Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  “I feel fine, Muttilein.”

  “Why don’t you eat here and go afterward? What does his wife know about your delicate stomach?”

  “She’s a fine cook. Very good.”

  My grandmother took him to the door to see that he had his handkerchief and everything. “Come back soon,” she said.

  “I don’t understand Paul,” my grandmother said when we three women sat down to supper. “How he can keep going to the house of a friend who doesn’t think of inviting his mother, his sister, and his niece.”

  “Omama,” I said, “what would you and Dolf have to talk about?”

  “Lorle!” my mother said, with a pleading look to me not to be rude to my grandmother. And she proposed that we should go down and sit in the triangle, the Dreieck’, as my grandmother had come to call the traffic island at the corner.

  Frau Hohemberg, who lived in the house where my grandmother had had her first lodgings, sat by my grandmother. “So this is the daughter and granddaughter? Why aren’t you out with a boy friend?” she asked me.

  “She doesn’t have one,” said my grandmother. “She is too choosey.”

  “I’ll go out. Don’t you worry about me,” I said.

  But I was worried. There was a picture printed permanently in the back of my mind—I had seen it through a door in the moment it had taken someone to open it and pass inside—a woman sitting on a high stool, swinging a leg; a man supporting himself on an elbow stood leaning toward her. Maybe I had only read about it in a book. On Saturday evenings, especially, I thought about finding such a door, but some bars, I knew from the movies, did not admit single women, and I didn’t know the names of drinks; no one might come and lean on the bar toward me. I looked at my ankle and doubted if it was the shape for swinging. My mother invited my grandmother and me to come to the triangle.

  I said, “Not me! I’m going out.”

  “Where are you going?” asked my grandmother, when she came to the hall door to see me off.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “When will you be back?”

  “Since I don’t know where I’m going, it’s hard to say how long it will take.”

  “Lorle!” my mother pleaded.

  “Why don’t you want to tell me where you are going?” my grandmother asked, very much surprised.

  “Because I’m twenty-three years old, Omama, and might want to go somewhere you wouldn’t approve,” I said, though I think her interest in my affairs would have irritated me less if there had been an affair to scrutinize.

  “Thank you,” said my grandmother, her eyes starting angrily out of their sockets. “That will be a good thought with which to lie in bed at night waiting for you to come home.”

  “Don’t think about me. I don’t need you to wait for me.”

  “I will never ask where you are going again, I promise you,” said my grandmother. “The best thing I could do would be to die,” she said, and went into the living room.

  “Go quick and kiss her,” my mother whispered, but my grandmother was laying out a game of solitaire and would not look at me.

  I took the subway to Times Square and walked among the lights of the advertisements that blinked and ran and jumped, changed colors, and started over. Yah, I thought, yah, “TIMES SQUARE, CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD,” indeed! It reminded me of the Viennese fair to which our maid, Poldi, used to take me around Christmas time, where the country people set up their gaudy booths. I walked, self-consciously philosophizing, describing in an imaginary letter to London the fifteen-cent turtles with “Greetings from New York” in red paint on their tiny backs, the Texan hats on which a woman at a rattling sewing machine would put your initials in rickrack for thirty cents. A fat girl in blue satin, wearing a flowered hat, pointed to the window next to the shooting gallery, where a crowd stood watching a Negro in an outsize chef’s hat broiling frankfurters.

  There was a bookshop. I went inside. Under the shrill lights, I saw titles I was ashamed to appear to be looking at, but I found a fascinating book called “Writers’ Yearbook,” and inside there was a list of writers’ clubs—one in Antioch, three in California, and one in Manhattan. I copied out the Manhattan address and went home and wrote a witty letter to the club. (For weeks, I tasted the delicious phrases in my recollection.)

  “Frau Hohemberg has a nephew, a very nice young man. She has told him all about Lore,” my grandmother said the next day, not addressing me directly, because she had not forgiven me.

  “He must have been thrilled,” I said.

  “He wants to get married,” my grandmother told my mother.

  “Good luck to him,” I said.

  “Lorle,” my mother said, “why don’t you at least see this young man? You might like him.”

  “Who said I wouldn’t see him?” I asked, and began to wait.

  Toni Lustig came on Friday to take me to the local movie. He had a very pleasant face with Jewish brown eyes, exactly like the eyes of all my grandmother’s brothers. Out of the sleeves of his navy-blue suit his wrists emerged nakedly, without cuffs. I cannot recall what film we saw, but I remember coming up the aisle afterward. Just as I was going to say, “What a nothing picture that was!” Toni said, “Wasn’t that a lovely movie?” I told myself to keep silent. We had come out into midsummer-night Broadway. I asked him what he did.

  “When I first came I was a Packerlschupfer,” Toni said in Viennese dialect, which means literally “one who chucks little packages around,” that is to say, a shipping clerk. “Then I was a bus boy. Now, I’m working as a waiter and going to hotel school at night. What about you?”

  “Well, in the Dominican Republic I taught English. I went to college in London,” I replied. And, thinking I might be sounding intellectual again, I said, “Now I’m just a file clerk and a bad one. But,” I added, “I’m going to be a writer.”

  “Oh,” Toni said. “You are a writer! What are you writing about?”

  “About a girl who saves all her money to buy the dress that’s going to make her nose small and round.”

  “But a dress doesn’t change a nose,” Toni said.

  “That’s right,” I said, “because it’s never the right dress. So she starts saving all over again, and meanwhile she is getting older, but she says, ‘It’s just the touch of rheumatism I had this morning that’s making me look badly. Tomorrow I will be pink and smooth, and my nose will be round—and my glasses will fall off.’”

  “So in the end what happens?”

  “She dies.”

  “Oh! Don’t you ever write about happy people?”

  “I don’t believe in the species. When did you ever see a happy person?”

  “I’m happy,” Toni said.

  “A beautiful young man,” my grandmother commented next morning, with a question in her voice.

  “A very nice young man, nicer than I,” I said. “But just the littlest bit stupid.”

  “Poor old snobbish Lorle!” Paul said.

  “Lore will never get married,” said my grandmother.

  “Lorle, you criticize too quickly,” my mother said. “How can you know anyone after a single evening? Even if he is not the right person, he might introduce you to people. You have to start somewhere, you know.”

  “Yes, I know, Mummy.”

  “Meaning, ‘shut up, Mummy’?”

  “Meaning, I wish you would pay me the compliment of letting me make my own life at my own time. Just please don’t worry about me.”

  “You’re quite right,” said my mother, looking anxiously at my grandmother, who, however, failed to be insulted and laughed gaily. “I’ve just this minute stopped worrying,” she said, and folded her hands in her lap with the air of one who is not going to lift a finger.

  That Saturday evening, I reminded Paul of his promise to help me rearrange the furniture. After we had moved everything around, my grandmother said she didn’t see that the room looked any better than the way she had arranged it before we arrived.

  I
said, “The trouble is that it’s impossible to see the space relations and planes till you’ve actually moved the pieces. Pauli, maybe the piano here and the couches parallel and then the table can go under the window.” But this change still failed to produce the elegant order, the sense of space, for which I yearned. “How about the couches forming a corner under the window?” I said, and ran head on into the end of Paul’s patience.

  “Omama has a headache, your mother looks exhausted, and so am I. I’ll give you a choice. You can leave it as it is.”

  “But it’s not right this way,” I said.

  “Then we will put it back the way it was.”

  “But it was ugly the way it was,” I said.

  Horrified, I saw that even this word had not the power to move Paul. He loomed larger than life, with an angry mouth, saying, “This is your Omama’s house, and you are only one of the four persons living it it. We must choose between your sensibilities and everybody else’s comfort.”

  I went into the bathroom and cried, because I would have to go on living in an ugly apartment and because Paul had spoken to me in irritation.

  When I came into the kitchen the next morning, he was studying the Sunday Times help-wanted columns. He told me that he had looked in at the laboratory on his lunch hour to ask if he could do anything, and they had asked him to wash some test tubes and he had dropped the bucket—a horrible mess. Paul said, “I’m going to put in an ad for myself. ‘Wanted: situation with excellent pay for man no longer young, no experience, two left hands, talent for sitting down.’”

  “Lend me the ‘Help Wanted—Female,’” I said. “I keep looking where it says ‘Wrtg.’ or ‘Coll. Grads.’ I keep thinking somewhere there is this fascinating job surrounded by a set of handsome, kind, and interesting people.”

  Paul said he had been thinking about me. He very much regretted that he had no hand skills, and this might be the time for me to acquire some.

  “Yes, I have been thinking, myself, of taking some evening courses. Maybe comparative religion.”

  No, no, Paul said, he had meant something more like shorthand and typing. “Only I think it should be something adjacent to your talents and interests—commercial art, perhaps.”

  “Ech, commercial art!” I said, and then I said, “Pauli, am I getting horribly on your nerves?”

  “Horribly,” Paul said. “Your mother and I were talking about you and saying that we’re sorry for the man who takes you on, but that you are well worth the trouble.”

  “What man?” I said.

  Toni never called again. For weeks, I tried to recall the words Paul had said about my being a lot of trouble to a man but worth his while, and I could never make out in my mind’s ear if he had said, “the man who will take you on,” or “the man who would take you on.”

  It was hardly three weeks later that my grandmother came home from the triangle with the news of Toni Lustig’s engagement. She had seen the girl, and she had buck teeth and was older than he.

  One day, I opened our mailbox and found my witty letter to the writers’ club, stamped “Address Unknown.” I put my hand inside the mailbox and felt all around it; there was nothing else. The box next to ours had its door hanging open, and I felt inside it, too, and stood a moment, frightened that I was losing my good sense.

  That winter, I took evening courses in shorthand and typing, and by the spring of my second year in New York I got a job with a public relations firm on Madison Avenue. They liked my British accent, and at first clearly thought that at fifty dollars a week I was a bargain. The firm was a new undertaking by two men, one of whom was nervous and one good-natured. The good-natured one did his own letters, and so did the nervous one after he found how badly I typed. Their clients—Danish Whale Meat, A Refresher Course in Male Magnetism, and A Proposal for Sending the Liberty Bell to the Philippine World’s Fair—made little work for anyone. The nervous boss told me to keep looking busy. I asked if it would be all right for me to write my own stories, and he said that would be just fine.

  On my lunch hour, I walked alternate pavements north and south, peering hungrily into the shop windows of high-class dress houses and aristocratic antique shops. At home, I undertook to paint the furniture. “If I could think of exactly the right color,” I said.

  “Brown,” said my grandmother.

  “Brown! Like imitation wood? Never! Paint should be paint. Red and blue aren’t very elegant. Green is impossible. Gray, maybe.”

  “Nobody in America has gray furniture,” said my grandmother.

  “How would you know?”

  “I know,” said my grandmother. “I hear what people say.”

  “Where? In the triangle? What Frau Hohemberg says?”

  “I’ve been in homes.”

  “In Frau Amalie Kruger’s home. Just stop and think, Omama—when have you ever been inside an American home?”

  “I have been, I have been,” said my grandmother.

  “Let me do it in gray, Omama. You’ll see it will look so much nicer,” I said, and my grandmother raised her right hand, palm out, and made a motion of throwing it away—of giving up.

  I agonized a week over the precise shade, and presently the apartment was full of large rickety chests of drawers painted gray, and my grandmother went to bed ill from the commotion and the smell of turpentine mixing with the heat of August.

  In the fall, Paul married Dolf’s sister Suse, with whom he had gone to school in Vienna, and they moved into an apartment of their own in the Bronx. My mother moved into the bedroom with my grandmother and left me the sitting room, in which I moved furniture around like mad. I made what I thought a handsome corner of the two couches, and sewed Chinese-red burlap covers for them, which, my grandmother complained, were too scratchy to sit on. Nor could she make friends with the Danish teakwood coffee table I had got on sale; it was too low for playing solitaire. So my mother moved the old kitchen table into the bedroom, and there, from that time on, my grandmother mostly lived.

  When my mother took a job in a bakery on Broadway and began to work late hours, she bought my grandmother an immense square black television set for the long evenings ahead.

  “That nice Liberace; he’s Jewish, isn’t he?” asked my grandmother.

  “Oh Omama! He’s not! That’s an Italian name,” I said.

  “I think he is Jewish,” said my grandmother. “But this man—” She pointed to the screen. A master of ceremonies was introducing a little dog which wore a ballet skirt and stood on its hind legs. “I don’t like him. He is an anti-Semite,” my grandmother said.

  “He uses Jews on his show all the time,” I said. “What makes you think he is anti-Semitic?”

  “I can always tell,” said my grandmother.

  “But you don’t understand a word he is saying. What are you judging by?”

  “I can always feel it,” my grandmother said, patting the air with her right hand in a gesture that was proof against the arguments of mere logic.

  On Saturday, my grandmother said, “Frau Hohemberg says there’s a nice young woman who used to work on the machine next to hers, who goes to a club on Broadway with a lot of nice young Jewish people. They have lectures and do interesting things. They go to artists’ studios and to the stockyards, and in summer they have picnics. She’s going to give me the address for Lore.”

  “I don’t want to go to the stockyards or to picnics with any nice young Jewish people,” I said. “But you, Mummy! You should go out once in a while.”

  “I go out,” said my mother. “Last Sunday, Omama and I went to tea with Frau Hohemberg.”

  “Yes,” said my grandmother, “and Frau Hohemberg had specially invited her brother, who is a widower, for you, and all you did all afternoon was play with Toni Lustig’s baby.”

  “But Muttilein, the baby was so much more charming than Frau Hohemberg’s brother. He has a very high voice and a smelly cigar.”

  “But Mummy, maybe he would be interesting once you got to know him,”
I said. “Or he might know some other people. You have to start somewhere. Omama has her television.”

  “You don’t have to bother about Omama, because Omama will soon be dead anyway,” said my grandmother and went into her bedroom.

  “Mutti! Lorle! I wouldn’t even know where to go,” my mother said.

  “There are clubs!” I said impatiently. It was a long time after my mother had learned to keep out of my affairs that I stopped advising her on hers.

  Then my grandmother took to going out by herself. In the fall, Paul had a son, Peter, and every week my grandmother undertook the trip, involving two changes of subway and one bus, to the Bronx.

  I got fired from the public relations office—the nicest job I ever had—when the nervous boss put a name and phone number on my desk and asked me to put a call through, and I said, “One minute; as soon as I finish this paragraph.”

  I branched into commercial art. I was hired in the capacity of apprentice-saleswoman-receptionist-bottle-washer in a small, sixth-rate studio at thirty dollars a week. The boss said, “You stick with me. I’ll make a designer out of you.”

  “You think I have talent, then?”

  “Don’t worry about talent. You keep your eyes open. I’ll tell you what’s selling. You’ll be a designer.”

  I think he must have had high blood pressure. He was a huge, red-faced Pole called Polacek, who believed that the more you yelled the more you got out of people. “You’ve got to yell at them!” he yelled after hearing my embarrassed tone with a customer on the telephone. “Now sit down and paint.”

  “I thought you wanted me to—”

  “Don’t think. Paint.”

  A tall, handsome girl called Margery helped me mix my colors when the boss wasn’t looking, and Mrs. Shapiro, the head designer, whispered that he really had a heart of gold—it was just his voice was loud. Mrs. Shapiro was built small and round, rather like my mother, and had the clear skin and happy eyes of a young girl. Sometimes her husband came to pick her up, and he, too, was small and round, with clear pink cheeks and the same charming air of happiness. Mrs. Shapiro talked with a modest tenderness of her two teen-age children and the senile mother-in-law who lived with them in their little house in Queens. Once, after work, I followed her downstairs and invited her for a cup of coffee.