Everyone arrived amid a clamor of shouts and hugs. I hadn’t seen our daughter in a week and she’d grown. Whereas I had come in from New York, D and our daughter had been in Dublin, visiting her parents, which is why they were all arriving together. Unable to miss school and join us, my son was back in New York with his mother. As predicted, D’s parents had to hire a second taxi to carry their luggage.
I showed everyone the apartment. D’s mother, Margot, an Irish charmer of regal bearing, of keen observations, and with an eye for mischief, insisted that D and I take the master bedroom, although I had already settled us in the office/second bedroom. Eventually she relented and the subject of food was brought up. I presented my haul.
“Oh. Well . . . ,” Margot said, her voice rising an octave upon seeing the eggs and white bread laid bare on the kitchen table. “Maybe we’ll just go out, leave you three to catch up.”
D had assured me everyone would be tired after the long trip and would not want to go out for an extended meal in a restaurant. Consequently, I hadn’t scouted for any during the day. I was more or less relaxed around D’s parents—they had welcomed me swiftly and without question into their world seven years earlier—but I had always been their guest, and the burden of hosting people who had spent a lifetime receiving and seeing to the needs of others was already proving too much for me. I froze.
“Come on now, Andrew,” Colm hollered, “you must have seen some restaurants on your travels today.” D’s father was a Kerry man, from the west of Ireland. He had run hotels for most of his life; he knew people and food. “Where should we go for a nice bite to eat in this neighborhood?” he shouted—he was also hard of hearing.
“Um, I think I saw a little café that was open, just down the street to the left, on our side.”
“Perfect,” Margot said, and they set out.
I snuggled with our daughter, who was feeling under the weather, and then D and I put her to bed. We sat down with a cup of tea.
No matter what was happening in our relationship, seeing each other after a time apart always gave us a fresh start—one that was often needed. This time was no exception. We had been struggling with our usual power play, not as bad as it once was, but bad enough that her trip back to Dublin had come at a good time.
The following day was D’s birthday and the original reason for our trip. D was born and spent the first six months of her life in Vienna, when her father was managing one of the city’s biggest hotels. She had never been back and had dreamed of one day returning to her birthplace. Her wish gave me an idea that I presented to a magazine: to discover Vienna from a “local” angle.
Then she invited her parents to join us.
Sitting on the couch now, we couldn’t remember what we had been arguing about when we last saw each other a week earlier. Then we heard the front door open.
“How was the restaurant, Mum?” D asked.
“Well,” Margot replied, “it was just grand.”
“Now, Andrew, I don’t know what you call cafés in New York . . . ,” Colm called out.
“Oh, no.” D stood up. “What happened?”
I had sent Margot and Colm to a greasy, dirty Viennese fast-food deep-fry joint.
“How about a little chocolate cake?” I asked, pulling out my ace in the hole, the Sacher torte.
“Andrew, you’ve redeemed yourself,” Colm roared out, and took a seat at the table. With elaborate ceremony, I presented the famous torte. Colm lifted his fork and tasted it. There was silence as we all looked on. “No.” He shook his head. “It’s dry.”
Then Margot tasted it. “Oh, dear.”
And then D. “It is a bit dry, luv.”
“Not what I remember at all.” D’s father shook his head in final judgment, pushing the plate away.
Maybe tomorrow would be better.
I left a small birthday gift, a box with a bracelet, beside D for when she woke up.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said with a sigh, and showed it to her parents, who made a fuss while sipping their coffee.
“I’ll go get us some croissants across the street,” I said, looking forward to a few minutes on my own.
As I put on my coat Colm called after me, “I’ll join you, Andrew. I could use the air.”
There went my five minutes alone for the day.
After breakfast, D turned to me. “You go on with Mum and Dad, luv. We’ll stay in this morning.” Our daughter was still not feeling well.
“Are you sure? I’m happy to stay home.”
“Go on, get to work.”
Margot, Colm, and I headed to the local open-air Naschmarkt, to stock up on groceries. Because I was supposed to be writing a story from a local angle, I insisted we take either the metro or the tram, as often as possible, instead of simply jumping in taxis. We changed trains twice, got lost, had to walk fifteen minutes and ask four people for directions. It took us nearly an hour, but once we found the market, there were hundreds of stalls, crammed one after the next, selling fresh fish and sausage, warm breads, freshly squeezed juices, cold meats and hot coffee, flowers, cheeses, and herbs. There were thousands of olives on display, stuffed with garlic or cheese or peppers. Small Asian women stood selling sushi beside large men hawking Palatschinken—Austrian crepelike desserts. Turkish immigrants sliced chunks of lamb from a spit while men and women in their winter coats stood elbow to elbow at outdoor tables drinking beer and slurping oysters. For block after block along the broad Linke Wienzeile boulevard, it went on.
“Oh, Colm, look at this.” Margot stopped at the fishmonger.
“Margot, try this.” Colm was tasting a piece of salami on offer.
D’s parents spent a long time talking to a woman named Daniela who sold vinegar at a stall she worked with her husband. With an eyedropper, D’s mother and father tasted and tested a dozen types of the nearly seventy fruit vinegars before settling on currant berry. Margot could make a stone sing, and she learned Daniela’s history and how she met her husband. “I was a very eager customer,” Daniela confided, “very eager,” and the two women laughed like sorority sisters. “But,” she lamented, “vinegar is Erwin’s life.”
“Oh, I know,” Margot told her, patting Daniela’s arm in solidarity. “I know.”
A little farther along, a very stout woman named Maria wielded a long machete, hacking off bits of cheese and thrusting them under Colm’s nose on the tip of the long blade. She had a gleam in her blue eyes and cackled wildly. When we were about to walk away with only a few French wedges, Maria locked her eyes on me—I had been only observing the long exchange and was surprised she had even realized we were all together—and raised her machete. Margot stepped in quickly and purchased a hunk of Bergkäse.
We bought four different pâtés, half a dozen types of salami, and three kinds of bread—each purchase preceded by a long chat. Eventually we came to Leo Strmiska, the sauerkraut man. He stood like a carnival barker behind two large wooden barrels of fermenting white cabbage. D’s father engaged him in a dialogue on the subtleties of preparation (“You must cook until translucent, and only then do you add the bacon”), then they digressed to discussing the greed of bankers, and then the conversation drifted back to Leo’s childhood and the war, and as we were leaving, Leo handed me the clear plastic bag containing a pound of the stuff. “Remember,” he said in a stern voice, his hand still clutching the bag, “fermentation never stops, take it out of the bag the minute you get home.” I nodded, but apparently without proper solemnity. “Do you need to write it down? Pay attention, now.”
“We’ll take care of him, Leo,” Margot told him, and ushered me away by the arm.
We sat down for an outdoor coffee, our winter coats zipped up tight. Then, as we crossed the street to head back to the metro, we passed a taxi stand. Margot opened the door and slipped into the back of a cab.
“My feet are tired, Andrew, my love.”
The ride home took five minutes.
When we got back to the apartment, D scou
red the unfamiliar cabinets for platters and bowls, and everything we had bought was spread out on the table. I had an idea that somehow we shouldn’t do this. “We just got all this stuff,” I wanted to say. “It took us hours. Shouldn’t we save it?” It was a silly notion and I kept it to myself, but it spoke to my innate lack of understanding of harvest and communal bonding through food.
Meals growing up in my house were not a time of sensuous delight but more a perfunctory ritual. There was nothing wrong with our family dinners, but they certainly weren’t a shared celebration of food and fellowship. For the most part, they were unremarkable. We sat most evenings, when my father was not away on business, at the large dining room table (large to me as a child). My brother Peter and I sat on one side, Stephen alone—and then later with Justin—on the other. My mother was at the end of the table near the kitchen and my father at the opposite end. It was made clear that he was at the “head” of the table. When guests came over, as they occasionally did, the table was pulled apart and a center section was added. There was a large, cut-glass chandelier overhead.
Only two meals stand out in my memory of childhood: Once when my mother told us that we were going to have a younger brother. I knew they wanted us to be happy with the news, and so in an over-compensatory fashion, I shouted, “Really, a goo-goo, ga-ga? A goo-goo, ga-ga?” I kept repeating it, over and over, very loud, until my father became irritated. And another time when my father told Peter that he wasn’t getting up from the table until he ate his asparagus, at which point he promptly ate one and threw up all over his plate.
We ate to live and in no way lived to eat. This trait has followed me into adulthood—and it’s yet another point of disparity between me and D. Whenever her family sat down to eat, they did so with gusto, and this time was no exception. Everything was tasted and commented upon. “This salami is delicious.” “Pass me one.” “Oh, my, that’s extraordinary.” “Oh, you must try this pâté. Just take a forkful.” “These olives are unbelievable.” “Wow, that’s spicy!” “Can you smell that cheese?” Forks were flying all over the table. I looked over at D, our flushed daughter perched happily on her lap. She looked relaxed and confident, like she always did when she was surrounded by her family. It made me both happy to see her like this and nervous. Was I intimidated by the serene confidence I saw in her at such moments? Or did I merely feel insecure that I might never be able to provide the kind of companionship she craved and felt she needed in order for her to live a full life?
After lunch, we went into the center of town and walked the old, cobbled streets. Down by Stephansdom Cathedral we passed the Zara shop and the McDonald’s. “Seem familiar, Margot?” I asked.
“Actually, no, Andrew, it doesn’t.” She shook her head. When we entered the great cathedral we all stood silently. “Now, this I remember,” Margot said softly after a time. D had been baptized here. “In one of these side chapels. Can you remember, Colm?” she asked, and looked off, squinting into the past.
Colm looked around as well, “I’m not sure, Peg,” he said, calling his wife by his pet name for her.
After an uninspired birthday dinner taken at an informal student restaurant near our apartment—so that we could keep our daughter close to home—we walked home and took off our shoes.
“What are you doing?” Margot said, putting her own feet up. “You two go on, hurry up and leave us alone.” Then she pointed to D’s iPad. “You just set up that machine there, and my little angel and I will watch The Sound of Music while you two go out for a birthday drink. I only wish our little boy were here to watch it with us.”
At home it’s easier to accept the pattern of togetherness and absence that divorced parenting creates, but on a family trip like this, with one member of the family absent, the occasional and unforeseen moments of melancholy were easily explained. So many times on this trip I saw things and was reminded of my son and imagined how he might have responded to them. That we had downplayed the trip with him before we left, and promised him another special trip, did little to assuage everyone’s disappointment.
D and I slipped out the door, into the night. We took one of the older red and white trams, the kind with the wooden seats, and rattled toward town. We went to a modern café. Everyone in the bar was “nerd chic.” All the furniture was for sale; a price tag of 533 euros hung from my chair. Our young waitress wore an orange mini-dress and white knee socks. She wore thick, black-framed glasses, and we got into a long conversation with her about food and sex and Freud.
We went to the Rote Bar, in the regal Volkstheater. Opened in 1889, the “people’s theater” was a reaction against the constraints of the national theater, Burgtheater, down on the Ringstrasse. There, a woman in a flowing evening gown played a grand piano before a red velvet curtain under a massive chandelier. The marble floor shone beneath our feet. We sat at a cocktail table with a dripping candle and our waitress there told us of another café.
“Just follow the tram tracks, and when they turn, keep going straight. You’ll see a metal, unmarked door. Knock three times.”
So we did. We were admitted into a gray, dark cave, filled with arches and pillars. Henna-like tattoo patterns were projected onto every inch of the walls and ceiling. A DJ played techno music and smoke filled the crowded room. There was a projection on the wall behind the bar that read ENGLISH IST DIE GAUNERSPRACHE—“English is the language of crooks.” The female bartender had black hair, wore heavy black eye shadow, and was dressed all in black. She wore a tiny silver birdcage that hung from a chain.
“I like your necklace,” D told her.
“I am a caged bird,” she whispered.
We went to another café, thick with smoke. D bummed a cigarette and happily puffed away.
“If you can’t beat ’em . . .” She shrugged. It was yet another difference between us. The idea that that I might be able to smoke just one cigarette every now and again, the way she did, was inconceivable to me. I had been a pack-a-day smoker who had quit years ago and intended to keep it that way.
Back on the street, arm in arm, we searched for another dive. D and I had never been bar hopping together in our life. We had never courted. We never had a playful period of dating, holding hands over a late-night cappuccino, sharing silly quirks that the other would find so charming and revealing. We had never strolled home after a movie and made out on the stoop before saying good night, only to call ten minutes later and say good night again. Our coming together as a couple had been so immediate—after only three meetings—and so complete that we were sharing a home and a life before we had given the matter any real thought.
D moved in with me in New York from her home in Dublin seven years ago and was instantly cast in a stepparenting role. My then-two-and-a-half-year-old son wondered who my “special friend” was. I existed in a constant state of anxiety over what I had done to him and to my previous life. Nothing we did was well considered or advised. I tried to tell a few friends of the sudden and life-altering changes that were happening to me. They told me I was being “insane.” Their advice to slow down wasn’t helpful, or plausible, under the circumstances. I simply stopped talking to them. “Love will carry the day” was our motto—perhaps it should have been “Fools rush in.”
Yet here we were, years later, in Vienna, and every night, after we all went out to dinner, we would leave our daughter at home with Margot and Colm eager to go back out—just the two of us. We went to old Viennese coffee shops with surly waiters, to hip, smoky joints, and to Art Deco salons; we didn’t care where. We laughed and played together, night after night, like we hadn’t before. We discovered we were excited in each other’s company, the way we were those first few days when we met in the Irish countryside.
“I can’t be in Vienna and not go to the Hofburg Palace,” Colm declared.
So a few days later, when our daughter was well again, we all boarded the tram into town.
Designed to impress and awe visiting heads of state from the thirteenth ce
ntury onward, the winter home of the Hapsburg dynasty—rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the Hofburg Palace is a sprawling complex of imposing buildings constructed in various architectural styles through numerous centuries and connected by massive formal gardens and plazas filled with fountains and statues of emperors and their horses. The palace withstood three major sieges, a fire, and the vagaries of taste through generations of royalty. It is home to the current president of Austria. It has twenty-six hundred rooms. It is difficult to miss.
I got us off at the wrong tram stop. We could see the rooftops of the royal buildings far off. I apologized profusely but Margot stopped me.
“It’s perfect, gives us a chance to take some air,” she said, leaning hard into the brogue.
We walked. And walked. Eventually we came to a side gate that led us into a large formal garden. This might have impressed D’s parents, who were avid gardeners, except all the plants had been pruned and tied up tight under canvas sacks for the winter.
Finally we made our way inside the first building we came upon. I hurried ahead and bought tickets.
“Do you know what this is, luv?” D asked.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be great,” I said, having no idea where we were. I handed all the tickets to our daughter to present to the guard.
Inside was a labyrinth of room upon room of silverware, napkin holders, and candlesticks, all behind tall glass cases.
“Oh, no,” I said, gasping. I tried to guide us toward an exit and only took us deeper into the honeycomb of rooms.
I knew Margot had little tolerance for museums, and our daughter was already squirming hard. Colm tried to show some interest but couldn’t keep it up for long, and then D turned up a flight of stairs.
The Longest Way Home Page 14