Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  “Is it very cold out?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m sick. My throat.”

  “Oh. Have you tried honey? Let me make you some tea.”

  “It’s not important,” he says. His coat is torn he notices as he unbuttons slowly. “I had an awful time getting here. But you’re looking well.” Brought me the papers I left in his closet.

  “You’re moving, you say?”

  “I have never seen you look so well,” he says, “The sea seems to agree with you.”

  “Oh I like it here at the bottom of the sea.”

  “I came to tell you that I’m getting married.”

  Telling me in that dreary voice just when I’m pouring the tea. Maybe he thinks the dead must be addressed in a special funereal tone. Congratulate him anyway?

  “You’re getting married?”

  “It looks like it. I haven’t told anyone yet, but it’s decided. Everything points that way. I mean, it’s just the obvious step. I can’t go on with the life I’ve been living...I suppose I’m going into it like every other idiot...”

  How he goes on. Reminds me of the letter Nicholas wrote me the day before his wedding: “...going the way of all flesh,” “...caught in the inescapable net of fate.”

  “Whom are you going to marry?”

  “Not someone you know...”

  Can’t say a really nice thing about the poor girl. Protecting her from my jealousy, I suppose. Still, why so dreary about it all? If you’re worried about the propriety of our meeting under water—but it’s a fish pool now, my lap. Besides, we’re just having tea.

  “The time has come,” he says, “I can’t say no to a risk. You look so shocked. But you should understand. You took this risk. I know it’s no answer...”

  So that’s what you really wanted all the time. Get married. Can’t think all that weight of years I just threw off. How terrifying it must be for you.

  “This is excellent tea. I think I’ll have some more. Is your watch right? I must be somewhere at five. You’re so silent. I can’t blame you for thinking...It’s too late to begin to explain...”

  “I wish you all the happiness.” Suddenly everything is clear. I see you stand before me in your coat, ten of you, cardboard flat, each differently intriguing. Love, I can’t put you together again. You will join the happy people in Father Time’s family album.

  You must be leaving; of course. I watch you button up gravely. A nice stranger, you ask about my work. Now that I’m dead I can write my autobiography at last. Of course I’m not serious.

  “But you should,” he says. “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. But I hope...” You look at me kindly, in a shy new way. Have I changed into someone else? You look lost. I’ll go with you part of the way if you like. Yes, I have time, all the time in the world. And I’ve been wanting to see the Statue of Liberty.

  “Come,” you say and take my arm. It’s all right now that we are strangers. My love is as secret as on the day I flew out of Idlewild thinking I’d never see you again. It’s perfectly all right to adore your profile; you should be dictator. Did I tell you about my crush on Mussolini? Il Duce, Count Ciano...What beautiful names they had. I don’t see the Statue of Liberty, do you? Missed it again. You walk so fast, it feels like flying. No, I don’t mind. I love it. Where are you taking me? You realize I’m only a child. Kidnap—that’s an American word. Are you Lindbergh? White skies over skyscrapers like in a movie, are we really flying?

  As soon as this dream is over I’ll jump out of bed and get under the cold shower, so help me God.

  A cup of coffee? Sure, why not. This is where we had breakfast the morning I left for Paris. I remember your look of triumph that said: Ezra was slain, and smiling at you with amused complicity. Why should I have told you it wasn’t Ezra you slew but the old dream lover conceived long ago behind black air-raid curtains in my father’s house, to whom I turned unfaithfully with Ezra, with you—dreams are invincible. Still, you chopped off at least one of his heads. And does it now sit on you? Alas. My greed for reality that winter in Paris, if you can forgive...

  “The book I’m working on? Yes, I’ve begun...” Reading love sonnets on the plane; of course I didn’t miss you. “It’s about a dead woman.”

  “I remember, you wrote me about it from Paris.”

  “This is something else. It’s told by the dead woman.”

  “You would do something like that,” he laughs.

  “It’s not so easy. You can’t remember a dream till you awake.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “You wake up when you have to.”

  “You must know.”

  How very well I look, you say for the hundredth time, saying good-bye before the subway station. Just now when you smiled a storeroom of plaster casts exploded into powder. Thank God for all this wind blowing. You kissed me so fast I didn’t know it happened till I saw you step off the curb, you will take a taxi downtown after all. Queer to be standing on Broadway in the daylight. Stroll down the street, stare at mannikins in new spring shades, wander into discount stores. Bedspreads on sale. See what’s playing at the New Yorker. If anyone asks how I came, what I’m doing here, who I am—nobody asks, this is America.

  IT IS AT a calamitous moment that the past opens into view. A block of high apartment buildings raised in fifteen years of marriage has been bombed away, revealing a long-forgotten landscape which lay hidden behind the walls. The clearing of the wreckage must wait. As for the price or damage to body, soul and mind of fifteen years of her life blanked out—or is it more?

  The sensation of forgetting comes back first, how one walked through years sealed in oblivion. It was a substance with its own weight and density, without color, texture or taste, like some abstract Newtonian matter, the unremembered past. The first crossing by boat to America putting an ocean full of mines and roving submarines between her and her childhood in Budapest, a sea voyage, a world war, another country, another language—distances which cannot be measured in miles or years—may have helped to cancel the first decade. Growing up in America during the war, the ten years she lived as a child in Budapest broke off. As for the years in America from 1939 to 1947, they were disowned when she married Ezra.

  The next crossing, covering a negligible distance by taxi from the hotel to the synagogue where she was to be married to Ezra Blind; up some stairs; in and out of rooms to sign papers; then walking from a side door to the center of the room under the canopy—pointless to count out the steps of what in one step had to annul the preceding years of her life.

  The process of annulment, begun the night of her engagement to Ezra Blind, was completed in the public wedding ceremony; it was like being hollowed out—thankful to know that one was only a mold—and being filled very slowly with some thin even fluid that would slowly harden.

  At the reception after the wedding she showed superior indifference to all the people wishing her happiness; and hordes of men, young and old, taking advantage of this day to kiss her, some boldly on the mouth, she received with equal pride. Invulnerable to personal insult or happiness, she accepted everything jarring or simply irritating that happened that day as contributing to her transformation, her triumph over past selves. The sense of triumph gave her strength to put up with what was unpleasantness and delay and hide her impatience, her wanting this day to be over, the congratulating, she needed all this to seal and bind so she could begin her new life.

  Thinking back after fifteen years to that day, she recalls the sense of annulment, already in effect as she walked under the canopy, like some bleach it permeated through every pore of her eighteen years. This dominated over her disappointment with the indifferent room, a library or classroom where a canopy and chairs had been set up; straining to hear the music. Mrs. Brensky was playing the piece on the piano in the next room, too far to hear. She was reluctant to enter, when they said now, she
was waiting to hear the music, the wedding march. She is playing in another room, they explained, and then she began walking but she heard no music even inside. And of the hours preceding, the mind retains only the inessentials: in a hotel facing the park, the night before, Aunt Olga’s voice saying: “Don’t put your hair in pins, it will press at night and give you a headache.” The drive uptown in a taxi through Central Park on a June day. She shut her eyes and looked and shut her eyes again on the green they were passing; because it was not like an ordinary drive through the park; nor was it like passing through the city for the last time before leaving; it was not like anything she had experienced before; for each annulment is new and disturbing in its own way.

  She believed she had brought all her possessions, what she wanted and in the shape that she wanted it, into the marriage. It seemed she would lose everything. But she lost only what was packed in that trunk.

  And now it is very strange, this new sense of the present, of a street in New York more like she experienced it as a girl than in the more recent decade of her marriage. As if a middle segment of a bone had been cut out, and the end sections joined.

  It worries her off and on—will the juncture hold? Sometimes she feels a painful crack. How fast our little props wear out their charm. These Italian sunglasses carried her through the week; but now it’s time for a new purchase.

  One walks more lightly, easily distracted by street sights, pursuing now a fantasy, now fabrics in shop windows; long-forgotten desires and interests resume their power. How odd to be thinking of Barry back in high school. The class had them practically engaged in spite of the fact that he was a shameless fairy. Still, the only boy in school who wasn’t frightened off either by Dr. Landsmann or his daughter, and courted her teasingly. She remembers the first time he came to the house; when her father appeared he put on a hilarious faggot act, at first declining to shake hands, “Oh Dr. Landsmann, don’t you come near me, I’m so ticklish,” he giggled, twitching all over. “Oh my goodness, you watch out, Dr. Landsmann, I know you’re a bug doctor!” He was so crazy and handsome and corrupt. And then he went into the navy and she never saw him again. Right now she feels like having a cup of coffee with Barry. Is she back where she was fifteen years ago?

  She has never walked so lightly, not as a girl. The breeze was never so fresh. It’s the gratuity of the present and the sense of this great continent where by historical accident she was taken as a child, but where she never really lived. Though she went to school, married and worked in America, she never really got off the boat in 1939, and now as it dawns on her she isn’t at all certain whether this time she has really arrived; and yet finding herself in New York, ridiculously stranded, seems to make some weird sense.

  • • •

  Years that do not belong to one’s life. Pittsburgh, 1939–1942, impossible to recall with clarity as it was at the time impossible for a child to perceive with clarity. Blocks of smoke-blackened houses with their rickety porches and grimly jutting fire escapes. Cars, billboards, soot, stench, litter, a lot of noise and no place to go except the movies. Walking down the street in outgrown dresses from Budapest or in strange ladies’ garments from the Jewish Welfare Agency, she thought: It is not I. Seeing too many movies, shoplifting from the five-and-ten, daydreaming in class, reading comics, screen romances and crime magazines from the drugstore rack, forging sick notes for the teacher in her aunt’s name; it was America, nightmare, trash, vacuity, stupor. From the year she came to America for the next eight years in Pittsburgh then Garfield then Bryn Mawr College till the year she married, she tried in vain to grasp the meaninglessness of every room and street corner, her inability to experience the rooms and streets as a moment in her life. In America the sky was not sky, the grass was not grass, Sophie Landsmann was not Sophie Landsmann. But America was America.

  A child of ten getting on the boat with her father and her uncle’s family in 1939 was immune to the sorrow of leaving everything behind and fears about the years ahead of them in a new country. The grown-ups had decided to make the step that would change their lives because they feared Hitler would occupy Hungary. They left to escape the terrible fate Jews would suffer; it was of this that they spoke, and of the hardships awaiting them in America. In the train from Budapest, before crossing the Austrian border, the Hungarian passport official had said to her aunt in beautiful country dialect, “Good woman, why are you taking these three beautiful children out of the country?”

  “Because they’re Jewish children,” Aunt Olga said, “if I don’t take them out of the country the Nazis will kill them.”

  “We’re all Hungarians,” the passport official said with feeling. “Jewish or Christian Hungarians, it’s the same thing. We Hungarians will not let the Germans harm the children on our soil.”

  “They are Jewish children,” Aunt Olga repeated and the passport official protested again that they were Hungarian children.

  She sat, her eyes nailed to the floor in mortified rage. It was over, it would have nothing to do with her in her new life. She stopped being Hungarian when she got on the train. From the day they boarded the S.S. Aquitania she wrote only in English, even though she had to look up most of the words in the Hungarian-English dictionary.

  The grown-ups’ reasons for leaving were their business; she had to hold on to the meaning this voyage had for her, the fulfillment of longings and presentiments that had begun to stir some years ago of a great event that would change her life.

  Sailing across the Atlantic on the S.S. Aquitania, Sophie was too caught up in the wonder and excitement of the voyage to think about past or future. The S.S. Aquitania not only had everything—shops, bars, restaurants, ballrooms, studies, game rooms, swimming pool, gym, movies, promenade decks—it had it three times; the three classes like interlocking cities of a floating island. She dressed up very nicely and practiced her English with stewards, deckhands and nice old gentlemen in the first-class bar. When she said she came from Budapest, eyes twinkled; many had been there, remembered the baths and the corso lit up at night. Tea every afternoon. It was not just the tea and cookies but the ceremonial way the steward poured it, asking how she liked her tea as if she were a real first-class passenger and as politely as he did for an older person. There was a beautiful wood-paneled study with leatherbound books in glass cases and writing desks with many drawers and slots full of different kinds of stationery. She would have been happy to spend the rest of her life on the boat.

  She wanted to love America. The Twentieth Century Fox newsreel played behind the word, coming on with loud music, the pictures changing so fast and more happening than one could take in—ladies playing tennis in white shorts, airplanes, a boxing match, a burning zeppelin, a parade, someone doing a backdive, exploding oilwells, bathing beauties, tanks. She thought of the twentieth century not just as the continuation of the nineteenth, but as something incredible that happened, as surprisingly and mysteriously as the newsreel turning on in the dark cinema, and it happened in America more than anywhere else. America was the twentieth century.

  Sitting at one of the desks of the wood-paneled library, she began writing in her new language. She had to construct the sentences slowly, a Hungarian-English dictionary at her side—often prompting her to make up something she hadn’t intended just so as to possess on her page an exotic word glimpsed at random in the dictionary.

  The sun was beginning to set when land came into view. A flat coast, low brownish rocks. A man pointing in the direction of the sun said soon they would see the Statue of Liberty; he told her it was a gift from France. But before she saw the statue she had to go inside and wait in the tourist-class smoker for customs officials. Every so often she got up and peered through a porthole, but there was nothing to be seen except people moving or the side of another boat. It was dark when the boat docked; they passed over the ramp with the crowd into a narrow passageway that seemed a continuation of the ramp, through a small doorway into a
n enormous hall where trunks were being pushed under the various letters of the alphabet.

  “Are we still on the boat?” her little cousin kept asking.

  There had been the excitement of a week’s boat trip; one day in a big New York hotel where the children raced each other up and down thirty floors on the stairways and the elevators; another day’s journey to Pittsburgh, emptying the great bags of sandwiches, potato chips, all varieties of candies and soda pop their American uncle gave them; suddenly, it seemed, they got out of a car on a littered sidewalk and quickly, with only a glimpse of people sitting on the stoop, through a narrow doorway and up four flights of stairs; then Uncle Dave said, “This is home,” and they walked into a one-room furnished apartment, each of them overcome by the sudden shock of loss which had to be hidden.

  Every night through that first long summer she listened to the grown-ups’ low, anguished voices and went to sleep believing they would go back. Only after war broke out in September did everyone fully grasp that the voyage to America was final. They could never return to Hungary. When Hungary joined the Nazi powers it ceased to be their country. From that time on Sophie wasn’t sure that her Hungarian past had anything to do with her at all. She stopped thinking of Budapest. The person she had been there ended there. Chance memories of any particular place or moment blurred instantly into shame and confusion. After living in Pittsburgh for a year she could not have said what she missed in America; she missed her father, of course, who had left for New York. But she never thought that she missed things she had been used to in Budapest.

  They lived in one of a long row of identical houses forming part of the Jewish ghetto; a block further along the same street was the Irish ghetto; at the next intersection began the Italian ghetto. The children of the three ghettoes did not speak to each other except to heckle. It was weird to land in a Jewish ghetto in America where being Jewish was an issue between people in a way she never experienced it in Budapest. She was accepted on the block when they arrived because she was a “Yid” and they were constantly after her to make her more their kind of “Yid,” telling her with whom she might or might not associate; teaching her Yiddish. The shopkeepers teased her for refusing to pronounce English with a strong Yiddish accent. The children on the block harassed her as the word got around that she went to the house of an Irish Catholic girl.