It spoiled all the fun on the Côte, so Esther went to England and recuperated from her shock in a comfortable London hotel for several weeks. She met some attractive people, but none she very much cared for. She knew she was not the type that Englishmen generally liked—dark-haired, lively, with an earthy wit that seemed to keep them off balance. Moreover, she could not easily return hospitality, and she was that awkward quantity, a single woman. She went for a while to Paris, but no one she knew was there except the Rosenfelds, who were actually refugees, they said. Things were going from bad to worse in Germany. The people seemed to be paralyzed, and the Jews, those who had any intelligence, the Rosenfelds said, were getting out. Esther thought the Rosenfelds were exaggerating. She went back to England, intending to wait a few more months until the talk about her divorce, and the Hitler craze in Germany, had quieted down before she went back and resumed her place—after all quite outside her husband’s stodgy circle—in Berlin society.
Then, quite by accident, she met Richard Friedmann at a cocktail party in Chelsea. She had met him three or four years before in Berlin. He remembered her, too, from an evening at her husband’s house.
He seemed terribly happy to see her, his ugly, lean, chinless face lighted with sudden warmth, and he showed his rather bad teeth in a boyish grin. He had come to England about a year ago, he said, and was now working for a publishing house in Chelsea, and also for a Fleet Street political magazine. In a corner of the room, they began to talk in German. He told her he had left Germany because, being half Jewish, he had been liable at any minute to be called up to work in the coal mines or at some other equally dangerous job where he would have been killed sooner or later. Either that or a concentration camp. He babbled it all out to her in his naive way, and the fact that he spoke in German made it all more real to Esther than ever it had been when she read it in the newspapers. He asked Esther to have dinner with him that evening.
She was not particularly taken with him; he certainly wasn’t handsome, and obviously could hardly keep himself on what he made, but she was attracted to his frankness, his pleasure in being with her, and she found it wonderfully comfortable to be with someone who, if he did not come exactly from her own social set in Berlin, at least had an idea of it. Esther saw him several times a week, and on Sunday mornings he invited her to breakfast with him in his two-room flat, because in the furnished room that Esther lived in, she could not cook. Esther, who spoke English more correctly than he, helped him polish up his articles for the political magazine, and typed them over for him, as his typing was very bad. Inevitably came a Saturday night when Esther did not go home, and after that, they spent every weekend together in Richard’s flat. He was not the best lover she had ever known in her life, and neither was he very gallant. Esther thought he treated her with an amazing indifference, in fact, considering her background and the men she had been used to—only one of lesser rank than a baron—which certainly Richard might have guessed. He asked her very few questions about herself, and when she did start to answer, to reminisce about some summer in Ravello or Capri, Richard would interrupt her with something that had happened that day in the office or in the newspaper.
Esther took a job as typist and letter writer for an auditing firm near Shaftesbury Avenue. It paid little and was a crashing bore, but she faced the fact that nearly every piece of jewelry she owned was gone now, and that Richard couldn’t possibly support her. She still went to fashionable parties now and then, but Esther knew that at forty-five she couldn’t expect to have the same success with men that she had had at thirty-five, or even at forty, when she had come to England. She had lived hard and fast since eighteen, and the last four years in London, on little money, had been even harder for all their boredom. She had put on weight around the hips, her chin had begun to sag with a look of middle-aged plumpness, and no amount of alcohol daubing could make the pouches under her eyes entirely disappear. Her beautiful nose stayed the same, but it was unobtrusive, too, and did not compensate for the rest. Only one man seemed to care for her, and he was Richard. But he had told her at the start of their relationship that he would never want to marry. He’d been born a bachelor, he said, and he would die one. That rather selfish bachelor attitude accounted, Esther thought, for his cautiousness about money, and the fact he’d never bought her a single present, except at Christmas. But neither was Esther in a hurry to marry. Besides, she was not quite sure she loved Richard enough to marry him.
Richard, and Esther, too, were among the few people who were thrown into a panic on the day in September 1938 when Czechoslovakia was abandoned by the Allied powers. Only a month before, Esther had learned through a letter from a friend in Germany that her former husband had disappeared from Berlin, and that all his properties had been confiscated. Esther had heard of five or six of her friends who had disappeared during the previous year. Esther told Richard she would like to move into his flat with him, and he agreed. Esther was frightened, and she felt less frightened living with Richard. As to what the neighbors said about their having two different names, Richard didn’t give a hang, and neither did she. But Esther was not too frightened to join firefighting and plane-spotting squads, and to stand side by side with the Londoners during the air battles of Britain. Both she and Richard stayed in London during the whole war, and neither of them ever suggested leaving for a safer place inland. With Richard it was a fatalistic indifference; with Esther, perhaps, that she never quite had time to realize how frightened she was. At the end of the war, when Germany was defeated, and she had been cited for personal bravery in saving an old man from a burning building near St. Paul’s, Esther realized that she had accepted the facts of the war with a numbness that, five years before, would have been completely unlike her. She realized, too, that she accepted Richard now in the same way. She no longer considered him in her secret heart a faute de mieux. She had grown to love his ugliness, his indifference, his dependability, which was nothing really but a bachelor’s rigid routine. The war years had welded their existences together, and it was no longer thinkable to Esther that she, or even he, could live alone again.
The friends they had in London were mostly artists, writers, and editors, not the sort of people to care whether she and Richard were married or not, but it had begun to bother Esther vaguely—like a tooth that doesn’t yet hurt but ought to be taken care of before it does—that she and Richard were not married. But whenever Esther hinted that they should marry, Richard escaped behind the wall of economic fact: he didn’t have the money to support a wife, he said.
“I don’t see that we’d be spending any more than now. I’d keep on working, you know,” Esther said.
Richard pondered this a moment. “This doesn’t embarrass you, this kind of life, does it, Esther?”
Esther assured him that it didn’t, but it did, a little. And as people got to be fifty and over, it seemed the logical thing to her to consolidate oneself somehow. Esther said this, and Richard simply looked blank.
“You said you’re making twelve or thirteen pounds a week?” Esther asked. It varied because of Richard’s freelance writing.
“Yes,” Richard answered solemnly.
“Well, I make seven a week. That’s at least nineteen or twenty pounds a week. We could live on that. We’re living on it now.”
“Esther, I—” he said between puffs as he got his pipe going. “If I do a thing like getting married, I want to do it right, not on a shoestring.”
The conversation more or less ended there. They had said the same things before. Esther did not want to remind him again that she would be just as happy living the way they were now, that she didn’t want any fancy apartment with new linens and expensive dishes. She was not twenty years old anymore. But the fact was, she did not really know the state of his finances. Was he in debt? Was he already getting some of his frozen accounts out of Germany and banking them here? Did he really make about twelve pounds a week, or
less? She felt most of his answers were only half-truths, and so long as she was not his wife, she felt she could not insist on exact answers.
So their life went on in the same way, and Esther adjusted herself to the prospect of an eternal loose relationship with Richard, as she adjusted herself to the prospect of eternal rationing in England. Things were far worse in Germany, she knew. But her cousin, Lotte Kiefer, who had just come from Munich, had told her that a great many German firms were on their feet again. Esther told Richard that Lotte had said Leopold Beckhof, the son of the founder of Beckhof Verlag, had bought back half his presses. Richard surprised her by saying that he knew it already. He had exchanged a few letters with Leopold’s secretary, he said, because he thought it was a good idea to keep Beckhof Verlag informed where he was.
Lotte and her husband stayed for several weeks with some English friends in Kent. Esther saw them a few times in London during the first of their stay, but when they left, Lotte merely called her to say good-bye. Lotte Kiefer, like most of Esther’s family, was on the stuffy side and considered Esther rather bohemian. Esther had no doubt that Lotte had heard, while she was in England, of her liaison with Richard Friedmann. Lotte must have remembered him from Munich, because Richard said he remembered her. It crossed Esther’s mind that Lotte had been cool to her because Richard was half Jewish, though she could not really believe that her family, proud of its blood though it was, could have been taken in by the vulgar Nazi propaganda. Nevertheless, Esther felt she had been slighted, but she accepted the slight as she had accepted her poverty, the war, Richard, and her graying hair and coarsening figure, with a shrug and a smile.
Then came the morning when Richard received the letter asking him to resume his old position with Beckhof Verlag in Munich. And at a salary Esther knew would go far in Germany now, four thousand marks per month. “Oh, Richard! Wie wunderschön! You’ll go, of course, won’t you?” Esther asked. Richard’s small hazel eyes had suddenly brightened. “Yes. I suppose I will.” They both had had to start off for their respective jobs a few moments later, and there had been no time to talk or to ask questions, except Esther’s “When do you want to go?” and Richard’s answer, “Oh, as soon as possible.”
Esther wondered if Richard would happily go off without her. She could not very well go to Munich with him, or just turn up as if by accident in a few weeks, not with all the people they both knew in Munich. The question was settled that night almost as soon as Richard came in the door. He said, “Esther, will you marry me now?” Esther said, “Of course.” She reached up and put her arms around his thin neck, and kissed him tenderly. There were tears of pleasure and surprise in her eyes, and for a few minutes she could say nothing. Richard said, “I told you, Esther, it was the money that prevented. Now that’s not a problem anymore.”
Esther and Richard were married quietly, and they gave a wedding supper for about ten of their friends at a restaurant in the King’s Road. Esther almost broke down at the thought of leaving all the people who had been such loyal friends to her and Richard—the Campbells, Tom Bradley and his girl Edna, and the Jordans. Esther got promises from Tom Bradley and Edna and from the Campbells that they would try to come to Munich before Christmas. “You can stay with us, so don’t worry about the travel allowance. I know we’ll have a place big enough,” Esther said.
As they were leaving the restaurant, John Campbell patted Richard on the back and said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”
“What?” asked Richard.
“Look behind you!” Esther said, laughing.
Pinned to his back was a cardboard sign saying: “We finally tied it!”
They had very little baggage, so they flew. Esther sat up close to the window during the short low hops over France and western Germany, but Richard read material that Beckhof’s had forwarded to him, and showed a total disinterest in what the face of Europe looked like. It rather exasperated Esther, though she said nothing. She had the feeling he was putting on an act for somebody, pretending to have made the trip dozens of times, and to know all there was to know. He behaved the same way in Munich. All he wanted to do was to get settled and to begin work as soon as he could.
Twice during the first week, Esther went with Richard to dinner parties where she met the Beckhof editors and their representatives from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Berlin. It thrilled Esther to see Richard treated as a man of importance now. Esther got on well with everyone at the parties. She had always gotten on well with writers and intellectuals. Adjusting to life in Germany would be very easy after all, she thought, here in Munich where people either didn’t know or didn’t care that she and Richard had just been married, and if there were any anti-Jewish sentiment anywhere, it would not exist among the kind of people she and Richard came in contact with.
They had hardly moved into the Bogenhausen house when Richard said he wanted to have some people over. “Not just business people. Some of our own old friends, too,” he said gaily.
“All right,” Esther agreed. But she didn’t know who their old friends could be, because she and Richard had known almost no one in common in Munich. It turned out that Richard meant he would invite some of his old friends, and she some of hers.
The day before the party, Lotte Kiefer called up. She had heard the good news, she said, through Leopold Beckhof himself, whom she knew. She congratulated them on their marriage, and sounded so warm and friendly that Esther invited her and her husband to come to the party. “It’s just some old friends of Richard’s and mine whom we haven’t seen in ages—a little reunion.” Esther felt suddenly happy and optimistic about the party. She might have been mistaken about Lotte’s coolness in London, she thought. She hoped so.
Everyone they had invited came. The big living room was completely filled, and she and Richard took turns showing people over the house. Lotte Kiefer asked all about Richard’s work, and said she and Richard must come for dinner at their apartment in Schwabing. “It’s a little on the arty side, compared to this,” Lotte said apologetically, “but it overlooks the Englischer Garten and I think it has charm.” Esther beamed with gratitude and said she and Richard would be delighted to come. It was not until after the buffet supper had been served, when people were sitting about with coffee and cigarettes—English cigarettes that Richard had thoughtfully brought over with him, because German cigarettes were still so bad—that Esther realized how shabbily Lotte was dressed. There was a worn streak in the brown fox piece around her neck, and cracks in her black alligator shoes, the kind of cracks that only slow time can put in good leather, for the shoes had obviously been expensive. And the poverty showed not only in her clothes but in her pinched face as well. Esther stared at her like a person who cannot believe his eyes, because Esther had been brought up to believe that Lotte’s branch of the family had much more money than her own. They had simply lost it, of course, since the war. Lotte was really just as shabby now as old Professor Haggenbach in his shiny black suit, or the dowdy woman called Frieda whom Richard had been talking to most of the evening.
Lotte said, “It’s just like slipping back into an old glove for Richard, I suppose, isn’t it? He has his old secretary back, too.”
“Who?” Esther asked.
“Why, Frieda Meyer. Didn’t he ever—” She stopped, and Esther looked at her. Lotte was smiling a little. “That’s Frieda he’s talking to now,” she said. Her name had not registered with Esther, she had met so many new people tonight. She did not think Richard had ever mentioned her.
Later that evening, when she and Richard were alone in their bedroom, Esther told Richard her surprise about Lotte Kiefer’s apparent lack of money. “It doesn’t surprise me,” Richard said. “Now it’s the commercial upstarts who’ve got the money. The old aristocracy and even most of the old solid merchants like the Kiefers are down and out.” He said it in such a loud, matter-of-fact voice, Esther was a little shocked. Moreo
ver, the Kiefers were not merely old solid merchants, but a very good family.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Fräulein Meyer was your old secretary? I didn’t have any idea who she was,” Esther said.
“Oh. Yes, Frieda worked for me before the war. I understand she’s worked for Leopold off and on all during the war years.”
In the next weeks, Esther thought a great deal about the financial reversals of people like Lotte Kiefer, not so much because it interested her as an economic phenomenon but because she began to see that the people who had had money before and had little now were making an effort to cultivate her and Richard for what they could get out of them. Lotte Esther minded least; she was merely hungry for invitations and for the aesthetic pleasure of a well-served dinner, because she had evidently been more or less dropped by her wealthier friends. Professor Haggenbach, retired and living on an inadequate pension, was interested in getting Beckhof to support him while he finished a book on philosophy. As to the Krügers, who were exactly the commercial upstart type Richard had spoken of, Esther could not bear them. Hermann Krüger had recently made his money from a new weaving method which he had sold to an Augsburg stocking factory. She and Richard had nothing in common with the Krügers, and it was obvious that the Krügers were interested in them for purely social-climbing purposes, because other people in comparable income brackets had not yet admitted the Krügers into their circle.
“It’s not that I particularly dislike them,” Esther said to Richard, “but what can we ever talk to them about except soccer and Strümpfen? There’re so many nice people in Munich, I don’t see why we have to get mixed up with these.”
Richard said with a little smile, “I don’t see what’s the matter with them. You aren’t getting snobbish, are you, Esther?”
So they accepted the Krügers’ invitation to tea on Saturday. It was a dreary, almost terrifying imitation of the old Munich Konzert afternoons that Esther remembered from her early twenties, when she had at least been able to amuse herself by flirting with handsome young men during the arias of the hired female singer. The other guests, without exception, were people like the Krügers, who could talk of nothing but textile manufacture and sport. But Richard chatted with everyone, and he told Esther he had had a very good time. Perhaps it was inevitable, Esther thought, that Richard did not judge such gatherings in the same way she did. He had a curiously impersonal attitude to people, and even, she admitted, to herself. And he was working so hard that any kind of social life was probably an agreeable relief. He had worked in his office all day that Saturday until time for the tea party, and that same evening he had to go out again to dinner with Leopold Beckhof and a man from Paris.
Nothing That Meets the Eye Page 34