by Lore Segal
He called the following day. “We made our date for next Thursday. We both forgot that it’s Thanksgiving and there won’t be any class.”
“I didn’t forget. I never knew.”
“You won’t be celebrating with your family?”
“We don’t celebrate anything any more. No Christmas because we’re Jewish, and no Jewish holidays because we were assimilated Austrians, and no Austrian holidays because we got thrown out for being Jewish, and we haven’t acquired the American holidays yet.”
There was a silence, and then Carter said, “And I don’t have anybody to celebrate with, so you and I will put on the dog together.”
“This lady and I are going to put on the dog because it’s Thanksgiving,” Carter Bayoux said to the waiter at the restaurant. “What will you have?”
“I didn’t think we had a choice. I thought it was turkey?”
“You may have the turkey. I’ll take Tournedos de Boeuf.”
“I’ll have that, too, whatever it is.”
“Two Tournedos de Boeuf, and bring us a Chambertin ’49,” Carter said.
“Have you noticed that brutal poster of a red-faced turkey running in terror from a greedy-looking Puritan with a raised hatchet?” I asked Carter. “That’s American Thanksgiving for you.”
Carter was looking at me with very bright brown eyes opened so wide that the irises stood free of upper and lower lid. He seemed to be waiting for me to continue.
I said, “I’ve been too shy to tell you, but I did awfully like your story about the Negro journalist who marries the white psychiatrist. I thought it was quite powerful.”
“And you also thought that because I’m a Negro and write bitter stories, you and I were going to sit here and make snide remarks about Thanksgiving together. I’m an American, you know. At any rate, there’s nothing else I am,” Carter said, keeping me impaled on his bright stare and staying with me through the rise of my blood to a full flush and its fading, so that we seemed to come out together at the far end of my first lesson. “I may order a French dinner and wine, but I do it affectionately and with a bit of bravado, like an American. And I’m a sentimental about Christmas and Thanksgiving, too, and if I celebrate by getting a little drunk it’s because I’m alone. I left the Negro world when I married a white wife, but I never married the white world. And then I divorced my wife.”
“That’s like a Pakistani friend of mine,” I said. “He’s lived in America for eleven years and he’s no longer an Oriental, and yet he’s not an Occidental, either.”
“No,” Carter said. “It’s not like that at all. I have not, like your friend, lost my culture, nor, like you, my country. My isolation is peculiarly American. When you told me that you didn’t have any holidays to celebrate, I was moved for you.”
I looked at him amazed. I had been boasting when I spoke of our emancipation from public celebrations. Now, I was suddenly moved myself. “It is rather sad. There’s my mother working in the bakery because it’s one of their busiest nights, and my grandmother watching television of which she doesn’t understand a single word.”
“Then we will take your grandmother some flowers,” Carter said.
“I’m afraid she’ll only think they’re an extravagance.”
“But that’s why we are taking them to her,” Carter said.
I had my fears about my grandmother’s reception of this large, portly, elderly brown man, but she rose from her chair and took Carter’s bunch of yellow pompons, and made him a small bow of politeness belonging to another style of manners. She even made a try at conversation, pointing to the television and saying, “Liberace. Spielt wunderbar.”
Carter looked at me.
I said, “She listens to that horror every week. She says, heaven help us, that he plays wonderfully.”
Carter turned to my grandmother and said, “Beautiful, wonderful!” and played the air with his fingers, nodding his head up and down.
My grandmother had discovered someone she could talk to. “Liberace ist ein nobler Mann” [literally, a noble man—a gentleman]. “He is always polite—not like the young people who dance in the afternoon. I watch them, but they have bad manners,” my grandmother told Carter in German.
Carter kept nodding and smiling. My grandmother nodded back with a bright, shy smile. After he had gone, she said he was a noble man.
The following week, I gave a party, pleased to find that I knew enough people in New York to fill my sitting room. My grandmother insisted on staying in the bedroom, but she had put on her best pewter-colored silk dress and looked out of her door every time the bell rang. When Carter arrived, she came and stood outside her door, making him a little smiling bow, but Carter seemed nervous and upset and walked straight into the room already full of people and voices and did not notice her.
When I was a child, I used to sit on the blue-on-blue carpet in our Herrenzimmer in Vienna, trying to catch the small hand on our mahogany clock in the act of moving from one hour to the next, and I never could. Once in a while, and always by accident, I have caught that visual click of time advancing. One day, I looked in the mirror and saw that though my nose was still long and sharp, it was newly accommodated by a softened cheek. The eyes behind my spectacles had lost their eager anxiety spelling hopelessness, thanks to Abdullah and to time. Simultaneously, I noticed my grandmother take a leap forward into old age. “It’s just that she’s been ill,” I said to my mother, when I saw by the way she looked at my grandmother that she had noticed too. “You wait a week and she’ll be just the same.”
However, my grandmother remained visibly shrunken, with a new economy in all her motions. “Your mother is going to make the supper when she comes home,” my grandmother said.
“Are you going to the Bronx?” I asked. Paul had had a second son, called John. My grandmother said maybe next week she would go.
“Then why have you got your silk dress on?”
“It’s time for Liberace.”
“So?”
“He always wears a tuxedo,” my grandmother said, and turned the knob and sat down facing the box and smiled as Liberace appeared, playing himself his own theme song. The camera panned onto that face cursed with a perpetual smile. With horror I saw my grandmother lift her hand and wave delicately with her fingers.
“Omama, do you know where Liberace is? In California. Do you know California is a thousand miles from New York?”
“But I can see him,” my grandmother said.
“You’ve been to the movies, Omama. You’ve seen figures moving on a screen.”
“But he is smiling at me,” said my grandmother.
“He’s smiling at the camera, Omama. Can’t you imagine a man standing in front of the camera and smiling into it?”
“Where is the camera?”
“Nowhere. In California.”
“Come here, Lore! Stand behind me. You see, he is looking right at me,” and my grandmother smiled at Liberace and nodded her head.
“Omama, do me a favor? Come over here just for a moment. Please.”
“I’m too tired.”
“All right, I’ll turn the television around. Look! How could there be a man inside this box? Omama! Imagine a piano!”
My grandmother said, “Aren’t you going out with Abdullah tonight?”
“I haven’t seen Abdullah in a year. Where’s your TV Guide? Here, ‘Liberace.’ Look—in parentheses it says ‘film.’ That means he isn’t even live in California. This program was filmed days ago—maybe months.”
In the following days, I noticed that my grandmother was not watching television. “Do you want me to turn it on, Omama? It’s time for Liberace.”
She raised her right hand and then threw it away. It didn’t matter.
“Don’t you like him any more?”
“He’s on film,” said my grandmother.
“Omama, would you like to go down to the triangle?”
“I don’t want to get dressed. Maybe tomorrow,” said my grandmo
ther.
“Come on, Omama. You have to get out sometimes. Would you like to go and see Paul and the little boys? Do you want me to go with you? I’ll get your silk dress for you. Come on, Omama.”
My grandmother rose slowly. She said, “I’m going to die soon. What am I waiting for?”
“So am I going to die. So is everybody,” I said, for I considered this a malicious line on my grandmother’s part. If it was anything besides, I didn’t want to know. And I noted how in the street she waited for the lights to turn green more carefully than I, who had my whole life to lose, and how cautiously she stepped off the sidewalk into the dangerous road.
We took a taxi. My grandmother said, “I’ve been thinking about God.”
“What have you been thinking? Do you believe in God, Omama?”
“God …” said my grandmother, and was silent, and in a moment she threw him away with the downward wave of her right hand.
Paul was looking skinny and tired. Earlier that year, he had left his job as animal attendant at the research foundation and got one in the sales office of a numismatist, sorting coins. He was bad at the meticulous and uninteresting work, and got shouted at. At home were his two energetic little sons, aged four and three. Peter kept switching the television on and off and little John turned round and round. My grandmother, who could not understand a word of the children’s English chatter, looked glad when it was time to go home.
When we left, Paul was sitting on a chair between the boys’ beds. He was playing a toy mandolin from Macy’s fifth floor and singing the children’s song that he had translated and transplanted from the German for them:
On the Hudson River
Swims a crocodile,
With his tail aquiver,
On his face a smile.
Do not use your gun.
Do not spoil his fun.
Catch him with a broomstick
Baited with a bun.
From time to time he laid down the instrument and, with no can opener, pressed two triangular holes into a nonexistent beer can and out of the larger opening fetched himself great refreshing draughts of the imagination.
One evening, I brought home a new job and carried it straight to the drawing table, which was permanently set up in the sitting room. I unrolled the painting and studied the intricate blue and purple roses, of which I would have to forge a dozen more, with such nervous distaste that when I realized my grandmother had followed me in, I said, “Hi, Omama,” without turning around, though I felt the strangeness of her standing there behind me. It was months since she had even come into the hall to meet me. Presently I knew that she had gone away. I followed her into the bedroom. She was sitting on the chair facing the silent television. “Did you make supper, Omama, or do you want me to make it? Mummy is going to be late.”
“You make it,” my grandmother said.
When I brought in the plates, my grandmother was sitting in the same position, and I said, “Omama, don’t you want to turn your chair around? Omama?”
She put her right hand on the table edge as if to help herself up, but still she sat.
“Omama!”
My grandmother rose slowly, but remained standing.
“Turn around, Omama.” I moved her chair for her, and she sat down on it. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
She picked up her fork but did not raise it to her mouth.
“Don’t you feel well, Omama?” I asked her.
My grandmother’s right hand twitched, as if in memory of the old wave of rejection and resignation. I asked her if she would like to go to bed and she said she would. She leaned on my arm, moving so slowly across the room she seemed to be forgetting how to put one foot before the other. I took off her shoes, but she had not the strength to lift her legs onto the bed. I called my mother, and by the time she arrived my grandmother had lost her speech. My mother called the doctor.
My mother stayed home from work and nursed my grandmother. Her power of speech returned, but she seemed to find nothing worth the trouble of saying, nor anything to eat that tempted her to chew. Yet soon she was sitting up, and in another week she could stand, though she never regained more than the merest shuffle of a walk.
“You won’t be able to stay home from work permanently,” I said to my mother.
“I know,” she said.
“Besides, it isn’t right for you to spend all your life nursing sick people—Daddy, and Professor Schmeidig, and then Opapa, and now Omama …”
“I know,” said my mother. Her face was flushed. The tears that dilated her eyes began to roll down her cheeks.
“Of course, I’m at home most of the time, but how would I go downtown to collect and deliver work? I mean, she can’t be left even for a moment.”
“No, no,” said my mother. “You can’t live like that. We will have to put her in an old-age home.”
“Mummy, it won’t be so bad,” I said. “They have trained personnel, and there will be other old people. She’ll never have to be alone again.”
“That’s right,” said my mother, and all the time she was crying and crying.
Once a week, I went to visit my grandmother in the nursing home in a converted brownstone around the corner from Central Park West. My grandmother sat in a chair next to her bed. I sat next to my grandmother and studied the gray wallpaper with the green and yellow chrysanthemums and worm-like leaves, looking for the repeat.
“So? Warm enough for you?” said an obese Negro nurse to Mrs. Kelly, who sat, on an August dog day, in two sweaters with a coat wrapped about her legs, guarding the closed window. The nurse stuck the last spoonful of applesauce into the baby-pink face on the pillow in the bed next to my grandmother’s and said, “Good as gold. Never any trouble out of her. Not like you, Mrs. Mankjewicz. Now you cover up—aren’t you a terror!” the nurse said to Mrs. Mankjewicz, who was dying of diabetes, and tucked the sheet around her. “And how are you today?” the nurse asked, and stroked her hand over my grandmother’s hair.
When she had turned her back, my grandmother made a face at her and said, “She doesn’t understand a word I say. But the night nurse is German. America!” said my grandmother, looking all around the room until she came to Mrs. Mankjewicz, who had thrown her covers off again and was waving her two skinny stumps, amputated at the knee, in the air. “America is no good.”
“Good-by, Omama,” I said. “I have to meet a friend on Riverside Drive.” And because my grandmother asked me. no questions, I said, “His name is David.”
“Come back soon,” she said.
That corner of Seventy-fourth Street still has the power to move me to a dry sort of tears, like sinuses aching behind the eyes. I walked out of the nursing home with a gasp of joy into the city lying in the exhaustion of the late-afternoon heat. Behind me, lovely Central Park was green, and the young girl crossing at Columbus Avenue swung her meager shoulders and swished her gay skirt, printed with orange, black, and turquoise galleys. It had pyramids in the background, which hit me familiarly so that I followed her a block uptown to get a clòser look—and yes, no hand but mine could have painted that awkward curl of the prow. It was a “conversation” print of the Egyptian period, which preceded the Roman era and placed the fabric squarely in my year at the Polacek studio.
I turned down Amsterdam Avenue, assailed suddenly by a complexity of misery in which I tasted the familiar ingredients of loneliness and shame and the beginnings of nausea, and, stopping for the light at the corner of Broadway, I looked inward, wondering what was the matter now. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the marquee of the Hotel X and recalled intact the dimly lit dance hall, and myself softening experimentally in the arms of the sad and beastly electrician. New York is as full of my past as of my old textile designs walking about its streets; on Fifty-seventh Street, for instance, there is a car dealer of the same name as the editor who turned down my first story, and every time the Fifth Avenue bus carries me past his sign, I feel an embarrassment grown so faint by now I hardly bo
ther to diagnose its cause. It is, I think, the way our histories become charged thus upon the air, the streets, the very houses of New York, that makes the alien into a citizen.
The traffic lights had changed, and I crossed Broadway. At West End Avenue, I caught the warm wind stirring from the river, and saw David waving from a bench under the heavy summer trees.
My grandmother died the night of her eighty-first birthday and was buried in a huge graveyard in New Jersey. My mother lives alone on 157th Street. David and I were married, and moved to an apartment in midtown. Like the little dog who turns and turns around himself to shape a place in the earth to fit his own proportions, I hunted the antique shops until I found our dining table—drop-leaf, eighteenth-century, and English. David said, “You don’t think Queen Anne might be misplaced on West Seventy-second Street?” I said, “Yes, but, please, I need it.” And so we made ourselves a home.
I keep looking around me: The war is still cold, and overseas; no one of my people, this moment, is ill; every day there are hours when I can write, and we have our friends. My husband is Jewish too, but he was born in America and accepts without alarm this normal season of our lives; but I, now that I have children and am about the age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing that it is surrounded on all sides by calamity.
About the Author
Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928, and was educated at the University of London. A finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Segal has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, two PEN/O. Henry Awards, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A recognized author of children’s books, Segal has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and Harper’s Magazine, among others. She lives in New York City.