Other People’s Houses (12 page)

Renate came on Saturday. I took her into the dining room and we played house. We sat under the table and pulled the dining-room chairs to hedge us in closely all around. Renate said that she wanted to be the mother and I must be the child, which wasn’t the way I had imagined it, and she kept
bossing me instead of my bossing her and she talked too quick and moved too suddenly and everything was quite wrong again, so that I wished with all my heart that it were Helene I had with me again, docile, under the table.

In the months that followed, Renate and I became very good friends. We had different games, and in the end it was I who won by a year and a half. A conspiracy between the
grownups to save me the pain of waiting and possible disappointment had kept me in ignorance of my parents’ being expected in Liverpool on my very birthday.

One Tuesday in March, I was called out of class into the study of the headmaster. Mrs. Levine was there, and they both looked very kindly at me. Mrs. Levine said for me to get my coat. There was a surprise waiting for me at home.

“My parents
have come!” I said.

“Well!” said Mrs. Levine, “so! Aren’t you excited, you funny child?”

“Yes, I am. I’m excited,” I said, but I was busy noticing the way my chest was emptying, my head clearing, and my shoulders being freed of some huge weight that must, since I now felt it being rolled away, have been there all this time without my knowing it. Just as when the passing of nausea or the unknotting
of a cramp leaves the body with a new awareness of itself, I stood sensuously at ease, breathing in and out.

Mrs. Levine was saying to the headmaster, “You never know with children. All she ever does is mope around the house and write letters home, and now she isn’t even pleased.”

“I am
so
pleased,” I said and began to jump up and down, though what I wanted most was to be still, to taste the
intense sweetness of my relief. But it would never do to have Mrs. Levine think I was not pleased and excited, and I had to jump up and down in the taxi all the way back to the house.

And in the two easy chairs, in front of the sitting-room fire, sat my mother and my father, and I hugged them and smiled and I grinned and I hugged them again and I made them come upstairs to show them my room,
and I showed them off to my new English family, and I showed off my new familiarities to my parents, and then the children arrived for my birthday party, bringing gifts. Crackers exploded. There were paper hats, and little cakes and jellies to eat. I bobbed and leaped and ran and chatted, and all the time I knew that, incredibly, my mother was in the room with me. Her eyes, huge and dilated with the
suppressed tears of her exhaustion and the shock of her relief, followed me around the room like the eyes of a lover.

Afterward the neighbors came in to have a look at the little refugee’s parents. The women talked Yiddish to my mother. She smiled and tried to tell them in her stunted school English that she did not understand Yiddish, but they did not believe her and talked louder. She applied
to my father, who was the linguist of the family, but he looked merely stunned. I try to recall his presence during the visit to the Levines, and see him sitting in the same armchair, rising when my mother rose, speaking only to echo what she said. Whenever I went over to kiss him, his face would break up and he wept.

In the evening, after everyone was gone, my mother opened the suitcase. She
had brought some of my things from home, including my doll, Gerda, who had had a hole poked through her forehead where the customs people at the German border had looked for contraband. There was a box of sweets packed especially for the little friend Helene Rubichek.

“Oh, her,” I said. “She isn’t even at school any more.”

“No,” Mrs. Levine added, “that Mrs. Rosen couldn’t keep her. She’s in
another home now.”

“Where is she?” I asked, momentarily frowning at the glimpse I caught of little Helene stuck on the telegraph pole wriggling helplessly between heaven and earth.

“I don’t just remember,” Mrs. Levine said, “but I think they put her in another town.”

And so I put Helene out of my mind.

My parents stayed at the Levines’ for three days, and the fourth morning they left to go
to their first English job in a household in the south of England. Mr. Levine was taking them to the station. They stood in the hallway by the front door. They had their coats on. “Come on down and say good-by nicely to your father and mother,” said fat Mrs. Levine, but I sat on a step halfway up the stairs. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had one arm twisted around the banister, and I waved
and wiggled my head.

I remained in Liverpool until the summer. It seems to me that after my parents came to England life at the Levines’ was less emotionally strenuous; I remember less about it.

Annie never remembered the half crown that I had lent her. I used to study her. From the free and easy way that she talked and laughed with me, I could tell she had forgotten that she owed me two shillings
and sixpence. I was too shy to remind her, but I never quit thinking that some day she would remember and give me back my money. This expectation became attached to Annie like an attribute, like the playful angle of her nose and the warm grip with which she used to swing my hand when we went walking in the park together. I always liked Annie.

I went on loving Mrs. Levine when she wasn’t looking.
There was no hope now of our coming together. The phrases that she spoke to me and the tone in which I answered had become ritual. Now, seeing me sit idly by the fire, she would often say, “Don’t you even want to go and write a letter to your parents?” And I would say, “No, I don’t feel like writing.”

Mrs. Levine said, “My goodness, I never saw such a child for sitting around doing nothing.”

“I’m not doing nothing,” I said. “I’m watching the fire.”

“And always an answer to everything,” Mrs. Levine said, and Sarah said, “Knock it off, Ma. Leave her alone.”

I used to keep thoughts of Sarah in abeyance till I went to bed, and then I imagined such situations, such things for her to say to me, such profundities for me to answer, that I excited myself and I couldn’t fall asleep. There
developed a serial story, which I carried with me through the years, from one foster family to the next. New characters were added, but the protagonist remained a pale, tragic-eyed girl. Her hair was long and sad and she wept much. She suffered. She kept herself to herself. I regretted my daytime self, which was always wanting to be where everyone else was, though I never did learn to come into a
room without stopping outside to hear if they were talking about me, to gather myself together, invent some little local excuse, or think up some bright thing to say, as if it might look foolish for me to just open a door and walk in.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Illford”: The Married Couple

When I was an adolescent, Tante Trade and Onkel Hans showed me the letter about the snow-capped rose which I had written them from Dovercourt camp. I was embarrassed for them because they had been taken in by my propaganda. They had sent this letter around among the refugee committees and had moved the family called Willoughby to sponsor my parents
on a married-couple visa. (“Married couple” was the technical designation for a husband-and-wife team of cook and butler. Domestic visas were the only working visas readily available to foreigners at a time when England needed to replenish its diminishing servant class. There was an anecdote, widely circulated at the time, about the young lady of wealthy Viennese stock who came downstairs on her first
morning in the house of the English people she believed to be her saviors, at half past ten o’clock, wearing a blue crêpe-de-Chine dressing gown with tassel, looking for her breakfast.)

From the letters my mother wrote me to Liverpool, and the stories she has told since, I have an idea of my parents’ life those first months in England. They traveled a day’s journey south. Mr. Willoughby fetched
them from the Mellbridge station and drove them to Illford Village, in Kent. It was toward the end of the day. The sky is immense in that part of the country. The round hills of the downs rise softly and nobly. The little bridle paths and the hedges that divide a field from its neighbor trace, lovingly as a Cézanne pencil, the large contours, the little surprises of their curves. Very old clumps
of elms stand here and there. The car went along the back country roads. My mother looked through the bare hazelnut hedges on either side of the road, and she was moved by this free and charming land where she had come to live. Mr. Willoughby drove through a wide, open gate up a gravel drive toward a handsome, gentle white house, and around it, and set my parents down at the back door.

Mrs. Willoughby
was in the kitchen to meet them with a most kind welcome. They must be tired, she said, and would want to rest. She told my father to bring the bags, and led them along a flagstone passage and up two flights of a narrow wooden back stairs that opened into an attic bedroom. The door was missing, Mrs. Willoughby said, but Groszmann could put up a curtain tomorrow. She would find a piece of
stuff, but meanwhile they should just rest and not think of doing any work today, unless Mrs. Groszmann would want to come down later and Mrs. Willoughby could just show her which was the kitchen china and which were the cups for Mrs. Willoughby’s early-morning tea, which she liked brought up to her on a tray at seven—but not to worry about anything, just unpack and make themselves at home. My mother
said she would come down with Mrs. Willoughby right away.

In the kitchen, my mother looked over Mrs. Willoughby’s shoulder into china cupboards and broom closets, at the sinks in the scullery, and the food-filled shelves of the pantry. Mrs. Willoughby said maybe Mrs. Groszmann was hungry and would like a little supper? She would set out an egg for her and Groszmann on the kitchen table. Now,
since they were here, Mrs. Willoughby might as well show my mother around the front of the house. They went along the flagstone passage again and through a green baize-covered door into a carpeted hall. Here, Mrs. Willoughby said, was the library. My mother said what a lovely room and there was something she wanted to ask—maybe Mrs. Willoughby could advise her what to read to quickly improve her English.
Did Mrs. Willoughby have
The Forsyte Saga
, which my mother knew very well in German, and that would help her read it in English? Did Mrs. Willoughby like Galsworthy? Mrs. Willoughby said she didn’t know, but my mother could see, later, if there was a copy, and she could borrow it so long as she brought it back when she was finished. “And this is our drawing room.” “Ah,” my mother cried, “a piano!
It is a Bechstein, no?” and she told Mrs. Willoughby that she had had a Blüthner, which the Nazis had taken, and that she had studied music at the Vienna Academy.

“Oh, really?” said Mrs. Willoughby. “In that case you must come in and play sometime when everyone is out.”

My mother was dissatisfied. She wanted to let the Englishwoman know that she, too, had once been comfortably circumstanced,
had had a well-appointed flat and a
Herrenzimmer
. “My husband,” my mother said to Mrs. Willoughby, “was accountant—like your husband, isn’t it?”

“Was he?” said Mrs. Willoughby. “Mr. Willoughby, you know, is a civil servant.”

“Mr. Groszmann,” countered my mother, “was in a bank. Main—what do you call it?—
chef
accountant.”

“Chief accountant?” suggested Mrs. Willoughby.

“Chief accountant,” said
my mother, “and he—how do you say?—
organiziert?
”

“Organized?” said Mrs. Willoughby.

“Yes. Organized all the system of accountants.”

“Ah?” said Mrs. Willoughby. Then she gave my mother a paper she had written out to hang on the back of the kitchen door, showing a list of the rooms and on which day each must be turned out, to help my mother organize her work. My mother thanked her earnestly.
She had no system of her own, she said, but she would do her very best for Mrs. Willoughby. She thanked Mrs. Willoughby for visa and employment. She asked Mrs. Willoughby to have patience with her.

My parents had been engaged to work at Illford House for one pound a week between them. To be more precise, my mother was engaged to work for one pound a week, with the stipulation that my father could
live in the house and receive food in return for his services as butler and handyman. Like all English servants, they were to have Thursday afternoon, and every other Sunday afternoon, off.

In bed that first evening, my father said out of the darkness, “Franzi …? I was thinking. Do you remember that passage behind the kitchen we used for the maid’s room?” My mother says she felt very close to
him at that moment because she, too, had been trying to remember what sort of mattress poor Poldi had slept on. She says there was a trick to lying on the Willoughbys’ mattresses. You had to push the lumps of kapok to either side and make a valley between them and then lie still.

My mother was downstairs by six o’clock the next morning, nervous and eager to start. She stood in Mrs. Willoughby’s
great empty kitchen, wondering what to do first. The house was silent. My mother tried to imagine what Poldi at home would do first thing in the morning. She had a single vivid image of Poldi with a long-handled broom—Poldi sweeping. My mother began to open closet doors looking for the broom cupboard, and suddenly she remembered about the early-morning tea. She tried to recall where around the
kitchen she had seen a tray. While she hunted, she kept wondering if she was actually supposed to carry it in to Mrs. Willoughby. Would she find Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby lying in bed together? It then came to my mother with a shock that if she was to make tea, water would have to be heated, and that she must light the coal stove. It was already six-thirty. From that moment on, for many years to come,
my mother was never again at a loss to find things she was supposed to do.

I had a letter from my mother telling me about that first funny morning. My mother arrived with the tray at exactly seven. Mrs. Willoughby drank her tea, told my mother that they would have scrambled eggs for breakfast, and turned on her side next to Mr. Willoughby, who had not even waked up. My mother hoped my father
would know what “scrambled” meant, but he did not. While he went into the library to look for a dictionary, my mother rushed upstairs to unpack her books to find
Mrs. Beeton’s English Cookery
. Breakfast was late, but Mrs. Willoughby had been nice about it.