Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  Mrs. Willoughby was in the kitchen to meet them with a most kind welcome. They must be tired, she said, and would want to rest. She told my father to bring the bags, and led them along a flagstone passage and up two flights of a narrow wooden back stairs that opened into an attic bedroom. The door was missing, Mrs. Willoughby said, but Groszmann could put up a curtain tomorrow. She would find a piece of stuff, but meanwhile they should just rest and not think of doing any work today, unless Mrs. Groszmann would want to come down later and Mrs. Willoughby could just show her which was the kitchen china and which were the cups for Mrs. Willoughby’s early-morning tea, which she liked brought up to her on a tray at seven—but not to worry about anything, just unpack and make themselves at home. My mother said she would come down with Mrs. Willoughby right away.

  In the kitchen, my mother looked over Mrs. Willoughby’s shoulder into china cupboards and broom closets, at the sinks in the scullery, and the food-filled shelves of the pantry. Mrs. Willoughby said maybe Mrs. Groszmann was hungry and would like a little supper? She would set out an egg for her and Groszmann on the kitchen table. Now, since they were here, Mrs. Willoughby might as well show my mother around the front of the house. They went along the flagstone passage again and through a green baize-covered door into a carpeted hall. Here, Mrs. Willoughby said, was the library. My mother said what a lovely room and there was something she wanted to ask—maybe Mrs. Willoughby could advise her what to read to quickly improve her English. Did Mrs. Willoughby have The Forsyte Saga, which my mother knew very well in German, and that would help her read it in English? Did Mrs. Willoughby like Galsworthy? Mrs. Willoughby said she didn’t know, but my mother could see, later, if there was a copy, and she could borrow it so long as she brought it back when she was finished. “And this is our drawing room.” “Ah,” my mother cried, “a piano! It is a Bechstein, no?” and she told Mrs. Willoughby that she had had a Blüthner, which the Nazis had taken, and that she had studied music at the Vienna Academy.

  “Oh, really?” said Mrs. Willoughby. “In that case you must come in and play sometime when everyone is out.”

  My mother was dissatisfied. She wanted to let the Englishwoman know that she, too, had once been comfortably circumstanced, had had a well-appointed flat and a Herrenzimmer. “My husband,” my mother said to Mrs. Willoughby, “was accountant—like your husband, isn’t it?”

  “Was he?” said Mrs. Willoughby. “Mr. Willoughby, you know, is a civil servant.”

  “Mr. Groszmann,” countered my mother, “was in a bank. Main—what do you call it?—chef accountant.”

  “Chief accountant?” suggested Mrs. Willoughby.

  “Chief accountant,” said my mother, “and he—how do you say?—organiziert?”

  “Organized?” said Mrs. Willoughby.

  “Yes. Organized all the system of accountants.”

  “Ah?” said Mrs. Willoughby. Then she gave my mother a paper she had written out to hang on the back of the kitchen door, showing a list of the rooms and on which day each must be turned out, to help my mother organize her work. My mother thanked her earnestly. She had no system of her own, she said, but she would do her very best for Mrs. Willoughby. She thanked Mrs. Willoughby for visa and employment. She asked Mrs. Willoughby to have patience with her.

  My parents had been engaged to work at Illford House for one pound a week between them. To be more precise, my mother was engaged to work for one pound a week, with the stipulation that my father could live in the house and receive food in return for his services as butler and handyman. Like all English servants, they were to have Thursday afternoon, and every other Sunday afternoon, off.

  In bed that first evening, my father said out of the darkness, “Franzi …? I was thinking. Do you remember that passage behind the kitchen we used for the maid’s room?” My mother says she felt very close to him at that moment because she, too, had been trying to remember what sort of mattress poor Poldi had slept on. She says there was a trick to lying on the Willoughbys’ mattresses. You had to push the lumps of kapok to either side and make a valley between them and then lie still.

  My mother was downstairs by six o’clock the next morning, nervous and eager to start. She stood in Mrs. Willoughby’s great empty kitchen, wondering what to do first. The house was silent. My mother tried to imagine what Poldi at home would do first thing in the morning. She had a single vivid image of Poldi with a long-handled broom—Poldi sweeping. My mother began to open closet doors looking for the broom cupboard, and suddenly she remembered about the early-morning tea. She tried to recall where around the kitchen she had seen a tray. While she hunted, she kept wondering if she was actually supposed to carry it in to Mrs. Willoughby. Would she find Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby lying in bed together? It then came to my mother with a shock that if she was to make tea, water would have to be heated, and that she must light the coal stove. It was already six-thirty. From that moment on, for many years to come, my mother was never again at a loss to find things she was supposed to do.

  I had a letter from my mother telling me about that first funny morning. My mother arrived with the tray at exactly seven. Mrs. Willoughby drank her tea, told my mother that they would have scrambled eggs for breakfast, and turned on her side next to Mr. Willoughby, who had not even waked up. My mother hoped my father would know what “scrambled” meant, but he did not. While he went into the library to look for a dictionary, my mother rushed upstairs to unpack her books to find Mrs. Beeton’s English Cookery. Breakfast was late, but Mrs. Willoughby had been nice about it.

  Everybody, my mother wrote, was very good to them. Mr. Willoughby was most polite. He had asked questions about Vienna. He was an accountant for the government and went to London every morning after breakfast. Besides him and Mrs. Willoughby, there were two daughters. Miss Elizabeth, the elder, worked in a museum in London and she caught the early train to town. My mother brought her tea to the schoolroom upstairs and Miss Elizabeth toasted bread on a small oil stove. My mother wrote that the smell of toast and tea and oil in the sleeping house, with the dark still outside the windows, was very special and nice. She said that Miss Elizabeth was very nice and spoke gently, though she never said much. The younger daughter was called Joanne. She stayed at home with her mother. She had a pony called Picket. There was a son, Stephen, but he was away at school.

  My mother said that she had spoken to Mrs. Willoughby about a sponsor to bring my grandparents to England. She said Mrs. Willoughby often reminded her of her own mother, which was odd because Mrs. Willoughby looked quite different, very thin, with very blue eyes. She had told Mrs. Willoughby about me, and this morning Mrs. Willoughby had said I could come and spend two weeks of the summer holidays with my parents. As soon as my father came down from resting, she would have him write to the Levines about it, but for me not to seem too anxious to get away.

  My mother said now she must stop writing and start dinner. She was going to make an Apfelstrudel for a surprise. She said she wished she could make me one. She said she loved me and that she and my father lived for the day when they could have me with them.

  My father’s career as a butler lasted three days. His first job in the morning was to do the front hall, but my mother says that after she had dusted the dining room and lit the fire and set the table for breakfast, she would sneak around after him and wipe away the excess polish he had left on the red tiles. The evening my father served his first dinner, he stayed so long in the dining room that my mother came to the door to see what had happened to him. Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby were sitting at the head and foot of the table, with their daughters on either side. Their four heads were turned toward my father, who stood with a napkin over his arm holding a tureen of cabbage. Mrs. Willoughby was saying, “Now try it again, will you, Groszmann, from the left side.” My father looked as if he had stopped listening some while ago. My mother crept back into the kitchen and wept bitterly out of pity for him, he looked so ridiculous.

  Two days later, when guests were
expected to dinner, my mother asked Mrs. Willoughby if she might do the waiting at table. She thought she could learn pretty quickly. Mrs. Willoughby was discouraged by my father’s lack of progress, but she hesitated. “I don’t see how you can come into the dining room in your kitchen apron.”

  My mother ran upstairs, got out her good afternoon dress, a classic black wool that she had had made the winter before Hitler. “Why,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “but you look very nice! I’ll go and find you a cap and apron and, yes, I think that will do very nicely.”

  “This is our Mrs. Groszmann,” Mrs. Willoughby said to her dinner guests. “She comes from Vienna.” The guests nodded pleasantly to my mother, who smiled and set the soup down in front of each, neatly, from the left, and so she did very well and everyone was pleased.

  My father was demoted from butlering to gardening, about which he knew even less. He had a city man’s tenderness toward things that grow, and he pottered at his own pace in the kitchen garden among the vegetables.

  During those first weeks, my mother developed a small pocket of resistance. One evening Mrs. Willoughby noticed that she was not wearing her white cap and apron. My mother said she had forgotten, and when she brought the second course she had put them on. Next day she had forgotten again. Mrs. Willoughby looked at her but said nothing. After that my mother served in her good black dress and the matter was not mentioned again.

  My mother had something else on her mind. It took her a few days to translate it into English. One morning as she stood before Mrs. Willoughby, who was sitting at the dining-room table after breakfast writing out the day’s menu, my mother spoke up. She asked Mrs. Willoughby if it would be possible, since she herself was addressed as “Mrs.” Groszmann, for my father to be called “Mr.” Mrs Willoughby looked up with her blue, blue eyes and thought a moment. She said that she didn’t know how they could do that. She said that the cook was always “Mrs.” and that the manservant was called by just his last name, and she didn’t see how they could very well change.

  My mother, shocked by this refusal of her direct appeal, looked through the window, where, under the sweet, harsh light of the April morning, Mr. Willoughby and my father walked among the flower beds. She watched their backs side by side. Mr. Willoughby was wearing his black town suit and bowler, ready for his train. My father was two heads taller. Despite his stoop, she thought he looked very well in his tweed knickerbockers. The men were bending to inspect the row of young hyacinths at the end of the path. They turned, and my mother saw that my father was wearing his green gardener’s pinafore.

  On weekdays, when Mrs. Willoughby and Miss Joanne were alone, they took their lunch on trays in the drawing room, and after my mother had cleared up and washed the kitchen, the hour and a half till teatime was her own. My mother tells me that all morning she would plan what she might do with it. She wanted to write to me; she wanted to write to her parents, and she must get a letter off to the Committee in London to find a sponsor for them; she wanted to take a bath; she wanted to walk in the fresh air; she wanted to study her English, for she found herself too exhausted at night after cooking, serving, and clearing up from dinner; she needed to sleep an hour, but my father had gone to lie down upstairs and what she needed above all was to be alone. She sat at the kitchen table, aware of her leisure slipping away. She kept looking at the clock, calculating how much time she still had before preparing the tea tray. One afternoon, the door opened and Miss Joanne came through the kitchen, trailing grass and hay from the stables. She dropped a dirty blouse into the scullery sink and went out again, leaving both doors open. This caused a draft where my mother sat, and my mother got up and slammed the door behind the girl. Then she was sorry. She remembered how she had disliked the ill-natured maids in her mother’s house, who fussed over their clean floors. She remembered that she owed these people her life. She went to the sink and washed Miss Joanne’s blouse and starched it; then, angry at herself for this servile act, she went to the china closet, took out Mrs. Willoughby’s best Minton, and made herself some powerful Viennese coffee. She tasted the delicate fluted china between her lips, half afraid that Mrs. Willoughby might come in and catch her, half wishing that she would. My mother wanted to make herself known to the other woman.

  It was becoming increasingly clear to my mother that there was much Mrs. Willoughby did not know. “Why didn’t you embark in Austria and come direct?” she asked my mother one day. “Why did you come such an awkward way around?” My father, who had just entered the kitchen, stared in astonishment. “Do you know we had to wait eleven weeks for you and Groszmann?” said Mrs. Willoughby.

  My mother tried to tell Mrs. Willoughby some of the things that were happening to Jews in Austria and Germany.

  “Tch, tch, isn’t that incredible?” Mrs. Willoughby said. “Quite, quite incredible.” And her eyes began to wander. Mrs. Willoughby would rather not know what she was being told, and besides, my mother’s conversation, in which Mrs. Willoughby had to be active, supplying the missing words, must have been tiring.

  My mother had another weapon; she is a great believer in laughter. She laughs readily and with abandon until she looks as if she has been crying. She had always been the comedienne of the family, and her routine of funny faces and gestures had caused the uncles and cousins to say that Franzi’s talents were being wasted. She is a true punster and takes equal delight in her cleverest and most terrible wordplays. These she now wanted to share with Mrs. Willoughby by translating them into English. When Mrs. Willoughby looked puzzled, my mother explained them painfully. Mrs. Willoughby would look tired.

  One day Mrs. Willoughby told my mother she thought it would be nice for her to meet some English people. My mother was surprised and gratified. Mrs. Willoughby said she had invited the vicar’s cook to take her tea with my mother and father on their next Sunday off.

  It was a very wet afternoon. Mrs. MacGuire arrived at the back door on the dot of four. She was a stout, decent-looking middle-aged woman, dressed all in black. She let my father take her coat and galoshes but kept her hat on while my mother gave her tea at the kitchen table. She spoke with a heavy Irish brogue; my parents recognized only an occasional word of her conversation. My mother had baked a Viennese cake for her, which she understood Mrs. MacGuire to say was far too rich. Mrs. MacGuire asked for a piece of paper and pencil, so that she might write down for my mother how to make a good plain sponge. At five o’clock, Mrs. MacGuire put on her coat and galoshes and went home.

  After that, my parents always went out of the house on their free afternoons.

  On a morning late in May, my mother fell down the stairs. She was overworked and sleeping badly, and she came through the curtain onto the landing at the head of the back stairs and went headlong with a tremendous clatter. Mr. Willoughby came rushing from the front of the house to the second-floor landing and ran down after her, but by that time my mother had picked herself up and was sitting on a step resting her head on her arms. She heard Mr. Willoughby’s trembling voice say, “What happened?” My mother raised her head. Mr. Willoughby, in his pajamas, had turned his avenging eyes up to where my father stood, petrified, at the head of the stairs, looking down. “Tell me the truth!” cried Mr. Willoughby. “Was it a fight?”

  My mother explained that the fall had been an accident. She has told me how, through the dizziness and nausea, she wanted to stop talking, as if it were too much trouble—as if it were too late—to explain anything.

  And so the Willoughbys had put my parents in their place; the refugees belonged to the class of people who eat in the kitchen, sleep on cheap mattresses, and throw their wives down the stairs in an argument—which goes to show that people have, after all, an innate sense of justice and cannot with equanimity be served by their fellows when these too closely resemble themselves.

  My parents were meanwhile adjusting their image of their masters. “She has no sense of humor,” said my mother. “She doesn’t know any geography,” said my father, “and the naive
questions that he asks me about the Nazis!” “They don’t know how to eat,” said my mother. “Do you remember the time I made them an Apfelstrudel and they asked for custard to put over it?” “They don’t understand,” said my parents, and so they put the English in their place.

  But my mother had a difficulty; she liked Mrs. Willoughby. She liked to see her on her way into the garden, wearing her blue-green wool kerchief that made her eyes more astonishingly blue, and there was about this thin, trim lady a quiet toughness, a presence, a capability in the firm, easy way she handled the reins of her household that was new to my mother and that she admired.

  Even Mrs. Willoughby’s obtuseness was incorruptible. She came into the kitchen on a Sunday when it was raining too hard for my parents to leave the house and said, “Oh, Mrs. Groszmann! Since you are here, maybe you wouldn’t mind bringing in our tea?”

  My mother minded it very much. She acquiesced in silent outrage. At the door, Mrs. Willoughby turned back. “But first why don’t you come up and get the linens to make up your little girl’s bed,” she said. “It’s this Thursday she’s coming, isn’t it?”

  My mother followed Mrs. Willoughby to the linen closet, vowing never to think an ungrateful thought about any English person again. “Not these,” said the lady, laying some folded sheets in my mother’s arms. “These are our good sheets, and you don’t want to get her used to this kind of thing. Set them down on the tallboy.” With my mother’s help, Mrs. Willoughby emptied the linen closet till she came to a pile of rust-stained sheets in the back. “There,” Mrs. Willoughby said, “and you and Groszmann had better take the morning off, too, and go up to London to fetch the little girl.”