by Susan Isaacs
Olga was smart. (My father didn’t get his brains at Woolworth’s.) She read every German-language newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on, kept up a correspondence with a couple of old relatives in Berlin. And so she was at least as well informed about what was going on in the world as the average U.S. senator.
By the mid-thirties, Olga and I started having fights about Hitler. She called him the Austrian, and she said he was an embarrassment. An embarrassment? I fumed at her. We stood on opposite sides of the table, stretching strudel dough. “An embarrassment is when you spill soup on the tablecloth. He’s passing laws saying Jews can’t be citizens. They have to have a ‘J’ on their identity cards.” She eased the dough, coaxed it, into a paper-thin sheet. She was a great German cook. Her strudel technique was not only graceful, it was flawless. “You’re the perfect German,” I went on. “But not in their eyes. Don’t just read what they say. Believe it. You’re not one of them. They’d make you go around with a ‘J.’ They hate you.”
She looked away and murmured: “And you also. You’re half…” I lowered the dough so I could look her right in the eye.
“I know. You know what they call my parents’ marriage? Rassenschande.” Race defilement. I didn’t rub it in by pointing out that her son would be considered the defiler and that his dopey wife would be viewed as Miss Aryan Purity. “You call all that an ‘embarrassment’?”
My poor, smart, sweet, hardworking grandma…stuck in a foreign country she didn’t understand, hated in her home-land, living with a birdbrained American daughter-in-law who, if she thought about Olga at all, considered her an old foreign thing attached to a mop.
I tried to talk to my father about it. I tried to tell him how hard it must be for Olga; she couldn’t say a bad word about my mother to him because she was afraid he would get so angry he’d ask her to leave. And where would she go? But my father didn’t want to hear about it. Listen, pal, your grandma’s a good sport and she likes to keep busy. Anyway, if she had a gripe, wouldn’t she tell me?
I tried to say, Hey, Dad, Mom will pick up a dust rag and spend a half hour admiring the fabric and then forget to dust. He wouldn’t listen. I’d try again. She’ll put down the dust rag, wander over to a mirror. She’ll make a little face; she wasn’t perfect. So she’ll drift into the bathroom for repairs. Makeup. Eyebrow tweezing. He didn’t want to hear any of it.
Whenever I started on him, my father would just shrug or stick his head back into the paper or smile. Love isn’t blind. It’s deaf. He wouldn’t hear me. And he couldn’t hear the weariness in his mother’s voice, or the sadness. But he was all ears for his Betty, his little girl. The minute she warbled, “Herm, honey,” he’d leave me in the middle of a sentence and rush down the hall to their room.
When I started working and got to listen to some of the lawyers, I realized my father was as smart as any of them. What he lacked was education—and ambition. But they lacked something my father had: a honeymoon waiting when they got home. They worked till all hours on Wall Street, but in Ridgewood when the clock struck six, my father could have been sorting a new truckload of meat, getting his pay or talking to his boss. It didn’t matter. He took off and ran home.
In 1933, when he was forty-six, he died when a fire caused by a sparking electric meat saw blazed out of control in one of the refrigeration rooms. The funny thing was, it happened about two minutes to six. Just a hundred and twenty seconds later, he would have been safe, rushing through the streets of Queens, back home to his little girl.
I know, I know. It may not have been a breeze to be the sole support of an arthritic grandmother and a lush mother, but it’s no old-maid guarantee, either. Some smart girl could have landed a guy who’d buy a house with a couple of back bedrooms.
So why wasn’t I married? Was I a prune-face, a blimp? Did my breath wilt celery? Did my small talk send guys into comas? No. What went wrong, I guess, was that I waited too long. I was looking for someone to love.
In senior year of high school, when the rest of the girls were grabbing up anything with hair under its arms, I said, Uh-uh, not me. I can do better. I was smart enough, and pretty.
While I didn’t inherit my mother’s true beauty, at least I had her fair hair and her eyes: big and brown. Depending on the light, they made men think I was either sad or intelligent or romantic. And I’d wound up with my father’s good, solid German bones: definite cheeks, strong mouth. It wasn’t a gorgeous face. People didn’t pass me in the street and go Ooh! But if a guy looked twice, he might say, Hey, not bad.
So while I wasn’t whistle-bait, I looked pretty nice in a dress and heels. And without; sometimes after a bath I stood on top of the toilet seat and angled the medicine cabinet mirror so I could see myself. It looked okay to me. From the front, anyway. I couldn’t really see the back. So except for guys who insisted on a girl with a chest like two footballs, I could do fine. Then how come I didn’t?
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, I was doing okay. There was always someone for Saturday nights; there even was a proposal. Willy Bauer was a bookkeeper for Con Ed and going to Brooklyn College at night to become an accountant. He had a friendly face—like the men in chewing gum ads—and there was nothing wrong with him. But at twenty, that wasn’t enough, so I said no.
I had a half proposal too. Michael Donnelly, who was a steamfitter, asked me to marry him after knowing him three weeks. It was half a proposal because there were strings attached; our children would have to be raised as Catholics. Michael said “Catlicks,” and that probably had more to do with my saying no than any worries about my future kids in a confessional. In any case, our romance happened so fast I never actually learned what a steamfitter was.
And then came twenty-two, twenty-three and twenty-four. Suddenly the phone got quiet. All of Queens, to say nothing of the other four boroughs, was married. And the few guys who weren’t, the bachelors and the widowers, either had the brains or faces of cockroaches or were old enough for my Grandma Olga.
Sure, I could have kept busy with someone at the firm; in the history of the world, it is not unknown for lawyers and secretaries to be buddy-buddy. There was always some corporate partner from New Canaan who wanted to grab a couple of laughs (etc.) before grabbing the 8:38. They didn’t tempt me, though, those lawyers whose wallets bulged with pictures of their kids. But even if my tongue had been hanging down to my knees for one of them, I would have said no. I was supporting Olga and my mother. Getting mixed up with a married man could mean a lot more than lonely Christmases. It could mean a pink slip when the fun stopped, and you’d have to be a complete fool to take such a risk during the Depression. The world was full of fast typists. So no married lawyers. And no unmarried ones, because what did they need me for?
It was then, right before my twenty-fifth birthday, that I suddenly realized I’d missed my chance. I was so lonely. All my friends were married, and I was the old maid. I had reached the age when guys say, So what’s wrong with her she’s not married?
Well, she waited for someone wonderful to come along, and he never did.
George Armbruster walked back into my life when I was twenty-eight. As George said: “Hey, twenty-eight’s a lot older than the last time I saw you. But you still got a pretty face.” Then he gave me the once-over. “I bet the rest of you’s not bad, either.”
By Ridgewood standards, George was a very eligible bachelor. He was an electrician who’d moved somewhere on Long Island but who had his own shop on Metropolitan Avenue and his mother had just died. What could be more perfect? We’d gone to the same high school, and one Saturday when I was at the grocery store communing with a slab of Swiss cheese, he came up beside me. I said hello. Despite a hairline that had inched backward, the face was familiar; he was one of a pack of boys in my English or civics class—the sort of boys who laugh sneaky har-har-hars, and until you see who they’re laughing at, you’re always afraid it’s you. But he was alone now, and seemed okay enough. He said, I forgot your name. Linda Voss. Ye
ah, that’s right. George Armbruster. You were at Grover Cleveland, right?
He came calling every night. Olga had been thrilled. Holding down a decent job in 1937. So what if he was Lutheran. He was very attentive. And okay, no one would ever say, “Hiya, handsome” to him, but good looks don’t pay the rent.
Even right after he shaved, George’s beard looked dark, like the bully in comics. That wasn’t so bad, but he had eyes, nose and a mouth just slightly less appealing than everyone else’s; there was not a single thing about him to go Ooh, how nice! No great eyelashes or broad shoulders or even interesting ears. And while he claimed he was five eight, I was just under five five, and you could have drawn a straight line over our heads.
I said to myself, Well, it takes time to get to warm up to some people. What do I have but time? My front door didn’t have dents from eligible bachelors pounding on it.
Besides, George wasn’t awful. In fact, he was slender and even graceful, like Leslie Howard from the neck down if he’d been an electrician. And he traveled in style. No subway: George had private transportation, his own truck. On the door was painted “ARMbruster Electricals,” and just below that, an arm with a grapefruit-sized muscle.
Every night, rain, shine or sleet, there was George at the door. Olga beamed and my mother actually risked her makeup to smile when George came for me and said Hiya.
Hiya, he said that first night, as we walked down the wooden stairs from the front porch onto the street. Howya doing?
Fine. I was a nervous wreck. I had a whole list of subjects to talk about, courtesy of the girls at the office. If he was going to be the strong, silent type, I would have to keep the conversation ball rolling all by myself. But conversation wasn’t necessary. George talked all the time.
“Wanna come see my shop? Hey, I got this new job in Glendale. I’m telling you, one more day and the place woulda been on fire. Never saw wiring like that in my life. I turned on my flashlight and thought, Jee-sus, this looks like a plate of Italian spaghetti. And the fuse box! Lemme tell you, it…”
Maybe I’d watched too many movies. Maybe I was a romantic sap. But maybe I’d been alone too long. This was obviously the way men and women talked, and I’d better get used to it.
We arrived at his shop, that first night and every other night for the three months we went together. Oh, boy—went together. Well, what else should I call it?
“So that George is coming around a lot,” my mother observed. “Guess it’s serious, huh?” My mother, who generally went off drinking before George came to the door, passed him now and then on her way out, when she was still sober, so she remembered him. After the second time, she pulled me aside and said, “He certainly is…well…You know how they talk about good things in small packages. Not that he’s that small. Having a good time with him?” Another time she giggled and started humming “Here Comes the Bride.”
My Grandma Olga had the time of her life, telling the butcher, the grandson of the man my Grandpa Otto used to work for: Linda and George Armbruster are keeping company. The butcher said, Oh; he hooked up my refrigerator. Every morning at breakfast, Olga demanded, “Tell me about last night.”
Well, I’d say, we had coffee with some friends of his. We went to a movie. The one I saw last week, but I sure didn’t tell him that. Olga would nod, smile. We went dancing at the Trylon Terrace. We went to Coney Island and went on the rides. We went to the city, to a restaurant that had candles on the table. He’s a real gentleman. Olga agreed. She could see that; George always got me home by nine at the latest.
But none of that was true. That first night and every night…three guesses. We never really needed the truck because we never went anywhere except to his shop. In the back was a couch with an itchy green afghan his mother had finished crocheting the month before she died.
“Come on,” he said, and started to unbutton his shirt.
“George!” I couldn’t believe what he wanted me to do, and boy, did I ever let him know it.
“Come on,” he insisted. I shook my head no. “Hey, Linda, you’re so pretty. I wanna see a pretty figure to match that face.”
He turned on a light bulb hanging from an old electrical cord. And I let him see.
Me, who had never let a boy in high school do more than kiss me good night, and after high school, not much more. I let George take off all my clothes in that dim, flickering light. He was trying to unhook my brassiere, and I was looking at the light bulb and thinking: Some lousy electrician, some rotten connection. Me, who had the guts to tell one of the senior partners in the first law firm I’d worked for, Listen, Mr. McCallister, I’m not that kind of girl. Well, I was.
For a little more than twelve weeks, I let George Armbruster do anything he wanted on a couch that smelled like it had gotten rained on two years before and never really dried. Not that George’s anything was such a big deal. I thought: This is what people make such a big to-do about?
What went on between men and women seemed like Thanksgiving turkey: Everyone always says, “Great!” even though it’s invariably dry and disappointing.
And then one night he stopped coming around. George has a real bad cold, I told my mother. He called me at work, still has a fever, I said to Olga. George is getting better, but he has a big job in Brooklyn. I kept it up for nearly two weeks.
I stopped because one night I came home from work and Olga pulled me aside and said, “The butcher took me to the back room, with the sink.”
“What?” I figured, Oh, God, now we’re in for it. It’s bad enough with three fourths of the neighbors. Now the butcher’s going on about my mother’s being a drunk. Maybe she took off her panties again.
“He feels bad about you.”
“About me? The butcher?”
“About you and that George Armbruster.”
“What about George Armbruster?”
Olga kept her head down. She chopped an onion. She muttered, “About that he’s married.”
“Married?”
“Ten years.” She chopped. “Right after school. He got married then. When everybody else did.”
Olga died the next year. Her heart gave out. So many times in those two years since she’d been gone, I’d thought: Maybe she would have managed to hang on if she’d just had George Armbruster to believe in. She could have been alive, believing in me and George, except for that damn big-mouth butcher.
Instead, she left me alone with the mop and my mother.
3
John Berringer could hardly bear the loss of his wife. He looked terrible, and boy, did that make me feel good. Dark gray circles appeared under his eyes, and their glorious deep blue glint died. His glow faded. It’s not that he wasn’t still gorgeous, but he was now gorgeous and in pain; you could see it. His skin was chalky. His lips were almost white. And you know what I thought, watching him suffering? Wonderful.
I know I sound like a monster, but I really wasn’t that bad. I think I was just hoping that as John got closer to the end of his rope, he’d need someone to grab on to. And who better than me? There I was, only four feet away, in my good white blouse with the soft, floppy bow at the neck.
He rubbed his face. “We have about another hour,” he said. “Can you manage?”
“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”
It was after seven, dark, silent. Nothing is deader than Wall Street at night and—sure, corny—it was as if we were the only two people left in the world. He’d loosened his tie a little, so I got a bonus: a couple of extra inches of neck, the smooth part, where he didn’t have to shave. I would have loved to kiss him right there. I smiled; if I was the only girl left in the world, maybe he’d let me.
He saw me smiling. So embarrassing. I couldn’t decide whether to pass it off as a cooperative smile or, because it may have looked something more than cooperative, to make up a boyfriend: Sorry, Mr. Berringer, just thinking about, um, Joseph. Everyone calls him Big Joe. We’re kind of engaged to be engaged, and…
“All right,” he said, �
�let’s get to work.” I could have taken out my teeth and strung them on a necklace in a permanent grin; he wouldn’t have noticed. “We still have the Hayn matter and…” His voice faded. For a second, he looked at the papers spread out all over his desk. He looked more than sad; he looked desperate, as if he knew his mind was somewhere in the room and his job was to find it.
That’s how I knew what bad shape he was in. John’s mind was always under control, whirring away like a perfect machine—even when all the other lawyers were sitting around looking like some lower, dopey form of animal life.
“We have Grunberg to take care of,” I said, trying to help him. “And we’re a little behind on the Schaaf matter too.” He looked at me. His shadowed eyes looked empty, like the eye holes in the tragedy mask at the Roxy.
The work! It was too much. I felt as lousy as he looked. We came in before seven every morning and stayed late just trying to stop the clients’ fright from turning into panic. It wasn’t easy. There was no one terrible event that March 1940, but each night the world grew worse. Turn on the radio, pick up a paper, and the only names on earth seemed to be Hitler and Mussolini. One evil, one deranged, and they grew huge, thriving as Europe sickened. And as their blight spread, the clients wouldn’t leave us alone. Those beady little corporation eyes that had been gleaming at the thought of the rich fascist war machine the month before were suddenly blinky, nervous; now all they wanted was to see their way out: Can you tell us what the situation is? What they really wanted to know was: Will everything be all right? And their only hope was that John Berringer—brilliant, calm, masterful—would tell them, Don’t worry. What they all wanted to hear was, Everything’s going to be just fine.
They probably would have paid him double to hear it, but he wouldn’t have taken their money. He was too ethical. He was the best kind of international lawyer. He didn’t just come up with a solid contract. He had the patience and the brains to explain to his big corporate clients how the German system worked. He didn’t just speak its language. He understood its laws, its ways of doing business, its people. But every day John was making transatlantic calls that didn’t get through. He was writing letters to people who no longer answered. Then he had to go back to the clients and say the words nobody wants to hear from a lawyer: I can’t help you.