Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  While my mother was getting dinner ready, Lizzi sat at the piano and entertained her host with the naughty cabaret songs of their pre-Hitler days. “Johnny, on your birthday, I’ll stay with you the whole night through …” she sang, undeterred by her complete lack of voice. She rocked her shoulders, looking toward the professor through the smoke that rose from the cigarette in the ash tray by her hand. She laid her head back laughingly, without releasing the old gentleman’s eyes. “Ach, Johnny, if only you had a birthday every day.… Johnny, I dream of you so much,” Lizzi half sang, half spoke. “Come to my door some afternoon at half-past four.” (I thought I would never dare to look into any man’s eyes with such an intimate look; it embarrassed me. Maybe there was something wrong with me!) The professor’s shoulders were rocking faintly inside his old smoking jacket and his eyes were fixed fulsomely on Lizzi’s face. Later, the professor insisted on our all taking Frau Bauer to her train. As the taxi drew up in front of Waterloo Station I thought I saw something: I thought I saw the professor’s right hand letting go of Lizzi’s left; I would have put it down to some trick of my vision if Lizzi had not intercepted my glance and smiled and raised her shoulders as much as to say, “What do you want me to do—he’s an old man.” The professor drove my mother and me home to our lodgings and came upstairs to have a cup of coffee. After that he came every evening and stayed to eat whatever my mother had prepared for us. Once he asked if we weren’t expecting our charming friend to pay a good-by visit.

  “All the way from Allchester!” my mother said. “That’s an expensive visit, you know.”

  “Call her up and say good-by on the phone. I want to pay for it,” the professor said very kindly. “And tell her to come and see me when she happens to be in London again. Do you think she would?”

  “Thank you, but Lizzi and I have said good-by,” my mother said. “But you can ask her to come and see you. I will leave you her number.”

  That was the day before my mother’s departure. The professor wept so bitterly it left him weak and ill, and we had to take him home. On the way back my mother made me promise to go and see him once in a while. “For me,” she said. “He will be so miserably alone!”

  Going to see Professor Schmeidig became, like studying, something I was always going to do tomorrow. Then my mother wrote me that she had had a letter from the professor in which he said he was so lonely he lay down nights praying he would not wake again, and the next day I rang his bell. The door was opened by Lizzi Bauer. “I was going to call you later,” she said. “I happened to be in London.”

  “And she came to see me,” the professor said from the kitchen door. He was dressed smartly in his best gray suit. He seemed so healthy he looked positively gay, and I felt angry for my mother’s sake. I said, “Mummy wrote me that you were not well and I just happened to be in the neighborhood.…”

  “Come in, come in. And how is my good Frau Groszmann? Come into the kitchen with us. It’s my horrid housekeeper’s day off, very fortunately. I was just boasting to Frau Lizzi that I make a famous cup of Viennese coffee.”

  Lizzi leaned in the doorway, ankles crossed, her elegant left hand with its outsize agate ring holding her cigarette. Her intimate, teasing eyes followed the professor on his bumbling way around the kitchen, and once in a while I caught her naughty glance directed toward me.

  After coffee Professor Schmeidig led her to the piano and she sang to him. When I got up to leave, she rose as well. The old gentleman fetched her coat and held it for her. As we were going out of the door I saw him put some pound notes into her hand.

  “He can afford it,” Lizzi said to me in the elevator going down, “and I can’t keep coming into town for nothing. I’ve got an hour till train time. Stay with me and talk.”

  At the little table in the corner teashop, Lizzi said, “Today I really had him up to here. This afternoon he made me sit on his bed and pulled the drawer out of his night table and emptied the whole thing into my lap! He wanted to give me everything in it, though I don’t know what he expected me to do with his old silk handkerchiefs, his bone shoehorn, his old key chain! Finally he came up with this,” and Lizzi pulled her white cuff back from her wrist to show me a handsome, old-fashioned gold watch. “It used to belong to his wife,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “He wanted to give it to Mummy once, but she wouldn’t take it. He wanted to marry Mummy, did you know?”

  “So he told me,” Lizzi said. “He’s chock-full of promises.”

  “No, but he meant it, I know. He asked her for months, and the last week before she left he spent every single evening with us.”

  “He told me,” Lizzi said. “He says he kept expecting me to turn up. He says when my boy gets to London he is going to take an apartment in his building for us, but, for all I know, he may be only a senile old man! We’ll see what all the promises come to! And now how about you, Lorle? How is the boy-friend situation?” she asked, watching me with her warm, intelligent eyes.

  “Nonexistent,” I said. “I never see a man, year in, year out. And if I did, he probably wouldn’t notice me. Except a year ago there was this Canadian student.”

  Lizzi Bauer sat with her cigarette between her long fingers and, under the spell of her intimate attention, I heard myself telling her more about the episode of the student than I myself had been aware of. My answers to her close questioning made it clear to me for the first time that the Canadian student had been in a fairway to fall in love with me; I was stunned. “But what use is that?” I said. “I didn’t really like him. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I’m one of those persons who never really … like anybody.”

  “No, but you may be one of those women who take a long time to grow up,” Lizzi said. “And living all those years with two old ladies and going to a girls’ high school did not help.”

  “That’s right,” I said, very much encouraged, “and now I’m going to an all-women college. Just imagine. A couple of thousand English women in mackintoshes and flat-heeled oxfords.”

  “I have an idea, Lorle,” Lizzi said. “Next time I come to town I’ll leave the old man early, and you and I will go and buy you a new dress.”

  “A dress! Where would I ever wear a dress? And besides, I’ve just used up my money and my clothing coupons on this suit.… It looks much better with a white blouse,” I said, upset because I could tell Lizzi did not like my brown herringbone wool of classic cut, though it had taken me three agonizing weeks to choose it, and I could never put down on my scholarship statement how much it had cost me.

  The next time I met Lizzi in the teashop at the corner of the professor’s apartment building, she told me she had almost had to put me off; Professor Schmeidig had wanted to take her to the bank vault. “But then the son turned up,” Lizzi said, “and we all had to sit and have our tea together, like good children.”

  “I’m glad to hear the son is taking some notice of his father,” I said. “So long as Mummy was there he didn’t stop by for weeks on end.”

  “Oh, he comes all the time, now,” Lizzi said. “He keeps his eye on me, though, of course, he’s all politeness and gratitude because I’m keeping his father company. What he doesn’t know is what the old man slipped into my bag at the door.” She took out a small pearl-studded brooch. “Not that this is worth much these days. He says the good stuff is all in the vault.” And then Lizzi asked me if I still had the little blue dress I used to wear at Clinton Lodge. She had brought me a collar of white piqué, edged with exquisite cotton crochet. It was still in the pink tissue paper in which she had wrapped it in Vienna in 1938.

  I wore the blue dress with the white collar the day of the English Society’s tea in the student common room. Monique came into the washroom where I was putting on some lipstick; that is to say, I was rubbing rouge onto the cushioned tip of my forefinger, which I then drew across my lips. Meanwhile, Monique, at the next mirror, outlined her mouth with a full, curved stroke of scarlet. I put more color on my own mouth,
in short staccato dabs. It; looked pretty.

  “Ready?” asked Monique.

  “One moment,” I said and quickly wiped the color off my lips. “Ready,” I said.

  Everyone in the common room was wearing the uniform tweed suit. I felt silly in my blue dress and Viennese collar, so I kept my mackintosh buttoned.

  The guest speaker was a young poet rising into first prominence. He was a tall man in a crumpled suit and amazing sky-blue socks. He had an ugly, charming, witty face and was so nervous he looked sick. He talked about the metaphysical poets, all religion and learning and love and just my cup of tea—but I could not listen because I was preparing the very clever question that I meant to put to him. Question time came and went and I was still waiting for my breathing to calm enough for speech. Tea was announced. In a moment the rare young man was surrounded by a cluster of girls as if he were the center of a many-petaled flower growing in our common room. I saw Monique laughing, holding a plate, feeding the poet chocolate biscuits.

  I collected my books. This time I really meant to go to the library to study, but I was waylaid by a bench under the largest of the plane trees and, sitting there, I presently saw walking along the path side by side, in casual conversation, the American girl and the poet. Monique waved to me. I watched them walk through the iron gate, over the little bridge that crossed the lake, and out together into Baker Street.

  Professor Schmeidig was so much in love, Lizzi said, that he was becoming a nuisance, always begging her to stay the night, though she had made it quite clear she was not that kind of woman, and, as she said to him, what would they do if the son suddenly decided to turn up?

  Toward the end of the month Lizzi called again and asked me to meet her at the Viennese Club. I said I really should work, I had my finals coming up, but Lizzi said to come for just half an hour. Something had happened.

  We sat at a small table, and my Torte with Schlagobers tasted like all the cakes I had eaten on all those Sunday afternoons in Vienna when my grandmother was in town and we went to the Kaffeehaus to meet all the aunts and uncles. I looked around me now, and the elderly man with the hooked nose sitting behind me, and the two women talking over their coffee cups, looked and sounded as if I had known them forever.

  Lizzi was upset. She had come to London especially early, and she and the professor had slipped away to the bank when who should burst in, as they sat at a table with the strongbox open, but that incredible son. He must have figured out where they had gone or, more likely, had them followed. And he had made the most unspeakable scene right in front of the bank guard. He said if he ever caught Lizzi anywhere near his father again, he would have the old man declared mentally incompetent and put away in a home.

  “How horrible!” I cried, and blushed, imagining the confrontation. “What can you do! I mean you can’t go and see him and you can’t leave him now!”

  “Why can’t I leave him?” Lizzi asked. “I’ll not be spoken to like that ever again, I assure you. So that is that! Let’s talk about you, Lorle. Any boy friends?”

  I was about to open my mouth to tell her what was uppermost in my mind—the poet at the English tea and Monique who had walked away with him—when I noticed something odd, almost like a squint, in Lizzi’s eyes. She was looking straight at me but without appearing to see me.

  “And how is Franzi? What does she write?” Lizzi asked, and her voice seemed pitched into the near distance, over my shoulder. I turned. The elderly man with the noble hooked nose stood holding his coffee with whipped cream, smiling. He said, “You two ladies are talking so animatedly, it makes a lonely man quite jealous.”

  “Then why doesn’t the lonely man bring up a chair and join the animated ladies?” Lizzi said, looking up with her charming, naughty green eyes.

  I rose. “Don’t worry about the chair,” I said. “I have to get home and do some studying.…”

  Then the exams were upon me. I have to this day a recurring nightmare in which I am not opening a book that is only one book on one of many shelves of bookcases beyond bookcases unfolding into eternity: and all the while I feel time drawing dizzyingly away like a receding wave drawing the sand away underfoot. Then I awake and know that I am not, that I will not in any future be, cramming for any imminent examinations, and I feel life good and sweet around me.

  In my college finals I did as badly as one can without actually failing.

  I think I had always expected that something would occur to prevent my having to really leave England and go to the Dominican Republic, but my mother’s letters kept coming, full of love and the sure expectation of being reunited with me before the end of the summer, and would I please be sure, she wrote, to go and visit poor Professor Schmeidig and say good-by.

  When I rang the Professor’s bell there was no answer. I was going to leave a message with the doorman but he said the professor had been taken away to the hospital almost a month ago, though it wasn’t until yesterday that the son had come and taken away the furniture and everything and closed the flat. The old man was dead.

  When I came out into the street there was a soft summer drizzle and London was suddenly nostalgic. All my English friends had gone home. Monique had left for a short hop to France before returning to New York.

  I took the underground to Piccadilly and walked over to Old Bond Street and up and down the sidewalk looking for a new dress. The new dress. I knew it in a world of speculation only—at once sexy and austere, elegant and gorgeous. What I ended up with was a navy silk I could not afford, with a potentially daring décolletage that tended to emphasize my thin long neck and my long sharp nose.

  “It has a drawstring, Madam,” said the exquisite salesperson, pulling the neckline close around my throat the way I saw I would have to wear it until the moment of my blooming, which I expected daily. My oxfords stood on the deep plum-colored carpet and my eyes, in the tilted full-length oval of the rococo mirror, looked back with a haggard eagerness and anxiety from behind my round spectacles. I remember I looked the saleswoman in the face, woman to woman, and said, “What do you think …” but she had written me off as “no sale” and was rubbing her left eye with a scarlet-tipped forefinger. She said, “It’s pure genuine silk, Madam.”

  On board ship there was a whole crew of Greek ship’s officers into whose glamorous company I was drawn through Paula, my cabinmate, a handsome, experienced Polish girl on her way to Trinidad to join a husband she did not love. I wore my pure silk low at the neck and thought, this is me, lying in a deck chair listening to the midnight guitar—smoking and drinking champagne into the small hours—and wished I didn’t keep falling asleep. Once I opened my eyes to see the young, beautiful, olive-skinned officer taking off Paula’s shoes. She was saying, “Now stop it. Don’t be silly.” “Come on!” I said to Paula, “Aren’t we going to bed?” because they were walking away together along the darkness of the long deck. “Hey!” I cried. “Where are you going?”

  There was a Lithuanian student whom I discovered for myself. We talked about the aesthetics of light and about comparative religion. Once, standing at the rail as the sun was setting, his radiant face turned toward me, he said he had something he wanted to tell me, but there was such a pounding of blood in my ears and light exploding that I could not stand it and I said, “What’s that book you’re reading?”

  During the night the boat put in at Guadeloupe, where the Lithuanian student got off, and three days later I myself disembarked in the New World.

  Part 2

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sosua: Paul and Ilse

  In 1948, when I arrived in the Dominican Republic, it was ten years since I had seen my Uncle Paul or my grandparents.

  Shortly after my parents left Vienna, Paul had gone to one of the training farms that were being established in the outskirts of Vienna by Adolf Eichmann, in co-operation with the Jewish community. On these Hachscharahs, young Jews wanting to emigrate to Palestine were to be trained in farm work.

  Paul wrote me to E
ngland. He enclosed a photograph of a plump young woman in working pants and a bandanna standing between a tall, pretty young man, who is pressing her left hand, and my bespectacled Uncle Paul, whose left hand she is pressing. Paul’s far arm is characteristically bandaged in an immense sling. The three young faces look laughingly out of that bitter time.

  I suspected nothing; I recalled the day when Paul had come to say good-by to me and how he had told my grandmother to figure the odds against a woman he wanted to marry wanting to marry him, and when, two weeks after the first letter, Paul wrote again to say that he had married this girl, Use, I refused, at first, to believe it. When I got used to the idea, I fell in love with the account of the marriage, so much more gallant than my parents’ formal wedding in that other world of 1927, in the presence of relatives from Vienna, Budapest, and Presburg, with a dowry including three dozen each of handkerchiefs, petticoats, nightgowns, pillow cases, all hand-monogrammed by the village girls and ready in the young people’s Vienna flat when they returned from their Italian honeymoon. Paul and Ilse were married outside the cowshed on the Hachscharah by a visiting rabbi, and caught the morning truck bringing eggs into the city. Paul and Ilse moved in with my grandparents, who were still living in Aunt Ibolya’s flat. Paul has told me that he and Ilse laughed so much carrying their combined and total belongings in a washbasket up the stairs that they had to stop and sit down on every landing.

  My grandmother wrote to my mother on a high note of complaint against this girl whom Paul had brought into the family, who put black stockings in with her white wash though my grandmother had specifically warned her not to. My grandmother said she had begged Paul with raised hands not to marry this spoiled, uneducated child, whom he had known only six weeks, and who was engaged to someone else, but when this Paul, whom everybody thought such a sweet-natured son, really wanted anything, it was no good even talking to him; he took the girl’s part in everything.