Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  My grandparents took me up to Hartford to see the Twain house one fall Sunday when I was in fifth grade. We took a bus to Hartford and then a taxi. The taxi driver didn’t know where Mark Twain’s house was, so my grandmother had to show him on the map. I don’t remember much about the house itself except that the banister was really smooth and that the guide said Mark Twain had smoked at least twenty cigars a day. She said that on a really humid day you could still smell them, but it wasn’t humid that day. I remember there was a room with a really fancy pool table, and the guide told us that Mark Twain used to go in there and play when he was thinking about his writing. When we got back from Hartford, my grandparents presented me with a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read over and over again, always imagining Mark Twain playing pool with a cigar hanging from his mouth, thinking about Huck and Jim riding down the hot river, and I would imagine my grandfather shooting pool with Mark Twain, closing one blue eye as he took aim.

  On the bus on the way back, a little girl just about my age vomited and her mother scolded her. “Why did you have to go and ruin your new dress?” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to,” the girl answered.

  “That’s what you always say: I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to.” The mother’s voice got higher and higher and each time she said, “I didn’t mean to,” she slapped the girl on the face. My grandfather had to stop my grandmother from going over to the mother and telling her that was no way to treat a young child. “She probably beats her,” my grandmother said loudly and my grandfather put his smooth finger to his lips. “Please,” he whispered. The three of us were quiet for the rest of the trip as if silence would cover up the girl’s sobs better than chatter.

  I could almost feel my grandparents in the room now, walking in slippers, getting things ready for dinner, my grandfather setting out the silverware, my grandmother carrying the soup into the dining room on a bamboo tray. Everything had to come in on a tray—there was a small one for silverware and napkins and salt and pepper and larger, sturdier ones for dishes and platters. I was happiest when we had chicken roasted with apples, prunes, and carrots. My grandparents always let me have the wings, both of them all to myself—at home I had to split them with my mother. I could almost smell the chicken and feel the warmth from the oven on my face.

  I tried to convince myself that my grandmother had gone to visit a friend, and it had gotten late and dark and cold and her friend had made up the couch for her. I heard both of them snoring, the door to my grandmother’s friend’s room slightly ajar, the sounds of their sleeping bumping into each other in the dark.

  But, as far as I knew, my grandparents didn’t have friends, not even Dr. Müller, the ophthalmologist who gave us our yearly eye examinations. He and my grandfather shared office space in the Bronx. Maybe my grandmother had made some since my grandfather’s death. Maybe they had always had friends, but didn’t want us to know. Or maybe they just didn’t have much to say to other people. But that was when they still had each other.

  Any minute now, I thought, and the key would turn in the lock and there she would be, carrying the New York Times in a net bag, her pocketbook slung over her chest like ammunition. Then I imagined her lying face down between two parked cars, blood in the corners of her mouth. Would my mother come out of her room for the funeral?

  I really wished she hadn’t locked the doors to her room because then I could have stretched out and slept, and in the morning I would awaken to the sound of her key in the lock. Would she be happy to see me? I decided that if she wasn’t back by noon, I was going to Ireland. What if I got to Limerick and George Liddy was dead, buried in the corner of the churchyard next to his parents with his favorite lines from Yeats on an overly shiny marble tombstone at his head? Then there was always Florida. How difficult would it have been to pick up the phone and say, “Hey Mercedes, I was thinking, maybe if things don’t work out with you and Leon, maybe I could go with you to Florida.” Or “I’ve been thinking about what you said about getting out of Tenafly and I thought maybe the two of us could go to Miami together, that is, if you and Leon aren’t going together because I don’t want to be a burden, I just thought . . .” Going to Ireland would have been simpler. It might not have seemed so then, but things with George Liddy are simple. He would probably hate it if I said so, but it’s true.

  New York

  I stopped talking for a while, walked slowly down the hall to the water fountain for a drink, returned to Tommy’s room, closed my eyes a little, but I couldn’t sleep. It’s impossible to sleep if you are waiting for someone to wake up, so I went back to my tale. “There have been times when I wished we had chosen Israel—picking grapefruit by day and sitting around a campfire singing newly composed patriotic songs by night. Maybe there Clara would have skinned her knee on sacred pebbles and learned to cry. Maybe she would have been blown up in a bus. Then we all would have had something to cry about.

  “But we chose New York. It was winter when we arrived, and our room on 106th Street, which we rented from an aging widow, smelled faintly of Vienna—mothballs and warm milk. Except for the nail polish. Our landlady was very proud of her long fingernails. Once a week she went to the movies, but otherwise she was always home, listening to the radio and reading movie magazines; and every evening she painted her fingernails the same color—bright red. We were polite and so was she, but we avoided each other; her domain was the kitchen, and we stayed in our room with the door shut, playing our own radio, drowning out Frank Sinatra. Our little room on the second floor looked out on the airshaft and in the mornings I stuck my head out the window to look up at the sky to see whether it was sunny or not. It usually wasn’t. Our landlady told us it was an unusually cold winter, but we were not cold. At first I thought I would never want to leave our room thick with heat from our sputtering radiator because it was the first time we were truly warm in years. But we woke up in the middle of the night sweating, the covers in a heap on the floor, and had to stand by the open window, naked, letting the cold winter air bring our bodies back to life, standing there until our flesh was cold and we could sleep again. Our landlady merely shook her head and smiled when we asked about turning off the radiator. It was as if we were asking her not to paint her nails.

  “For a few extra dollars a week, our landlady watched Clara while Karl and I attended English classes. The classes were taught by an overly exuberant elementary school teacher who clapped her hands whenever we were able to spit out a few intelligible words. She clapped her hands when the words were unintelligible too. She wore very high heels and I wondered if she wore them during the day also or just for our benefit. I tried to imagine her running after a classroom full of small children, clapping her hands, bursting into song when her charges performed especially well or wrote an especially symmetrical line of Fs or Qs. Our teacher was very fond of tongue twisters and spent more time than necessary making us repeat them in unison. Betty Botter bought some butter, but, she thought, this butter’s bitter. If I put it in my batter, it would make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter, that would make my batter better. So ’twas Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter. Still, we didn’t dare miss one class, eager as we were to gobble up every bit of English that came our way.

  “When we came home from our class, the landlady always reported that Clara was such a charming, easy child. ‘Not a peep from her all night,’ she would say, but we hated leaving Clara with her because it would usually take at least an hour to unstiffen her little body when we got home, and we wondered why the landlady didn’t think it strange that Clara could spend two hours sitting in the armchair, her legs sticking straight out, her tiny nails digging into the cushions, not moving, without making a peep. Maybe the landlady thought Clara couldn’t speak yet because she was such a small child, stunted from her early trauma. But we had to go to our classes and we knew no one else to as
k, and Clara never formally protested having to stay behind with the landlady. She never mentioned it at all, and when we asked her what she did while we were away, she said, ‘I was thinking.’

  “‘What were you thinking about?’ we would ask.

  “‘Things.’

  “‘What kind of things?’

  “‘Words.’

  “‘Which words?’

  “‘Words like book and table and chair.’

  “We figured there was nothing wrong with leaving Clara behind to think about words, especially when we were in class thinking about words too, although she didn’t pick up much English until the spring when we started taking her to the park to play with other children. We thought English would confuse her as it confused us, but she never mixed languages. From the very beginning, she instinctively kept German and English separate and always knew, even before someone opened his mouth, which language to use. At the time we thought her language abilities were nothing less than miraculous. The funny thing is that she doesn’t remember anything from that period except the smell of nail polish. She doesn’t remember our little room or sitting in that chair being watched by the landlady. She doesn’t remember the refugee camp either, not the nurses or all that bad chocolate, not even the Ukrainian. What she remembers, or claims to remember, is lying still, wrapped in a dirty blanket in the concentration camp. She remembers the cold, the stench, the silence, the bony bodies that held her, trying to keep her warm.

  “I would like to tell you that we had a very difficult time when we came to this country, but that would not be true. Although my first job was tedious, it was not burdensome. I worked for a year as a token seller at the 110th Street IRT stop. From four in the afternoon to midnight, I slid tokens through the little window to passengers who paid absolutely no attention to me. I saw only their hands—fat hands, thin hands, gloved hands, black hands, white hands, old and young hands, cold red hands. I liked not having to look people in the eye, and there were times when I thought I could recognize my customers by their hands, but I never tested myself because I didn’t really want to recognize anyone. The hands seemed innocent to me, angerless, devoid of malice. Of course I knew the hands were capable of terrible things, but I imagined them as disembodied creatures who felt like taking a ride on the subway. They weren’t going to work; they weren’t going to meet lovers or friends; they weren’t going to the movies. I saw them sitting properly, one hand crossed over the other, or swinging their fingers off the edge of their seats like children.

  “By that time we already had our apartment and could not rely on the landlady for babysitting, so Karl and I took turns watching Clara. I worked the evening shift so I could spend the days watching Clara while Karl went to the library to study for his Medical Boards. On Sundays we went to the park. In a year Karl passed his boards and, through the Aufbau newspaper, found another doctor who wanted to set up a small practice. They opened an office in the Bronx and I came to work for them. And, since people are always sick, we always had plenty of patients, and we worked hard—six days a week. We were efficient, and we charged little. Our only real hardship in New York had been the smell of nail polish.

  “People did not look at us strangely when we walked into a store; in fact, they didn’t look at us at all. It was as if we were invisible or as if we had been coming into their stores all their lives. I kept expecting someone, a cashier or a bus driver or the woman at the post office, to look up as we asked for something in our bad English. ‘Six stamps, please.’ We always made a point of saying ‘please.’ But the woman at the post office just handed us our six stamps and took our money. Sometimes when we thanked her, she said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and sometimes she didn’t. But I always expected her to look up and see me for what I was. I expected her to hold my hand, look into my eyes and say she was terribly, terribly sorry for what had happened. Of course, I realized even then that that was too much to ask. They were civil to us, which is all we needed, and we ate well and had our own apartment with a river view, and we went to the park on Sundays, and we went to concerts, and most of our patients had minor illnesses, which we cured or, most commonly, which cured themselves.

  “Still, I suppose deep down we expected them not only to care about our suffering, which perhaps they did in a theoretical, general way, but to acknowledge it. But they had their lives and they let us slip into their city, their streets, their shops, their subway, concert halls, schools. It took me years to learn to love the privacy of New York, the solitude that is possible only here. Of course, now I realize that they would have crushed us with kindness if they had decided to be kind. We would have buckled under the pressure, felt indebted, moved, sentimental. What if our landlady had baked us cookies or pressed secondhand sweaters into our hands? What if, instead of letting Clara sit for hours in a chair, our landlady had taken her to Radio City Music Hall or read her bedtime stories? Where would we have gone to hide then? What if the ladies from the United Jewish Federation, from whom we received monthly checks for the first year, had shown up at our apartment laden with toys and smiles? What if they had held our hands and said, ‘You have suffered enough.’ Would we have asked them in for tea?”

  “Tea?” Tommy’s eyes popped open suddenly. “I would love some tea, Mrs. Mondschein.” He looked me straight in the eye without a trace of embarrassment. Did he remember how he had fallen asleep last night? Did it matter? I made chamomile tea in the waiting room microwave and we sipped our tea out of Styrofoam cups.

  “I dreamt I remembered my own birth, so if you think your story is having no effect on me, you’re absolutely wrong.”

  “I didn’t think that,” I said because I wouldn’t have kept on going through all the details if it were having no effect whatsoever.

  “I remembered my mother’s screams and somehow knew I was the cause of them, and there was an awful lot of blood and excrement. The world smelled of blood and excrement. And then there was a horrible total silence when I was placed in my mother’s arms. She didn’t say a word. She just stared into my eyes, and those eyes frightened me. Finally, she fell asleep and I lay there looking at the pores along the sides of her nose. What if it really was like that? What if my memory is being jagged somehow, now that I am slipping away from the world? That would be the ultimate act of cruelty towards oneself, to force oneself to remember such a thing.” Tommy paused and looked into his Styrofoam cup without drinking. “But it was just a dream because I know I can’t remember anything before the age of four. That’s when the Scottos moved in next door, and Mrs. Scotto used to invite me over for hot chocolate and to play in the sandbox with Jimmy Scotto, who always wanted me to bury him right up to his chin in sand. I remember wondering what it would be like to be nothing more than a head that your mother could carry around with her, put in her pocketbook or set on the table. How can Clara remember so far back? Is that even possible? I had a boyfriend who was always trying to get me to go to a hypnotist to do some kind of rebirthing, but thank God he dumped me before I actually agreed to do it. The things I used to do for love.”

  “Clara is the one who claims she remembers her own birth, being pushed out of a warm, wet place into the cold stench of the bunker, but I don’t believe it. She only thinks she remembers, and I have told her that time and time again, but she just shakes her head sadly as if I were the one who believed in something impossible. You see, we told her about it so many times. Every night almost she would say, ‘Tell me about how I was born,’ and we would tell her. Every night since the first night we sat by her bed and told her about Pribor.”

  “How old was she when you first told her?”

  “Three. It was the night of her third birthday.”

  “Mrs. Mondschein, I don’t mean to criticize, but wasn’t that a little strange, to tell a three-year-old such a bedtime story?”

  “It didn’t seem strange at the time. We tried to make it into a fair
y tale, viscerally frightening yet heroic like ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ You know how frightening ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is.”

  “But your story was reality, and children know when you tell them a fairy tale that it’s a fairy tale, both too horrible and too beautiful to be real.”

  “I realize that now, but perhaps we were trying to make a fairy tale out of reality. Perhaps that was our biggest mistake. We made such an effort to tell it beautifully, using that almost hypnotic rhythm that fairy tales have, repeating key phrases and images over and over and over again.”

  “Tell it to me,” Tommy said, pulling the covers up to his bone-thin cheeks.

  “No. I don’t think I could remember it properly,” I told him, though as I spoke I heard myself whispering in my storytelling mode—‘And the women chewed their stale crusts of bread until they were soft and warm in their mouths, and Clara opened her tiny mouth like a little bird and Mother fed her, touching her lips to Clara’s lips as the warm mush passed gently from one mouth to the other.’” Tommy knew I was lying and I knew he knew, but I could not say those words out loud, not because I knew I should never have spoken them—I am still not convinced that it was wrong of us to try to explain and even to immortalize our experience—but because the words were sentimental, like a prayer. There was no horror in them and perhaps that was our biggest mistake.

  “It’s not your fault.” Tommy put his hand on mine. It was freezing cold.

  “Are you cold?” I asked.

  “I’m always cold, Mrs. Mondschein.”