Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  Ruth grieved for her mother for years. She was twenty-eight when her mother died. Rooshka had died of cancer, at sixty. She had died with her beauty undimmed, her looks as luminous as they had ever been. Ruth often

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  still cried, now, when she thought of her mother. A psychologist once asked Ruth if she had linked her mother’s death with her own ability to lose weight. Ruth had nearly fainted at the question. It was not a connection that had occurred to her. A lack of understanding about the connections and complications of being the child of survivors was not the only thing missing from most children of survivors. Children of survivors depressed Ruth. She tried to avoid them. She found them curiously blank and lifeless.

  Joyless. The high achievers seemed as muffled as the more forlorn.

  Even in expansive moments children of survivors still seemed mute.

  Ruth had watched Leon Wasserstein at his wedding to wife number two.

  Ruth had been at school, in Melbourne with Leon. He was a short, slight man. A scientist. He looked frightened even when he was expressing happiness. Leon was born, after the war, in Bergen-Belsen. When Ruth asked him about Bergen-Belsen, he said he had no memory of it and was sure it had had no effect on him. “It was my mother and father who suffered,” he had said.

  Leon Wasserstein was forty-three when he married for the second time.

  His wife, a tall, big-boned, blond Australian, several years older than Leon, announced that she and Leon were going to dance for the guests. “My wife Lee-Anne choreographed these dances, herself,” Leon added, before they began dancing.

  On the dance floor, Leon Wasserstein looked like a child trying to guess what was going to happen next. Lee-Anne flung him around. He followed her movements as best as he could. They were tricky movements. The couple had to put their hands up, then their hands down. They had to kick the right leg out in front of them, then kick the left. They had to turn toward each other with their arms outstretched, and turn back again, and clap.

  They had to step this way and that way, and turn and whirl.

  At one stage, the bride’s blue satin dress billowed wildly and nearly swallowed poor Leon. When he emerged, he was still kicking. Ruth noticed that although Leon’s fingers and toes were animated, his face had remained peculiarly unmoved. By the third dance, Ruth had had to leave the room.

  She couldn’t bear the sight of Leon nodding his head to a beat that was clearly out of his reach.

  Ruth was about to enter the Bristol Hotel. The Bristol was one of Warsaw’s most expensive hotels. “I think you can hear me,” a voice said. Ruth T O O M A N Y M E N

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  nearly fell over. It was that voice again. Her heart started pounding. She looked behind her. There was no one there. She was alone. She looked in front of her. The doorman was standing behind the large, glass doors of the hotel. There was no one else about. The doorman stepped forward to open the door for Ruth. She turned away. She walked briskly along Krakowskie Przedmiescie. Then, with no warning, she stopped and looked back. There was no one there. Nobody was following her.

  She began to walk back to the Bristol. “I think you can hear me,” the voice said again, with an emphasis on the word you. Ruth felt frightened.

  She began to tremble. She pulled herself together. She was just tired, there was no one there. “I can’t hear you,” she said, defiantly, to the almost empty street. “I knew you were the one,” the voice said triumphantly. Ruth shook herself. This was absurd. She was, clearly, hearing things. She had always had an overly active imagination. She really must be very tired.

  Chapter Two

  T wo wake-up calls, five minutes apart, woke Ruth up.

  She always requested two wake-up calls in hotels. It decreased the odds of the call being forgotten by 50 percent. Three minutes later, the alarm clock she had set rang. At home, in her regular life, she had weaned herself off a variety of multiple wake-up mechanisms. She now made do with two alarm clocks.

  Ruth found it hard to go to sleep at night. Night had an endlessness about it. An excessive number of unstructured and unknown hours that frightened her. Alarm clocks punctuated that time. Marked the end with a loud ring.

  Alarm clocks enabled Ruth to feel some sense of certainty about waking up.

  She confused sleep with death, one shrink had said to her. Another suggested that sleep frightened her as what happened when she was asleep was something that was out of her control. Ruth didn’t like either theory.

  She had slept well last night. She often slept well in hotels. There was less to feel anxious about. Someone was on guard all night. In expensive hotels several someones were on guard. There were security systems. Cameras that roamed the elevators, staircases, and hallways. There were fire and smoke detectors. Less could be overlooked.

  Ruth felt refreshed. Her head felt clear. Her vasomotor system must have gone astray yesterday. She wasn’t sure exactly what her vasomotor sysT O O M A N Y M E N

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  tem was. She thought it had something to do with her nervous system. She imagined it as a series of wires connected to her brain. When one of them came loose, things went a bit haywire.

  She thought that as a mature person, she should understand the work-ings of the brain in more detail. But she didn’t want to. If you knew too much, Ruth felt, about how any part of your body functioned, it left you more vulnerable about what could go wrong. Certain things, Ruth was certain, could cause a loose connection in the brain’s electrical circuitry. Like jet lag. It must have been jet lag that made her imagine someone was speaking to her.

  She had a suite in the Bristol. A bedroom and a living room. The living room had a sofa, an armchair, a coffee table, and bookshelves. The books in the shelves simulated somebody’s real collection. There were well-thumbed-through old volumes, and current titles. A couple of the book covers were torn. It was an upper-class library that this collection was imitating. There were several leather-bound books and no paperbacks.

  Ruth had tried to look through the books on the shelves last night. But there wasn’t enough light in the living room. On the whole, the more you paid for a hotel, the less you could see. As though an adequate amount of light might lower the tone. The lighting definitely seemed to dim or brighten in direct ratio to the dollars expended by the guests.

  Ruth got out of bed. She couldn’t see herself in the mirror. If she stayed in hotels any more expensive than this, she would have to pack a flashlight.

  All four phones in the suite rang. Ruth looked around. She couldn’t see any of them. Every surface contained a figurine or a vase or a bowl. It took her a couple of minutes to locate a phone.

  “We can put calls through to you now, madam?” the hotel operator asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She had forgotten that she had asked not to be disturbed until 8 A.M. today.

  “You have Maximilian on line two for you,” the operator said. “Line two is in the bedroom.”

  “Maximilian?” Ruth said.

  “Yes, madam, Maximilian,” the operator said. “She waits for you already five minutes.”

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  Ruth picked up the other phone. “Hi, Max,” she said. “The operator told me Maximilian was on the line.”

  “She called me Maximilian,” Max said. “Maximilian is better than Max-ine. I told her it was just Max. I told her that my parents wanted my brother to feel involved in my birth, that they didn’t want him to feel left out, so they let him name me. I told her he was six and he named me Max. I explained it to her carefully, but she didn’t seem to get it.”

  Ruth laughed. Max often made her laugh. Max was twenty-six. She had been working for Ruth for five years. Max always overcommunicated everything. It drove some people mad, but Ruth found it an endearing quality. When Max’s effusive explanations got too much for her, she would say, “Edit, Max, edit.” Max never took offense. She just removed the extraneous detai
l. Ruth was very fond of Max.

  “Max, isn’t it very late at night for you?” Ruth said. “You can’t still be in the office?”

  “No, I’m at home,” Max said. “It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Two o’clock in the morning?” said Ruth.

  “I thought it would be easier to catch you at this time,” Max said. “I’m always up anyway. I’ll be brief and to the point, I don’t want to intrude on what has to be a very emotionally tumultuous trip.”

  “The tumult hasn’t quite started,” Ruth said. “But let’s not run up your phone bill more than necessary. Is everything okay?”

  “Everything in the office is A-1,” Max said. “If my personal life was in as good shape as this company, I’d be off and away. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “Good,” said Ruth.

  “Bern is working out well,” Max said. “He got in late this morning, but he said, and I believe him, that there was some kind of holdup on the subway. They kept the train at Union Square station for thirty minutes. With the doors closed. He couldn’t get off. That doesn’t happen so often now, but it used to happen to me, regularly.”

  “Edit, Max, edit,” Ruth said. She didn’t need to hear about Bern’s battles with the city’s transport system. She had hired Bern two months ago.

  He used to make deliveries to them from a local stationery store. Ruth liked him from the first day she’d met him. She had asked him why he didn’t stop smoking. “I’m not a quitter,” he had replied. Ruth was impressed by his T O O M A N Y M E N

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  eloquence and his good nature. He often asked Ruth questions about the business.

  “You are a smart dude,” he had said to her one day. “I’d like a company like this.”

  “You could have one, one day,” she’d said.

  “I need to learn the business first,” he said. “Would you give me a job?”

  The question had taken her by surprise. Bern was very young. He was only eighteen.

  “I’ll do your pickups and deliveries,” he said. “I’ll clean the office. I’ll do all the jobs you don’t want to do until I’ve learned the business and I’m more useful.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. A week later, she hired Bern.

  Bern hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d got the job. His mother had called Ruth to thank her for giving Bern this opportunity. Ruth had felt bad. She felt she wasn’t giving Bern all that much.

  “We needed someone else in the office,” she said to Bern’s mother.

  “Not many white women would give a young black man a chance,”

  Bern’s mother had said. “I’m going to pray for you in church, on Sunday.”

  “Thank you,” Ruth had said.

  Ruth knew life was hard for young black kids, especially boys. She could see how segregated America was. If you went to the theater or a dinner party or a museum or an art gallery, you saw very few black people. At an opening of anything, in New York, everyone wanted to let themselves be seen being friendly to the two and a half black people who were present.

  Ruth was very fond of Bern, but she didn’t want to be sitting in the Bristol Hotel, in Warsaw, discussing delays in the New York City subways.

  “Sorry,” Max said. “We’ve got an order for fifteen different thank-you letters. It’s Mr. Newton of Newton Labs. He wants fifteen thank-you-for-your-thoughts-while-I-was-ill letters. His secretary said to make sure we don’t duplicate any of his thank-you-for-our-wedding-anniversary-gifts letters. I can’t put fifteen different versions together from our thanks-for-your-thought file, especially if they can’t duplicate the wedding-anniversary letters. There were seventy-five of them, I looked them up. Each one was slightly different.”

  “I’ll do it,” Ruth said. “What was wrong with Mr. Newton?”

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  “Bypass surgery,” said Max.

  “Okay,” Ruth said. “I’ll do that right now.”

  The business center of the Bristol Hotel had a genteel, refined, and very masculine air. It was furnished with large, well-padded leather sofas and armchairs. Leather-bound books lined the bookshelves and tasteful framed prints, drawings, and historical documents were on the walls.

  “Are you looking for someone, madam?” the man at the business desk asked her.

  “I need to fax some documents,” she said. He looked surprised. “There are a lot of women doing business today,” she said. “Probably even in Poland.”

  “Of course we have faxing facilities,” he said, and stood up, rapidly, to greet a very fat man with a gold fob watch hanging from his pinstriped waistcoat.

  Ruth pulled up a file labeled Thanks-Post-Surgery from her new laptop computer. It was the smallest and lightest computer on the market. Her father would have approved of this purchase, Ruth thought.

  Ruth blinked her left eye five times. She always did this when she composed letters referring to a person’s health, or death. It was a strange safeguard she didn’t really understand. A sign to someone, a higher being, maybe, that she knew these things were not to be meddled with. But she didn’t believe in higher beings. She didn’t believe in God.

  “There is no God,” was the only reference to religion that was voiced when Ruth was growing up. “There is no God,” her mother said, always looking up at the sky. Ruth often wondered why her mother looked upward when she made this statement. She never asked. She didn’t want to hear the stories of babies used as footballs by the Gestapo, or babies who had their heads smashed against brick walls again.

  Ruth finished the thank-you letters without any more blinking. A man sat down on the other side of the table she was working at. She recognized him. He had been at the front desk when she left for her run yesterday. “I am a physician,” he had kept shouting, in his thick German accent. “I am a physician and I do not like the room you have given to me.”

  Forty-five percent of German doctors became members of the Nazi party T O O M A N Y M E N

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  during the Third Reich. Ruth knew that from her reading. Doctors were the largest group of any professionals to join the Nazi party. The Nazi Physicians’

  Association, in March 1933, appealed to their fellow physicians who had so far resisted the cause. “No profession is as Jew-ridden as the medical profession,” they said in a published statement. “Jewish doctors control the profes-sorships in medicine, take the spirit out of the medical art, and have imposed on generation after generation of young physicians a mechanistic spirit.”

  A mechanistic spirit. Ruth had an image of a group of German doctors dispensing warmth and exuberance and tenderness once they had rid themselves of those mechanistically spirited Jews. In April 1933 Nazi doctors and SA Sturmabteilungen troops stormed public hospitals and clinics and universities expelling their Jewish colleagues. Removing the Jewish doctors removed the competition. German doctors’ careers flourished.

  Ruth looked at the German doctor sitting opposite her. He seemed calmer this morning. They must have given him the room that he wanted.

  He was a thickset man in his seventies, with coarse features and a large, grim face. Ruth wondered if he still saw patients. She wouldn’t want to have her health in this physician’s hands.

  It had taken Ruth a long time in America to find a doctor she liked who was on her health insurance company’s list of doctors. Health care was a large issue for most Americans. The issue was the health insurance. How to get the insurance, how to pay for it, and exactly how much health was covered by this insurance.

  Health care insurers were often portrayed as being more interested in their own profit than anyone else’s pain. The image of insurance companies as paternal, trustworthy institutions, who provided peace of mind for their insured, was almost gone, in America, today.

  Some insurance companies had a bleak past. Days after Kristallnacht, that night in November 1938 when German mobs smashed, looted, and burned one hundred and
seventy-one synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops and businesses, German insurance companies seized the opportunity to save themselves money. Nineteen of the forty-three German fire insurance companies stood to suffer losses for the year if they honored the policies held by their Jewish policyholders.

  The Isar Life Insurance Company articulated the problem eloquently in a letter dated November 17, 1938, in which it explained that so many Jew-

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  ish clients were desperately trying to cash in their policies that “the worst fears have to be asserted for the further existence of our company.”

  They didn’t have to worry. Their concerns were heard. The Nazis established the practice of confiscating the insurance assets of German Jews. It was no longer necessary for German insurance companies to make payments to Jews for fire or life insurance.

  In December 1938, an insurance company that sold pension annuities informed the German government that it would be discontinuing the payment of pensions and widow’s pensions “insofar as the recipients are Jews.”

  That was fine with the German government.

  Ruth put away her work. She felt nauseous. She decided she needed some breakfast. She often felt nauseated if she tried to skip breakfast. The dining room was full of businessmen. Ruth found a table she could have to herself. She didn’t like eating with strangers. She took some melon and strawberries and kiwi fruit from the buffet.

  The men at the table next to her were German. She watched them eat.

  They were so neat and particular. They wiped their mouths with a napkin after each mouthful of food, and buttered their bread with architectural precision. These small movements were made by large men. Tall, big-boned men. Their hands, the ample hands of grown men, were at odds with the gestures they were making. The fastidiousness of the men’s habits belonged to a more diminutive race.

  The men were quiet while they ate, too. Unlike their American counterparts, who spoke in voices loud enough to pollute most of the dining areas they inhabited. The German businessmen were also formal in other ways.