Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  Mrs. Hooper excused herself and went out, and presently she came back and said to Gwenda, “You go out and talk to him.” She said to us, “You’ll have to excuse Albert; he says he’s too mucky from work to come in. He’s shy, see,” she said, “but he’s a good boy. He’s got ever such a nice job down at the gasworks and he makes good money.” She seemed at once to be trying to hear and trying to cover up the fierce whispering and hissing in the back. Gwenda came in rubbing her shoulder.

  “What did he do?” Mrs. Hooper asked.

  “He didn’t do anything,” said Gwenda, and she sat down with her chin trembling. Her eyes filled slowly with tears.

  “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing, Ma!”

  My mother said they must be going to catch the bus back to lllford. She took Mrs. Hooper’s hands, and she said she wished her English were better to thank Mrs. Hooper with. Mrs. Hooper said for me to take my parents out the front way. “See, he’s washing himself,” she said, nodding toward the back of the house.

  I said good-by to my parents outside the gate. My father was crying with a tiny whimpering sound; my mother’s face had the familiar shrunken look and great sore eyes and lips. My father said he thought he felt ill, and she walked him away. I remember their backs moving off down the road together—the large, heavy, stooping person of my father propelled by my small, plump mother, who had given him her arm and seemed at once to be holding him up and looking lovingly around into his face as if she were holding on to him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Mellbridge”: Albert

  I went into my new home and closed the street door and stood in the hall. The door into the living room-kitchen, in the back, stood open and I wondered if I was supposed to go inside. I could see a square table so large it left only a margin for chairs. On one wall was a tall dresser with dishes, and on the opposite side, a grate with a fire. A large yellow dog in the yard was leaping at the window and barking. Gwenda and Mrs. Hooper were both addressing the closed door to the scullery, which doubled as bathroom.

  “Come on, Albert!” Mrs. Hooper said. “Rover wants to come in and I got to go.”

  “Albert,” said Gwenda, “come on, open up. Ma’s got to get outside to the toilet. Come on, now! Albert?”

  “Oh, there you are,” said Mrs. Hooper, seeing me in the doorway. “What was your name again?”

  “Lore,” I said.

  “Lorry, eh? Oh. Well, you go on upstairs. Gwenda, take her up, and mind you don’t worry Albert’s things.” She dropped her voice as if she were speaking behind the back of a sick person. “He’s upset, see!”

  Gwenda was fourteen, three years older than I. “Your ma and dad, they work for a family, don’t they?” she said as we walked up the narrow stairs.

  “Yes,” I said. “But in Vienna my father was chief accountant in a bank and my mother plays the piano. She studied in the Vienna Music Academy. What does your father do?”

  “Dad’s a stoker on the railway and he belongs to the union.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Does that Albert live here, too?”

  “Yes. They adopted him out of the orphanage three years ago. Albert’s all right. He’s going to marry Dawn. She’s my sister.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Sixteen. In there is my ma and my dad’s room.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Hooper’s bedroom was in front, over the parlor. Gwenda and Dawn shared the room over the kitchen, and the room over the scullery was for me. My room had a wardrobe in it and a bed. It had linoleum on the floor, and was narrow as a passage. (I remember I had a recurring dream, in those days, of apartments vast as the halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and in my dream, rooms seemed continually unfolding before me.) I went to the window and looked out over the yard and the strip of back garden. It was as wide as the half house, with a flagstone path running the thirty-foot length. At the foot of the garden, beyond the privet hedge run wild, I could make out, in the gathering darkness, an open space, a sloping field. “What’s that?”

  “That’s the playing field of the County School,” said Gwenda. “That’s where all the snooty girls go. They wear green uniforms, the stuck-up things.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “To the Central School, down by the station. Ma says when school starts I’m going to take you.”

  “Why don’t you go to the County School?” I said.

  “What, me!” said Gwenda. “With them and their la-di-da talk!”

  I didn’t say anything then, but I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to go to the stuck-up school and talk la-di-da myself.

  Gwenda said, “This used to be Albert’s room. He’s going to sleep on the settee in the parlor. You can unpack, and I’ll take some of his things down.”

  After she had gone, I started to take dresses out of my suitcase and hang them in the wardrobe, but I was too impatient to finish, what with all that I was probably missing downstairs. I kept hearing the dog bark and footsteps in the alley. Doors opened and shut. Voices and dance music from the wireless came up through the thin floor boards. I took some drawing paper and crayons out of my suitcase and, thus fortified, went down into the kitchen full of people.

  The light was on. The wireless was blaring “A Tisket, a Tasket” so loud under the low ceiling that I blinked. A girl at the table was eating tangerine sections out of a tin. She looked a little like Gwenda, except that she had a long chin, and every feature was bigger and thicker. She wore her hair like most girls that year, in two horns, one over each temple, with the back hair falling long and loose, and this she kept swinging away from the boy, Albert, who stood behind her trying to get hold of it. She said, “Tch, oh, ALBERT! Hello,” she said to me, and stared a little.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Albert was glaring just past my head. He walked around the side of the table by the fire and pulled a chair out and sat leaning so far backward on two legs that we all gasped. Then he put his two feet on the table.

  In the open scullery door, a man was unbuttoning his collarless shirt. His face was black with soot and dirt. When he smiled, his teeth showed white, with a little gap between the two front ones, which looked very friendly. I liked him. He seemed to be looking and smiling at me. “How are you?” he said.

  “Come on, Gwenda,” said Mrs. Hooper. “Hand your dad the towel so he can wash up and I can give him his supper.”

  “How can I?” said Gwenda. “With Albert in the way.” With his head against the mantel and his feet on the table, Albert was straddling the margin.

  “You let Albert be,” said Mrs. Hooper, “and come around the other side. Dawn, get up and let her through.”

  “Tch, oh!” said Dawn. She got up. She came around the table and lowered the blaring wireless. The relief was blissful. Albert reached over and turned it back up and louder.

  Mrs. Hooper was setting a place for Mr. Hooper’s supper, and he came in from the scullery with his face scrubbed and his hair flattened down with water and a clean blue-and-white striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up his brown arms. Mrs. Hooper brought him a plate of meat, potatoes, greens, and gravy, and sat down beside him with her arms on the table and watched him eat and told him everything that had happened—how my mother hadn’t played half beautiful on the piano, and how Albert would not come in even to say good evening.

  “Oh, Albert!” said Dawn. “You are a pill.”

  Mrs. Hooper said, “Let him be,” and Dawn said, “Look, Dad, with his feet all over the tablecloth.”

  But Mr. Hooper wiped his mouth with his napkin and moved to the armchair between the window and the fireplace and grinned at me before he pulled the paper up between himself and his family.

  Albert must have known that he had been a pill. Next evening, he came home from work with a present he said he had bought with his pay money. It was a game with cards and pictures, and Albert explained that it was played like lotto, but Mr. Hooper was having his supper on one side of the table, and I had my
drawing things spread out. I was doing a village in perspective, with houses, streets, and cars. I had been drawing this for years, and I could do it pretty well. Gwenda, who was watching, said she wanted to draw, too, and I gave her paper and lent her some crayons.

  “You’re late,” Mrs. Hooper said to Albert.

  “Well, I had to go all the way in town, didn’t I, to get the game!”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Hooper. “Go in the scullery and get washed so I can get your supper.” But Albert said words under his breath and Mrs. Hooper told him not to swear. Albert found some dance music on the wireless and turned it up so high that the set rattled, and he walked out into the scullery and banged the door. “He’s upset,” Mrs. Hooper whispered. I was shocked at this violence and afraid that it was somehow my fault, and I kept my head down when Albert came back, with his yellow hair wet and jutting over his low forehead and his face all red from the water, but he sat down across from Gwenda and me and ate his supper like a lamb.

  I did another drawing. This one had houses, streets, a church with spire, and even a village square. Gwenda was doing a house with a fence. Dawn stood watching. Albert asked Dawn to come and sit beside him, but she said no, she wanted to draw. I was hurt for Albert. I thought if he had asked me I would have gone to sit beside him. Albert finished his supper, and afterward he came and stood behind Dawn and stroked her hair and bothered her, she said. “Tch, oh! Da-ad!” she said. “Tell Albert to let me be. Daaaad!”

  “Albert, let Dawn be,” said Mr. Hooper, from his armchair.

  “I’m not doing anything. You tell her to let me be.”

  “Dawn, let Albert be,” said Mr. Hooper, and settled back into his newspaper.

  I knew that Albert would have liked to be drawing, too, and my heart thumped, but I was too shy and too afraid of him to offer my paper and crayons, and Albert was too shy to ask.

  “What’s those there supposed to be?” he asked Gwenda, in a mean voice.

  “Birds,” said Gwenda, “on the roof of the house.”

  “Birds,” said Albert. “Yeah!”

  Gwenda said, “Albert is going to play goalie for his team tomorrow, aren’t you, Albert?”

  “Yeah,” said Albert, and then he went and sat down, and he didn’t put his feet up.

  Except for Mr. Hooper, who had the day off and went early to work on his allotment, where he grew our vegetables, we all went to stand in the drizzling rain to watch Albert lose the soccer game for his team.

  “He’s ever so good,” said Mrs. Hooper. “The ground is slippery for him.”

  Dawn stayed at the sidelines with her mother, like a young lady, but Gwenda and I kept Albert company behind the goalposts. Every time the ball came at him he would take off and throw the length of his body straight over the ball, which shot into the goal below him. We suffered for him and we would go and help clean him up. I held Gwenda’s handbag while she wiped the mud out of his eyes with her handkerchief. “That was a good try,” we would say. “You couldn’t have saved that one, never in a million years.”

  We walked home with Albert between us. “You were ever so good,” we all said. Dawn supported him on her arm, looking admiringly round into his face. “That other team,” she said, “they didn’t know half the time what they were doing.”

  I saw an opportunity to get into Albert’s good graces. “And they were all so big,” I said.

  “They weren’t, either, not all that big,” said Dawn. “Albert isn’t all that short.”

  “The ground wasn’t half slippery!” Mrs. Hooper said.

  But Albert knew that he was too short for goalie, and that he had loused up the play. All afternoon, he kept trying to be funny. Gwenda and I had gone up to my room, and she was standing by the window with her back to the door. A thundering and sharp slapping sound came up the stairs, making her jump, and a huge headless shadow appeared in the doorway, its arms raised. Gwenda turned red and then white, and began to tremble and to cry. I began to cry, too. I don’t know why, because I hadn’t a moment’s doubt that it portended anything worse than Albert with his head stuck inside his back-to-front jacket. My heart never missed a beat to see him standing in my doorway, growling and cracking a leather belt like a whip. I howled to keep Gwenda company. Mrs. Hooper came running up the stairs and said, “Oh, Albert, now look what you’ve done!” and sat down on the edge of my bed and folded Gwenda under one elbow and me under the other and rocked us on her soft bosom. We roared.

  Albert backed away, muttering about trying to have a little joke, God damn it.

  “And don’t you swear in this house!” Mrs. Hooper said. She shepherded us tenderly downstairs, where we paraded our tear-stained faces before Albert. Albert was walking around the scullery. Afterward, he went out and came back with a new card game for everyone to play, but we said we were too upset, for goodness’ sake, to play games, and to put that thing away.

  I remember the shelf on the bottom right-hand side of the kitchen dresser, where all Albert’s games were kept. I had half an expectation that the family would sit down one evening around the table and all play together, but always Mr. Hooper removed to his chair and his paper, and Mrs. Hooper wandered between the kitchen and the scullery, fixing things and worrying. Gwenda and I drew at the table, Dawn quarreled with Albert, and Albert fiddled with the wireless, following the programs of dance music around the dial. Albert’s wireless was a real pain to me. Except for one tune that had no lyrics and was called “In an Eighteenth Century Drawing Room.” I once waited a whole Thursday afternoon when my parents were visiting to have it come on for my mother to hear. “Don’t you like that?” I said. “Listen to this one. Do you like it?”

  “Mein Gott!” said my mother. “That’s a Mozart piano sonata. In C major. I used to play it! What have they done!”

  “Isn’t it terrible!” I said, thankful that I had been saved from confessing how pretty, how marvelously orderly and sweet it sounded in my ears.

  Albert had come in to take his tea with us; he sat with his shy, sulky eyes lowered, not saying a word so long as my parents were there, but afterward he danced around the table, singing my tune in a facetious falsetto. I removed my eyes from stocky Albert with his hunched shoulders and slightly bowed legs mincing a minuet, to spare him and myself, as one looks away from a person in an embarrassing predicament.

  I usually tried to not see Albert. I used to watch Gwenda, who would talk to him and look at the permanent redness about his nostrils and the virulent pink-and-purple eruptions on his adolescent skin without appearing to be revolted. This puzzled me about her.

  Once, Albert and I happened to arrive at the front gate simultaneously, and there was nothing for it but to walk up the narrow alley to the back door together. I kept hard to my side of the wall to avoid contact with his person, from which, as he moved beside me, there came a body warmth. All the while, I kept up a mindless conversation, which, out of my confusion, sounded like flirtation. “Listen to that dog,” I said. “He knows we are coming. I wonder if he knows it’s you and me.” Albert said not a word. There was a moment’s confusion over the matter of the back-door handle, to which each of us had raised a hand, and our eyes accidentally met. Before I could avert mine, I had seen, with surprise, where I had expected pure hatred—for had I not turned him out of his bed and room?—a mere surface of blue, an insult. I walked into the kitchen ahead of him. The house was silent. There was no one home, and, terrified at finding myself alone in a room with Albert, I murmured that I had drawers to clean and ran upstairs to my room.

  Downstairs, the wireless shouted. I sat on my bed. I dreamed a daydream: I was looking Albert in the face. I was saying, “Don’t you know that everyone would like you better if you were nicer and better behaved?” In my dream, Albert was converted and became a good boy and a gentleman, all due to me.

  I stayed upstairs till I heard Mr. Hooper come home, and then I went down to the kitchen. I looked surreptitiously at Mr. Hooper’s eyes. He had brown eyes, not alie
n, chilly, Christian eyes like Albert. I knew that Mr. Hooper was Christian, too, but not a blue-eyed Christian. To all intents, Mr. Hooper and Gwenda were Jewish; I adopted them.

  Gwenda I liked awfully. The only quarrel I remember having with her resulted from our drawing together, and was the occasion of my first political insight. Gwenda now had her own crayons, and they were a different combination of colors from mine, so we figured out a system of exchange: If she borrowed my pink, I would borrow, say, her sky-blue. However, if my pink, which I never used, was long and her sky-blue, which was much in demand, was short, I would also borrow her green, to make up for the difference in length. The complication arose if she needed her sky-blue back while I was still using her green, because then she would have to make amends for the blue with another crayon of equal length, and we forgot which was whose and there were words. I don’t know to which one of us was given the revelation that we should pool our resources and each use out of the common property according to need. We got a big box and put all our crayons in it. For the rest of the evening, we went about with our arms around each other. Next day came the counter-revelation: both of us wanted to do our skies at the same time, and there were words. Still, it seems to me that Gwenda and I were tender and decent with each other, and as the weeks went on, we were friends. If one cried, the other cried, too.

  Once, on the day before a Sunday visit to my parents, Albert spoiled the village I had done to take to them as a present. It had houses, streets, church spires, a church square, and even people walking in it, and I had left it upside down, wanting the Hoopers to admire it without wanting to seem to want it, so that it was just possibly an accident that Albert took it to use for a shoe wiper. I was momentarily pained at the loss and started to cry. Gwenda came running to see what was the matter, and, on being told, she cried so sincerely that I wondered if the situation were really as sad as all that. That was the day Albert brought home Monopoly.