by Lore Segal
“Is that you, Lore? Come here. I want you.” She had not raised her head and I could tell by her voice that there was something the matter. I looked around and I was glad that Annie was there, busying herself in the far corner of the dusky room. “I have to speak with you,” Mrs. Levine said. “I hear that you are going around telling people we don’t give you enough pocket money. I was very upset. I think that’s very ungrateful of you.”
“I didn’t,” I said, but without conviction; I was trying to recall to whom I had said such a thing. “I never,” I said.
Mrs. Levine said, “I was quite upset. We do everything for you, and when I hear you are saying Uncle Reuben gives Bobby more money than he gives you I get very upset. And criticizing everybody—how my grandson is spoiled, and this one you like, and that one you don’t like. You don’t do that when you live in other people’s houses.”
I felt the blood pounding in my head—confused because she was accusing me of thoughts I did not recognize, and not accusing me of thoughts for which I had long felt guilty. I wanted to go away and think this out, but I knew I must stand and let Mrs. Levine scold me as long as she felt like it.
Her hand that was guiding the needle trembled. “It’s not that I expect gratitude,” she said. “But you might at least say ‘Thank you, Auntie Essie’ when you see me sitting here sewing a dress for you, but you never notice what people do for you.”
“I do,” I said. “I do notice.” But a small sulky voice inside me said, “If she doesn’t know I love her, I’m not going to tell her.”
Mrs. Levine had not done with me yet. She was thoroughly worked up and she said excitedly, “And how often have I asked you to call me ‘Auntie Essie,’ but you never even remember—though you always say ‘Uncle Reuben’ to him, and then you go around telling people he doesn’t give you enough pocket money and I’m sure he gives you as much as he can afford.” Mrs. Levine was silent, sewing agitatedly on my dress.
I stood trembling. I looked toward Annie. I thought that any moment she would speak up and tell Mrs. Levine that there had been a mistake, and explain everything, but Annie seemed still to be dusting the same shelf, and her back was to me.
I ran out and up to my room and threw myself on the bed meaning to cry and cry, but I managed only a few dry sobs. I was thinking how that little Bobby really did get twice as much money as I. It surprised me that I had not thought of it before. It made me angry. I decided that I would not go downstairs for supper, nor to breakfast the next day, nor ever again. I would stay in my room and starve. I tried to cry some more, but I did not particularly feel like crying. I wondered if there was something the matter with me. I began to dream a dream—I imagined that I was weeping bitterly and that Sarah came into my room and saw me so and softly begged me to tell her why, and I could not speak because of the tears in my throat. My heart ached deliciously, imagining how Sarah wept for me.
I lifted my head from the pillow, listening to footsteps coming upstairs. Perhaps Mrs. Levine was coming to look for me. I held my breath, but they had stopped on the floor below. A door opened and shut. I heard the bathroom chain pulled and then somebody went back down. That was the front doorbell now—Uncle Reuben coming from his shop, or Sarah. Soon everybody would be home. They would sit around the table without me.
I thought of writing a letter to my mother, but I didn’t move from the bed. There was too much now that I could not tell her; it had shocked me profoundly to realize that everybody did not love me, and I knew if my mother were to find out that there were people who did not think me perfectly good and charming she could not bear it. The room had become dark and it was chilly. I was getting bored. I thought how Annie would have to come up to my floor when she went to bed. Maybe I would call her. Maybe she would come in. I thought, If she invites me again to come into her room, I will go. I wondered how long it would be before Annie came upstairs.
After a bit, I walked out onto the landing and sat on the top step. Presently I went down to the floor with the green carpet and hung around there, and then I went all the way down to the ground floor. Everybody would be home by now. I could hear them talking in the living room, but I didn’t know if I should go in. I wondered if Mrs. Levine was telling them all those things about me. I stood outside the door trying to hear what they were saying, but my figure limned itself on the frosted glass and Mrs. Levine called out, “All right, then, so come in. You don’t have to listen behind the door.”
I came in with my head on fire. Mrs. Levine was biting off her basting thread. She asked Annie if we had time to try on before supper, and though I kept waiting for the catastrophe Mrs. Levine only said, “So, you want to have that little Helene over to play with you?”
I said no, I wasn’t playing with Helene any more, but I had a new friend at school, called Renate. Mrs. Levine said to ask her to come to tea on Saturday.
* * *
—
Renate was two months older than I. She had tight black hair and wore glasses, and she was as smart as I was. After I taught her the game about guessing about letters, she only lost once, and she had come up with such fantastic and imaginative mishaps to delay her mail that she spurred me to ever greater stretches of unlikelihood. If she made her letters travel the long way around the world, I must send mine via the moon, and so the thing got out of hand and wasn’t any fun any more. But Renate thought of a new game. We had to guess when our parents would come. I said, “I guess two years.” Renate guessed five years. I said, “All right, mine is six years,” but she said that didn’t count because I had had my turn. I said I didn’t care. I knew a secret. She said, what. I told her how I had heard Mrs. Levine tell her eldest daughter that Mrs. Rosen didn’t know what she was going to do with Helene now that her parents were dead.
“Oh,” said Renate, “then Helene is an orphan.” And so Renate and I stood having our secrets together. I asked her if she would like to be best friends with me, instead of Helene, and she said she would.
But I kept looking curiously at Helene who was an orphan. She stood by herself in the middle of the schoolyard looking before her. She still wore her little thick coat and her rabbit’s-wool hat tied under the chin. One would never have guessed from looking at her that her parents were dead. I tried imagining that my parents were dead, but whenever I tried thinking about my father I would see him spread-eagled high above the ground comically wriggling his arms and legs, trying to get down from the thing like a telegraph pole on which he was trussed up. I wondered if that might mean that he was dead and tried to imagine him climbing down but could not crystallize this idea in my mind’s eye and so I removed it from him and focused it on my mother, but whoops, there she went, too, right up on the pole, and I knew that she could not come down until I had removed my thought from her. For the rest of the week I was continually at work to stop myself from thinking of my parents so that they could keep their feet on the earth. Mrs. Levine worried about me: She would see me suddenly shake my head or change chairs or dive under the table and would say, “For goodness’ sake, can’t you sit still a minute? I never saw such a child for fidgeting.” Renate came on Saturday. I took her into the dining room and we played house. We sat under the table and pulled the dining-room chairs to hedge us in closely all around. Renate said that she wanted to be the mother and I must be the child, which wasn’t the way I had imagined it, and she kept bossing me instead of my bossing her and she talked too quick and moved too suddenly and everything was quite wrong again, so that I wished with all my heart that it were Helene I had with me again, docile, under the table.
In the months that followed, Renate and I became very good friends. We had different games, and in the end it was I who won by a year and a half. A conspiracy between the grown-ups to save me the pain of waiting and possible disappointment had kept me in ignorance of my parents’ being expected in Liverpool on my very birthday.
One Tuesday in March, I was called out of class into the study of the headmaster. Mrs. Levine was ther
e, and they both looked very kindly at me. Mrs. Levine said for me to get my coat. There was a surprise waiting for me at home.
“My parents have come!” I said.
“Well!” said Mrs. Levine, “So! Aren’t you excited, you funny child?”
“Yes, I am. I’m excited,” I said, but I was busy noticing the way my chest was emptying, my head clearing, and my shoulders being freed of some huge weight that must, since I now felt it being rolled away, have been there all this time without my knowing it. Just as when the passing of nausea or the unknotting of a cramp leaves the body with a new awareness of itself, I stood sensuously at ease, breathing in and out.
Mrs. Levine was saying to the headmaster, “You never know with children. All she ever does is mope around the house and write letters home, and now she isn’t even pleased.”
“I am so pleased,” I said and began to jump up and down, though what I wanted most was to be still, to taste the intense sweetness of my relief. But it would never do to have Mrs. Levine think I was not pleased and excited, and I had to jump up and down in the taxi all the way back to the house.
And in the two easy chairs, in front of the sitting-room fire, sat my mother and my father, and I hugged them and smiled and I grinned and I hugged them again and I made them come upstairs to show them my room, and I showed them off to my new English family, and I showed off my new familiarities to my parents, and then the children arrived for my birthday party, bringing gifts. Crackers exploded. There were paper hats, and little cakes and jellies to eat. I bobbed and leaped and ran and chatted, and all the time I knew that, incredibly, my mother was in the room with me. Her eyes, huge and dilated with the suppressed tears of her exhaustion and the shock of her relief, followed me around the room like the eyes of a lover.
Afterward the neighbors came in to have a look at the little refugee’s parents. The women talked Yiddish to my mother. She smiled and tried to tell them in her stunted school English that she did not understand Yiddish, but they did not believe her and talked louder. She applied to my father, who was the linguist of the family, but he looked merely stunned. I try to recall his presence during the visit to the Levines, and see him sitting in the same armchair, rising when my mother rose, speaking only to echo what she said. Whenever I went over to kiss him, his face would break up and he wept.
In the evening, after everyone was gone, my mother opened the suitcase. She had brought some of my things from home, including my doll, Gerda, who had had a hole poked through her forehead where the customs people at the German border had looked for contraband. There was a box of sweets packed especially for the little friend Helene Rubichek.
“Oh, her,” I said. “She isn’t even at school any more.” “No,” Mrs. Levine added, “that Mrs. Rosen couldn’t keep her. She’s in another home now.”
“Where is she?” I asked, momentarily frowning at the glimpse I caught of little Helene stuck on the telegraph pole wriggling helplessly between heaven and earth.
“I don’t just remember,” Mrs. Levine said, “but I think they put her in another town.”
And so I put Helene out of my mind.
* * *
—
My parents stayed at the Levines’ for three days, and the fourth morning they left to go to their first English job in a household in the south of England. Mr. Levine was taking them to the station. They stood in the hallway by the front door. They had their coats on. “Come on down and say goodbye nicely to your father and mother,” said fat Mrs. Levine, but I sat on a step halfway up the stairs. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had one arm twisted around the banister, and I waved and wiggled my head.
I remained in Liverpool until the summer. It seems to me that after my parents came to England life at the Levines’ was less emotionally strenuous; I remember less about it.
Annie never remembered the half-crown that I had lent her. I used to study her. From the free and easy way that she talked and laughed with me, I could tell she had forgotten that she owed me two shillings and sixpence. I was too shy to remind her, but I never quit thinking that some day she would remember and give me back my money. This expectation became attached to Annie like an attribute, like the playful angle of her nose and the warm grip with which she used to swing my hand when we went walking in the park together. I always liked Annie.
I went on loving Mrs. Levine when she wasn’t looking. There was no hope now of our coming together. The phrases that she spoke to me and the tone in which I answered had become ritual. Now, seeing me sit idly by the fire, she would often say, “Don’t you even want to go and write a letter to your parents?” And I would say, “No, I don’t feel like writing.”
Mrs. Levine said, “My goodness, I never saw such a child for sitting around doing nothing.”
“I’m not doing nothing,” I said. “I’m watching the fire.”
“And always an answer to everything,” Mrs. Levine said, and Sarah said, “Knock it off, Ma. Leave her alone.” I used to keep thoughts of Sarah in abeyance till I went to bed, and then I imagined such situations, such things for her to say to me, such profundities for me to answer, that I excited myself and I couldn’t fall asleep. There developed a serial story, which I carried with me through the years, from one foster family to the next. New characters were added, but the protagonist remained a pale, tragic-eyed girl. Her hair was long and sad and she wept much. She suffered. She kept herself to herself. I regretted my daytime self, which was always wanting to be where everyone else was, though I never did learn to come into a room without stopping outside to hear if they were talking about me, to gather myself together, invent some little local excuse, or think up some bright thing to say, as if it might look foolish for me to just open a door and walk in.
FROM
HER FIRST AMERICAN
Her First American, begun in 1968 and published in 1985, took eighteen years to write. Some third of the way into the novel, I found that I didn’t know where I was going with it and took a few years off to write Lucinella (published 1975). The story told in Her First American takes place in the mid-fifties.
The world in the meanwhile has kept turning and turning. I don’t believe that writers sit around rereading our old books, so when it comes to publishing these excerpts, I am taken by surprise: “Negro,” the inevitable word in use when I wrote it all those yesterdays ago, is unacceptable when I read it today—unacceptable to my own ears.
Here we have an interesting, very modern dilemma: We could correct history and replace “Negro” with “black”—the word I would use if I were writing today. But let it stand as is, keeping history in place while we acknowledge that we are elsewhere.
THE FIRST AMERICAN
Ilka had been three months in this country when she went West and discovered her first American sitting on a stool in a bar in the desert, across from the railroad. He was a big man. He bought her a whiskey and asked her what in the name of the blessed Jehoshaphat she was doing in Cowtown, Nevada.
“Nevada?” Ilka had said. “I have believed I am being in Utah, isn’t it?”
“Utah!” The big American turned a sick color. “Where the hell am I?” he asked the barman.
“Hagen, ass end of Noplace, Nevada,” replied the barman and swiped his dish towel at a glass mug.
“Aha! So!” Ilka sipped her whiskey and, hiding her smiling teeth inside her glass, said, “I do not believe.”
“What don’t you believe?” asked the American. “That I sit in Utah.”
“Nevada,” said the American.
“I do not believe Nevada, Utah, America.”
* * *
—
It had taken Ilka Weissnix more than a decade to get to the United States, of which she knew next to nothing and came prepared to think ill: Ilka was twenty-one. The Viennese Weissnixes had known so little of their relations, the Litvak Fishgoppels, that Ilka was not aware that she had an American cousin until some time after the war was over. It was early in the fifties when the c
ousin traced Ilka to Lisbon and sent her an affidavit and a ticket.
Fishgoppel came into New York to fetch the refugee from Idlewild. “Ich muss nemen ein examen. Ich muss gein back to school,” shouted Fishgoppel across the roar of the subway that carried them uptown. “Ihr will stay in mein apartment in New York, OKAY?”
“Excuse please?” Ilka shouted back.
“My horrible Yiddish!” yelled Fishgoppel and hit herself in the head.
“Yiddish!” shouted Ilka, lighting on a word she understood. “By us in Vienna has nobody speaken Yiddish outside the Polischen!”
“What?” hollered Fishgoppel, and they laughed and turned out both palms of their hands, perfectly understanding each other to mean “Too noisy. One can’t hear oneself talk!”
Fishgoppel’s small Upper West Side apartment had the simple layout of a dumbbell. The front door opened into the middle of a narrow foyer with a room at each end.
“One for you,” said Fishgoppel, “and one for your mother, when we get her to America.”
“I do not know where is my mother living. My father was found after the war on the list of dead but not my mother. I do not know if she is living,” said Ilka. She was looking around at Fishgoppel’s possessions. Each object was out of harmony with every other in a way for which the laws of probability did not account. Ilka looked at Fishgoppel. Only a persevering spirit could have parlayed such skin, such wonderful black hair and sweet, clever eyes into this dowdiness. Ilka stared at the crosswork of faint scars, like a deformation on Fishgoppel’s fair young forehead; the hallucination as suddenly passed: it was only Fishgoppel frowning. “Look at the time!” Fishgoppel spread the subway map in front of Ilka. “Here is where you get off for the employment agency. This is where they give English classes. Are you going to manage?”