Goodbye Without Leaving (20 page)

“This is myself!” said Dr. Frechtvogel, snatching the telephone from my hands.

“Hello!” he barked, and continued the conversation in what sounded like angry German. Then he shouted “Servus!” and slammed the telephone down.

“Mrs. Rosenstiel,” Buddy said to me. “One of his girlfriends.”

“What does ‘servus' mean?”

“It's a sort of sign-off from old Vienna,” Buddy said. He looked down at the papers on his desk. “Can you start tomorrow?”

I was unprepared for this, but why couldn't I start tomorrow? I would take Little Franklin to school, and then what? I could start my job. I could go up to the office at school and give Bernice, the secretary, an actual work number. What a statement! Then everyone could tell me how I was endangering the welfare of my child by working, just as they had once told me that he was being warped by my not working. Three days a week I would be wearing grown-up work clothes, as opposed to grubby child-care clothes. Sure, I said.

Out in the street, I did not call Johnny. I called Mary Abbott from a pay phone to tell her my interesting news and then I went off to pick up my boy.

46

“I've never heard of these people,” said my mother. “Who did you say they were?”

“I said they were called Regenstein. And I can't imagine why you would have heard of them. They started out as collectors of delta blues singers.”

“I suppose you'll have to get some sort of baby-sitter for Franklin,” my mother said, stirring her coffee.

“I won't!” I said brightly. “Because I'm only working part-time.”

Oh, mothers! What did they mean to say? Did she mean it was a good thing or a bad thing that Franklin would not have a baby-sitter? Was I doing the right thing or the wrong thing by going to work?

A baby-sitter—if I had said there would be no baby-sitter—would have been a better choice in my mother's eyes, because my job would take up my energy and I would be tired and therefore unable to give Little Franklin the full attention he deserved when I came home from work. Had I said I had decided to get a baby-sitter, my mother would have doubtless told me how bad for Franklin this might be, since no baby-sitter can ever love and console a child as a mother can, and so on. This, of course, was the conflict of my mother's generation, lavishly handed down to mine. Why hadn't I seen it before? I remembered the baby-sitters I had had as a child—older women I and my little friends had tried to torture as my mother sat in her studio, torn between her desire to paint and her responsibilities as a parent. There was no end to these things—they were like laundry. You felt that you had gotten them clean and folded and put away and suddenly there they were—a tangled mess, everywhere you looked.

I said, “You know, Ma, you were lucky. You had work you loved to do and you could do it at home. The work I loved to do I had to go on tour to do. You can't do that sort of thing and have a child and a husband.”

“That's all in the past, darling,” said my mother. “Now you ought to find something you can be happy with. This new job sounds very minimal. What about going back to school?”

Or going to law school or writing a book or consulting on a documentary film about rock and roll? How about deciding on a singing career? What about finding someone like Doo-Wah and putting together an act? How about finding something that would put my heart at rest?

“It'll come along,” I said. “Right now I'm going to work part-time and hang out with Little Franklin, since my days are numbered in that regard.”

“Well,” said my mother. “What are your other friends up to? I never hear you mention Mary anymore. Did you two have a falling out?”

“She's going to be a nun,” I said.

“Oh, good gracious!” said my mother. “You girls! What next? Why ever is she doing that?”

“Well, Ma, she
is
a Catholic, you know.”

“Darling, there are millions of Catholics. That's hardly a sufficient reason. Oh, her poor parents!”

“She feels she's being called,” I said. “She's going to enter a monastery upstate. They keep a farm and spin their own wool.”

My mother looked pained. “Farming and spinning,” she said. “Why?”

“They live by the rule of St. Benedict. Work and pray, live self-sufficiently. I've done a lot of reading about it. It sounds very nice. I find it restful to think about.”

“I'm sure they don't let Jewish women with children into monasteries,” my mother said.

These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture—a picture you did not have to paint yourself.

“Perhaps this new job of yours will lead to something else,” my mother said.

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps I'll get the Nobel Prize in physics.”

“Now, Geraldine,” my mother said.

“Now, Mom,” I said. “My instinct tells me this is the right job for me.”

“But you say that young man hired you the minute you walked in the door. He knows nothing about you.”

“It's just as well,” I said. “Maybe his instinct told him to hire me.”

“Oh, you young people,” said my mother. “Instincts. Monasteries. What does it all mean?”

From down the hall we suddenly heard Little Franklin. “Mama,” he called. “Can I have some ice cream right this minute?”

“Our little prince is up,” said my mother. “Darling,” she called to him. “Your Nanny is here and she has hazelnut ice cream for you.”

At these words Little Franklin came bounding down the hall. Hazelnut ice cream was my mother's ace in the hole. She led Franklin, who had not bothered to acknowledge me in any way, into the kitchen. Several minutes later I found them deep in conversation.

“Is there any ice cream left for me?” I asked.

“Not too much,” said Little Franklin putting his little hand over his dish.

47

My first meeting with Bernard Regenstein, Sr., was not auspicious. He had coughed in my direction and then disappeared into his office. For a long time, if he wanted me, he called to Gertje (who instructed me
not
to call her Mrs. Regenstein) to fetch me. I often felt he was unclear about my name, and for months after I had been hired I would find the occasional note to me addressed to the man I had succeeded.

Bernard was tall and cranelike, and he stooped like a crane. He had a beautifully formed, egg-shaped head, bald and polished. He wore old, tweed jackets with a long silk opera scarf around his neck. In winter he wore a beret and an enormous old raccoon coat. He was delicate in his lungs, Gertje said, although he smoked a pipe. The imported tobacco he preferred was kept in stock at the smoke shop in the lobby.

Gertje was a big, handsome woman who wore a cape. Her hair was cut rather like Franklin's, but longer and gray. She had a bobbed nose and hazel eyes. Her face was a mesh of fine, distinguished lines. It was clear she had been a great beauty in her youth.

On my first day she had held out her hand and said, “How lovely to meet you!” as if I had been a tea guest. “How clever of Buddy to hire you! Our dear Paul Robinson left us just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “He was studying science. And when his fellowship came through … pffft! Vanished!”

She had a sweet, girlish voice. Her accent had mellowed, but not much. After a month or so at the Regenstein office I began to think that it was a feature of all German women to have beautiful voices.

I answered the telephone, typed letters, made photocopies and filed letters. I also began the task of reading my way through the files. In the Regenstein office was a copy (or a photocopy) of everything Hans and Sonia Regenstein had ever written. An entire file drawer was devoted to contracts concerning another of their classic texts,
Music of All People
, a book every schoolchild in the Western Hemisphere had been brought up with.

Hans and Sonia Regenstein had plunged into the culture of their adopted country with a passion. They had written several books for young people,
What Our Colonists Wore
and
What the Pilgrims Ate
, as well as
Musical Instruments and Interests of Colonial People
. They had written monographs on corn-husk dolls, chain-gang songs and quilting styles.

What interested me most about them was why two cultivated Europeans from the Old World would come to this country and find themselves in a Studebaker with a lot of primitive recording equipment, listening to old blues men and women in the middle of the Deep South.

“I will tell you something,” Gertje said. “Bernard's aunt and uncle came here and they fell in love. You Americans have no idea what this country looks like to a European. The old world was crumbling. They felt that terrible things were about to happen. They did not think Hitler would simply go away. Hans was in the first war—a Jewish war hero. His comrades believed that no one would harm a Jewish war hero—they all perished! Hans and Sonia came here and they saw a big, open country with lots of room and lots of food. Bananas! Pineapples! I myself was a grown woman before I ever tasted such things, and I was rich as a girl. A huge country where everyone speaks one language! The army does not try to overthrow the government! A constitution! No kings or royalty! Paradise.” She took a sip of coffee from a blue and red cup.

No matter how long Gertje had lived in this country, no matter that she had raised an American son, she remained exotically and essentially European. She wore a kind of heavy stocking I had never seen before (sent to her from Germany by a cousin), and white shirts she bought on her yearly trip abroad, and heavy yet elegant shoes.

The things she kept in a cupboard in the inner office were a European's emergency larder: raspberry jam, imported biscuits, a flat, round tin of herrings rolled up with pickles, and four cartons of cigarettes.

“Someday I stop smoking,” Gertje said. “But until that time … when I am down to even two or three packs, I begin to feel anxious. You know, in the war cigarettes were gold. They were diamonds! To have a cigarette meant that for a little time everything was all right. Of course, everything was not all right. You cannot imagine what it is like to come here and see cigarettes everywhere! I used to go by a tobacconist's near where I lived and I would stare at such abundance. Boxes and boxes of cigarettes! You cannot imagine, Geraldine, what an amazing sight a cigarette
machine
is, that spits out the cigarettes, so! But now I keep my little stockpile and it makes me feel calm.”

She also kept a small tea cloth for the table, in case of guests, and a pack of fancy paper plates, but she could not abide plastic forks and so, in a little wicker basket, was a set of silverware. There were wineglasses, too, for special occasions. In a tiny office refrigerator, the size of a doll's house, were a few bottles of sparkling water, a tin of peach nectar and a bottle of champagne, lying on its side.

As the months went by, I felt more and more at home at the Regenstein office. Gertje was sincerely interested in Little Franklin, who came to visit once or twice on his way to the dentist. But Gertje, Bernard and Dr. Frechtvogel were as exotic to me as the Reverend Willhall. They were all from a world I had never known and to which I had only the most minimal access.

Bernard and Gertje were often out. They went to Europe, they had business lunches, they spent four-day weekends at their house in Vermont. Often I was left alone with Dr. Frechtvogel.

Dr. Frechtvogel's occupation was to sit in the back office dispensing advice to Bernard. Once he had opened the mail and finished his coffee, he waited for Bernard and Gertje to come in. Then the three of them sat smoking and arguing in German until I came in and threw the window open to let the smoke out.

Gertje told me that Dr. Frechtvogel had been a lawyer in Vienna and that he had made a pledge never to work again once he came to this country, although a good many elderly Europeans came to the office for consultations with him. He had dozens of lady friends who called the office all day long and he claimed, as a young man, to have lived with a trapeze artist who, because of a scar, had never taken off her face paint for the duration of their affair. My happiest moments came when Dr. Frechtvogel and I were alone and he would talk to me.

We had lunch every day in the back office, providing he was not out with one of his ladies. Each day I ordered him the same thing: roast beef on dry toast with black coffee. Each day he gnawed his sandwich and then made terrible noises about the terrible coffee, until I was moved to get up and make a fresh pot for him. I lit his cigars and brushed the ashes off his clothes. I found his glasses for him when he lost them, and remembered to have the mail stacked neatly at his place on the coffee table. I discovered that he adored those hard black Dutch toffees that come in a tin and bought them for him. When he was angry he called me a brainless American, but I noticed that it was crucial that I kiss him goodbye before I left each day. He was the grandfather I had never had.

“You were a singer,” he said one day. “Why do you no longer sing?”

I explained that I hadn't really been a singer, I had been a backup. He had no idea what this was, so I explained it to him. I told him that my purpose was to punctuate the lead singer but that every once in a while I got to sing a very small solo.

“Sing something to me,” Dr. Frechtvogel said.

“I'll sing you Brahms' Lullaby.”

“Stupid girl!” he said. “I mean something you sang on your job.”

“Okay,” I said. I was sitting on the sofa and he sat in his big leather chair. I sang “You Don't Love Me Like You Used to Do.” He sat quite still, allowing the ash on his cigar to grow. I sang, fixated on the cigar. When I finished, the ash was scattered all over his jacket.

“That is an extremely stupid song,” he said. “Brush me off. Now, do you know this song called ‘The Tennessee Waltz'?”