reach for a glass of water.

“Are you all right?” Rolf asked, alarmed, and she made ineffectual little hand movements, in between splutters, to show she was fine, while Phillip, taking out his notebook, asked Rolf to give him some names and numbers for the refugees.

“He’s an odd duck,” Phillip said, with a little snort, when they had parted.

“Do you think so?”

“What do you mean? You were the one who laughed at him back there. You were damn rude, actually.” She sensed him scowling at her, and looked across the street, at the crowds hurrying along; the hot-dog vendor on the corner, in a dirty apron, was bawling out indistinguishable words. A woman hurried past in a red, belted suit, her face emptied of expression. She imagined Rolf on his way to work that morning; he would not really see those people; he would carry an idea of them in his head.

“Come along,” Phillip said. “I need to get back to the hotel and phone some of the people on his list. We don’t have much time left here.”

But the only person he managed to reach was the pediatrician who had treated Louisa when she was small, a man she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. He used to recite nonsense rhymes while he listened to her heart, and sometimes, when he was finished, perform magic tricks for her, the joke being that they never worked. He’d put a pfennig behind her ear, inviting her to remove it and see what it had changed into, which was always just a pfennig; promising to produce a rabbit from his doctor’s bag, he brought out his hand with a flourish and peered in dismay at the stethoscope that appeared instead. “The clever devil,” he’d say, “he got away again,” and sigh loudly. It was his own enjoyment of this foolishness that made her giggle.

Phillip had offered to go to the rooming house where he was staying with his wife and daughter, but the doctor refused. He would prefer to come to their hotel, he said. So they waited for him in the lobby, where the chairs were covered in the same red-and-green plaid as the bedspread in
their room upstairs. Louisa, keeping an eye on the revolving door, felt a childish excitement at the thought of seeing Dr. Joseftal again. A man in a loud blue suit entered—“What is it about Americans?” Phillip said. “They all look so newly hatched somehow”—and then two women in feathered hats and clanking gold bracelets. They did not look so newly hatched, it seemed to her, but she refrained from saying this. She was humming to herself, a tune the black pianist had played the night before, and thinking with pleasure of the length of embroidered ribbon she had bought at Saks that morning, when a gaunt shabby man came through the door, blinking, and looked around with the furtive air of a criminal. The desk clerk, his attention alerted to the presence of someone so clearly out of place, narrowed his eyes and watched his progress across the floor, to where Phillip and Louisa sat.

She jumped up, holding out both hands, babbling about how lovely it was to see him, and he parted his lips in a facsimile of a smile, showing two broken teeth. Phillip stood and thanked him for coming.

“Would you like some coffee?” Louisa asked. “Or some tea? I could ask them to bring it.”

“No, thank you,” he said, seating himself, very upright, in the plaid chair opposite. He pulled the too-short sleeves of his jacket down over his wrists. “It’s very kind of you, but no.”

“I was just remembering you and the rabbit,” she said, in the same bright social voice. When he looked puzzled, she repeated the words in German.

“Do you speak German?” he asked Phillip, and Phillip said no, unfortunately not.

“Then we shall converse in English.”

They sat looking at each other.

“What precisely is the information you are seeking from me?”

“I’d hoped you’d be willing to tell me about your experiences in Germany. Your impressions of what is happening there.”

“So you said on the phone. You are a newspaperman, I believe.”

“Of a sort. A journalist, anyway.”

“You are a Communist?” he asked, pronouncing it in the German way. “In my experience, it is only the
Communisten
who are interested in these stories.”