Exiles in the Garden (5 page)

"Admiral."

"Ronald."

Alec thought the neighborhood had a European feel to it, though precisely what that feel was he could not say, since he had been to Europe just once, as a child, accompanying his parents on a senatorial junket that featured American hotels and French museums; an embassy reception ended the day. Perhaps it was the lack of haste in the streets, and the regularity of the neighbors' habits, and the uniformity of the houses, many of them dating from the Federal period. The small shops, the dry cleaner, and a tiny grocery store down the street lent the neighborhood a mom-and-pop commercial aspect. Also, Alec found an appealing modesty to the cars that lined the streets—Volkswagens and Ford Falcons, the admiral's black Chevrolet, Ronald diAntonio's Dodge. Mrs. Wheatley had a Vuillard on the wall of her dining room but the car on the street outside was a 1955 Buick. European egalitarianism, Alec concluded, a disinclination to display wealth, at least out of doors. Lucia, who had grown up in Europe, agreed that the street was not the normal American street—whatever that was—but it did not remind her of Europe, either. It was true that many of their neighbors were elderly, Mrs. Wheatley near sixty and the admiral at least eighty years old, but there were couples their own age, too, with children. Tricycles and red wagons crowded the front stoops of three houses across the street, and that was not at all normal in a settled district in a European capital; young people could not afford the rent. More to the point, Lucia had the feeling that in Washington life was lived not in houses but in offices downtown, whereas in Europe it was the reverse. Alec was habitually late for dinner, and at parties the men seemed able to talk convincingly only of work, the projects they were involved in and office intrigue, meaning political intrigue. With the advent of the Kennedys, government had acquired a glamour entirely absent in Europe. Glamour would not be the word attached to Chancellor Erhard or Prime Minister Macmillan, though the Profumo mess suggested the presence of a demimonde, willing girls and their middle-aged suitors meeting at country houses for a weekend frolic while the wives looked on, and all of it spread across the front pages of national newspapers. There seemed to be no such demimonde in Washington, so buttoned up and serious-minded. Lucia's view was changed only marginally when one afternoon she encountered her father-in-law's great friend Eliot Bergruen emerging from Mrs. Wheatley's doorway. He was charming as always but a little distant and he did not linger. Eliot Bergruen had failed to ask after Alec.

Eliot? Alec said that evening. Impossible. You must have been mistaken.

No, it was Eliot. We spoke for a moment.

Huh. Well, Eliot handles wills and trusts among his other specialties, so probably that was it. A house call.

He looked so debonair with his boutonniere and his cane, Lucia replied.

Thick-waisted trees lined the street, at midmorning giving it the ambiance of a settled neighborhood in a small historic town. No one was about. In summer the trees provided welcome shade even in the back yard, the one that measured twelve by twenty feet, space enough for a round table and four chairs, bounded by a high wooden stake fence. The roses climbed the fence, white and yellow and five shades of red, large and small roses with gnarled stems that reminded Alec of the faces of old-timers in the city room of the newspaper, men (and a few women) with taut self-conscious faces, seen-everything faces, habit-of-service faces, world-weary and droll. They had unexpected answers to routine questions, as Alec explained to Lucia one night after she had asked about his colleagues at work, what sort of people they were. Alec rarely brought home anyone from the newspaper office. They were old, he said, with college-age children and, in a few cases, grandchildren. They have no interest in people like us.

But they did know things about the texture of life in the capital. Alec had overheard one of the young reporters complain about Washington's cab drivers, slow to the point of inertia, cabs habitually lagging behind general traffic. Negroes especially did not understand the concept of promptness, moving customers with dispatch from point A to point B. Time had no meaning for them because they were fundamentally lazy. Horseshit, one of the seen-everything faces said. They're slow because they're cautious, and they're cautious because they're scared. Cop pulls them over if they're doing one mile over the speed limit. That's a fifty-dollar fine and maybe a trip to the station house, where the paperwork is lost and they spend a night in the can, probably slapped around a little. Maybe you've noticed and if you haven't you should. In this town all the cops are white and the cabbies are black. And that's why they take their time motoring up Pennsylvania Avenue.

That's a terrible story, Lucia said. Can't something be done?

Not so far, Alec said.

Your father—

Alec laughed. No, no. He's involved in the Defense Department supplemental.

The garden had been allowed to decay, a matter of simple indifference on the part of the previous owners, but Alec and Lucia soon put it right. In the spring and summer the roses seemed to grow as they watched. In early evening, the garden in deep shadow, the rose petals seemed to Alec to assume fantastic shapes, harelips, cleft palates, divided faces, faces divided against themselves. Alec made shot after shot of the divided faces but was never able to capture on film what he saw with his own eyes. He liked to shoot at twilight, the buzz of the neighborhood all around him, the whir of air conditioners and the slippery sound of automobiles on the soft tarmac of the street, show tunes from Admiral Honeycutt's vintage phonograph. Then, round about six-thirty, they heard one voice and then another, a gathering chorus reminiscent of the chattering of songbirds at sunrise. Cocktail time had begun, latish because the upper bureaucracy worked late. Often the men didn't arrive home until well after seven, usually carrying a heavy briefcase. A briefcase and a frown, according to Lucia.

The brick house next to theirs, very grand, had a wide and deep back yard with a towering cedar at its center and benches and wrought-iron tables placed at intervals as in a park. A fountain splashed all day and all night, always the sound of falling water. Lucia called the neighbors' house the Alhambra. Each evening Charles, the Japanese butler, brought a tray to the garden. Alec and Lucia could hear the creak of his starched shirt and the clink of glasses and his murmured announcement that drinks were served, your excellency and madame—and in a moment the count and countess arrived and helped themselves to champagne, thank you Charles, no need to detain yourself. On his way out Charles lit the torchères that bathed the garden in yellow light. And not long after that, guests arrived speaking a variety of languages, settling into the events of the day, always so puzzling to foreigners, the interplay of the legislature, the courts, and the White House—called, not entirely with sarcasm, the Palace—all of it overseen by an amiable yet reckless press forever seeking accommodation when accommodation was the least desirable of the many, many opportunities open to democracies. The truth was, since the triumph of the Cuban missile crisis—a miracle of statecraft—America had lost its nerve. America had turned its back on victory. The Palace had settled for stalemate, and that was the true meaning of fear breeding fear, Munich turned on its head. Kennedy and his people had refused to go the last inch.

Alec was often late, so Lucia sat alone in their garden, shamelessly eavesdropping, listening to heavy accents that ranged from indignation to resignation and back again, hearing the voices of her youth, voices crowded into her mother's second-floor study in Zurich, words tumbling over themselves while her mother struggled to keep order. Lucia's mother, gone now five years, had been a professor of European history, an exile from Prague who settled comfortably—well, comfortably up to a point; Zurich was not Prague by any stretch of the imagination—in neutral Switzerland. Her mother's great fear was that the small languages of central Europe would disappear, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and all the dialects with them. These languages did not export; they were specific to the soil from which they sprang. Czech identity could be expressed only in that language, and the same was true for the others. In her mother's multilingual study all these languages were spoken except when making points of particular subtlety to the company at large—and a point was hardly worth making if it was not subtle—when second languages proved unequal to the task: the Hungarian listening to the Pole, or the Romanian listening to the Czech and striving to grasp precisely what was being said, at which time the company switched to the blunt instruments of German or French, admittedly with the utmost reluctance. Really, it was a kind of crime. The reluctance was most palpable when a German or a Frenchman was present. Fortunately, that was not often.

Well, her mother said with a decisive shrug, they took everything else so why not our language? Another of war's spoils.

They—an international they, Asians, Africans, Americans included—did not understand that Europe was not Europe without its central constituencies. Small nations, yes, but vigorous and fundamental to European culture. Was Asia Asian without Cambodia and Burma? Was America American without the upper Midwest and the cotton South? Lucia grew up with the idea of loss, things that were gone and irreplaceable. So she listened avidly to the voices of her youth magically transported to the garden next door, the voices of involuntary exile, echoes of the Caucasus, the Carpathians, the Masurian lakes, Galicia, the Andalusian plain. Most were in flight from the Soviets but there were also republican Spaniards who refused to return home so long as Franco was alive, and a few German Jews disillusioned with Zionism. Lucia listened and thought they were all displaced persons, voices in an existential state of emergency. There was a frontier and they were on the cusp, neither here nor there. The day-to-day life of the American government was of scant interest, merely an inescapable fact of life in Washington. Their obsession was with their own lands, occupied by criminals and usurpers whose specialty was subjugation and humiliation, the long totalitarian night. And as for the German Jews, they did not care for the desert sands or the desert sun or the desert food. They wanted only to return to their language, their music, and their communal life in Leipzig, Dresden, or Weimar, but their memories would not allow them to, and the East German authorities were unenthusiastic in any case. Lucia sat alone and listened to these voices as she would listen to music, Haydn perhaps, or Gustav Mahler. Fate had been unkind and no one had come to their rescue; and perhaps they, too, had been weak. And now they found themselves in America. One night Lucia heard two women discussing Washington. Apparently they were visiting and surprised at what they had found.

The city is very pleasant, one of them said. I expected vulgarity.

Certainly there is vulgarity, the other said.

Not the vulgarity I expected. They do not hate us. Instead, we are accepted.

Leisl, Washington is not Munich.

It is not Zurich, either. Or Paris. Or Warsaw.

Lucia's head snapped up at the mention of Zurich and for one moment she was tempted to say something in defense of her city. But what would she say? That in order to remain neutral, compromises were inevitable? Neutrality was a fundamentally unnatural performance, a cat doing a handstand. And now and again the cat was bound to lose concentration, look away, become distracted from the task at hand. The audience expected it.

They are too busy for vulgarity in its obvious forms.

I would be more generous than that, Leisl said.

You would, the other said. But wait. It's there below the surface.

I have not seen it, Leisl said.

It's there. It's always there.

But—Jews are everywhere in the government.

Tokens only, the other said. A cabinet secretary, one or two on the White House staff. Never, ever, let down your guard, Leisl. You should know better.

I think I might stay here, Leisl said. I like it. I think the president and his wife are
gemütlich.
I do wish the symphony orchestra was better. I wish the galleries were better. I miss our coffeehouses and the conversations with artists and writers. And I do so miss our language. But I feel safe.

Alec listened soberly when Lucia replayed the overheard conversation to him later. He said, Leisl was correct. We don't have that here. Washington has many faults, but anti-Semitism isn't one of them. They don't have time for it. The government absorbs all their energies and all their ambitions. Their loyalty is to their party and the government. People here speak warmly about the state they're from, follow the politics and the football teams and so forth. But religion or ethnic mumbo-jumbo doesn't play a serious part. They like the motto E Pluribus Unum.

But, she said, what about the cab drivers you were telling me about?

Alec laughed and said, Touché.

Lucia had the idea that the exiles would never become reconciled to America, nor would their children. America was their grandchildren's country, blue suede shoes and the senior prom, a job that promised advancement and no politics except briefly every four years, and if you didn't want to pay attention you didn't have to. That was the beauty of America; civics was an option. The Declaration of Independence promised a successful pursuit of happiness, not a pursuit of justice. Lucia's mother favored an engaged life of which the ballot box was but one feature.

She said, America is a barbarian country, whereas Prague is fraternal.

America is a fine place if you love capitalism.

But, she concluded, Prague would not be Prague again in her lifetime. And for that we have the Nazis and Soviets to blame. No one came to our aid.

Lucia herself had no memory of Prague, not the look of the streets or the sky, the castle, the bridge, the river, or the summer weather. She did not remember the house she was born in. She had no memory of the Nazis, and by the time the Soviets invaded she was living in Zurich. She hated the idea of Prague vanishing. She was appalled when she considered what the Eastern Europeans had endured at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets, twenty-five years of misrule and the end not in sight. Lucia had a toehold in those times without having memory of them. She felt the shadow on her spirit. She was a part of that time whether she wanted to be or not. That was yet another legacy from her mother, an inheritance like blue eyes or left-handedness. And her own knowledge of the Czech language began to fade, had started to slip away when she left Prague, and but a trace remained by the time her mother lay dying in a Zurich clinic. Their last conversations were conducted in German. Lucia did not seem to belong in Prague or Zurich. She did not know where she belonged, only that the voices in the garden next door reminded her of home. She wished she had been kinder to her mother.