Although Werner and I went to the same high school, like all the boys in the neighborhood except the dummies who had to go to trade school or the smart alecks who were picked for Townsend Harris, we were really friends because both our families had back apartments in the same house on Hamilton Terrace, a street which angled up a hill off Broadway and had nothing else very terrace-like about it, except that its five-story tan apartment buildings had no store fronts on the ground floors. Nowadays that part of Washington Heights is almost all Puerto Rican, but in those days nobody in particular lived around there. My parents had moved there supposedly because it was a little nearer to their jobs in the Seventh Avenue garment district than the Bronx had been—my father worked in the fur district on Twenty-eighth Street, and my mother still got work as a finisher when the season was on—but actually they had come on the insistence of my Aunt Luba, who lived nearby—a sister of my mother’s, of whom she was exceptionally fond and could not go a day without seeing.
When Luba talked about the Heights being higher-class than the Bronx, my parents got very annoyed. Like a lot of the garment workers of that day they were members of the Socialist Labor Party, although they no longer worked very hard at it. Occasionally, still, of an evening, after my father had gotten all worked up playing the violin with two or three of his cronies in the chamber music sessions that he loved, there would be a vibrant discussion over the cold cuts, with my mother, flushed and gay, putting in a sharp retort now and then as she handed round the wine; then too my older sister had been named after Ibsen’s Nora—which sounded pretty damn funny with a name like Rosenbloom—and of course nobody in the family ever went to a synagogue. That’s about all their radicalism had amounted to. My younger sister was named Carol.
The Hausers had been in the building for a month when we moved in on the regular moving day, October first; later a neighbor told my mother that they had gotten September rent-free as a month’s concession on a year’s lease—a practice which only became common in the next few years of the depression, and, as I heard my mother say, a neater trick than the Rosenblooms would ever think of. Shortly after they came, a sign was put up to the left of the house entrance—Mrs. Hauser had argued down the landlord on this too. The sign said Erna Hauser. Weddings. Receptions. Parties, and maybe the landlord was mollified after he saw it. It was black enamel and gold leaf under glass, and about twice the size of the dentist’s. When I got to know Werner, at the time of those first frank questions with which boys place one another, he told me that ever since he and his mother had been sent for to come from Germany five years before, the family had been living in Yorkville in a furnished “housekeeping” room slightly larger than the one Mr. Hauser had occupied during the eight years he had been in the United States alone. Now Mrs. Hauser would have her own kitchen and a place to receive her clientele, mostly ladies from the well-to-do Jewish families of the upper West Side, for whom she had hitherto “helped out” at parties and dinners in their homes. From now on she would no longer “help out”—she would cater.
Most of what I learned about Werner, though, I didn’t learn from Werner. He would answer a question readily enough, but very precisely, very much within the limits of the question, and no overtones thrown in. I guess I learned about him because he was my friend, by sucking it out of the air the way kids do, during the times I was in his house before he was forbidden to hang around with me, and during the dozens of times before and after, when he sneaked up to our place. He was at our place as often as he could get away.
Up there, a casual visitor might have taken him for one of the family, since he was blond and short-featured, like my mother and me. He was a head taller than me, though, with a good build on him that was surprising if you had already seen his father’s sunken, nutcracker face and bent-kneed waiter’s shuffle. It wasn’t that he had the special quiet of the very stupid or the very smart, or that he had any language difficulty; he spoke English as well as I did and got mostly nineties at school, where he made no bones about plugging hard and was held up as an example because he had only been in the country five years. It was just that he had almost no informal conversation. Because of this I never felt very close to him, even when we talked sex or smoked on the sly, and sometimes I had an uneasy feeling because I couldn’t tell whether he was stupid or smart. I suppose we were friends mostly out of convenience, the way boys in a neighborhood are. Our apartments partly faced each other at opposite sides of the small circular rear court of the building; by opening his bedroom window and our dining-room window we could shout to each other to come over, or to meet out in front. I could, that is, although my mother used to grumble about acting up like riffraff. He was not allowed to; once, even before the edict, I saw the window shut down hard on his shoulders by someone from behind. After the edict we used to raise the windows very slightly and whistle. Even then, I never felt really close to him until the day after he was gone.
Saturday mornings, when I was that age, seemed to have a special glow; surely there must have been rainy ones, but I remember them all in a powerful golden light, spattered with the gabble of the vegetable men as they sparred with women at the open stalls outside their stores, and ringing with the loud, pre-Sunday clang of the ash cans as the garbage collectors hoisted them into the trucks and the trucks moved on in a warm smell of settling ash. It was a Saturday morning when I first went up to the Hausers’, to see if Werner could get off to take the Dyckman Ferry with me for a hike along the Palisades. I already knew that he helped his mother with deliveries evenings and afternoons after school, but I had not yet learned how prescribed all his hours were. The hall door of the Hauser apartment was open a crack; through it came a yeasty current as strong as a bakery’s. I flicked the bell.
“Come,” said a firm, nasal voice. Or perhaps the word was “Komm.” I was never to hear Mrs. Hauser speak English except once, when Werner and I, who had not heard her come in, walked through the parlor where she was dealing with a lady who had come about a daughter’s wedding. That was the occasion at which I saw her smile—at the lady—a fixed grimace which dusted lightly over the neat surface of her face like the powdered sugar she shook over her coffee cakes.
I walked in, almost directly into the kitchen. It was very like ours, small and badly lighted, but it had two stoves. Rows of copper molds and pans of all shapes hung on the walls. One graduated row was all of Bund pans, like one my mother had, but it was the first time I had seen utensils of copper, or seen them hung on walls. Supplies, everything was in rows; nothing wandered or went askew in that kitchen; even its choke-sweet odor had no domestic vagary about it, but clamped the room in a hot, professional pall. Werner and his mother, bent over opposite ends of a cloth-covered table, were carefully stretching at a large plaque of strudel dough which almost covered its surface. Both of them glanced up briefly and bent their heads again; the making of strudel is the most intense and delicate of operations, in which the last stretching of the dough, already rolled and pulled to tissue thinness, is done on the backs of the hands, and balances on an instinctive, feathery tension. I held my breath and watched. Luba and my mother made strudel about once a year, in an atmosphere of confused merriment and operatic anguish when the dough broke. As I watched, red crept up on Werner’s face.
Almost opposite me, Mrs. Hauser bent and rose, angularly deft, but without grace. I had expected some meaty-armed Hausfrau trundling an ample bosom smeared with flour; here was the virginal silhouette of a governess, black and busked—a dressmaker’s form collared in lace. From the side, her face had a thin economy, a handsomeness that had meagered and was further strained by the sparse hair spicked back in a pale bun.
Suddenly she straightened. The paste had reached the edges of the cloth; in a few whisked motions it was dabbed with butter, filled, rolled, cut, and done. She brushed her hands together, blew on the spotless front of her dress, and faced me. She was not handsome at all. Her nose, blunt-ended, came out too far to meet one, her eyes protruded slightly w
ith a lashless, committed stare, and the coin-shaped mouth was too near the nose. She wore no make-up, and her face had the triumphant neatness of the woman who does not; next to it Luba’s and my mother’s would have looked vital, but messy. Her skin was too bloodless though, and her lips and the nails of her floured hands were tinged with lavender, almost stone-colored, as if she suffered from some attenuation of the heart.
Werner mumbled out my first name, and I mumbled back my errand.
Mrs. Hauser, holding her hands lightly in front of her, still gave me her stare, but it was to Werner that she spoke at last.
“Sag ihm nein,” she said, and turning on her heel, she left the room, still holding away from her dress the hands with the stone-colored nails.
After that, I knew enough not to go to Werner’s unless he asked me to, usually on evenings when his father was on night duty in the restaurant where he worked, and Mrs. Hauser had an engagement, or on Sundays, when she had an especially fancy wedding and Mr. Hauser, dressed in his waiter’s garb, went along to help her serve.
I never got used to the way their apartment looked, compared with the way it smelled. When there was no cooking going on, and the hot fumes had a chance to separate and wander, then it was filled, furnished with enticing suggestions of cinnamon, vanilla, and anise, and the wonderful, warm caraway scent of little pastries stuffed with hot forcemeat—a specialty of Mrs. Hauser’s, of which her customers could never get enough. Standing outside the door, I used to think it smelled the way the house in Hansel and Gretel looked, in the opera to which my parents had taken me years before—a house from whose cornices and lintels one might break off a piece and find one’s mouth full of marzipan, an aerie promising happy troupes of children feasting within, in a blissful forever of maraschino and Nesselrode.
Actually, the four dim rooms, curtainless except for the blinds which the landlord supplied—one yellow, one dark green to a window—had an almost incredible lack of traces of personal occupancy, even after one knew that the Hausers never thought of the place as anything but temporary. It was furnished with a bleak minimum of tables and chairs like those in hired halls. Mrs. Hauser had procured everything from a restaurant supply house, all except the beds, which were little more than cots, and wore hard white cotton spreads of the kind seen in hotels. Here, in the bedrooms, some of the second-hand surfaces were protected with doilies, on which a few European family photographs had been placed. Years later, when I was staying in the luxurious house of a family which had managed to keep on its servants in the old-fashioned way, stumbling inadvertently into the servants’ wing, one morning, I came upon a room that reminded me instantly of the Hausers’, although even its dresser had a homely clutter of tawdry jewelry, dime-store boxes, and letters.
Even so, when Werner and I hung around awhile in his room, we never sat on the drill-neat bed. Usually we sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. Except for the times we did our homework together, we either just talked or exchanged the contents of our pockets, for it was the kind of house in which there was simply nothing to do. Once or twice we smoked cigarettes there, carefully airing the room and chewing soda-mints afterward. I supplied both the cigarettes and the soda-mints, since it was an understood thing that Werner never had any money of his own; the considerable work he did for his mother was “for the business.” The rows of cakes, frilled cookies, and tiny quenelles that we sometimes passed, going through the kitchen, were for the business too. I never got anything to eat there.
Usually, after we had been there a short while, Werner, wriggling his shoulders sheepishly, would say, “Let’s go up to your place,” or I would invite him up. I knew why Werner liked to be there, of course, why he could not keep from coming even after Mrs. Hauser had forbidden it. It may sound naïve to say so in this day and age, but we were an awfully happy family. We really were. And I never realized it more strongly than during the times I used to watch Werner Hauser up there.
I guess the best way I can explain the kind of family we were is to say that, although I was the only nonmusical one in a family that practically lived for music, I never felt criticized or left out. My father, although he tired quickly because of a shoulder broken when he was a boy and never properly healed, was the best musician, with faultless pitch and a concertmeister’s memory for repertoire. Nora played the cello with a beautiful tone, although she wouldn’t work for accuracy, and Carol could already play several wind instruments; it was a sight to watch that stringy kid of ten pursing her lips and worrying prissily about her “embouchure.” Both Luba and my mother had had excellent training in piano, and sang even better than they played, although Luba would never concede to my father that she occasionally flatted. My mother, contrarily, tended to sing sharp, which so fitted her mock-acid ways that my father made endless plays on words about it. “Someday,” he would add, striking his forehead with his fist, “I am going to find a woman who sings exactly in the middle; then I will steal the company’s payroll, and take her to live at The Breakers in Atlantic City!”
“Mir nix, dir nix,” my mother would answer. “And what kind of music would be at The Breakers?”
“A string quartet,” Luba would shout, “with a visiting accordion for the weekends!” Then the three of them would pound each other in laughter over the latest “visiting accordion” who had been to our house. All kinds of people were attracted to our house, many of whom had no conception of the professional quality of the music they heard there, and were forever introducing a protégé whom they had touted beforehand. Whenever these turned out to be violinists who had never heard of the Beethoven Quartets, or pianists who had progressed as far as a bravura rendition of the Revolutionary Etude, our secret name for them was “a visiting accordion.” Not even Carol was ever rude to any of these though; the musical part of the evening simply ended rather earlier than usual, and dissolved into that welter of sociable eating and talking which we all loved.
When I say I wasn’t musical, I don’t mean I didn’t know music or love it—no one in that family could help it—I could reproduce it and identify it quite accurately in my head, but I just couldn’t make it with my hands or my voice. It had long ago been settled upon that I was the historian, the listener, the critic. “Ask Mr. Huneker here,” my father would say, pointing to me with a smile (or Mr. Gilman, or Mr. Downes, according to whatever commentator he had been reading). Sometimes, when in reading new music the group achieved a dissonance that harrowed him, he would turn on me: “We should all be like this one—Paganini today—Hoffman tomorrow—and all safe upstairs in the head.” But the teasing took me in; it never left me out. That’s what happened to Werner at our house. They took him in too.
We had our bad times of course. Often my father’s suppertime accounts of his day on Seventh Avenue, usually reported with a deft, comedian’s touch, turned to bitter invective, or were not forthcoming at all. Then we knew that the mood in which he regretted a life spent among values he despised had stolen over him, or else the money question was coming up again, and we ate in silence. Luba and my mother quarreled with the violence of people who differ and cannot live without one another; their cleavages and reunions followed a regular pattern, each stage of which pervaded the house as recognizably as what was simmering on the stove. My sister Nora, eighteen and beautiful, was having trouble with both these contingencies; each month, just before her monthly, she filled the house with a richly alternating brooding and hysteria that set us all to slamming doors and leaving the house. A saint couldn’t have lived with it. And Carol and I bickered, and had our pint-size troubles too.
I can see how we must have seemed to Werner though. No matter what was going on, our house had a kind of ruddiness and satisfaction about it. Partly its attraction was because there was always something going on. If anyone had asked me about the state of my innards in regard to my family, I guess I would have said that I felt full. Not full of life, or happiness, or riches, or any of those tiddly phrases. Just chock full. I would have
said this, most likely, because, as I watched Werner hanging, reticent but dogged, to the edge of our family, watched him being stuffed by my mother, twitted by my father, saw him almost court being ignored by Nora and annoyed by Carol, I had the awful but persistent fancy that he must be absolutely hollow inside. Literally hollow, I mean. I could see them, his insides—as bleak as the apartment where his parents were either oppressively absent or oppressively around, and scattered with a few rag-tag doilies of feeling that had almost no reason to be there. There would be nothing inside him to make a feeling out of, unless it were the strong, tidal perfume of the goodies that were meant for the business.
One evening at the beginning of that summer, Werner was with us when my father scooped us all up and took us to the concert at the Stadium, only a few minutes’ walk from home. We went often to those concerts, although, as everyone knows, open-air music can rarely have the finish of the concert hall. But there is something infinitely arresting, almost pathetic, in music heard in the open air. It is not only the sight of thousands of ordinary faces, tranced and quiet in a celebration of the unreal. It is because the music, even while it is clogged and drowned now and then by the rusty noises of the world outside the wall, is not contaminated by them; even while it states that beauty and the world are irreconcilable, it persists in a frail suggestion that the beauty abides.
Werner, at his first concert, sat straight-backed on one of the straw mats my father had rented for us, taking in the fragments of talk milling around us, with the alertness of a person at a dinner who watches how his neighbor selects his silver. During the first half, when an ambulance siren, combined with the grinding of the trolleys on Amsterdam Avenue, clouded over a pianissimo, he winced carefully, like some of those around him. But during the second half, which ended with the Beethoven Fifth, when a dirigible stealing overhead drew a thousand faces cupped upward, Werner, staring straight ahead with a sleepy, drained look, did not join them.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 9