On a snowy eve when the highways were already thickly blanketed, I went into labor, quick and fast. This time I knew to hurry. Paul bundled me and Tucky into the car and made for Princeton, as hell-bent as snow allowed. By the time we got to the hospital, I felt the baby pushing at the gates. The nurses got me onto the delivery table and told me to hold back, the doctor was on his way. But the contractions were too strong, and within a minute of his arrival, the baby’s head was in his hands. I remember asking, “Is it a boy or a girl?” just before a nurse clamped a mask over my protesting face.
When I came to, the doctor gave me the bad news. The baby had been stillborn. It was perfectly formed, they could find nothing wrong, but they couldn’t make it breathe. Boy or girl? I asked again. If it was a girl we’d decided to name her Cecilia, after Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.” It had been a girl. We declined a casket and gave permission for an autopsy, which revealed nothing. My doctor was shaken. I was given sleeping pills and hauled away to a hospital bed. Paul drove Tucky home in the snow, put her in her crib, and when he pulled back the covers to get into bed himself, found a dead mouse on the pillow.
When I woke the next morning, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. My entire face was swollen. I asked the doctor what had happened. “You cried in your sleep,” he said. For the next four days I was trapped in bed behind dark glasses while colleagues and friends dropped by on sympathy calls. I hated it, whether they were full of cheer or commiseration. I was not going to feel sorry for myself. To focus on something concrete, I decided to learn classical Greek from a grammar someone had given me.
I was doing word cards the day the doctor came in and I told him that I had a funny lump in my throat that made it hard to swallow. Before I knew it a smiling surgeon was there, asking me to swallow, feeling with his fingertips what I could now see was a lump just above and to the right of the clavicle. “It’ll be gone before you know it,” he said, ever smiling. “I’ll make a little incision here, just below, and we’ll shape it in a semicircle so that you can cover it with a string of pearls, or makeup.” You didn’t question doctors. They told you what they wanted you to know. Evidently something was wrong with my thyroid and at the very least they’d have to take a look. Nobody said the dread word cancer, and it wasn’t until I spent the night before the operation talking to the East Indian woman in the bed next to me, who had just had a breast removed, that I realized I was in the cancer ward.
It wasn’t cancer. It was a freak rupture of a blood vessel that had destroyed one lobe of my thyroid, but I still had the other lobe and there were thyroid pills you could take if needed. My voice was hoarse, my throat was sore, and my smiling surgeon had indeed left me with a permanent pink smile of my own, just below the clavicle. But I didn’t mind at all staying on in the hospital and eating quarts of vanilla ice cream. Besides, in the hospital I could catch up on my sleep.
Paul had hired a German housekeeper to look after Tucky and the house while I was gone. She was to remain another week after I came home. I hugged Paul, kissed Tucky, and asked after the kittens our cat Tiggy had deposited in the clean diaper basket in the laundry room just before I’d gone off to the hospital. In some unexamined nook, I was relieved not to have brought home another baby of my own.
I was lying in bed upstairs when I heard fierce barking outside and saw Fang racing across the snowy lawn into the bushes. Paul reported, reluctantly, that Fang had just killed Tiggy and her entire litter. The timing was bad. I had kept control in the hospital, after a fashion, but now I rose like a waterspout in my nightgown and robe and ran out barefoot into the snow, the housekeeper raising her hands to stop me, crying, “Nein, nein, Frau Fussell, nein, nein,” like a cartoon Hausfrau in the Katzenjammer Kids. I confronted the Slav, who had got hold of his dog, and shook my fist in his face. “Killers,” I croaked. “Murderers.” His eyes narrowed and he backed away, without apology, muttering about the right of every boy to have a dog.
Et in Arcadia ego. I knew we’d have to go, even before we were notified that Paul had won a Fulbright to Heidelberg for the forthcoming year. But I couldn’t let the Snopeses think they had beaten us. I took them to small claims court on the charge of recklessly damaging property, which wasn’t hard to prove, what with the depredations of lawn and eggs and shrubbery and kittens and cats. But it was justice I was after, in a world in which there was none, in which babies could be born dead and kittens killed. This time luck was on my side. Unknown to me, Ben and the Snopeses had gotten drunk and stolen somebody’s antique carriage at a distant farm. They were trying to hitch their horse to it when the owner caught them. The judge fined them a goodly sum and they had to sell the horse to pay the fine. I don’t suppose anybody would have bought the dog.
I knew I was not in good shape. I’d have to take action and get out of the goddamn house. I wrote a letter to the English Department at Princeton University to inquire about applying for graduate school. I’ve saved the return letter from the chairman to this day because it put my dilemma so neatly. “Until now Princeton has never had any female graduates or undergraduates. This may be our loss, but it is certainly our policy.”
Next I tried for a job at Princeton University Press. The director wanted to know why I wanted to work, since I had a husband and a family and I’d have to commute. I confessed that I had just lost a baby and felt I must take my life in hand. He was polite but embarrassed and I knew I’d muffed it. In desperation I took a job as a copywriter at a local radio station. When I got there, I was handed sheafs of boilerplate commercials for Gorstein’s Hardware and Jake’s Garage to read live on the air and told to keep my mouth shut in between. The paycheck wasn’t enough to cover the cost of Tucky’s day care and I quit.
With Paul’s promise to look after Tucky in the evenings, I landed the part of Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with the Princeton Community Players. Since the McCarthy witchhunts had provoked the play, I admired it as serious dramaturgy, and for a while it worked wonders in restoring my soul. As the tight-lipped loyal Puritan wife, defending her husband even after he’d confessed his lust, I was good typecasting. I was uneasy about Elizabeth’s confession to her husband, though, because I feared it applied to me: “It were a cold house I kept.” One morning when I was crying at the breakfast table and Paul asked me what was wrong, I said, “I don’t know, I don’t know, just get out.” “Don’t say that,” he replied. Until then I hadn’t even known I could hurt him.
That summer, on our way to Germany, we spent a couple of months in London. Our basement apartment in Knightsbridge was so dark and damp that washed diapers hung on a line grew mold before they could dry. A wire-mesh box attached to the window substituted for a refrigerator, and even with the cold it was hard to keep milk from curdling. Tucky lived, British style, on bread and jam because there was so little else to eat. The country was still on short rations, and anything other than tea or beer and cold toast and bread sausages seemed a luxury. I spent hours in Kensington Park reading, while Tucky placed her doll in the stroller meant for her and pushed it round and round Round Pond. The best food was pub food, but to get to a pub we had to call Nannies Inc. They sent us genteel elderly ladies in rice powder and lavender gowns who wished to discuss Shakespeare’s sonnets instead of what time Tucky should go to bed.
Living in a London that was still in ruins from having been bombed, hearing Brits talk about who’d been killed in the Blitz, hearing Big Ben toll what even then felt like the death knell of an empire, made us apologetic for being American. We scorned America as we scorned Russia, the pair of them bullies engaged in a Cold War instituted by fanatics on both sides. With war’s effects so ominously visible, how could we possibly drop a hydrogen bomb over Bikini? How could the Russians possibly invade Hungary with their tanks? And yet we did and they did, both in the same year. The Cold War felt to me like little boys playing little boys’ games with matches in a kitchen full of gas.
We wanted to explore every inch of
Europe, and we could, because it was cheap, and we had American dollars. We took the ferry to Calais and, in the smallest of dockside cafés, I had my first bite of real butter and real bread. The wonder of those simple flavors and textures—the sweet and the yeasty, the creamy and the crisp—formed the base that sustained the harmonies and countered the discords of our travels through France for the next twenty years in search of real food.
From Calais we drove across Belgium and the Netherlands to Arnhem and down the Rhine, through Cologne, Mainz, Frankfurt. By the time we got to Heidelberg, we had seen what two wars stretched over thirty years could do to a landscape and its people. In the early fifties Americans were so unpopular in Europe, particularly in provincial towns where communism dominated local politics, that we’d pretend to be Swedish or English or even German. Paul cringed in the presence of tourists from Iowa, with their loud twangs and big bellies and drip-dry suits, and he would tell me to hide my camera lest we be mistaken for the tourists we were. Like some nationalist transsexual, he felt he’d been born an Englishman in an American’s body. I felt American to the marrow of my Bible Belt bones.
Still, I didn’t like being identified as the enemy, and we were, especially in Germany. So the moment we secured an apartment in Heidelberg for the year to come, we escaped to the Mediterranean, abandoning Tucky en route in a Swiss nursery school in Nyon. She had been sick with some kind of stomach upset on the drive down to Heidelberg, but a doctor at the school thought she seemed okay. We left her and drove off across the Alps, through a blizzard at Brenner Pass, and down into the sunshine of Italy’s Adriatic coast to hop a ferry at Brindisi. We were free again.
In Greece we consumed centuries as if we’d never eaten before. Every day we could now taste and touch and smell what we’d stored up in our minds from books, enjoying the gap between the two—the fluted columns of the Parthenon pocked by air pollution, the garlic breath of short dark Greeks with dwarfish legs who looked not at all like Pericles’ Apollo in marble.
We shipped across to Sicily, glad to pass safely between the points of land we knew only as Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis. In a trattoria in Erice, while devouring our first fritto misto, we picked up an English sailor who ran the radio equipment on a Greek oil tanker and was off for a week to spend his “stash of lolly.” He was an upper-class type who’d been sunk once too often on destroyers during the war and had opted out for good, content to read books on shipboard and train the falcons who landed on his radio antennae, one of which he sported on his arm, hooded in its leather cap.
We became a scapegrace trio, astonishing the natives in remote coastal villages not only with our hooded falcon but with our blue eyes and blond hair. Many had never seen a “foreigner,” so it was not hard for us to pass ourselves off as a Hollywood film crew. We picked names that we thought might sound vaguely familiar or at least plausibly foreign—Elia Kazan for Tony, Troy Donahue for Paul, Veronica Lake for me. Tony would burst with his falcon into some dank eatery and call for champagne for the house and ask where he could buy film, and within minutes every man in the village was crowding around, all talking at once, while Tony jabbered in his fake Italian and Paul and I tried to keep dark hands from feeling us all over to see if we were real. We were and we weren’t.
We dropped Tony in Palermo to return to his ship and drove to Nyon, where Tucky burst into tears when she saw us. She had been very sick with bronchitis and the school had been very anxious because they’d had no way to reach us. We were back in the Real World.
But the year in Germany turned out to be more like a paid vacation for me, because there was always someone to help look after the baby. We employed so many nice ladies who came for that purpose that Tucky rebelled: “Nice lady not come!” Europe was different from America; you weren’t expected to do all your own work. If a mother was educated, she was not expected to be a full-time housekeeper, nanny, and cook. There was no question of my spending much time at the stove in any event, because the kitchen in the apartment we’d rented had but a pair of burners set on a table next to the sink and the bathtub. I could fry up a Wiener schnitzel and bathe Tucky at the same time.
I did have a miscarriage in Heidelberg and worried about it a bit, after the stillbirth. But I took it as only a momentary defeat, even a kind of triumph, because the doctor prescribed coffee and red wine, and in Germany both were excellent. And sure enough, before long I was pregnant again and full of appetite for German Kartoffeln and Nudeln and, above all, the big bowls of Schlagsahne that German ladies wolfed down for a midmorning snack, placing their Teutonic bottoms on stools before a counter to spoon up mountains of whipped cream.
Paul had been twenty when he’d fought as a lieutenant in the Army’s 103rd Infantry Division in Alsace. He’d lost most of his rifle platoon to German mortar fire in the snowbound woods outside Nancy before he was wounded himself. It was unsettling for him to return as a civilian to the homeland of the enemy, especially when we were so often mistaken for part of the U.S. Army of Occupation. There was a large American Army base just outside Heidelberg, and Army uniforms crowded the narrow streets, jammed the Bierstuben, and thronged the castle on the hill. The Germans tended to regard the Americans as barbarians or, worse, as killers of innocent women and children. This was not for them the Good War. Even educated Germans were more likely to identify with English culture and to equate Yanks with brute savagery.
No one had been a Nazi, no one knew anything about concentration camps or about bombing London. Germans had not been aggressors but victims of an injustice that provoked rage and outrage in their hearts. We met only one German, in the Anglischiste Seminar of Heidelberg University, with whom we could talk directly about the war. Most of the professors had been too old to fight, had lost their positions under the Nazis, and had been sequestered where they could do no harm. Most of the current students were too young to remember anything but bombings and hunger and fear. But one young faculty member had been a soldier at sixteen on the Russian front, at Stalingrad, and could tell war stories with an irony that matched Paul’s. It was Herr Iser who showed us the photographs he had taken of Russian hostages hung from the trees, silhouetted like skeletons against endless fields of snow. Paul and Wolfgang talked as soldiers while his wife and I drank coffee and talked about Kinder, Küche, und Kirche, even though she was finely trained in English and was at that moment translating into German a major American work of literary criticism.
Although Heidelberg had escaped severe damage to its picture-book bridges and castle perched high above the Neckertal, signs of war were everywhere. You could read them in the beer halls of the dueling societies of prewar Heidelberg, where aristocrats had worn their scars as badges of honor. Upriver, Albert Speer’s house stood empty as a reminder that the man who had once drunk Gewürztraminer in his garden was now in prison composing his memoirs of innocence. Downriver, the ruined town of Mannheim had risen from its ashes in a magnificent opera house, where Parsifal was performed on Helden Sontag and the audience sat silent for a full ten minutes after the curtain had dropped to honor the heroes who had died for the Fatherland.
We traveled everywhere we could, like people with a toothache, probing the aching cavity. We toured half-crumbled cities like Köln—the German name rang like a bell, whereas Cologne sounded like cheap perfume. We couldn’t go to Dresden because it was in East Germany. We couldn’t go to Berlin because of the blockade that preceded the Wall. We could go to Munich. In enormous underground beer halls where two or three hundred linked arms, their mouths full of Weisswurst and bock beer, to sing “Ich bin Edelweiss,” it was not hard to imagine the young Socialists of 1933 singing up from the ashes of ruined Germany their new Parsifal.
Or we could cross the border into France to visit out-of-the-way sites like Oradour-sur-Glane, preserved like Pompeii as a town of ashes. The war had altered permanently categories of fair and unfair, soldier and civilian, and the six hundred and forty-two dead of Oradour-sur-Glane were mute testimony to that fact. The
June I graduated from high school, a German soldier had been killed by the local Resistance, and the SS had entered the village in force, machine-gunned the men, herded the women and children into the church and set it afire, then torched the village. The houses went up like a box of allumettes and the smell of burnt flesh hung in the woods for months. What was so disturbing in the ruins was the particularity of the houses and their incinerated contents, here the blackened remains of a stove, there the twisted framework of a treadle sewing machine. Oradour showed the underside of heroic battle in the field, the messy reality of ordinary people slaughtered in the middle of their everyday lives.
I had the same feeling when we visited Auschwitz in the 1970s. What struck me most was how the bunkers where Kommandant Rudolf Höss had displayed his efficiency with Zyklon B were right next to the backyard of his family house, where Frau Höss had hung out the laundry on lines that were still in place beneath the trees, and where she must have complained to her husband from time to time about the smell and the soot that besmirched her sheets. Here it was that little Fritz and Heidi, or whatever their names, had played tag until she called them in because Onkel Heinie was coming for tea, and Onkel Heinie Himmler loved children. Kinder, Küche, und Kirche, universal as death.
I was eight months pregnant by the time we returned to New Brunswick on the Flandre, a small boat that rocked violently when a hurricane overtook us, making me, for the first time and to my utter disgust, seasick. From Heidelberg, sight unseen, we had rented a modern cement slab of a house in a Rutgers enclave in Piscataway. As it turned out, we developed a penchant for slab houses and went on to live in two more. I might have taken heed of the words of one of the drunks in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life—“No foundation, all down the line”—but I didn’t.
My Kitchen Wars Page 10