by Lore Segal
“Oh, well,” said Annie comfortably, “there’s always something you can do with money.”
That very night, Annie knocked at my bedroom door. She was all dressed up in a navy-blue uniform with a red collar and red-ribboned bonnet, and she looked very smart and strange, almost like somebody I didn’t know at all. She said could she come in, and did, and stood just inside my door.
I was proud to have her in my room in her uniform. “Where are you going in that?” I asked, making conversation.
“It’s my Salvation Army day. We got a meeting,” Annie said. “We have a band and hymn singing. We sing hymns and sacred songs and we have this collection to give food to the poor people and bring them the Word of the Lord.”
I listened intelligently. Annie had never spoken such a long sentence to me before. I was flattered. She was even coming over and sitting down on the edge of my bed.
“Today I don’t know if I’m going, because I don’t have any money to put in the collection. So I don’t know if I’m going.” Annie looked down at her immaculate black shoes and gave them a dusting with her black-gloved hand.
I noticed absently that her stockings were black, too. There was a brand-new thought working in my mind. It was so tremendous it made me dizzy. I blushed. I said, “If you like, I can lend you some money.”
“Oh, no,” Annie said. “No, that I never would. I wouldn’t borrow money from you, though you are a darling child, that you are, and I’ll pay you back every penny come payday—half a crown if you can spare it.”
I was shocked at the largeness of the sum, for though I valued friendship above money, I had an attachment to the silver coins that had accumulated over the weeks. I counted five of the six into Annie’s upturned palm and watched her take out her black purse and drop them in and clap it shut.
Then Annie asked me if I would like to come into her room. I blushed again, because Annie was taking so much account of me, and because I wanted so very badly to go into her room I said no, and immediately regretted it, especially after Annie had gone and her footsteps sounded away down the stairs.
It was, I think, on the following afternoon that I came downstairs and found Mrs. Levine sitting by the window just where she had sat the first morning, and she was sewing a blue dress for me. I remembered with a shock of remorse how I had not liked her and how I had written about her to my mother. I suddenly liked her enormously. I was glad that she was old and ugly so that I could love her forever, even if nobody else did, and was casting about in my mind for something to say to her so that I could address her as “Auntie Essie,” but she spoke first.
“Is that you, Lore? Come here. I want you.” She had not raised her head and I could tell by her voice that there was something the matter. I looked around and I was glad that Annie was there, busying herself in the far corner of the dusky room. “I have to speak with you,” Mrs. Levine said. “I hear that you are going around telling people we don’t give you enough pocket money. I was very upset. I think that’s very ungrateful of you.”
“I didn’t,” I said, but without conviction; I was trying to recall to whom I had said such a thing. “I never,” I said.
Mrs. Levine said, “I was quite upset. We do everything for you, and when I hear you are saying Uncle Reuben gives Bobby more money than he gives you I get very upset. And criticizing everybody—how my grandson is spoiled, and this one you like, and that one you don’t like. You don’t do that when you live in other people’s houses.”
I felt the blood pounding in my head—confused because she was accusing me of thoughts I did not recognize, and not accusing me of thoughts for which I had long felt guilty. I wanted to go away and think this out, but I knew I must stand and let Mrs. Levine scold me as long as she felt like it.
Her hand that was guiding the needle trembled. “It’s not that I expect gratitude,” she said. “But you might at least say ‘thank you, Auntie Essie’ when you see me sitting here sewing a dress for you, but you never notice what people do for you.”
“I do,” I said. “I do notice.” But a small sulky voice inside me said, “If she doesn’t know I love her, I’m not going to tell her.”
Mrs. Levine had not done with me yet. She was thoroughly worked up and she said excitedly, “And how often have I asked you to call me ‘Auntie Essie,’ but you never even remember—though you always say ‘Uncle Reuben’ to him, and then you go around telling people he doesn’t give you enough pocket money and I’m sure he gives you as much as he can afford.” Mrs. Levine was silent, sewing agitatedly on my dress.
I stood trembling. I looked toward Annie. I thought that any moment she would speak up and tell Mrs. Levine that there had been a mistake, and explain everything, but Annie seemed still to be dusting the same shelf, and her back was to me.
I ran out and up to my room and threw myself on the bed meaning to cry and cry, but I managed only a few dry sobs. I was thinking how that little Bobby really did get twice as much money as I. It surprised me that I had not thought of it before. It made me angry. I decided that I would not go downstairs for supper, nor to breakfast the next day, nor ever again. I would stay in my room and starve. I tried to cry some more, but I did not particularly feel like crying. I wondered if there was something the matter with me. I began to dream a dream—I imagined that I was weeping bitterly and that Sarah came into my room and saw me so and softly begged me to tell her why, and I could not speak because of the tears in my throat. My heart ached deliciously, imagining how Sarah wept for me.
I lifted my head from the pillow, listening to footsteps coming upstairs. Perhaps Mrs. Levine was coming to look for me. I held my breath, but they had stopped on the floor below. A door opened and shut. I heard the bathroom chain pulled and then somebody went back down. That was the front doorbell now—Uncle Reuben coming from his shop, or Sarah. Soon everybody would be home. They would sit around the table without me.
I thought of writing a letter to my mother, but I didn’t move from the bed. There was too much now that I could not tell her; it had shocked me profoundly to realize that everybody did not love me, and I knew if my mother were to find out that there were people who did not think me perfectly good and charming she could not bear it. The room had become dark and it was chilly. I was getting bored. I thought how Annie would have to come up to my floor when she went to bed. Maybe I would call her. Maybe she would come in. I thought, If she invites me again to come into her room, I will go. I wondered how long it would be before Annie came upstairs.
After a bit, I walked out onto the landing and sat on the top step. Presently I went down to the floor with the green carpet and hung around there, and then I went all the way down to the ground floor. Everybody would be home by now. I could hear them talking in the living room, but I didn’t know if I should go in. I wondered if Mrs. Levine was telling them all those things about me. I stood outside the door trying to hear what they were saying, but my figure limned itself on the frosted glass and Mrs. Levine called out, “All right, then, so come in. You don’t have to listen behind the door.”
I came in with my head on fire. Mrs. Levine was biting off her basting thread. She asked Annie if we had time to try on before supper, and though I kept waiting for the catastrophe Mrs. Levine only said, “So, you want to have that little Helene over to play with you?”
I said no, I wasn’t playing with Helene any more, but I had a new friend at school, called Renate. Mrs. Levine said to ask her to come to tea on Saturday.
Renate was two months older than I. She had tight black hair and wore glasses, and she was as smart as I was. After I taught her the game about guessing about letters, she only lost once, and she had come up with such fantastic and imaginative mishaps to delay her mail that she spurred me to ever greater stretches of unlikelihood. If she made her letters travel the long way around the world, I must send mine via the moon, and so the thing got out of hand and wasn’t any fun any more. But Renate thought of a new game. We had to guess when our parents would come.
I said, “I guess two years.” Renate guessed five years. I said, “All right, mine is six years,” but she said that didn’t count because I had had my turn. I said I didn’t care. I knew a secret. She said, what. I told her how I had heard Mrs. Levine tell her eldest daughter that Mrs. Rosen didn’t know what she was going to do with Helene now that her parents were dead.
“Oh,” said Renate, “then Helene is an orphan.” And so Renate and I stood having our secrets together. I asked her if she would like to be best friends with me, instead of Helene, and she said she would.
But I kept looking curiously at Helene who was an orphan. She stood by herself in the middle of the schoolyard looking before her. She still wore her little thick coat and her rabbit’s-wool hat tied under the chin. One would never have guessed from looking at her that her parents were dead. I tried imagining that my parents were dead, but whenever I tried thinking about my father I would see him spread-eagled high above the ground comically wriggling his arms and legs, trying to get down from the thing like a telegraph pole on which he was trussed up. I wondered if that might mean that he was dead and tried to imagine him climbing down but could not crystallize this idea in my mind’s eye and so I removed it from him and focused it on my mother, but whoops, there she went, too, right up on the pole, and I knew that she could not come down until I had removed my thought from her. For the rest of the week I was continually at work to stop myself from thinking of my parents so that they could keep their feet on the earth. Mrs. Levine worried about me: She would see me suddenly shake my head or change chairs or dive under the table and would say, “For goodness’ sake, can’t you sit still a minute? I never saw such a child for fidgeting.”
Renate came on Saturday. I took her into the dining room and we played house. We sat under the table and pulled the dining-room chairs to hedge us in closely all around. Renate said that she wanted to be the mother and I must be the child, which wasn’t the way I had imagined it, and she kept bossing me instead of my bossing her and she talked too quick and moved too suddenly and everything was quite wrong again, so that I wished with all my heart that it were Helene I had with me again, docile, under the table.
In the months that followed, Renate and I became very good friends. We had different games, and in the end it was I who won by a year and a half. A conspiracy between the grownups to save me the pain of waiting and possible disappointment had kept me in ignorance of my parents’ being expected in Liverpool on my very birthday.
One Tuesday in March, I was called out of class into the study of the headmaster. Mrs. Levine was there, and they both looked very kindly at me. Mrs. Levine said for me to get my coat. There was a surprise waiting for me at home.
“My parents have come!” I said.
“Well!” said Mrs. Levine, “so! Aren’t you excited, you funny child?”
“Yes, I am. I’m excited,” I said, but I was busy noticing the way my chest was emptying, my head clearing, and my shoulders being freed of some huge weight that must, since I now felt it being rolled away, have been there all this time without my knowing it. Just as when the passing of nausea or the unknotting of a cramp leaves the body with a new awareness of itself, I stood sensuously at ease, breathing in and out.
Mrs. Levine was saying to the headmaster, “You never know with children. All she ever does is mope around the house and write letters home, and now she isn’t even pleased.”
“I am so pleased,” I said and began to jump up and down, though what I wanted most was to be still, to taste the intense sweetness of my relief. But it would never do to have Mrs. Levine think I was not pleased and excited, and I had to jump up and down in the taxi all the way back to the house.
And in the two easy chairs, in front of the sitting-room fire, sat my mother and my father, and I hugged them and smiled and I grinned and I hugged them again and I made them come upstairs to show them my room, and I showed them off to my new English family, and I showed off my new familiarities to my parents, and then the children arrived for my birthday party, bringing gifts. Crackers exploded. There were paper hats, and little cakes and jellies to eat. I bobbed and leaped and ran and chatted, and all the time I knew that, incredibly, my mother was in the room with me. Her eyes, huge and dilated with the suppressed tears of her exhaustion and the shock of her relief, followed me around the room like the eyes of a lover.
Afterward the neighbors came in to have a look at the little refugee’s parents. The women talked Yiddish to my mother. She smiled and tried to tell them in her stunted school English that she did not understand Yiddish, but they did not believe her and talked louder. She applied to my father, who was the linguist of the family, but he looked merely stunned. I try to recall his presence during the visit to the Levines, and see him sitting in the same armchair, rising when my mother rose, speaking only to echo what she said. Whenever I went over to kiss him, his face would break up and he wept.
In the evening, after everyone was gone, my mother opened the suitcase. She had brought some of my things from home, including my doll, Gerda, who had had a hole poked through her forehead where the customs people at the German border had looked for contraband. There was a box of sweets packed especially for the little friend Helene Rubichek.
“Oh, her,” I said. “She isn’t even at school any more.”
“No,” Mrs. Levine added, “that Mrs. Rosen couldn’t keep her. She’s in another home now.”
“Where is she?” I asked, momentarily frowning at the glimpse I caught of little Helene stuck on the telegraph pole wriggling helplessly between heaven and earth.
“I don’t just remember,” Mrs. Levine said, “but I think they put her in another town.”
And so I put Helene out of my mind.
My parents stayed at the Levines’ for three days, and the fourth morning they left to go to their first English job in a household in the south of England. Mr. Levine was taking them to the station. They stood in the hallway by the front door. They had their coats on. “Come on down and say good-by nicely to your father and mother,” said fat Mrs. Levine, but I sat on a step halfway up the stairs. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had one arm twisted around the banister, and I waved and wiggled my head.
I remained in Liverpool until the summer. It seems to me that after my parents came to England life at the Levines’ was less emotionally strenuous; I remember less about it.
Annie never remembered the half crown that I had lent her. I used to study her. From the free and easy way that she talked and laughed with me, I could tell she had forgotten that she owed me two shillings and sixpence. I was too shy to remind her, but I never quit thinking that some day she would remember and give me back my money. This expectation became attached to Annie like an attribute, like the playful angle of her nose and the warm grip with which she used to swing my hand when we went walking in the park together. I always liked Annie.
I went on loving Mrs. Levine when she wasn’t looking. There was no hope now of our coming together. The phrases that she spoke to me and the tone in which I answered had become ritual. Now, seeing me sit idly by the fire, she would often say, “Don’t you even want to go and write a letter to your parents?” And I would say, “No, I don’t feel like writing.”
Mrs. Levine said, “My goodness, I never saw such a child for sitting around doing nothing.”
“I’m not doing nothing,” I said. “I’m watching the fire.”
“And always an answer to everything,” Mrs. Levine said, and Sarah said, “Knock it off, Ma. Leave her alone.”
I used to keep thoughts of Sarah in abeyance till I went to bed, and then I imagined such situations, such things for her to say to me, such profundities for me to answer, that I excited myself and I couldn’t fall asleep. There developed a serial story, which I carried with me through the years, from one foster family to the next. New characters were added, but the protagonist remained a pale, tragic-eyed girl. Her hair was long and sad and she wept much. She suffered. She kept herself to he
rself. I regretted my daytime self, which was always wanting to be where everyone else was, though I never did learn to come into a room without stopping outside to hear if they were talking about me, to gather myself together, invent some little local excuse, or think up some bright thing to say, as if it might look foolish for me to just open a door and walk in.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Illford”: The Married Couple
When I was an adolescent, Tante Trade and Onkel Hans showed me the letter about the snow-capped rose which I had written them from Dovercourt camp. I was embarrassed for them because they had been taken in by my propaganda. They had sent this letter around among the refugee committees and had moved the family called Willoughby to sponsor my parents on a married-couple visa. (“Married couple” was the technical designation for a husband-and-wife team of cook and butler. Domestic visas were the only working visas readily available to foreigners at a time when England needed to replenish its diminishing servant class. There was an anecdote, widely circulated at the time, about the young lady of wealthy Viennese stock who came downstairs on her first morning in the house of the English people she believed to be her saviors, at half past ten o’clock, wearing a blue crêpe-de-Chine dressing gown with tassel, looking for her breakfast.)
From the letters my mother wrote me to Liverpool, and the stories she has told since, I have an idea of my parents’ life those first months in England. They traveled a day’s journey south. Mr. Willoughby fetched them from the Mellbridge station and drove them to Illford Village, in Kent. It was toward the end of the day. The sky is immense in that part of the country. The round hills of the downs rise softly and nobly. The little bridle paths and the hedges that divide a field from its neighbor trace, lovingly as a Cézanne pencil, the large contours, the little surprises of their curves. Very old clumps of elms stand here and there. The car went along the back country roads. My mother looked through the bare hazelnut hedges on either side of the road, and she was moved by this free and charming land where she had come to live. Mr. Willoughby drove through a wide, open gate up a gravel drive toward a handsome, gentle white house, and around it, and set my parents down at the back door.