Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  (I look back to the generosity of this scholarship with amazement: It paid my full tuition and “maintenance,” inquiring into neither my status as a foreigner nor my future intentions. I was asked to send in a semiannual report as to my continued attendance at the college and a statement of my needs for rent, food, clothing, books, fares, and miscellaneous items, which were totaled and sent me in the form of monthly checks.)

  It seems to me that I spent my three college years walking through London, the elegant shopping districts, the picture galleries, the churches and secondhand bookstores. My state of mind was near euphoria, alternating with a painful sort of desperation because I had no one with whom to be in love, and over all there hung a cloud of guilt because of the studying I was not doing. I loved my lecturers but studied the variety of their performances instead of the subjects of the lectures. Instead of taking notes, I doodled loose-leaf books full of faces, dancing figures, elaborate houses—whole townships. I read, but nothing to its conclusion and never what had been assigned. In my first term, I decided to ground my present studies in a comparative survey of world literature of the past. Beginning with the orient, I came across a quote from the diaries of Lady Murasaki. Writing about her school career, she says: “It was not long before I repented having … distinguished myself, for person after person assured me that even boys become very unpopular if it is discovered that they are fond of their books. For a girl, of course, it is worse.… I became careful to conceal the fact … with the result that to this day I am shockingly clumsy with my brush.” I closed the book, immensely excited: What my own experience had revealed about modern middle-class England appeared to have been true in the court circles of eleventh-century Japan. Lady Murasaki and I were two women with an unfortunate intellectual tendency. Where she had tried to conceal her books, I had tried to take the curse off mine by reading messily. In the beginning, I had had to work hard to unlearn the disciplined ambition of my early years in the Vienna schools. In my first year at Allchester High School, I had won the prize in penmanship out of sheer habit, but by my Upper-Fourth year I was becoming so clumsy with my pen that my writing was all but illegible, and in the Lower Fifth I was able to boast a “C” in spelling. I was surprised that my classmates did not seem to like me any the better; somewhere I had miscalculated. My best friend, Margaret, a clever, elegant English girl, kept on getting brilliant marks, yet she was always first to be chosen on any team.

  I had always assumed that when I got to the university I would really start to work. I thought that any moment now I would go on reading Lady Murasaki’s diary, instead of looking out of the library window to where the trees dipped their dark wet branches into the mist and a big white goose, rising out of the pewter-colored lake, waddled through the iron gate into the college grounds and came up the path toward the library. She started up the steps with a hop and a flap, and came face to face with Dr. Milsom, our professor of Middle English, coming out of the building. Up went the professor’s arms, black briefcase flying; out went the goose’s white wings. Neck stretched, she turned, half-flying down the steps, and did not stop till she had reached the middle of the wet lawn, where she shook and chatted with herself. The professor, having regained his composure, walked toward the gate, raising his hat to Monique, who came on brilliant red legs like some tropical bird, high-stepping up the college path. (It is hard to convey what a sudden stroke of color can do to an English townscape. I remember, sometime late that year, coming out of the park into Baker Street and seeing, outside the underground station, a cart piled high with peaches. The peddler, his hands deep in his ragged coat pockets, stared at the circle of rush-hour Londoners collected on the wet pavement, staring at the fruit that burned in the greenish October dusk with a light absorbed in some other time and place.)

  When I came out of the library, Monique called to me to wait for her. “Look at them,” she said, pointing around the grounds full of women in uniform mackintoshes, flat-heeled walking shoes, and kerchiefs tied under their chins. “Who would have thought English women dress as badly as people always say? Restores your faith in prejudice, doesn’t it? In New York,” she continued in her attractive husky contralto, “we wear raincoats because it’s so British, but we keep sending them to the cleaners, whereas now I see they are supposed to look filthy.”

  “That’s because the English don’t wear mackintoshes to be stylish but to keep dry,” I said, “and it never stops raining long enough to have them cleaned.”

  “There!” said Monique. “There! That’s what I mean! Did you really think it would rain continually in England?”

  “I didn’t have the opportunity to form prejudices,” I said. “I came here when I was a child of ten so I’m about fifty per cent English myself.”

  “Fifty per cent? Ah!” Monique said. “You’re one hundred and fifty per cent English. It’s just that hundred per cent that will always elude you and me.”

  In our khaki room, my mother met me with the news that she had found a job. She was going to be housekeeper to an old German gentleman, a Professor Schmeidig.

  “Mu-mmy! You said you were going to look for a restaurant job. You promised you weren’t going back to private service!”

  “This is different, Lorle. I’m going to be a sort of companion-housekeeper. The London restaurants don’t need any more Viennese cooks. And the professor is old and ill and he does need somebody.”

  “So, you’re going to start all over again, nursing a sick man!”

  “Oh, he’s not sick like that,” my mother said. “It’s not the same thing as with your father. This man is a stranger to me. I go in at eight in the morning, tidy up the flat—which is quite small and easy to clean—do the shopping, prepare his meals, and at five I’m off. I don’t even have to stay while he eats his supper. He wants to meet you. I told him all about your scholarship.”

  I found Professor Schmeidig, in his ancient velvet smoking jacket, perfectly charming. He talked interestingly to me, comparing the English universities with the prewar universities of Germany, and he talked with a warm gallantry about my mother. He said he was lucky to get someone with a sense of humor, someone with whom one could talk about music. “And she’s going to play the piano for me. Sit down, Frau Groszmann.”

  “I wouldn’t be so unkind to you,” said my mother. “I haven’t practiced since the year before Hitler.” But she was persuaded to sit down at the small upright and had apologized her way through half a Chopin étude when I noticed that the professor’s head had fallen forward onto his chest. In sleep, his old man’s nose and chin looked enormous.

  My mother got up and put a pillow behind his back. “It’s his age,” she said as we tiptoed out. “He even falls asleep in the middle of his meals. You go on home, you have to study. I’ll just wait till he wakes up and set his supper on a tray.”

  My mother called me at seven o’clock to say I was not to worry. She was sitting with the professor until his son arrived from the other end of London. The poor professor had awakened feeling far from well, and she didn’t like to leave him.

  The next night my mother did not come home till almost eleven o’clock. “And you left the house before six this morning,” I said bitterly.

  “That’s only as long as he is feeling so unwell. What do you want me to do? I can’t leave him there, sitting alone, feeling ill and frightened.”

  “He has a son!” I said.

  “His son has a wife and three children. He can’t be with his father all the time.”

  “You’re too goddam good and nice,” I said, almost in tears, “and it drives me up the wall!”

  “It’s nothing to do with being good,” my mother said. “It makes me more comfortable to be with him than to be home worrying about him. Besides, Lorle, you have your studying in the evenings. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Go out a bit. Try and meet people. Look at Lizzi!”

  Lizzi Bauer, our friend from the old Clinton Lodge days, had been to see us. She had come to
London to see if she could hurry her son’s immigration to England, and to see, she said, after all those lonely years in Allchester, if she couldn’t meet someone. She told us how she had gone to Hyde Park and sat on a bench and noticed this very good-looking man, and how he had come and sat beside her and they had talked. He was a Russian—had been a lawyer back home—a fascinating man. He had been quite taken with her. They had walked around the Serpentine and he had held her hand. He had pleaded with her to come to dinner with him, but Lizzi had said that she was not the kind of person who goes to dinner with a man she meets on a park bench.

  “So what good did it do Lizzi to meet him?” my mother said.

  “It’s just that she, at least, tries!” I countered. “One of these days I’ll be going out … with someone,” I said, thinking of the young man with the Kings College scarf, whose back I had seen this morning disappearing into his door on the floor below. “And all the time I’m out, I’ll be thinking of you sitting here alone! You know that’s the one bad thing about you,” I explained to my mother. “You don’t even try to have a life of your own.”

  “Yes, I have that from my poor father,” my mother said. “We are both very dull. We’re no good at anything except doing our duty. But you don’t have to worry about my sitting alone. Lizzi has asked me to go to the Viennese Club with her the next time she comes to London. Just let me wait till the professor is feeling better.”

  The next day my mother was home by five-thirty. The professor was much better. “He wanted to give me his dead wife’s gold watch,” my mother said.

  “Where? Let me see!” I said.

  “Of course I couldn’t accept such a valuable present. It belongs to his son, and to his grandchildren. He says he wants to marry me,” my mother said, blushing and laughing self-consciously.

  “So?”

  “Lorle! You wouldn’t want me to marry a sick old man! Besides, he doesn’t really want me. He feels grateful that I stayed with him while he was ill. He is afraid to be alone.”

  “And why can’t you consider the possibility that he actually likes you for yourself?” I lectured my mother.

  “Anyway,” said my mother, “we want to go to the Dominican Republic as soon as you’re through with your studies.”

  “Mummy,” I said, “do we really want to go to the Dominican Republic?”

  “But don’t you want to see Paul and the grandparents again?”

  “Yes, but not in the Dominican Republic. Do you know I was asking around among my friends at college and no one except an American girl there has ever even heard of the place?”

  “But we’re not going to stay there. We’re going to wait there till our American quota comes through.”

  “Mummy,” I said. “Do we really want to go to America?”

  I had found a paragraph in Joyce Cary’s To Be a Pilgrim about England:

  On summer days like this, in Harvest, the rich essence of the ground seems charged upon the air so that even the blue of the sky is tainted like the water of a cow pond, enriched but no longer pure. It is as if a thousand years of cultivation had brought to all, trees, grass, crops, even the sky and sun, a special quality belonging only to very old countries.… The shape of a field, the turn of a lane have had the power to move me as if they were my children.

  It seemed to me that by the power this had to move me I was, at least by adoption, English. I copied it out, and what Cary wrote about “the new lands where the weather is as stupid as the trees, chance dropped, are meaningless,” and showed it to Monique. “My trouble is that I can’t apply for British nationality till I’m twenty-one and by that time I may be in America!” I complained.

  “You may like America better than you intend,” Monique said.

  “But I don’t want to like it,” I said. I kept bringing Monique examples of the naiveté of American politics and the crudity of its commercialism; I came across an American article about the Soviet Union illustrated with the kind of brutal line drawing that made every Russian into a monster.

  Monique said, “Ah, but I don’t think America need stand or fall by a weekly picture magazine, do you?”

  “No, but …” I said, outargued and amazed that an American should prove superior to me in sophistication.

  The Kings College student and I finally met at the corner of our block and walked home together. He said he had just this afternoon finished the last of his exams and now he couldn’t think what to do with himself. He was a Canadian, he said, on a year’s scholarship, and had spent all his time with his nose in a book. He wondered if I would show him around London, before he left for home, but the suggestion seemed to me to come too abruptly, out of too short an acquaintance; it didn’t seem a proper invitation. So I said, “Actually, now I have my exams coming up and should put my nose in a book. I’ve done nothing all year except walk around London.”

  Nevertheless, next day we went to the Tower. He said, wouldn’t London be nice if it didn’t rain all the time.

  “Well, I like London so much I even like the rain. I must have an affinity for damp and fog,” I said. I was afraid that I might be sounding too intelligent and he wouldn’t like me and would go away, and at the same time I was afraid that if I didn’t think of something intelligent to say he would get bored and go away. I wished I had stayed quietly at home.

  The following week we did Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Each time he came to pick me up I stalled, saying I ought to stay home and do some work, so as not to appear overeager.

  On Sunday it stopped raining and we took a walk along the Embankment. He was leaving for home at the end of the week. “Soon you’ll be going to the Dominican Republic,” he said. “With all this traveling, who knows, we might meet again.” He turned me around so that we stood face to face and put his hand on my shoulder, which embarrassed me. I said, snippily, “And if not in this life, we’re sure to meet in the next.” After a moment he dropped his hand. We walked on.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you,” he said. “What nom de plume are you going to use, so I can look out for your first book?”

  I looked at him as if he had been clairvoyant. “But how fascinating you should say that!” I cried. “How did you know I was going to be a writer?”

  “Why, you kept telling me and telling me!” he said.

  The next evening the Canadian student knocked at my door and asked if he might come in. I said, “Of course,” feeling awfully urbane, for I was alone—my mother was staying late with Professor Schmeidig, who was having another of his sick spells. “You’ll have to excuse me if I go on with my work. Exams start Wednesday.”

  “That’s all right. I’m dead-tired myself,” he said, flopping down on one of our brownish sofa beds. “I was packing all morning and running around London all afternoon, picking up my ticket, dispatching my luggage … Tomorrow morning I leave. Bring your book over here. Sit down by me.”

  I said no, I had to sit at the table where the light was better.

  He laid his head back against the pillow. I got out my book and writing things with a deal of fuss. When I turned around next time, the Canadian student was asleep. I was deeply offended and when he left, later, I said good-by offhandedly and would not look at him.

  Then I was in the middle of the end-of-year exams. Professor Milsom, who handed me back my papers, asked me if I had happened, in the course of my reading, to have come across the word “asyntaxis.” I had not.

  “Ah! No. Well, ‘asyntaxis’ describes a pathological condition which prevents the sufferer from organizing ideas into sentences.”

  “Yes, yes,” I cried excitedly, “I know just what you mean. I’ve been aware for some years of a progressive softening of my mind so that now, when I would like to pull myself together, there’s nothing to get hold of in the general consistency of much, except my own bootstraps.” I was delighted at my own description of my predicament, but Professor Milsom continued, with his head bent noddingly over my papers. “Well, well, well, inte
resting concept, ‘asyntaxis’! You might look it up in the dictionary. I do recommend to your notice, Miss Groszmann, the dictionary! I wouldn’t say that your paper is altogether without merit. I feel there might be interesting ideas here, if I could read them, and if they were expressed between periods with a full complement of verbs. Do let me recommend to your attention, Miss Groszmann, the full stop and the verb.”

  Toward the end of 1946 my grandfather had a heart attack. Paul wrote that it was not serious, my grandfather was recovering well, but my mother decided to go to the Dominican Republic without waiting for me. I was to follow in two years, after my finals.

  “You see how little good and nice I am,” my mother said. “Professor Schmeidig is feeling so miserably sick these days and I’m preparing to leave him without a second thought.”

  “That’s because you’re in such a hurry to get to the Dominican Republic to nurse your sick father.”

  “Talking of sick fathers,” my mother said, “yesterday, for the first time, the professor complained to me about his son. Do you know he hasn’t been to see the poor old man in three weeks? How alone he will be after I’m gone!”

  The evening of the day my mother left Professor Schmeidig’s employ, the professor called on the telephone. He had some funny, vulgar things to say about the new housekeeper his son had taken for him. Then he wept. He asked my mother to reconsider and stay in England and marry him. My mother said she could not do that, but she had another idea. Her friend Lizzi Bauer was coming up from Allchester tomorrow, and we would all come over and my mother would cook dinner at his flat.

  The evening was a huge success. Lizzi was an ugly, worldly woman of enormous charm. She had a large mouth with large, tobacco-stained teeth, vital, very black hair, and intelligent green eyes. She invariably dressed in navy blue sparked with something crisply white, a collar, or chiffon scarf, or piqué flower, at once chic and feminine. Her figure was small with a high plump back that was almost a hunch; she wore her breasts flattened in the fashion of her own well-to-do and successful twenties in the Vienna of the twenties of the century.