Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  Ciudad Trujillo (now renamed Santo Domingo) is the chief port and capital of the Republic. Around its Spanish cathedral of ancient brown stone the houses are painted the same white, pink, and earth-yellow as the houses in Santiago, with the same wooden galería with painted balustrades, and patios with scarlet flowerpots. I gave the driver the address of the Hotel Parisienne and asked him to let me off at the nearest stop, but the community of the bus decided on a small detour to take me to the very door. The gamecock owner, now completely crocked, helped me carry my suitcase up the steps, his jacket wings flying, and handed me with a profound and unsteady bow to the care of the proprietress.

  Frau Bader, a juicy Viennese blonde, showed me to a tiny room opening onto the back yard. She was giving me special rates, in the hope, she said, that having a young girl about would keep the place jumping. The Parisienne was the stopping-off place for visitors from Sosua, and the regulars, too, were Central European Jews, all waiting for their American quotas. Janos Kraus, the young Hungarian painter who had the room next to mine, wore his hair in cliché curls behind the ears, which immediately decided me against him. “Doctor” and “Madame” Levy were Viennese, too. He was not a real doctor, said Frau Bader, who sat with me while I ate my first dinner, but had taken a course in pedicure after the Nazis confiscated his restaurant. They had hidden out in Paris all through the war. “Madame” Levy gave French lessons and would speak German only with a French accent. Frau Bergel was from Frankfurt and taught the piano. Frau Bader asked me what I was going to do. She said she used to have a lovely girl, Magda Fischer, living in the Parisienne who had done very well for herself working in the Hotel Jaragua, and it might be worth my while to apply. There were lots of Americans in and out.

  And so my first job was at the Jaragua, at that time the only hotel of chic and size in town. I stood behind a glass counter next to a potted palm in the beige-and-scarlet, glass-and-metal lobby, selling cigarettes and waiting for romance.

  In the mornings, taxis brought the daily Americans from their Caribbean cruises. They hung around the cool of the lobby. A sunburned middle-aged man in a sport shirt came and stood at my counter, talking. He said he could tell I was Jewish, too. An elegant young man asked me where the golf course was, and three old ladies wanted to know where there was something wild that they could go and see, but I looked past them all to the exquisite elderly woman in lilac tweeds, with bored arrogant eyebrows, who sat talking with no one, drinking cups of espresso. In the evenings, the taxis came to take them back to the boats on their way home to America.

  My free afternoons I spent walking on the main shopping street, called El Conde. It had tall office buildings like the one that housed the American Consulate, where one day—at this very moment, perhaps—my American papers might be processed. Next door was a small, pink, one-story house with little shops like the small-town shops of Santiago. There was the chic Magda’s Dress Salon, and the Café Madrid that opened like a stage onto the street, where I walked up and down pretending not to be looking in at the front center table occupied by the English colony. Mr. and Mrs. Darcy had sat there every afternoon for the last fifteen years and sit there, I understand, to this day. Darcy was quite an old man with a pale, long face and aristocratic mustache, who looked out in silent benevolence over his beer and pipe. The talking was done by his wife, who was many years younger, fat and plain like a peasant, a loving, sensible, useful woman. The British Embassy people, the English officers from the shipyard, and English business people and their families simply stepped in from the sidewalk. Mrs. Darcy would call the waiter to bring up a chair and iced tea if it was a lady, beer for a gentleman. No one came who did not belong, except myself, and I cannot remember doing it. I recall the weeks in which the English table was the center of my consciousness, but oblivion covers the moment, the excuse or blind determination with which I stepped over my shyness into the Café Madrid. I remember sitting beside Mrs. Darcy, talking. I said I had lived in England from the time I was ten, which was precisely half my life, and that I had a B.A. in English from Bedford College in London. “Do you happen to know it? On the Inner Circle, in Regents Park. If you got tired of Beowulf you could watch the geese from the lake walking across the lawn. I adore London! All I want is to get back.…”

  A lady at the table who worked for the British Consulate said, “That shouldn’t be hard, under the circumstances,” and she sent me a notification, within the month, to come and pick up my visa.

  I was horrified: Behind the memory of white geese under the great plane trees on the jewel-green lawn appeared, like a double exposure, my bespectacled self, in mackintosh and oxfords, on a cold drizzling English June day, coming across the bridge into Baker Street in such an agony of loneliness that I can recall it in my memory like an event; I remember I stood a moment to diagnose the cause and felt my feet wet and knew I hadn’t a sixpence left for my gas meter.

  “A visa! To England!” I cried. “How marvelous … only I won’t have money for a while.…”

  “The visa is renewable,” said the lady from the consulate.

  “And my mother depends on me to go with her to America,” I said, and blushed. I walked home thinking the English were through with me forever. But the very next week, Mrs. Darcy waved me in from the sidewalk, ordered my tea, and said she had been speaking about me to the ambassador of X, who was looking for an English teacher. In the next months, her patronage provided me with a sizable clientele wanting to learn English with a British accent—even one that came via Vienna. I soon gave up my job as a cigarette girl in the Jaragua.

  The ambassador was my best customer. His chauffeur fetched me five times a week, before breakfast, and at the end of every lesson the ambassador propositioned me.

  The chauffeur, seeing us emerge onto the front steps, threw down his wet swab and snapped to attention at the door of the huge black Lincoln Continental that dripped and gleamed and sparkled wetly on the gravel drive. The ambassador had stopped with his forefinger raised to command attention.

  “You.” He pointed to me and contracted his brows in concentration. “Mit?” he appealed to me.

  “Meeet?” I suggested.

  “Meeet,” the ambassador corrected himself, “me,” he pointed to himself and leered archly, “at’ otel Jaragua this night?” he finished triumphantly and cocked his head for approval. He was small and stocky and hardly taller than I.

  I shook my head. “Will you meeet me at the Hhhotel tonight,” I pronounced.

  The ambassador giggled and slapped his thigh. “I mit you! I mit you!”

  “That’s right,” I would reply, “I’ll meet you tomorrow morning, seven as usual. And will you please review chapter six, about the interrogative in English.”

  The ambassador looked crestfallen and threw his hands out. “You not love me!” he said.

  Janos Kraus, coming up the drive with his palette and box of oils to do the ambassador’s portrait, raised his panama in confusion, not knowing whether to bow first to the gentleman who was an ambassador, or to a fellow refugee who was a lady; the ambassador handed me into the car, and, looking back, I saw the Hungarian bowing from the waist and the ambassador kissing his fingers to me by the veranda steps.

  “How are you doing, Ticher,” asked Jaime, the chauffeur.

  “Teeecher.”

  “Teeecher,” Jaime corrected himself. He got his lesson free every morning while he drove me to and from the ambassador’s house. He surprised me with the idiomatic, slapdash English I seemed to have taught him in the six months in which the ambassador had not learned one new rule or unlearned one old mistake. It seemed to me that those who learned English caught it out of the air and those who did not catch it were never going to learn it. The road from ignorance to knowledge was a mystery to me.

  “Isn’t it a fine day? Is right, ‘fine day’?”

  “‘Is it right?’ Yes, it’s a very fine day.” We were driving along the handsome Malecon that runs along the Caribbean, which lay very st
ill and blue to our right. On our left were the fanciful villas of the rich, set back in their great gardens. On the lawns sprouted the small black boys holding water hoses so that they seemed to be urinating splendid, sparkling arcs of water, keeping the grass green under the intense brightness.

  The blonde Frau Bader brought my breakfast to the table on the galería and sat down opposite. She was in her forties, good-looking despite her bad teeth, and was about to marry a fourth husband. Her wit was gross; her walk, her gestures, her whole person was so vivid that in her presence my bones felt fragile. I liked her, and I was sorry that I was being a disappointment to her—for men were by no means pouring into her hotel on my account—so I had mentioned to her the ambassador’s advances, and now she was on at me to bring him to the Parisienne. “We’ll cook you a Viennese dinner the like of which that man has never eaten.”

  “I’m sure you would,” I said, “but I don’t want to encourage him.”

  “Why not?” asked Frau Bader.

  “He’s married,” I said.

  “So?” said Frau Bader. “You should have been here the year Magda Fischer lived here. The place was jumping. Of course, she was a big red-headed girl, eighteen and what a beauty! You know her dress salon on the Conde! They used to live here, she and her mother and Eva—that was her little sister—when they first came from Hungary. One day President Trujillo saw her—imagine!—and he drove up to this very gate and sent his chauffeur, a lieutenant, in a uniform, walking up these stairs for Magda to come for a drive. She said she couldn’t, alone, just like a Dominican girl, but the lieutenant said she could bring her mother, so what could they do? It seems the three of them sat in the back, the President between Magda and her mother, and all the time he kept talking with Mrs. Fischer, he kept holding Magda’s hand. Mrs. Fischer told me afterward, she said, what could she do? And a week later he sent the lieutenant to fetch Magda to a party, and Magda said she couldn’t go because her mother was ill, poor thing, but the lieutenant said she could bring her little sister—Eva must have been, what, thirteen—and a pretty little thing already. It seems there were all these V.I.P.’s, a whole motorcade, and they drove out to one of the President’s estates and there was a fiesta in the garden, with lanterns, and Magda sat next to him and little Eva sat next to the lieutenant. They gave her some wine and she fell asleep on his lap. I remember I sat up with Mrs. Fischer till the morning waiting for the girls to come home, but let me tell you, the President paid for Mrs. Fischer’s operations, and the nurses, and the funeral. That girl could have had anything she wanted—a house, an estate, anything—but she always had her head screwed on the right way. She told him, she said, she needed to earn her living and she made him furnish the shop on the Conde. And little Eva used to bring the lieutenant up here for my dinners. Why don’t you bring this ambassador?”

  I shook my head. I said, “It’s nothing like that with the ambassador and me. I mean, when he invites me he isn’t serious. He just thinks he’s paying me a compliment. It’s his way of being polite to girls.” I waited for Frau Bader to say, why shouldn’t he mean it? but she said, “So? If you can’t get him, why don’t you invite some of your English friends?”

  “I don’t know them that well.”

  “What do you mean? Every time I walk down the Conde I see you sitting at that table.”

  “Yes, but I’m not on the kind of footing where I could invite them,” I said.

  “Why not?” asked Frau Bader.

  “Here’s my next pupil,” I said.

  This pupil who came to the hotel for her lessons was one Doña Piri, a Dominican, a woman close to fifty, very small and dried up, with a pronouncedly heart-shaped face that must once have been charming but was now wrinkled and furrowed over and yellow like the face of an octogenarian. She wore her hair orange and frizzled to stand away from her head. Her nails were long and blood red, and at the beginning of each lesson she sharpened her pencil to a needle point on the sole of her shoe.

  “Doña Piri,” I said, “I was wondering if three lessons a week isn’t more, perhaps, than you need.…” (I wanted to say, “Doña Piri, your English is as good as one of your limited intelligence can make it, and I don’t know what to do with you for a whole hour.”) “I mean, your English is quite fluent …” I said.

  “But my accent,” cried Doña Piri. “It is terrible. I love your accent, Señorita. You speak such an educated English.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “And you dress so well. You always dress, how do you say it, like ladies.”

  “Ladylike? Thank you, Doña Piri, but …”

  “I think you have beautiful taste. I have been moving yesterday. I would like that you should come and help me arrange my room.”

  “I should like you to come,” I said. I never took seriously Doña Piri’s bids for intimacy. I could not believe that she liked me any better than I liked her.

  “I should like you to come to dinner, maybe tonight? I want to invite some friends … a friend … there is a gentleman …”

  The invitation took on a new aspect, and I began to consider going to dinner with Doña Piri.

  “I have his picture here. It happens he was in the newspaper.” Doña Piri dipped into her outsize red plastic pocketbook and handed me a newsprint picture of two men in laughing conversation, of whom I recognized one as President Trujillo. Doña Piri pointed to the caption with a sharp blood-red fingernail. “This here, you see, it says, ‘Don Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre habla con el Generalissimo Dr. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, Presidente de la Republica y Benefactor de la Patria.’” I was surprised that Doña Piri had a friend so evidently a man of the world, and I saw, too, that he was by no means the man for whom my life was held in abeyance. He was fat and quite elderly.

  “Is President of United Picture, old friend of my family.” Doña Piri was watching my face so anxiously that I thought I saw how the land lay, and I smiled and said knowingly, “I’d be very glad, Doña Piri, to have dinner with you and your friend. This evening will be fine.” I was sincerely glad that old Doña Piri should have a man of her own.

  “Hello Ticher,” said the three pretty girls in chorus. They were sisters, one aged seventeen and twins of fifteen.

  “‘Hello teeecher,’” I said. “Good morning. Please sit down.”

  A merengue came from inside the house. The rocking chairs and table for the lesson had been set up on the galería, which was beautifully tiled and ran around four sides of a very old patio with flowerpots and climbing plants that filtered and dappled the brightness. It looked cool, but it was, in fact, extremely hot. The young girls wore loose house dresses and had their hair in curlers, and they rocked and giggled and poked each other. The older sister, whom I thought the prettiest even though she wore glasses like me, said, “Ticher, why you have no boy friend?”

  “How do you know I don’t?” I asked, blushing under their six black eyes.

  “We saw you. Yesterday—con los Ingleses. In Café Madrid.”

  “‘With the English. In the Café Madrid,’” I said. “I saw you, too, walking by with your mother.” I would have asked them to stop rocking, but their mother, who chaperoned the class at a small distance, sat in a rocking chair, and she was rocking, too.

  “Emanuela,” the mother called into the house, “turn off the music and get the front door. Hot, isn’t it?” she said to me, fanning her armpits with a palm leaf.

  The maid showed in “Doctor” Levy. We greeted one another, and when Doña Maria was well insulated from the lesson, with her feet in water and with the merengue continuing into its hundredth chorus, I said to the young girls, “Today we will have English conversation. We will talk about boy friends. If a boy friend asked you to come for a walk on the Conde, would you go?”

  The girls looked prettily at me. They said, “Yes, and Mama would come with us.”

  I said, “Supposing a lady you knew asked you to come to dinner, would you go with her?”

  “Mama would go also
,” they said.

  “English girls go everywhere alone,” I said. “Don’t you ever wish you could go out alone?”

  “Oh yes, we do wish it,” they said out of politeness, but I could tell from the pretty roundness of their throats and cheeks and their bright giggling eyes that they dared more under their mother’s wing than I in the pride of independence.

  I said, “Now we will have English dictation.”

  “There’s a gentleman on the galería asking for you,” said Frau Bader at my door that evening.

  “A gentleman!” I said, and wished I had my mother here to go with me. I wished I were staying at home.

  “Why don’t you ask him to dinner? You know I make a special price for you!”

  The man standing at the head of the steps was small, fat, and old. He wore a very light, buff-colored suit open over his large stomach, upon which waved a loose, brightly patterned tie. He gave me a remarkably delicate hand and said he was Indalecio Aguirre and that Doña Piri had asked him to give me a lift because it was difficult to find her house. He spoke English well. He appeared to be so nervous that I wanted to put him at his ease, and I said, “That’s kind of you, though I’m quite used to getting around by myself.”

  “Wonderful,” said this Don Indalecio, and he took my elbow to lead me down the steps to where an immense chauffeur-driven car stood at the curb. I was gratified to know that both Frau Bader and Julia, the hotel maid, were watching my man-accompanied departure. Don Indalecio got in after me and settled, I was relieved to see, well over to his side of the back seat as we drove off into the tropical sunset that turned the day into total darkness within seconds.

  “Is it a very long way?” I asked.