Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  “Ja so,” said my grandfather. “He always likes his butter every evening. You see now he is showing her his tie, shirt, his undershirt, his drawers …”

  It was December; the rain had stopped. In the mornings, I woke to the sound of the chicken boy with the goatee singing out his wares and the birds flapping and gurgling as my grandmother tickled them under the wings.

  Then it was Christmas. Every house in our street had its papier-mâché tree imported from the United States, decorated with glass tubes filled with a colored liquid that bubbled when plugged into the electric outlet.

  The Rodriguezes were in Santiago for the holidays, and my mother, my grandmother, and I went there for the Christmas Eve celebration. Señora Rodriguez had ordered a yew tree from the mountains. It smelled of the forest and was decorated in German fashion with brown tallow candles smelling of honey, and hung with silver chains and golden glass balls, and chocolates, candy, and cookies wrapped in colored foil. There was an elderly German gentleman staying in the house. “He is leaving for Germany as soon as he can get his passport,” Señora Rodriguez whispered. “He’s just come out of prison, poor man. He was arrested for spying for Germany near the end of the war—though my husband tried to get him out of the country. Germany was doing so badly already, you know; one had to do every little thing one could.” Señora Rodriguez asked my mother to play “Silent Night, Holy Night.” She said she could never get used to celebrating Christmas with the sun high, in eighty-nine-degree weather. It didn’t seem right.

  That week La Viuda’s brother was pardoned and sent home. He was a little brown man who stood embarrassedly on the galería next to his sister. La Viuda wore a flowered gown as if she were going to a garden party, accepting the congratulations of the neighbors.

  Frau Grüner seemed to have forgiven my grandmother and came to the shop. She invited us all to her house on Sunday to welcome the returning Freibergs. My grandmother said she wasn’t going. “It’s you she wants, and Lore,” she said to my mother. “She doesn’t want me.”

  “She asked for you especially,” said my mother. “Frau Freiberg has always been fond of you, Mutti. I’ll do your hair. Go and fetch Omama’s silk dress, Lorle. I’ll stay with Vater, and you and Paul and Lore go, even if it’s just for an hour.”

  At the Grüners’, I watched my grandmother sitting with Frau Freiberg, who was saying, “Vienna is nothing any more for our people,” pulling down the corners of her mouth and shaking her head in dismissal of the Old World.

  “But here is no good, either,” said my grandmother. “The climate … Paul has not been well a day since he came to Santo Domingo.”

  “He wouldn’t like the cold in Vienna any more,” Frau Freiberg said. “And everyone so—I don’t know—I used to say to my sister-in-law, ‘What would it hurt you to put on a little lipstick? Why don’t you go out somewhere?’ You wouldn’t recognize the old Vienna. No culture. You remember the opera, the theater, the music. Everybody who is anybody has gone to America.”

  “We never used to go anywhere,” my grandmother said. “I lived, from the time I was twenty-six till Hitler came, in a village outside Vienna. We were the only Jews. There was nowhere to go, no one to see. Once a month, I came into Vienna to visit the children.”

  “Sigi’s old friends at the glee club kept saying they would invite us, but they never did. Karl Haber was very funny about it. Once he said what did we know, living on a tropical island all these years while they had been through hell—first the Germans, then the English and Americans, now the Russians. But the Americans weren’t so bad. I was saying to Herr Paul just now he should wait till he gets to America and finish his studies.”

  “Paul will never finish anything,” said my grandmother, throwing her right hand out in her half wave of resignation and rejection. “He never finished his medical studies. Now he has got his diploma for remedial exercises, and it turns out that a United States diploma doesn’t count in the Dominican Republic.”

  “But it’s all different in America,” said Frau Freiberg. “Sigi’s sister and brother-in-law live in Queens. That’s near New York. He works in a zipper factory—fifty-five dollars a week and the apartment cleans itself, she says. Next year, they are going to get television.”

  “America!” said my grandmother. “A friend I know, a certain Miklos Gottlieb, went to America—New York. I will never see America. I will go into the ground in Santiago,” and my grandmother nodded her body from the waist, like a man praying in the synagogue.

  Frau Grüner brought coffee and Sacher Torte. My grandmother whispered to Paul not to eat it; it was heavy and would upset his stomach. After that, Paul and I were ready to depart, but my grandmother didn’t want to go home.

  In the Dominican Republic, children get their presents from the Three Kings on the Feast of Epiphany. The street was gay with balls and hoops and new dolls. Mercedes came to the shop for a quarter pound of rice and laid her arm along the counter and put her head on it and rubbed her left ankle with her right instep and said, “No me dejaron nada,” which means “They didn’t leave anything for me.”

  All morning La Viuda’s brother went up and down the street asking everyone if he had heard of the accident on the road to Ciudad Trujillo. It was not an accident, he said, but an anti-Trujil-loist friend of his, whose car had been forced over the cliff by Trujillo agents.

  The following day, two policemen came walking down the center of the road and fetched away La Viuda’s brother, and she came out on the galería and wept in grief and fury.

  That night, my grandmother dreamed about a little child in a black shift leading a baby and beckoning, and so she knew that some calamity would befall us. We said it was only because Mercedes was always in and out with little América Columbina and we were seeing La Viuda in her black weeds again, but one afternoon that week, in agony, my grandfather died. My mother leaned her arms against the wall and put her head in them and cried with deep, painful sobs.

  Paul closed up the shop. Herr and Frau Grüner and Rudi and the Freibergs came bringing food, according to Jewish tradition. They said what a good man my grandfather had been. When they were gone, my grandmother said, “I know what they think. Everyone always thought I mistreated Joszi.”

  “No, no, no, no,” said my mother.

  “I never told you what he did to me on our wedding day. He carried the stair carpet my father had given us, so we would save the carrier’s fee. On our wedding day, he took me home carrying a stair carpet! A woman can’t forgive that kind of thing,” said my grandmother, with her angry eyes and her nose standing large and bleak in her white face.

  There was no Jewish cemetery nearer than the one in Sosua, so my grandfather’s body was buried in the Catholic graveyard in Santiago de los Caballeros.

  Afterward, the neighbors came to sit with my grandmother—Dr. Perez and his wife and daughter, La Viuda, and Señora Molinas with América Columbina. On the third day, Paul reopened the shop.

  One Sunday afternoon, when Paul and I were walking up and down the street, he said, “I sent away for a course in bookkeeping, in which I am getting a certain amount of practice through the shop, and I might perfect myself and maybe get a job in the city until our American quota comes. Your Omama would be so much happier.”

  “In town or in America? You mean she needs more people to quarrel with?”

  Paul said, “I wonder if you remember, Lorle, how you used to love coming out to Fischamend for visits.”

  “It was lovely,” I said.

  “When Franzi and I went to school in Vienna, there was nothing more wonderful for us than to come home weekends, to fill up the house with our friends. Omama always made a perfect feast of food, and Franzi played the piano, and there were stories. Omama loved to laugh. Opapa used to keep asking what the joke was. It is curious that a woman who is so little capable of happiness herself should have been able to fill her house with such an immense amount of fun!”

  There is a triangular traffic island at Br
oadway and 157th Street. It has benches, six dusty trees, and pigeons. Every time one of the Fifth Avenue buses lumbers past, the pigeons rise into the air—spreading disease and germs over everyone, my grandmother used to say. Here, in summer, at evening time, the elderly German-speaking population of Washington Heights comes together; and one day in 1951, my grandmother happened to mention her old friend Miklos Gottlieb to one Hilde Hohemberg, who had a cousin who happened to live in the same house as Herr Gottlieb and knew him and knew that Rosa Gottlieb had died a year ago after a long illness. And Miklos, hearing that my grandmother was in New York, asked to be allowed to pay his respects.

  I looked forward to this meeting that promised to be the very cliché of romance. My grandmother put on her pewter-colored silk dress. She let my mother arrange her hair, but under protest—like a very young girl who doesn’t want to acknowledge wanting to make an impression.

  “It was me, you know, he wanted to marry,” my grandmother said.

  “Did he ask you, Omama?”

  “He spoke to my father. He asked my father what he would give me for a dowry. But even if he had asked me, I would not have married him. He was flighty.”

  The old man to whom I opened the front door did not fill the role of decrepit, doddering, has-been manhood in which I had cast him. He was a very old but dapper little person, in a well-fitting suit with matching vest, and he carried a walking stick. His mustache was of the First World War Viennese style and suited the style of his face. He turned his tiny, very blue eyes appreciatively on me, with a frank tribute to youth and womanhood not unlike the more vulgar leer that Dr. Perez in Santiago had thought my daily due.

  My grandmother came out into the hall.

  Miklos Gottlieb hooked the crook of his walking stick over his wrist so as to have both his hands free to take my grandmother’s right. “Ja, Frau Rosa!” he said. “Still those beautiful black eyes!”

  My grandmother acknowledged the compliment by pulling her head a little forward and down into her shoulders. My mother said, “Muttilein, take Herr Gottlieb inside. I’m coming with the coffee.”

  My grandmother sat down in a chair over by the window while Miklos Gottlieb complimented the room, the persons in it, and, presently, what he was given to eat and drink, ending with a neat observation on the smallness of the world and the water that had passed under the bridge. “But you, liebe Frau Rosa, you have your children here with you. I have lost two sons—my Johann in the First World War fighting the Allies in Caporetto, and my younger one, Franzl, in the second war, in London, in a German raid.” He looked around to have us appreciate the irony.

  “I have lost, too. I have lost,” my grandmother said, nodding the upper part of her body. “My Franzi lost her husband. My Paul lost his wife—twenty years old. I was still in Vienna. The night before I heard, I had my dream about a little child.”

  “If you dreamed it the night before you heard,” I said, “it could hardly count as an omen of the event, as she must have died weeks before you had the news.” I wanted the old people to stop keening over their dead.

  “We follow one another across the world, and we leave our dead behind,” my mother said. “My Igo in a huge graveyard in a Jewish slum in London, Paul’s Ilse on a hill in Sosua, and my father in a Catholic graveyard in Santiago.”

  “And Ibolya in Auschwitz,” said my grandmother.

  “Ah, the lovely Ibolya with the charming nose,” said Herr Gottlieb.

  “And Sari God knows where in Hungary,” said my grandmother. “And Ferri and Kari taken away in Poland.” And my grandmother went down the gallery of her eleven dead brothers and sisters, naming the places where they had been murdered. “And of the three of us alive, Wetterl is in Paraguay, and Hilde in Canada, and I will go into the ground in New York.”

  “And my Roserl,” said Miklos Gottlieb, closing his eyes so that they looked like little trembling pebbles set deep in their sockets. Tears pressed out between the lids. “My poor good wife, my golden Roserl—five years she was ill; the last two she couldn’t move out of her chair, and she had to die, and what am I without her?”

  “Ein bisserl Kaffee,” my mother said and filled up his cup, but my grandmother got up and walked out of the room. When Herr Gottlieb was leaving, my mother had to fetch her out of the kitchen.

  Miklos Gottlieb had perked up and recovered his sprightly gallantry. There was a tear, a shining, perfect sphere, still poised on the ruddy crest of his cheek. He held my grandmother’s hand, saying, “You see, dear Frau Rosa, I told you I would always come back to you.” But my grandmother would not answer him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ciudad Trujillo: Don Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre and I

  After Opapa’s death, and with the “American quota” still off in some indefinite future, I began to wilt. The white sky burned unremittingly over Santiago. Inside the house, I roamed from the shop into the kitchen and upstairs to look out of the window. It is incomprehensible to me, now, that I never acquired any regular duties. I seem to have fed on great expectations of coming, presently, into some fate worthy of my talents, a faith encouraged by the family, whose eyes I could feel following me around with doting concern. Only my grandmother said, “Lore will never get married.”

  “In Santiago I certainly won’t,” I said. “Who is there in Santiago?”

  “What’s wrong with Rudi?” asked my grandmother. “Lore is like my sister Ibolya. No man was ever good enough; this one was not tall enough, that one was not smart enough …”

  “But she got married!” I said anxiously.

  “At twenty-nine she married the butcher, who was a great brute. She left him after six weeks.”

  I was relieved that Ibolya had got married at twenty-nine. It gave me a definite year on which to fix those expectations. However much I quarreled with my grandmother, I believed in the wisdom of her black predictions. The more they went against my best hopes, the more likely they seemed.

  Paul said, “Lorle should go ahead to live in Ciudad Trujillo, where she can meet people and can get an interesting job—drawing, perhaps. There’s nothing for her here,” and he wrote to the Hotel Parisienne, which belonged to a Viennese acquaintance from Sosua, and arranged for me to travel into town with Otto, but I said I was going by bus. “If I’m going to live in a refugee hotel, I will at least travel like a Dominican. That’s the trouble with us,” I said. “We stick so close together, we never see the country and we never meet the people.”

  “What people! You don’t want to meet these people,” said my grandmother. “You remember, Paul, the first maid we had, who borrowed my good little vegetable knife because she said she had quarreled with a neighbor and the neighbor had a knife and she did not.”

  “She brought it back the next morning,” Paul said, “saying she had made up with the neighbor.”

  “You see,” I cried, “an honest, peaceable woman.” But my grandmother’s páranoia had infected me, and when I went to the bus stop I saw in a panic moment the dozen black peasant faces turned on me with a single gap-toothed nightmare smile.

  The bus must once have been painted bright blue and orange, but it was so scratched and banged up that it looked like a child’s toy left from some previous Christmas. On the roof was a pyramid of tin suitcases, market baskets, and livestock. A turkey tied by the legs hung over the side of the bus.

  I climbed up the rickety steps and sat down beside the only other woman traveler, an old grandmother in a clean, faded cotton dress, who said to me, “Qué me pica el pavo!” I lifted my shoulder in a practiced gesture of nonunderstanding and regret. The old woman giggled and leaned up against me, and when I looked where she pointed I saw the naked, scarlet head of the turkey looking in the open window. The bird had corrected its upside-down situation by bending its neck into a U, and was regarding the grandmother’s fat black arm with a most human expression of suspicious irascibility before taking another peck.

  The bus driver asked the owner of the turkey, “Este pavo, amigo
, es macho o hembra?” (“This turkey, my friend, is it a male or a female?”)

  “Que va,” said the owner—to the best of my understanding—“I want you to take one look at this splendid bird. Can you doubt it is a male?”

  “It is a male turkey,” the driver explained to the old grandmother, and he took his seat at the wheel.

  The old woman smiled shyly at me and shrugged her shoulders. The driver started up, his foot full on the gas, so that we all fell back in our seats and the gamecocks belonging to a stout man in a loud houndstooth jacket awoke and began to croak in excited pebbly voices inside their canvas sacks, which lifted for a moment like helium balloons into the air, and settled for the journey, only giving out, once in a while, low pebbly noises, like creatures distressed in their sleep.

  The bus rattled on the road—Dominican roads are so cheaply made that every rainy season washes them away—and the heat was intolerable. The stout man in the houndstooth jacket brought out a bottle of whisky, which he passed among the men. He was organizing a game: Bets were laid, and the first person to catch sight of an oncoming car received the pot. The bottle made the rounds.

  We were soon climbing into the mountainous region. The driver turned and said, “Mira! Accidente por allá abajo!” (“See the accident down there!”) I could see, far below us in the bottom of the ravine, the wreck of a navy-blue car. While everyone’s attention was thus diverted, the driver called out, “Un carro!” Everyone laughed and clapped him on the back. They passed him the bottle. By now the men were standing up, hands on the seat in front, spurring the driver to go faster to see what was coming around the next hairpin turn, which the vehicle took on two wheels, skipping the water-filled holes like a Mickey Mouse bus, sending pebbles rolling down the cliffs on our left. The grandmother crossed herself, crying out aloud to Jesús and Mary to have mercy on us, but every time the road straightened below her and she found herself alive she turned her happy face to me with a shy, apologetic smile. But I could neither cry out nor smile back, for I had my teeth clenched, holding on to myself. By late afternoon, as we descended into the southern plain, within sight of the tall modern buildings of the city’s main street, my jaw and shoulders ached.