Other People’s Houses (21 page)

Sister was already walking toward us, with the young nurse coming behind, her hands clapped over her mouth and giggling. “Mrs. Groszmann, your husband has been moved to another ward. I left a message at the porter’s lodge. Silly of them.”

“How bad is he?” asked my mother.

“Nurse here is going to work in your husband’s new ward, so you go
along with her.”

We followed the nurse through a maze of corridors that led to the older buildings. I remember how her head bobbed up and down before us, and how she drew her hand along the wall and swung around the corners.

There was a strange Sister waiting for us outside this other ward. “Is that Mrs. Groszmann? Mrs. Groszmann, the doctor would like to see you.”

“How is my husband?”

“If
you’ll wait in here, nurse will bring you a chair.”

We were shown into a bare little cloakroom. A mufti coat and a Sister’s scarlet-lined cloak hung on pegs. On the wall were notices: “Please Turn Out the Lights.” “The Hospital Is Not Responsible for Property Left in This Room.”

“I wonder what happened to the chair,” said my mother.

I went to stand in the doorway, looking out into the blind
corridor with its bare electric bulb reflected in brown linoleum and in the shining yellow oil paint of the walls. A door opposite was thrown open, and I saw a kitchen, steam rising over a sink, a nurse sitting on a table swinging her legs. Someone was laughing. The door closed.

There were people coming toward us—the Sister, and a young doctor I did not know. I pulled back into the room. They
passed the door and then stopped. They were talking just outside. I could see the doctor’s sleeve. The sleeve disappeared, and then the doctor was in the room with us. “All right, you can go in to your husband now,” he said.

“How bad is he, Doctor?” my mother asked.

“He had another stroke, and he was calling for you all afternoon. We’re surprised he’s still alive. He’s got a heart like an ox”
is what I thought the doctor said, and I looked at him in amazement. I had the impression that he was shouting at my mother. “Dr. Adler left word that you could stay the night. Sister here will make the arrangements, and I’ll be on duty. You can call me. Or call Sister. You’ll be all right.”

My father lay stretched on a bed with his head in a net of tubes and bottles and tanks. His eyes showed
slits of the white eyeballs. I wondered if he was dead, but then I saw there was a small, furious pulse beating at the base of his throat.

“Here’s a chair,” said the Sister, “and you can take one from that bed. I’ll be at the desk in the corner, behind the screen, if you need anything. Would you like a nice cup of tea?”

“Yes, Sister, please,” said my mother. “You are so kind.”

“That’s right.
You make yourself comfortable. The night always seems long.”

“Mummy,” I whispered, “what does the doctor mean about Daddy having a heart like an ox?”

“I think he said ‘oxheart.’ That’s a medical word, though I don’t just know what it means.”

The little nurse who had shown us the way came with a cup of tea for my mother. “I put sugar in, and I never even asked you.”

“I don’t take it usually,
but this will be lovely,” my mother said.

“No, you wait. I’ll get you another. Always do everything wrong, that’s me.” She bore the cup away, and that was the last we saw of it.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Twenty-five minutes to ten. Darling, why don’t you go home? You have exams coming.”

“And you have to go to work. I’m staying as long as you’re staying.”

I shifted on the hard chair. The
man in the bed next to my father’s raised himself on an arm and slapped his pillow. Behind him the great room was full of the impatient movements of bodies looking for relief, and of noises—coughing, snuffling, and a small sound something between a whimper and a laugh. The ward was getting hotter, and the heat and the noise joined into one swelling roar, and I jerked myself out of sleep. “What time
is it?”

“Five minutes to ten.”

Around midnight, my mother took an envelope out of her purse and began to write on it, smiling to herself.

“What are you writing?”

She passed it to me. It said, “
WDYGH
?”

“What?” I asked.

“It says, ‘Why don’t you go home?’”

“Lend me the pencil.” I wrote, “I’m
SALA
you’re s.”

My mother smiled and put the envelope back in her purse. At half past twelve, my
father opened his eyes and asked what day of the month it was. My mother called the nurse, and the nurse called the Sister, who brought the young doctor. They took his pulse and touched his cheek and stood around the bed, but he lifted his right hand with the old impatient gesture and brushed them all away. My father had put off dying for that night.

When we came out of the hospital, the streets
were turning a weird electric blue. Trees and houses were collecting their bulk and outline. It was very cold. The milkman at the corner was rattling the empties. He touched his cap to us.

I looked at my mother and saw that there were tears running down her face. “Darling, I promise you something,” she said. “If Daddy dies, I won’t be unhappy any more.” Now that she had begun to talk, she began
to sob. “I’ll cheer up very quickly, I promise. You won’t have to worry about me any more. It’s just that now he is so poor.”

I considered the probability of my father’s dying, with terror, because I might have no tears for him and the emptiness of my unnatural heart would be exposed to my mother and proved to myself.

But it seemed my father was not going to die, after all. He began to get better—to
sit, to walk again, and to want my mother to take him home.

One day, old Dr. Adler turned up at Clinton Lodge.

“Is my husband worse?” cried my mother. “I only left him an hour ago.”

“No, no. Nothing like that. Could I come in? I was just leaving the hospital and wanted to see you a moment. Maybe you would make me a cup of coffee, too? Your husband is doing very nicely and we’re going to be
sending him to a convalescence home soon. I’ve been talking to Mrs. Dillon, of the Refugee Committee, and it’s being taken care of.”

“Ah, how good you all are!” said my mother.

“We were also talking about you, and both Mrs. Dillon and I think that you should take a holiday.”

“Maybe when my husband is better—”

“Mrs. Dillon has been in touch with Mr. Harvey, where you work, and they want you
to take a week off beginning this Friday.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think I can afford, right now—”

“Here’s the address of a house that belongs to one of the doctors on the hospital staff,” said the doctor. “He and his family are going to be away for a week, and they want you to go and stay there. There’s a German housekeeper, who will look after you. Here is the bus schedule. I’ve marked Friday
afternoon.…”

I visited my mother on Sunday and found her shelling peas. “I thought you were going to rest!” I said.

“I’m resting,” said my mother. “Darling, it’s very unrestful for me to have to sit doing nothing.”

“Why don’t you at least sit in the middle of the chair.”

“I forgot. But really I’m resting. Didn’t I sit in the drawing room this morning, Mrs. Hubert?”

“Yes, after you swept the
upstairs and made the beds,” said the old housekeeper.

“But I’m feeling much better,” said my mother. “Darling, you will go and see Daddy in the convalescence home, won’t you?”

“You’re not supposed to be thinking about Daddy while you’re on your holiday!” I shouted, almost in tears. “Rest!”

When I got home that night, I heard Mrs. Dillon talking on the telephone in the dining room. “He’s quite
impossible and they don’t think they can keep him. The servants say he’s always calling and then he talks to them in German,” she was saying. I knew she was talking about my father. “And the other patients are complaining they can’t sleep, because he calls for you all night.” Then I knew it was my mother she was talking to. I leaned my head against the door and cried.

My mother came back that
night and took my father home to Clinton Lodge.

It was 1943. I had turned fifteen. The repeated suspense of my father’s relapses and partial recoveries, my mother’s helpless exhaustion, along with the nightly German rockets, had become the conditions of our life.

Early in June of 1944, my father was back in the hospital. It was the week of the landing of the Allies on the French beaches. We
told him about it, but he did not hear.

Then one night my father died. I had one short, harsh paroxysm of grief, and even afterward I found I was able to produce a creditable pain in my chest by recalling how my father had wanted to amuse me with the story of Rikki-tikki-tavi, and to lend me his crocodile belt on all the important occasions of my life, and how he had wanted to make me a present
of it the day I pushed him onto the floor.

My mother and I sat in her room. Mrs. Katz brought our meals on a tray and stayed to talk—about how good my mother had been to my father, and how she had nothing to reproach herself with, and how this must be a comfort to her now.

My mother shook her head and said, “Not so good. Not as good as you all think. You don’t know how often I lay in bed, with
him right beside me, and my hands like this.” My mother interlaced her fingers and pressed them passionately together. “How I would long for him to be allowed to die, for his sake, but not for his sake only. For Lore’s and for my sake.”

“But that’s only natural,” Mrs. Katz said. “You didn’t want him to suffer.”

“Oh, I don’t blame myself for that,” my mother said. “I will tell you what I can’t
forgive myself. You remember when he came back from his first day at the milk office, he was so ill he could hardly move his leg? I wanted to take a taxi up the hill to the house, but I kept thinking how silly to take a taxi for just two blocks, and I made him walk.”

“It’s all over now,” said Mrs. Katz, for my mother had begun to cry, her face shrunken and red.

“I could have taken a taxi for
him,” said my mother. “It wasn’t even the money. I was afraid the taxi-driver would think it silly for just two blocks, and our being refugees. I made him walk those blocks uphill because I was afraid of looking silly to the taxi-driver. I’ll stop in a minute,” said my mother, sobbing out of the depths of her chest. “I promised Lore that if Igo died I would cheer up quickly. And you will see, I will.”

One Sunday, about a week after my father’s death, I came back to Clinton Lodge and found the fat doctor having a cup of coffee with my mother. “Are you ill?” I asked her.

“Goodness, no. Dr. Adler was so kind as to be worried about me.”

“I was just passing the house on my way home from the hospital, and I thought I would look in on your good mother. She was making herself a cup of coffee and
I asked her to give me one. As a friend, you know. As a doctor, I should tell you that you have no business taking so much caffeine.” He tapped her on the wrist with a forefinger. “I suspect you drink altogether too many cups of coffee, and it’s not good for your nerves.”

“My nerves
have
been playing me tricks lately,” said my mother. “You can’t think what incredible mistakes I’ve been making
at the restaurant. Poor Mr. Harvey! Yesterday I put salt in the peas twice, so today I put none in the potatoes. Don’t go to Harvey’s for lunch tomorrow, because they’re serving shepherd’s pie made with unsalted potatoes.”

“I promise not to come to Harvey’s if you will promise someday to cook me a real Viennese dinner.”

“
Wiener Schnitzel,
” said my mother. “Any time you like.”

In the middle
of that week, my mother said, “You’ll never guess what I did today. I bought myself a new dress. I left the restaurant half an hour early, went to the bank, took out twenty shillings, and went and bought myself a pink dress.”

“How do you mean, pink? A sort of pinkish gray, you mean?”

“Pink,” said my mother: “It was the only pretty dress in the shop and I put it on to see how silly I looked,
but then I took down the knot in my hair and did it more loosely, like this. Look, you see—there is still a wave, and the pink brings out the red lights. It looked very well on.”

I was pretty sure she was kidding me. “So where is it?”

“It’s being altered for me. Now I can’t even take it back. I told them to go ahead, and I’ll have it for the weekend.”

That weekend, Dr. Adler came and had
Wiener
Schnitzel
with us. My mother wore the pink dress. It was very pink. I watched the doctor to see if he thought it strange, but he was in great spirits and said my mother looked like a girl. Her face had a high color; her eyes were too bright. After dinner, we went into the drawing room and she sat across from the doctor, making jokes and laughing in shrill, harsh bursts in her throat. Later, the
doctor asked her to come for a stroll around the block.

On Monday, Mrs. Dillon was waiting for me by the front door of Adorato. She asked me to come in a moment. “Come into the drawing room. Sit here on the sofa.” She sat down beside me.

“Has something happened?” I asked in alarm.

“Well, no, I don’t think so. Not yet. Guess who came to see me at the refugee office? Mr. Harvey. He’s worried
about your mother.”

“Why is he? Mummy is all right. I haven’t seen her laugh so much in years.”

“Well, that’s what seems to be the trouble. Mr. Harvey says she is a changed person. He says even when things were worst she was always conscientious about her work, and now all of a sudden she doesn’t seem to care. He says she keeps making mistakes every day. He told her the restaurant just can’t
afford to go on like this, and she laughed in his face.”

“What’s going to happen, then?” I asked. Panic settled familiarly back into my chest.

“He says he doesn’t know what to do. Today she forgot to light the oven under the roast and they had to take it off the menu. He says he took her aside to talk to her seriously, but she blew right up in his face. He says he never in his life heard her
shouting before. She said why can’t she take it easy, like all the other people do all the time. He wants me to talk to her, but I think maybe you should. You can talk to her. You tell her she must be more careful and not make so many mistakes.”