The Receptionist (20 page)

Th
at evening, I took more trouble getting myself ready than I had in a long while. Alex was late, but he was pleased by my looks, so I was pleased. We drove under the flood-lit Acropolis, across Athens, then out to a highway along the coast. Greek music flowed from the radio. I felt very well.

A number of cottages lined a small cove, and we turned in beside one of them, passing a uniformed guard at the gate, who waved us through. Alex brought us each a drink as we sat on the terrace and ordered dinner from a nearby caterer. A radio was playing American music of the forties—the big bands. Alex proposed the Greek toast, “Yasou!”

After dinner, we had coffee laced with brandy. Alex relaxed and was at his most extravagant then, making love to me. He compared me to Eve and said he was in paradise.
Th
e next minute he was spinning a desert fantasy out of
Th
e Arabian Nights.
Th
en, as I lay watching in disbelief, he sprang off the couch and began to show off for me. Doing calisthenics and boasting of his athletic trophies and ribbons.

I was reminded of Fritz and of an evening party on Long Island, during one of the bad times. Fritz’s play had just come back from his publisher in Germany with a rejection, and he was drinking more than was usual for him. He did not hold his liquor well.
Th
ere were about a dozen people at the party in a beach house that belonged to a photographer named Harry, who specialized in moody shots for fashion magazines. Because someone had mentioned the Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston bout, Fritz and Harry had challenged one another to a boxing match.

Harry’s girlfriend and I watched from a corner of the room as the two grown men staggered around the living room in swimming trunks, protecting their noses with Harry’s sons’ junior gloves, each bragging loudly that he would very soon knock the other down. One of them actually did get a bloody nose when he tripped over his own foot and, falling, bumped his face against the corner of an easy chair. I had wanted to shout, “Please don’t!”
Please don’t show us how like little boys you are. We don’t want to see how vulnerable you are. We come to you for strength and protection. If you show that you are weak, like us, we are confronted in a way that you are not—no, you really are not, having on some level known it all along—that we are alone, that no one is safe, and that men and women can only cling to one another, suspended over the void.

Alex may have seen that my eyes were wet, for he drew my head down on his shoulder and spoke tenderly to me. To weep, to be consoled, must have been what I wanted. Soon I was lighthearted again. Alex heard me laughing in the bath and came in to ask, “What’s so funny?”

I waved a sponge at the steep-sided porcelain chair I was sitting in and hooted, “
Th
is isn’t a bathtub; it’s a throne!”

Alex was wounded. “Many tubs in Greece are of that style,” he retorted with dignity. “To me it seems a very pleasing form. I see nothing funny about it.” Later he wanted to comb my hair, or, as he said, “plot” it.

“Not
plot, plait.
”

“Yes, please.” And then, holding up his handiwork: “
Plait.
What a curious word.”

“What a curious plait.”

In the morning, as we drove back to Athens, Alex began worrying out loud that I was not seeing enough.

“You must go to one of our wonderful islands. You can go to Hydra in a day, simply by taking the tube from Omonoia Square right to the docks in Piraeus. And Hydra is magnificent.”

I said I’d think about it, adding, “
Th
is evening, I want to go to the Sound and Light performance.”

“An excellent idea,” said Alex. He did not suggest going along.

We drew up in front of Andria House. Fat, dark, formal Mr. Propopoulous came forward, anxiously tossing his beads and crying, “But where have you been? You did not come in all night.” He looked past me at the street, where Alex was starting the Saab and pulling away from the curb. Mr. Propopoulous drew himself up into a semblance of a shrug and mumbled, “Ah, these young people . . .”

I DECIDED TO WASH
my hair. Mr. Propopoulous was prevailed upon to put in motion a set of operations that eventually yielded hot water. When, hair washed, I expressed a wish to dry it and asked if he had a blow-dryer, Mr. Propopoulous pointed to the top of his house: “No such apparatus, but perhaps the sun?” Stepping out onto the roof, I was rewarded by a spectacular view, not only of the cathedral, but of a corner of the Acropolis as well, together with a vista of coral-tiled roofs and whitewashed buildings against a bowl of blue sky.

For long minutes I seemed to be in a world without activity. Even the sounds of the street were muted.
Th
en, without warning, a window opened directly opposite me. A black-haired matron of thirty-five or forty appeared. Here, out of context, she seemed almost an apparition.
What can she be like?
I wondered.
Does she sing? What stories does she tell her children?
I wished I had learned the Greek word for “hello.” Just as I was about to try out “buongiorno,” the woman withdrew.

Reluctantly, as if it were something I had long avoided, I tried to think what the other woman had seen. I realized that I myself was more profoundly out of context, not only to this other woman, but to all who encountered me as I traveled about alone, possessed of no other identifiable relationship to the world or to society but a sexual one. Was it possible that I had no other identity?

Th
at evening, as I walked up the steep path to the roped-off entrance of the Sound and Light show, people all around me were exchanging desultory comments in French. I turned to a buxom woman with a deep tan and sun-bleached auburn hair and ventured a question in French: “Excusez-moi. L’exhibition—ce n’est pas en anglais?”

Th
e woman smiled at me: “Mais non, c’est en français, mademoiselle. Vous êtes americaine, n’est-ce pas?”

I admitted that I was and said I had come thinking that this performance was to be in English. Really, I was worried, I said. My French was not equal to the occasion.
Th
e woman smiled again and drew a handsome young man, also deeply tanned, into the circle of her arm. “Don’t worry, mademoiselle. I am sure Pedro will be glad to be your interpreter, won’t you, Pedro?”

Pedro grinned. “But of course, Mademoiselle—?”

“Groth.”

“Mademoiselle Groth. I am Pierre LaSalle.
Th
ese funny friends all call me Pedro. It is because I come from Nice. You must call me Pedro, too, and if I may, I shall call you—?”

“Janet.”

“Jeanette, may I present to you our little group.” He gestured at a group of people who might have stepped straight out of a Buñuel film. “Sylvie, Pepe, BaBa, Monsieur le Président, Monsieur le Docteur, Nikki, and Mr. Jacques. We are all traveling together, you see. We would be most happy if you would join us.”

Th
e others joined in the invitation: “Yes, by all means.” “Do, please.”

“
Th
ank you—you are very kind.”

Th
e rope across the entrance was removed at this point and I followed the others to a row of folding chairs near the crest of the hill. Pedro and his “funny friends” had gone back to their conversation in French, and I was on my own.

Afterward, Pedro asked me to make myself a member of their party. I felt no great desire to join them, but Sylvie pressed me to come, giving me a strange look of desperation, and I relented. When we arrived, the Bacchus Tavern was very crowded, but after Nikki exchanged a few words with the headwaiter, we were assured the best table would be ours within minutes. So we stood in the roofless hall outside the vine-arbored dining room. Mr. Jacques, who had shown no interest in me before, suddenly struck a match and brought it up to my face. I saw his leering eyes behind the flame.
Th
en he said in English, “First class. Absolutely first class.”

Th
e headwaiter came and seated us at a table near the front. When the food came, it was consumed without ceremony. More wine was poured. Everyone laughed a great deal. An ass wearing a wreath of vine leaves over his ears ate off the tables and pushed his head into the ladies’ laps. At last, the rest of the party moved to go. Without seeing precisely how it had happened, I found myself alone in one of the cars with Pedro. He drove me to Andria House obediently enough but was less willing to let me leave the car and enter by myself. Caught in his vice-like grip, I laughed, releasing my breath in gasps that sounded almost like sobs. Pedro was passionately committed to possessing me; I, just as passionately to my release. To get his way, Pedro could only use force. To get mine, I resorted to feminine wiles. I seduced him into the idea of tomorrow. Tonight was impossible, I told him, with the perfect semblance of infinite regret. But tomorrow—ah, if he would only just be patient until tomorrow . . .

Finally a pact was sealed. I was to go into my hotel alone, since Pedro was convinced that I must. He would call for me in the morning and I would fly away with him. Inside Andria House, I informed Mr. Propopoulous that I would not be in to anyone named Pedro. It amused me to think of my seduction as a complete nonevent. Chances were, Pedro would not come. Most certainly, whether he came or not, I would not be there.

I left at seven for the boat to Hydra. But the boat to Hydra was not in port.

“It was full, so it left.”
Th
at was the whole story. Departure time may be listed officially as 7:45 a.m. but if at 7:10 the ship is full, in Greece it is considered logical to cast off. I bowed before the logic of it, but I didn’t know what my next move ought to be. I began to wander aimlessly along the wharf.

A number of small boats were taking passengers. I noticed one with the Arabic numerals 8:25 a.m. I couldn’t make out its destination from the Cyrillic letters, but the sign below reading 18:45 must have been the return time. Just right. A day’s journey to a Greek island was all I really wanted. I had no special brief to hold for Hydra. I went onboard.
Th
ere was no sign of any other foreigner. When the little boat docked, the Greek passengers went to a walled church enclave where an outdoor bazaar was taking place in addition to the services inside. I was both too shy and too curious about the rest of the island to accompany them. Stopping at a roadside stand, I filled a net bag with some cheese, a bun, a container of yogurt, and three yellow peaches, then walked down what appeared to be the only road on the island.

Soon the shoreline became rougher, rising up from the water in steep banks. Gnarled trees and brambles made it difficult to get close to the water’s edge. At last a narrow path led me to a rocky cove with a small, sandy beach where I could spread my towel.
Th
ere I sat, watching the slither of a long, yellow-brown eel just below the surface of the water.
Now I’ve done it,
I thought.
Got myself into a situation where there is nothing to do but think.
Hardly knowing how, I set about some long-deferred self-examination. I wished, at last, to make sense of my life, the same life I had, on that night of the open gas jets in 1960, held forfeit to a passing mood of self-loathing. Oh, I had, in the Lenten season that followed, made my confession and set my soul in order, but now I tried for a more basic foundation. A return to my roots.

I began by taking a deep breath and looking around me.
Here I sit, in a quiet spot on an island off Piraeus whose name I do not know. No one in the world knows I am here. And no one in the world cares.
At this point, I brought myself up short.
Th
at can’t be true. No cheap self-dramatizing, please. My father and mother care. I care.
But on came the essential question:
Who am I? Surely the answer lies in the answer to the question, who are they?
Th
ink, girl.
Th
ink!

G
REECE:
T
HE
J
OURNEY
I
N

I
LEANED BACK ON MY
towel, closed my eyes, and thought. It was not for nothing that I’d been devouring bildungsromans since the summer I was twelve and my older brother dared me to read the classics from his world-lit course. I knew one began these journeys with an overview of one’s birthplace.
Th
ere arose in my mind a picture of Saint Ansgar, Iowa, a farm community of fewer than a thousand people, dropped in a straight line down the map from Minneapolis and Saint Paul, to a point just below the Minnesota border. Mile upon mile of corn, soybeans, oats, and alfalfa stretched as far as my mind’s eye could see. Every three or four of these checkerboard fields was punctuated by a grove of trees, sometimes poplar, more often scrub oak or pine, with a red or white barn, hugged on one corner by a silo, three or four sheds, and a white farmhouse, a pattern to be repeated until the horizon brought the sky down to a flat line miles away.

Towns dotted this farmscape—had to, to keep the farmers supplied, one or two villages to a county.
Th
e Mitchell County seat was Osage, twelve miles east, but Saint Ansgar was on a rail line, and the wagon trains of Swedish and Norwegian immigrants stopped there before dispersing west into Indian territory; it was a traffic hub and so the more colorful town. Still, there were no eighteenth floors in Saint Ansgar.
Th
e tallest structure, the grain elevator next to McKinley and Sons, was barely 150 feet high; the First Lutheran Parish House, however, rose an imposing two and a half stories on a large corner lot toward the north end of town.

Th
e high-off-the-ground first floor became the site of church suppers. In the winters of my childhood these were often lutefisk suppers. I remember the smelly, frost-covered pails of lutefisk, soaking in lye and stacked in the vestibule of my father and mother’s house. Mother would roll her eyes when she saw them coming. In vain she set bottles of Air Wick around the little hall. Still, the vestibule—and, if we were not careful to keep the door shut, the whole front of the house—stank to high heaven. On the day of the church supper my father and Uncle Bill would begin soaking off the lye and carrying the fifty pounds or so of now strangely flavored fish to the parish house to be served, swimming in butter, along with mounds of mashed potatoes. As if this were not starch and white food enough, the fish and potatoes were augmented by rolled crepe-like potato pancakes called lefse.
Th
e lefses, when smeared with butter and sugar, were quite tasty, and many a child, including me, passed over the fish to make a meal of them.

Th
e dinner ended and the tables cleared, bedsheets were strung on clotheslines across one end of the hall to create a “fishing pond.” We children would be allowed to “fish” by dropping light cane poles with string lines into the pond. Behind the sheets, stooping adults would tie a brightly wrapped gift to the end of the string and jerk on it until each child “landed” a toy. Always my favorite of the festivities. Saint Ansgar was also a place of German farmers, who, in addition to owning and operating the best farms in the state, had their own churches and church suppers. But I suppose you could say I wound up going to the Norwegian ones with the lutefisk and lefse because Daddy was a charmer.

Th
e first picture of him in the family photo album shows Father looking pleased with himself, wearing a dark dress with a white lace collar and cuffs and long golden curls.
Th
ere follows a photo of Father in a sailor suit. Next we get Father in side-buttoned knickerbockers, and then there is one of him in the doughboy uniform he wore, first at boot camp in the Ozarks and then, in November 1918, when he shipped out to France, arriving in Bordeaux just in time for the armistice.
Th
en comes a baseball uniform from a year in Triple A.
Th
en, having successfully negotiated “business college,” Father joined a family partnership in his uncles’ grocery store. His new life as a small-business man called for gabardine twill pants, a long-sleeved shirt and tie, and a big white apron. Its Groth Brothers Grocery logo, however, changed within the year. He and Uncle Bill bought out the uncles to become Groth Brothers Jack Sprat Grocery. A few years later, Father bought out Uncle Bill.

It was with the Jack Sprat franchise that Father met Mother, who caught his eye one day as she stood demonstrating pancake mix in the store’s front window. She was fresh out of her two-year commercial degree at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. Determined not to go back to the farm, where she would have been expected to rise at dawn and cook breakfast for twelve to fifteen men at threshing time, she—Esther Hartwig then—took a job as a traveling saleswoman in 1924. By the spring of 1925 she and Father wakened her sleeping parents, and as Grandmother and Grandfather Hartwig sat up in bed in their nightshirts, Father asked for her hand.
Th
e difference in their religion was noted and frowned upon as a serious obstacle. Father was, after all, a baptized, practicing member of the Norwegian Lutheran church; Mother, a member of the German Lutheran church, Missouri Synod. Two different kinds of Lutherans! Two different worlds! Permission to marry was granted, however, since Father was already an established merchant in the town.

In 1929, Father successfully negotiated for the purchase of a fine four-bedroom clapboard house, in which, seven years later, I was born.

My earliest memory is of Daddy reading “Bye, Baby Bunting” to me while in his and Mother’s bed, me in my Dr. Denton’s and he in his blue and white striped pajamas. While I heard about the rock-a-bye baby whose cradle might fall, I looked with fascination at a tiny red mole nestling among the thin, reddish-brown hairs on his chest. On his head, however, that red-brown hair—Mother would have said auburn—was thick and wavy, at least in the photographs of him in his youth. (He was already forty-three when I was born.) In infancy he wore a center part with big waves on either side swooping down toward his ears. I was startled to see a resemblance to the most often reproduced image of Oscar Wilde.
Th
ere is one picture of Dad in his shirtsleeves, beside his Essex automobile, which captures the attractiveness he had to women.
Th
e center part is gone, thank God, and he seems to have brushed his hair straight back in a wavy pompadour. His left hand casually fondles the head of his German shepherd, Bruno, and he looks as if he could take on the world.

Here I pause to remind myself that I must not neglect the other half of my genetic makeup. Mother had a widow’s peak and a heart-shaped face and looked ladylike and lovely in carefully chosen blouses and jewelry and well-cut suits.
Th
e way I remember her best is in a dark tailored short-sleeved dress with a white V-shaped collar, white gloves, and a picture hat. She looked like Irene Dunne in
Penny Serenade.
Men always showed special gallantry around my mother, and she always managed to accept their gallantries as nothing more than her due.

Counting the square footage of the deep, tree-shaded corner lot and the several outbuildings, the house I was born in was quite a spread.
Th
ere were snowball bushes in front of the front porch, and Father was a proud tender of them. His other pride and joy was a picket fence and white trellis and archway between the flower garden that ran along one side of the house and the vegetable garden in the rear. He trained roses to grow up this archway, and one of my favorite photos is one he shot of Mother, my brother, and me standing there, in our ideal family mode.

Were we rich? I once asked mother, who said we were “comfortable,” but added that nice people gave no thought to material things, treating all God’s children, rich or poor, exactly the same. She had a fur coat, though, so we
looked
rich, although the coat was made of something called sable-dyed muskrat, which doesn’t rise to the level of the best pelts. Still, she looked fine in it, especially with the little hats she wore on top, saucily tilted felt numbers with dotted veils.

Was I smug and satisfied as the princess of this castle? Not on your life. I longed for the family to move to the small white, green-shuttered bungalow in the next block, which looked more like the houses in my Dick and Jane books and spelled “normal” to me.
Th
e great cham of the frightened child. Let’s be normal. Let’s have no late-night fights or early-morning trips to Grandma’s house. Let’s have little squares of green lawn on either side of a cement walk leading up to the front door. Let’s just hunker down and never have to overhear, from a sheltered spot under the counter at the Jack Sprat store, two women customers, as one says, “He drinks, you know.
Th
at’s why she has to work. She thinks she can keep an eye on him.” And the other says, “Yes, and where is he right this minute? In the tavern next door, I can guarantee it.”
Th
en the first: “Poor Esther.” But I never told poor Esther what I heard. She knew it well enough. I have since identified the sick feeling of shame that washed over me when I heard those voices as the source of my lifelong timidity and what are now called “issues of self-esteem.”

His athleticism notwithstanding, and probably as a consequence of the beer he consumed from his forties on, my father grew stout in middle age, which only made Mother call him “well fed” and even more distinguished looking. “Like a professor or a professional man,” she insisted. But although for forty years he subscribed to a publication called the
Progressive Grocer,
Father was never what might be called a professional man. He was smart, and he was honest, and he was a good businessman, but as he had reason to know, that is not always enough in this world.

In point of fact, Father was several times close to utter defeat in his business and personal life. I suppose you could say, in the matter of the fire that destroyed the block of stores of which his Jack Sprat Grocery was one, that it was only one of the vicissitudes of fate. But if he had not been fuddled with drink on a two-week binge that fall, would he have failed to notice that the insurance had lapsed?

It was the week before Christmas when we were awakened by two sharp explosions, like shots out of a big hunting rifle.
Th
e whole sky was red orange, with black sparks shooting up into it, all visible out of the second-story bedroom where—as a temporary measure while my own bedroom was being painted—my cot stood in the corner opposite the big walnut bedstead where Mother and Daddy lay.

Daddy leaped out of bed, holding on to his pajama bottoms so they wouldn’t fall down on account of his having broken the string. He held me back with a wave of his free hand, but his own face was close to the window and his voice anguished as he cried, “Oh God, Mother! It’s the store! It’s the store!” He pulled on some pants, a shirt, and shoes and ran out of the room and the house to rush uselessly to the scene.
Th
e whole block—the bakery next door, where the flour exploding had sparked the blaze, the grocery, the little blacksmith shop, and the corner beer parlor—all smoldered in black, evil-smelling swirls the next morning as Mother made me walk to school on the other side of the street.
Th
at was so I wouldn’t see the hole in the ground, the cellar of the Jack Sprat, which was the only thing left of a property that, it became apparent, had been uninsured since September 15.
Th
e upshot was that he and Mother, whose principal asset it was, had to bear the entire loss themselves.

Th
at was December 1945. Early in May 1946 we moved to Clarence, Iowa, another small town in the east-central part of the state—leaving my brother behind to finish his schooling. It was while going through the fourth and fifth grades in Clarence, light years away from New York, that I first set my heart on living in Manhattan. In Clarence, Mother and Father and I, with the aid of Bob, the projectionist, ran the town’s only movie theater, the Roxy. Mother sold the tickets, Father took the tickets. I popped the corn. My job operating the popcorn concession meant that I was at the movies seven days a week. Some of the films we showed in those postwar years were what are now called film noir, and they invariably opened with an aerial shot of the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. I didn’t pay all that much attention to the plots of these movies, but I absorbed from them the conviction that life begins in New York City. Inwardly, psychologically, I was headed for New York from that time on.

Even by keeping the overhead to a minimum, business at the Roxy was poor—not because of television (still a decade ahead) but because the town was largely made up of conservative Methodists who did not hold with moviegoing. Unable to sell it as a theater, after less than two years Father swapped the building and the lot it stood on for a silver Airstream trailer. We hitched it to the family car, a gray 1945 Dodge, and took Route 66 to Long Beach, California, where I spent grades five (what there was left of it) and six on the West Coast. For a time, the sun of sunny California shone on the family fortunes, permitting my parents to own and operate, with the help of only skeleton staff, a diner and a short-order restaurant, directly opposite each other on the West Pacific Coast Highway.
Th
e way began to seem clear for us to move out of the trailer and, for the first time since Saint Ansgar, have a house of our own to live in.

Th
ere was just one fly in the ointment—the ointment itself: the beer on license in the short-order restaurant, and my father’s fondness for it, and his weak head for tolerating it without loss of function. Mother enlisted my help in keeping the lid on Dad’s intake, and between us we managed to keep it down to zero while he was under her eye or mine. But there were inevitable glitches, and one night one of them resulted in tragedy. A US Navy able-bodied seaman first class had been sideswiped, his motorcycle overturned, and the sailor’s foot seriously injured. (He was later to lose a toe.) Passersby had gotten the license plate of the car that did not stop, which proved to be the 1945 Dodge registered to Dad. Awakened from a sound sleep, Dad was completely unaware that anything untoward had happened as he made his way home from a series of tavern visits. But that was of course no excuse. By the time the services of a good attorney were secured, a trial was held, jail time served, and damages and attorney fees paid, the sum total could only be managed by selling the trailer, selling the diner, selling the short-order restaurant, and asking Grandma Minnie to advance Mother’s inheritance—most of the acreage of one of Grandma’s five farms. None of this was enough to destroy his good standing in Great Hartwig’s eyes, as her children and grandchildren called her, now that her offspring had reached a third generation. Both before and after the trial and the sentencing and the six-week incarceration in Los Angeles County Jail, she maintained, “Joe Groth is an honest man. I’ve always said so and I always will.”
Th
ough she could be judgmental and often was, that sign of integrity was key to retaining her financial support.