by Lore Segal
That Bessie’s sympathy proves to be better than my empathy in easing some of this world’s discomforts has been waiting for some eighty years in memory’s notebook to conclude the recollection of our family excursion through the Raggaschlucht in August of 1936 or ’37.
THE FOUNTAIN PEN
I was in the fifth form at Guildford High School the year my fountain pen went missing. It was the last year of World War II, and to account for events so many decades later is to write anthropologically about people doing what people do in a changed vocabulary. Are there readers to whom I should explain the fountain pen? It was the precursor of the ballpoint and the felt-tip. You dipped the nib into an inkwell and pumped the inner tube full of as much ink as it could hold, and got ink on your fingertips. As little kids, we assembled small squares of cotton to make pen wipers to give as Christmas presents.
The tallest girl in the class—call her Regina—was taller by two heads, maybe, than the next tallest, which would have been Patsy, our fifth-form tennis star, or my best friend, Ann. Regina was taller, and she was older by almost two years, having been kept back twice—was it because of a natural incapacity or because she never did her homework? Who knows what was eating her. Today we would look for “dysfunction” in her background. She was very tall and slender, a beautiful girl who had acquired a sizable clique of hangers-on and terrorized the fifth form. Walking past me she would snap her fingers against my forehead; the clique watched and grinned.
Internalizing the belief that people don’t like you if you know the answers and get the prizes at prize-giving was a better bet than thinking that it was because I was one of two refugee girls in the class, which was something I could do nothing about. What I could and did do was stop doing my homework. It puzzled Miss Stone, the teacher, who liked me. Was that why Regina and her gang hated me? At any rate, dropping my grades turned out to do not a bit of good. Regina stood towering over me, messed with the things on my desk, fingered my fountain pen, pushed my notebook with the purple cover onto the floor and did not pick it up. The clique laughed.
How was it that my friend Ann, the daughter of Dr. and Lady Hurstwood, continued to do her homework and get prizes at prize-giving, yet she was voted head girl?
So, I had this idea, which I communicated to Ann, who came with me to carry it to Miss Gent, the headmistress.
Miss Gent was then a woman in her thirties, a scholar and High Episcopalian. Her perfectly round face shone as with a high polish; her person was round, with the legs attached at each side in a way that gave her a waddling walk, falling from one foot onto the other. I thought she was interesting and desired her notice.
Miss Gent’s study was at the end of the passage to the teachers’ common room. I have a memory of a window on the right and Miss Gent, behind her desk, listening to my project for making the world a better place. It was a plan that would have made every kind of sense in the sixties: The fifth form, according to this plan, would organize itself into a Friendship Society. Members would swear friendship each to each and each to all; all unkindness was to be outlawed.
Miss Gent heard me out. When my enthusiasm had exhausted itself, she asked me whether I foresaw any difficulties. No! I said, no, because all difficulties would have been eliminated by the original oath of friendship!
My projected Friendship Society was aborted by the event indicated above: the loss—the theft, as I believed, as I knew—of my fountain pen. It had been a Christmas present to me from Ann’s mother, Lady Hurstwood. I walked to the front of the room, stood before Miss Stone’s desk, and told her, with a significant look to where Regina sat at her desk, that my fountain pen was missing.
Miss Stone was a small, lumpy woman in her mid-thirties with untidy dark hair and magnificent eyes. Miss Stone was what I would not have known at the time to call an intellectual. It was she who had introduced Ann and me to Jane Austen, making no attempt to hide the fact that we were her favorite pupils. To me she assigned the writing of an essay on a Robert Bridges quotation: “I too will something make and joy in the making.” And she talked to us about having “a sense of proportion.”
Miss Stone clapped her hands. There followed a significant silence. Miss Stone asked the class whether anyone had seen Lore’s fountain pen. Blue, was it? Yes, blue. She walked with me to my desk and made me take out every object not once but twice. She had me turn my school satchel inside out. Might I have left the pen at home, where I lived with Miss Ellis and Miss Wallace, my elderly foster mothers? Could I have lost it between Miss Ellis’s front door and the gate by which the day girls entered the playground and crossed to the school’s back entrance? No, because here was my purple notebook in which I had taken notes, with my fountain pen, that morning. Might the fountain pen have fallen onto the floor? The girls at the desks in the vicinity of my desk all looked under their desks.
There was a fountain pen on Regina’s desk, but that was her fountain pen, said Regina.
I said, “Mine was blue.”
Regina’s fountain pen was also blue.
“Mine,” I said, “had a clip with which you could clip it to your shirt pocket.”
So had Regina’s fountain pen. Didn’t all fountain pens have such a clip?
The next days and the following week remain in my recollection as intensely, excruciatingly, continuously unpleasant. I was embarrassed at the fuss I was creating. I wished the fountain pen to hell, and I wished to have it back. I wished I had never said anything, and I wanted revenge against those who had bullied me and laughed.
Miss Ellis was asked to come in and sat in Miss Gent’s study with Miss Gent and Miss Stone. Miss Ellis perfectly remembered the fountain pen, and that it might have been blue. Lady Hurstwood, reached by telephone, testified that she had given me a blue fountain pen at Christmas. Unlike Ann and I, who were day girls, Regina was one of Guildford High School’s boarders. Whoever was responsible for her was contacted or supposed to be contacted and might or might not have responded. Finally Regina was summoned and spent some time in Miss Gent’s study. When she returned to the classroom, she approached my desk, stood over me, and laid the fountain pen on my desk.
She said, “You can have this one. They are going to get me another one.”
“All right,” I said. I remember not looking into her face.
“All right, everybody,” Miss Stone said. “Now let’s get back to work.”
I looked at the blue pen that had a clip with which to clip it to your shirt pocket. This was not my pen. I got up and walked to Miss Stone’s desk and said, “It’s not my pen.”
Miss Stone said to me, “Go. And. Sit. Down.”
* * *
—
When, at a time in the 1890s, my great-grandfather Benedik moved the family from a small Hungarian village to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was thought safest to leave Michel, the youngest child, temporarily behind. The three oldest girls, Berta, Frieda, and Rosa, who was to become my grandmother, remembered their mother’s terrible grief and distress at the separation from her baby. In Vienna, the family lived in two large rooms during the years the father established himself in business. I have a yellowing photograph of a mustachioed man standing in the door of his wine shop. And they sent for little Michel.
The blissful reunion of the mother with her child is not what happened. Berta, Frieda, and Rosa observed their mother’s dislike—a physical distaste for the child from whom she had been forced to separate. They had to intervene to protect the little boy from his mother’s impatience, irritation, and rage—from her cruelty. They prevented her treating the little boy’s chilblains with water that was close to boiling. And yet my grandmother remembered taking her little brother to the nearby Prater—Vienna’s permanent fun fair, with its famous Riesenrad—and her mother running after them, weeping, with a scarf to fix around the little boy’s throat.
Later, in the Hitler period, separation of mother and child was a common experience. Mothers saved the lives of their infa
nts by giving them into the care of Aryan foster mothers. When my parents despaired of leaving Vienna, they put me on the train to England. The dreamed of, longed for reunions, after the war was over, were sometimes difficult and bitter. How bitter that today, other generations of parents and children hurt by separation and changed by experience, will become foreign to each other.
Can my small fountain pen story throw light?
The pen Regina laid on my desk when she returned from Miss Gent’s study did not look like my pen. It had the disagreeable look of a thing I did not care to touch. What had happened—happened to it, happened to me—had attached to the object and misshaped it into something alien. This was not the object that had been an important pleasure for me to own, and I stood up, the blood rising into my head, and walked to Miss Stone’s desk and said, “It’s not my pen,” and she told me to go and sit down.
I asked to see Miss Gent in her study. I told her that I didn’t think this was my fountain pen. I did not look into Miss Gent’s face on the far side of the desk, in order not to see in her look the nuisance that she must be thinking me. Miss Gent said that in any case I should keep the fountain pen. She said that a member of the board of governors had a spare fountain pen that he was going to give Regina.
At the end of the school year Miss Gent left Guildford High School and we got another headmistress. Ann said that Miss Gent and Miss Stone had moved into an apartment together.
The war was over. After my three years at the University of London, I rejoined my family in the Dominican Republic, but that’s a different story and ends with our immigrating to the United States and becoming naturalized New Yorkers.
In 1964 I published my first novel. I wrote to Ann in England, and she found me Miss Stone and Miss Gent’s new address. They were living in another city. The day after the publisher sent me my author’s copies I packed one and took it to the post office to mail to Miss Stone. I never heard from her.
BLACK BREAD
I like to ask friends what, if they had committed a murder and were going to be executed, they would want for their last meal. It’s a question to which my answer is Bread and Butter. A slice of buttered New York’s Zabar’s seeded rye will do, but the true answer is the black bread my grandmother made in the kitchen behind Grandfather’s dry goods store, Warenhaus Joseph Stern. The store stood on Fischamend’s main square, catty corner from the tower, and was expropriated by the Nazis in August of 1938.
First I want to tell about my grandmother’s soup. I remember her stance, whipping lightly on the balls of her feet, her upper body leaning forward over the work space. In the sixties in New York when we were into French dining, I made Julia Child’s classic soup, but it hadn’t the complexity of the soup that my grandmother started right after breakfast for that day’s Mittagsessen (midday meal).
* * *
—
I was ten years old when I left Vienna on the Kindertransport to England, lived with a series of English foster families, and did not see my grandparents again until, after getting my degree from the University of London, I rejoined the remnant of my family in the Dominican Republic, where we were waiting for our quota to come to America. My Uncle Paul ran a grocery store called Productos de Sosua, in Santiago de los Caballeros. There, after breakfast, my grandmother crossed the backyard into the kitchen to start the soup for the Mittagessen.
* * *
…
Today, in my late eighties, I look back with irritation and remorse at my nineteen-year-old self’s snobbery quarreling with my grandmother’s un-English table setting—the oilcloth, the mismatched plates, the dime store cutlery. If there happens to be a heaven after all, may it forgive me for trying to teach my grandmother not to rest her coffee spoon against the edge of her saucer. The Kaffee in the cup tasted of Vienna; the soup in the plate had the complexity of fine wine.
* * *
—
But about my grandmother’s black bread.
* * *
—
The virtue is in the kneading—isn’t it?—the patient time, the elbow grease that forms the pillow of dough which must be pitched down onto the floured wooden board, covered with a cloth, and left to rise. Then uncovered, punched with a balled fist—bread-making is very physical—turned over and thrown onto the board a second time, covered, and left to rise again.
* * *
—
Do not try to use my memory as a pumpernickel recipe, for mine is the bread of love. I growled at a recent newspaper article about modern bread-making, and shall go to my grave swearing it was never molasses that colored my Omama‘s bread. Though I know nothing of the true mystery of her ingredients. I scowled at the article’s promise of light, fluffy bread, while I grieve that in all of greater New York I cannot find the dense, almost damp texture of the bread of my childhood in the Fischamend kitchen.
* * *
—
When the dough was ready to be formed into a round loaf, about thirteen inches in diameter, it was put in a basket, covered with the cloth, and placed in the oven of the black iron stove which, when turned off, retained the correct temperature. When the bread had fully risen, my grandmother and I walked it through the store and out the front door and carried it to the bakery on the other side of the square. We climbed the half dozen steps and handed the basket to the white-aproned baker who took the loaf out of the basket, arranged it on the flat paddle of the wooden baking shovel, and with its long handle pushed my grandmother’s bread into the brick kiln to be baked.
* * *
—
When it came home, the mahogany-colored loaf gleamed with its egg wash, engraved with the basket’s circular pattern which, starting at the center, circled and circled to the loaf’s outer edge. My grandmother held the loaf perpendicularly against her chest and with a serrated bread knife sliced toward herself.
* * *
—
The midmorning snack was a piece of bread with rendered chicken fat and gribenes, or, if we had killed a goose, with the stiff, raw white fat from under the skin, salted and with a sprinkling of the red Hungarian paprika, or plain and delicious with butter.
FAILURE
By failure I mean wanting, intending, and continuing to believe that I was going to do something, and not doing it. I remember the year I failed to jump into the swimming pool.
On Summer Sundays we might take the morning tram to the foot of the Kahlenberg and hike to the top, from where you could overlook the city of Vienna with the Danube below, a silver ribbon sparking silver points of light. Vati carried the rucksack with the chicken legs, the hard-boiled eggs, and the cookies. I don’t remember anybody worrying whether the nine-year-old was going to keep up. The problem was more likely to be Mutti’s feet hurting.
My mother’s preferred option was to spend the whole long day in one of Vienna’s “swim baths.” These were ample grounds with several pools of different depths and convenient areas to get changed. You could buy a Kracherl, the sweet, red fruit drink that tickled the roof of your mouth; we brought the chicken legs, the hard-boiled eggs, the cookies.
Sunday’s social life depended on my mother’s many cousins. Yellowing snapshots immortalize them lining up beside the pool, being comical. I wish I could tell which was which. The following year, if they were lucky, they would have managed to go to Uruguay, Paraguay, Cuba, Shanghai; if they were unlucky, to France.
I was the family’s little girl, noticed for my breast stroke, praised for having mastered the art of floating on my back. But I got into the pool by the ladder. This was the Sunday I was going to jump. I had been going to jump the Sunday before and all the previous Sundays. The cousins encouraged and jollied me. My jumping or not jumping into the water from the edge of the swimming pool had become a cause. Today I was going to jump in, once, before we left.
“Come and get dressed,” said my mother. “Vati wants to start back.”
“Yes, but first let me jump in.”
“I let you, I l
et you!” said my mother.
“You go away and then I will jump.” With nobody on my case, the ticking time was going to make me have to jump. “Just once,” I said.
“Hurry it up.”
* * *
—
The air felt distinctly cooler and there was a change in the quality of the light. The place was emptying; those who had not left were leaving. I had the pool to myself. I stood in my swimsuit on the cement rim, looking into the element that was going to be degrees colder than my body, and wet, and would, once my feet detached from what they stood on, close over my head and go up my nose and mouth and choke in my throat. I knew when my father, with the rucksack, passed behind me in the direction of the exit. Still I stood and was still going to jump, when my mother, some little way off, said, “Lorle, come.” She had my sandals and my mauve dress with the stripes. (Those blissful childhood summers, when getting dressed was drawing on a pair of knickers and throwing the minimal cotton dress over my head.)
“Come. We’re leaving. All right?”
“All right,” I said, but it was not, it was not all right.
* * *
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