by Lore Segal
“I’ll write tomorrow,” said my mother.
“You aren’t going down again tonight, are you?”
“I’m going to stay right here and go to bed. Look, I’ll show you how tired I am.” She pulled her hair down over her eyes and stiffened her legs and let her arms hang rag-doll fashion.
When I looked in on my father the next day, Mrs. Bauer was in despair in the kitchen. “He’s laid supper on the kitchen table. He laid it at noon today!”
“It’s for your mother,” said my father when I went upstairs to argue with him. “You said I never think of her, but you see I do.”
“But you can’t monopolize a kitchen table all afternoon and evening in a house where there are five other people.”
“Franzi has as good a right to the table as anybody else,” said my father. “Why are you putting your hat on again? Aren’t you going to stay with me?”
I had turned toward the wardrobe mirror to fix my hair under my school hat.
“Why are you angry with me?”
I did not answer. In the mirror I saw him coming up close behind me.
“Would you like to have my crocodile belt for your own?”
“Mind!” I said, stepping away from the mirror as if to get a better distance, but it was really to force him to back away, and though I knew that his feet were not quick enough to realign themselves, his failing to move infuriated me so that I turned and put a hand against his chest and pushed him. Astonished, I saw the astonishment on his face as he felt himself keeling over. Falling, it seemed to me, with infinite slowness, he struck the foot of the bed with his shoulder and slid almost gently to the floor. I knelt on the floor. I said, “You fell over.” We heard footsteps already on the landing. My mother, who had arrived downstairs in time to hear the thump, came running in. “You probably didn’t know he was behind you,” she said.
“I didn’t,” I said.
“And you couldn’t step out of the way fast enough, Igo, could you?”
“I couldn’t,” said my father.
“You think he is well enough to go to work?” my mother asked Dr. Adler when he came to give my father his weekly checkup.
“Well, how do you feel?” the doctor asked my father and patted him on the knee.
My father sat with his shirt open. He lifted his right shoulder and turned his palm out in a questioning gesture. He smiled embarrassedly and looked at my mother.
“He walks better, don’t you think?” said my mother.
“He does, he does,” said the doctor.
“I just wish he ate more.”
“You must eat more,” said the doctor to my father. “Eat, eat,” and his right hand made motions of putting food into his mouth while he nodded encouragingly.
My father lifted his right shoulder and turned his hand out.
“You be a good fellow,” said the doctor, and patted my father’s knee. “You’ve got a wonderful little wife to look after you. And I don’t want you to get too tired, either,” he said to my mother at the door. “Get some rest, now.”
“Did you hear what the doctor said? You’re supposed to rest,” I said to my mother.
“I’m going to,” she said. “I’m going to the kitchen right now to have a cup of coffee.”
“I’ll make it. You sit down. Look at the way you’re sitting, as if you’re ready to jump up any moment. Only half of you is on the seat.”
“That’s the only half that’s tired,” said my mother.
“Oh, Mum-my! Why do you have to play for those singing lessons? Mrs. Dillon says you wouldn’t have to pay the one pound ten a month for my schooling. The Committee would pay it.”
“But I want to pay it. And I like to play the piano.”
“And why did you tell the firewarden you would watch one night for Daddy as well as one night for yourself?”
“Because Daddy can’t get up every time the siren goes off and walk around the streets at night.”
“But they wouldn’t expect him to. You could get a certificate from Dr. Adler.”
“Darling, that’s not the point. We’re refugees. It’s important for us not to shirk anything we can do. You see, they even suspend our curfew for the nights we are on duty.”
“But the doctor said you are supposed to rest. You’re doing too much.”
“Darling, would you really like to help me?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t nag me. I promise you if I feel I am getting too tired I will stop playing for the singing lessons. All right?”
But I could no more stop nagging my mother than she could stop jumping, and that week Mrs. Bauer had the flu and my mother volunteered to do her fire watching for her. I remember, on the way back to Adorato I cried about it.
I watched my mother in those days the same way I watched my father, imagining their bodies under the skin, rather like the intricate anatomical drawings I remembered from Paul’s medical books, only with moving parts, all liable, momentarily, to go wrong. Remembering how in Vienna my father had always fallen ill when I was not expecting it, I kept myself in a state of alarm. I kept expecting calamities as if this would prevent them from happening. While I lay in bed at night, whenever I remembered during the school day, and always on my way over to Clinton Lodge, I invented awful things that might be happening to my father, precisely where, and in every circumstantial detail. In this way I kept up a sort of intimacy with my father’s continuous malaise. I can imagine as if it were a memory out of my own life the afternoon he spent in the men’s room at the local milk office, afraid to come out in case he had to vomit again. It was his first day there as a file clerk. He told my mother, and my mother must have told me, that by the end of the morning he was feeling very ill. A girl was explaining the filing system to him when he began to retch. He said, “Excuse me,” and stumbled among the chairs toward the door of the men’s room. The door was locked from inside. My father prayed, Please, don’t let me be sick here, knowing the girl’s surprised eyes were watching at his back, and then toppled backward as the door opened into his face. “Whoa, there!” said the man coming out, and put a hand up to steady my father, who pushed past him into the lavatory and locked the door and vomited. Afterward, he felt better, though his legs trembled and his body was heaving the way it did when he was going to have an asthma attack, and he quickly pushed up the window. The cold air turned the perspiration icy on the exposed surfaces of his face, neck, and the backs of his hands. He concentrated, as if listening to the complex of violent and terrifying sensations, wondering if he was about to have another stroke. Someone outside rattled the doorknob; rattled again and again, and went away. My father was breathing more quietly. He washed his hands under cold running water, thinking he could go back into the outside office, when he suddenly retched. All afternoon, people came to the door and went away again. At half past five, when everybody had left, my father let himself out and came into the street. He was afraid of collapsing there; he wanted to, but instead he kept pushing himself blindly forward. Then he turned a corner and saw my mother and me coming down the hill toward him.
I had met my mother on my way back from school, walking rapidly, with her coat thrown around her shoulders. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing, darling. I’m going for a walk.”
“A walk? Have you eaten?”
“Not yet. I just thought I might go a little way to meet your father, and, darling, let’s not have an argument about it. Please! It’s his first day at work.”
“But Daddy’s all right. The doctor said he could go to work. You don’t have to worry every minute you don’t see him.”
“I don’t worry. That’s him now.” We stopped, listening to the slurping footsteps and the tapping of a stick around the corner.
“That’s not Daddy. That’s an old man,” I said, and saw him come into sight—my father, with his cane—and I blushed deeply. “Oh, I thought you meant that old man over there on the other side of the street. That’s who I thoug
ht you meant.”
My father had stopped to breathe at the bottom of the hill. His raincoat collar was turned under behind his neck, and his fly was unbuttoned.
“Igo!” my mother called.
He saw us and his one-sided, wasted face beamed. There was egg stuck to his badly razored left cheek.
I turned back with them, up the hill, but my father seemed unable to move his left leg. He stopped.
“Maybe we should take a taxi,” said my mother, “but it’s only two blocks. It seems silly. You see that holly over the wall? We’ll walk that far and then we’ll rest again. You remember, Igo, in Vienna, Lore always had enough of walking within a block of our house and started crying, ‘I want to be home now!’ Here is the holly. Rest, Igo. Are you all right?”
The upper part of my father’s body heaved profoundly with each breath.
“There’s a taxi,” said my mother. “But it’s only a block and a half now. Now let’s make it as far as Miss Douglas’s gate.”
My father worked in the milk office for a month. One Sunday morning, while I was dusting in Miss Douglas’s drawing room, he had another stroke, in the bathroom at Clinton Lodge, falling against the door, which was locked from the inside—a circumstance I had failed to imagine, and at a moment when I had forgotten to think about him. It was a relief for the next weeks to be able at any moment of the day to think of him safe in a hospital.
One evening, just as my mother had hung up her coat and taken off her shoes and put the kettle on for a cup of coffee, a man rang the front doorbell and asked for her.
He smiled at my mother. “You Mrs. Groszmann? The doctor wants you to come over to the hospital, Ma’am.”
“Is my husband very bad?” asked my mother, finding her coat to put around her shoulders.
The man held the door. We hurried alongside. “Lucky you live so near the hospital,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, we are lucky,” said my mother.
“Cold,” said the man. “Only a quarter to nine, and looks like blooming midnight.”
A cruel wind blew across the open courtyard between the porter’s lodge and the huge hospital doors. It whipped the skirts around our legs. Inside, the elevator was on the ground floor, chained open, and there seemed to be no one in attendance, so we ran up the stairs. The doors of my father’s ward were closed. A nurse, who looked hardly older than I, came out.
“Nurse,” said my mother, “I’m supposed to see my husband.”
“Not now, you can’t. It’s not visiting time now.”
“They sent for me. Where’s Sister?”
“Ooh, I don’t know where she is,” said the little nurse, looking up and down the empty corridor. “She’ll be along, I expect. I have to go to work in this other ward.” She went on her way.
My mother opened the door. The only light came from the faint blue lamps down the center of the ceiling, but we could make out the hump of my father’s knees in his cot. My mother started toward him, but it was a strange man lying in my father’s bed. He opened his eyes, saw us, passed his tongue over his lips, and closed his eyes again.
Sister was already walking toward us, with the young nurse coming behind, her hands clapped over her mouth and giggling. “Mrs. Groszmann, your husband has been moved to another ward. I left a message at the porter’s lodge. Silly of them.”
“How bad is he?” asked my mother.
“Nurse here is going to work in your husband’s new ward, so you go along with her.”
We followed the nurse through a maze of corridors that led to the older buildings. I remember how her head bobbed up and down before us, and how she drew her hand along the wall and swung around the corners.
There was a strange Sister waiting for us outside this other ward. “Is that Mrs. Groszmann? Mrs. Groszmann, the doctor would like to see you.”
“How is my husband?”
“If you’ll wait in here, nurse will bring you a chair.”
We were shown into a bare little cloakroom. A mufti coat and a Sister’s scarlet-lined cloak hung on pegs. On the wall were notices: “Please Turn Out the Lights.” “The Hospital Is Not Responsible for Property Left in This Room.”
“I wonder what happened to the chair,” said my mother.
I went to stand in the doorway, looking out into the blind corridor with its bare electric bulb reflected in brown linoleum and in the shining yellow oil paint of the walls. A door opposite was thrown open, and I saw a kitchen, steam rising over a sink, a nurse sitting on a table swinging her legs. Someone was laughing. The door closed.
There were people coming toward us—the Sister, and a young doctor I did not know. I pulled back into the room. They passed the door and then stopped. They were talking just outside. I could see the doctor’s sleeve. The sleeve disappeared, and then the doctor was in the room with us. “All right, you can go in to your husband now,” he said.
“How bad is he, Doctor?” my mother asked.
“He had another stroke, and he was calling for you all afternoon. We’re surprised he’s still alive. He’s got a heart like an ox” is what I thought the doctor said, and I looked at him in amazement. I had the impression that he was shouting at my mother. “Dr. Adler left word that you could stay the night. Sister here will make the arrangements, and I’ll be on duty. You can call me. Or call Sister. You’ll be all right.”
My father lay stretched on a bed with his head in a net of tubes and bottles and tanks. His eyes showed slits of the white eyeballs. I wondered if he was dead, but then I saw there was a small, furious pulse beating at the base of his throat.
“Here’s a chair,” said the Sister, “and you can take one from that bed. I’ll be at the desk in the corner, behind the screen, if you need anything. Would you like a nice cup of tea?”
“Yes, Sister, please,” said my mother. “You are so kind.”
“That’s right. You make yourself comfortable. The night always seems long.”
“Mummy,” I whispered, “what does the doctor mean about Daddy having a heart like an ox?”
“I think he said ‘oxheart.’ That’s a medical word, though I don’t just know what it means.”
The little nurse who had shown us the way came with a cup of tea for my mother. “I put sugar in, and I never even asked you.”
“I don’t take it usually, but this will be lovely,” my mother said.
“No, you wait. I’ll get you another. Always do everything wrong, that’s me.” She bore the cup away, and that was the last we saw of it.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Twenty-five minutes to ten. Darling, why don’t you go home? You have exams coming.”
“And you have to go to work. I’m staying as long as you’re staying.”
I shifted on the hard chair. The man in the bed next to my father’s raised himself on an arm and slapped his pillow. Behind him the great room was full of the impatient movements of bodies looking for relief, and of noises—coughing, snuffling, and a small sound something between a whimper and a laugh. The ward was getting hotter, and the heat and the noise joined into one swelling roar, and I jerked myself out of sleep. “What time is it?”
“Five minutes to ten.”
Around midnight, my mother took an envelope out of her purse and began to write on it, smiling to herself.
“What are you writing?”
She passed it to me. It said, “ WDYGH?”
“What?” I asked.
“It says, ‘Why don’t you go home?’”
“Lend me the pencil.” I wrote, “I’m SALA you’re s.”
My mother smiled and put the envelope back in her purse. At half past twelve, my father opened his eyes and asked what day of the month it was. My mother called the nurse, and the nurse called the Sister, who brought the young doctor. They took his pulse and touched his cheek and stood around the bed, but he lifted his right hand with the old impatient gesture and brushed them all away. My father had put off dying for that night.
When we
came out of the hospital, the streets were turning a weird electric blue. Trees and houses were collecting their bulk and outline. It was very cold. The milkman at the corner was rattling the empties. He touched his cap to us.
I looked at my mother and saw that there were tears running down her face. “Darling, I promise you something,” she said. “If Daddy dies, I won’t be unhappy any more.” Now that she had begun to talk, she began to sob. “I’ll cheer up very quickly, I promise. You won’t have to worry about me any more. It’s just that now he is so poor.”
I considered the probability of my father’s dying, with terror, because I might have no tears for him and the emptiness of my unnatural heart would be exposed to my mother and proved to myself.
But it seemed my father was not going to die, after all. He began to get better—to sit, to walk again, and to want my mother to take him home.
One day, old Dr. Adler turned up at Clinton Lodge.
“Is my husband worse?” cried my mother. “I only left him an hour ago.”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Could I come in? I was just leaving the hospital and wanted to see you a moment. Maybe you would make me a cup of coffee, too? Your husband is doing very nicely and we’re going to be sending him to a convalescence home soon. I’ve been talking to Mrs. Dillon, of the Refugee Committee, and it’s being taken care of.”
“Ah, how good you all are!” said my mother.
“We were also talking about you, and both Mrs. Dillon and I think that you should take a holiday.”
“Maybe when my husband is better—”
“Mrs. Dillon has been in touch with Mr. Harvey, where you work, and they want you to take a week off beginning this Friday.”
“Thank you, but I don’t think I can afford, right now—”
“Here’s the address of a house that belongs to one of the doctors on the hospital staff,” said the doctor. “He and his family are going to be away for a week, and they want you to go and stay there. There’s a German housekeeper, who will look after you. Here is the bus schedule. I’ve marked Friday afternoon.…”
I visited my mother on Sunday and found her shelling peas. “I thought you were going to rest!” I said.