Other People’s Houses (9 page)

When I came out onto the landing, my heart was pounding. There was a door opposite. It stood slightly ajar. I could see,
reflected in its own mirror, the top of a neat dressing table. There were photographs stuck all round the mirror, and on the table were a brush-and-comb set, and a pincushion in the shape of a heart. I held my breath. I gave the door a little push. I saw the corner of a bed with a green satin counterpane and wanted to look further in, but the quiet in the house frightened me and I backed away.
I wondered where all the people might be and peered over the banisters to the floor below. I saw a green carpet and a number of doors, but they were all shut. I think I got the notion then that the five maids in uniform were inside the rooms, cleaning. Slowly I made my way down to the floor with the green carpet and then down the next flight to the ground floor. I thought I heard voices behind a
door and tried to look through its frosted-glass inset. I could make out nothing, but my silhouette must have appeared upon it, because a voice inside said, “Come along. Come along in.”

I came into a warm, pleasant kitchen-living room with a big table in the middle and a fire burning briskly in a fireplace. The dog, Barry, lay with his paws on the brass fender, and a fat lady sat by the window,
sewing. She said, “Come in. Sit down. Annie will bring your breakfast.”

I said, “I have to write to my parents where I am.”

“Well, you can have your breakfast first.”

The maid in the blue linen dress came in with a boiled egg for me, and tea and toast. She pushed in my chair and buttered my bread. Miserably, I watched her pour milk into my tea. I looked up at her. Her nose had such an upward
sweep that from where I sat I could see way into the black caverns of her round little nostrils. It occurred to me that she was winking at me, but I wasn’t sure and I kept my eyes on my food and ate it, peering around me now and then. I expected every moment that the doors upstairs would open and release all the people. Everything was quiet. The fire crackled. The fat lady sewed. The dog was scratching,
drumming with his hind leg on the fender. The maid was clattering pans in the scullery, and when I was finished she came and fetched away my dishes.

I sat at the table happily writing a letter. I wrote how last night we were taken to a house and there was an ugly old woman who had chosen me and how I had not wanted to go with her. It had been like a slave market. I thought that was pretty clever.
I wrote, “The people I am going to live with are very rich. They have five maids. There is a fat lady here sewing. She said I should call her Auntie Essie, but I’m not going to. She doesn’t look like an auntie to me. She is very fat.” It amused and excited me to be writing to my mother about this person who was sitting there within touching distance. I felt a rush of blood to my head; it had
come to me in a flash that this was the identical old woman in the fur coat—and yet it wasn’t, either. This lady had on a loose cotton dress. She was quite different. But she was elderly, too, and large, and she wore glasses. Perhaps it was the same one, and yet perhaps it was not. I kept looking surreptitiously across at her. She raised her head. Quickly and guiltily, I bent mine over my letter.
I wrote that I had found the chocolate my mother had hidden for me in the bottom of my suitcase. Then I said I loved them, in block capitals, and that it was
very
important to write me what was the meaning of the word “Taimtarais.”

When my letter was sealed and addressed, Mrs. Levine gave me a stamp and told me to find Annie and she would post it for me.

Annie was in the drawing room, in the
front of the house, lighting the fire. The flames were rushing with a fierce hiss upward into the chimney. I sat down on the little footstool and watched. I wanted to cry. I cradled my head in my hands and planted my elbows on my knees and let homesickness overcome me as one might draw up a blanket to cover one’s head. I never knew when the maid left the room or how the day passed. Once, I came to
as if with the wearing off of a drug that left me sober and sorrowless in a strange room; I looked curiously about me.

There was an old man sitting on the far side of the fireplace. His little eyes blinked incessantly behind his thick glasses, and he was watching me across the quiet of the room. I recognized him immediately; he was the same old man who had pulled out this footstool for me last
night. I had a notion that he had been sitting there ever since, watching me gently and patiently, with the fire crackling between us. He was curling his finger for me to come to him. I got up and stood beside him. I could see his little wrinkled left eye from the side, and a second time through the lens, magnified and yet as from a tremendous distance behind the sevenfold rings and more of the
thick glass. He was tickling a silver sixpence out of his purse. When he gave it to me, he put his finger to his lips and winked at me to signify secrecy. I nodded conspiratorially. I had to laugh—and that frightened me. I sat down quickly, wanting to lose myself again in grief.

In the course of that day, I developed a technique: I found that if I sat curled into myself on the low stool facing
the fire, and stared into the heart of flame until my eyes stung and my chest was full of a rich, dark ache, I could at will fill up my head with tears and bring them to the point of weeping and arrest them there so that they neither flowed nor receded. Though I knew when, toward evening, the house filled up again with people and that they were in the room whispering about me, I would not turn,
so as not to disturb the delicate balance of my tears.

I must have been a great trial to the Levines in that first week.

“Have some tea,” Mrs. Levine would say. “Annie, go and bring her a nice hot cup of tea. It’ll make you feel better.”

I shook my head. I said I didn’t like tea.

“She doesn’t like tea,” Mrs. Levine said. “Here, how about going for a walk. Eh? The fresh air will do you good.”
She smiled encouragingly into my face. “You want to go for a nice run in the park with Auntie Essie?”

I said I didn’t feel like going for a walk. It was cold, I said.

“I know what she wants,” Mrs. Levine said, looking up at Annie. “She wants somebody to play with. I’ll go and call that Mrs. Rosen that got the other little refugee and she can come over and play. Wouldn’t that be nice?” she said
to me. “Wouldn’t you like a nice little girl to play with?”

I said no, I felt perfectly cheerful and I didn’t feel like playing with any children, and I was trying to think of something grownup to say to Mrs. Levine to keep her there talking to me. “How long please does a letter take from Vienna to England?”

“Two or three days,” said Mrs. Levine, with her smile frozen on her face. She sighed,
and, groaning, she rose from her knees. She was too fat and old to have conversations with me while I sat under the dining-room table refusing to come out. “That’s the third time since breakfast she asked me that,” Mrs. Levine said and looked at me from the distance of her full height. I think it frightened her that the refugee she had brought into her house to protect from persecution was talking
back to her and watching her out of melancholic and conscious eyes—I caught the look she looked over my head at Annie with a turning outward of her hands and a turning down of the right corner of her mouth.

The next afternoon I stood at the window and saw the thin, angular, tall woman leading a small fat child up the path toward the front door. The little girl had red hair and a white rabbit’s-wool
hat tied under the chin. She carried a red patent-leather pocketbook.

Mrs. Levine walked into the hall to let them in and I came to the drawing-room door and watched in some excitement. The child stood perfectly still and allowed herself to be peeled out of her thick little coat, switching the pocketbook to the right hand while the left was being slipped out of the coat sleeve and ungloved and
back to the left to get the right glove off.

Then Mrs. Levine called me to take my visitor into the dining room to play and Annie would bring our tea.

The little girl stood in front of the fire holding her pocketbook, looking straight before her. She was an exceedingly plain child and I knew that I could boss her. I started on that exchange of essential information which in later life lies hidden
under our first urbanities:

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Helene Rubichek.” She didn’t ask me mine so I told her what it was and asked her how old she was.

“Seven.”

I said that I was ten years old. I told her that my father was in a bank and asked her what hers did. She said her father had had a newspaper but he didn’t do anything now. I said mine didn’t work in the bank any more either, and
because it felt so easy to be saying things in German for the first time in a week I went on to tell her about my mother who played the piano and my grandparents who had a house. I said, “I know a game. Let’s guess which of our parents will come sooner, yours or mine.”

“Mine are coming next month,” she said.

“I bet mine come sooner than yours,” I said, and then I asked her what she had in her
pocketbook, but Helene put her head on one side so that her cheek came to lie like a fat pouch on her shoulder and wouldn’t answer.

“Anyway,” I said, “let’s play,” because I remembered the game Erwin and I had played together and wanted to be playing. “Let’s play house. Do you want to?”

“Yes,” said Helene.

“All right,” I said, “I know where we can play.” I took her by the hand and led her to
the dining-room table in the middle of the room and made her get under it and crawled in after. We squatted together. “Now they can’t even see us,” I said, looking in delight around this pretty, compact little world under the table roof, hedged in by a complex of chair legs. “Now we have to be comfortable,” I said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” said Helene.

“All right, let’s play. I’ll be the
mother. You be the child. You have to cry and I’ll make you feel better. Put your pocketbook down so you can be comfortable.” Helene put her head on one side and looked straight before her. “Never mind then,” I said, “go on,” and I bobbed up and down in my excitement because I knew precisely what it was I wanted her to be doing so that I could do what I wanted to do. “Cry!” But Helene sat growing
fatter and more stolid every moment. I thought it was because she wasn’t properly comfortable, holding the pocketbook, and I said, “Put it down over there.”

Helene said, “No.”

“You can have it back as soon as we’ve finished playing. Please,” I wheedled. “I’ll take it for you, come on,” and I put my hand out to take it, but Helene had gripped her pocketbook with surprising strength. “Come on,”
I said, tugging at it, “please!” But as I looked into her face I saw that it had broken up, changed out of all recognition, and become perfectly red. The cheeks had closed up over both eyes. I knew what was happening. Helene really was crying. A round black hole appeared where her mouth had been and out of it came a hideous roaring.

The door opened. Mrs. Levine and Mrs. Rosen came running. I
came out from under the table protesting that I had only wanted Helene to be comfortable. Mrs. Rosen had hold of Helene’s wrist and was pulling out the rest of her, cramped in a fat little ball, yelling monotonously. “Come on now,” she kept saying, “do stop crying, will you? Do stop.”

Mrs. Levine said to me, “What do you want to pick a fight for with the little girl when she comes to visit? You
have to be a little hostess, don’t you?”

“But I said ‘please,’” I explained while Mrs. Rosen over my head said to Mrs. Levine, “She never did that before. For goodness’ sake stop, can’t you? At home she never even opens her mouth. She gives me the creeps. I tell my husband if it wasn’t for her parents coming in a month I wouldn’t know what to do with her, she makes me so nervous. My husband laughs
at me. He says she’ll come around. He always wanted children. He comes home at night and he brings her toys and that little pocketbook and he jokes and laughs, but it’s me that’s left alone with her all day and all she ever does is stand around and I don’t know what she wants or if she understands what I say to her and I get so nervous.” I was watching in fascination the way Mrs. Rosen’s left
cheek kept jumping independently of the rest of her.

Now Mrs. Levine had begun to talk about me and I listened with that hungry silence which one renders to conversations of which oneself is the subject. “This one talks all right,” Mrs. Levine was saying, “don’t you?” and she patted my head. “When I tell her to come out from the table and be happy with us, she says she’s happier down there. She’s
got an answer for everything.” Mrs. Levine bent down to little Helene, whose noise was becoming exhausted and mechanical. “We’ll have some nice tea, eh? And cake. Go call Annie,” she said to me.

Annie came with the tray and she spread the cloth and poured our tea and heaped little Helene’s plate with cake while I watched in an agony of impatience. I was dying to get back under the table, ridden
by the sharp and clear desire to have Helene sitting beside me in our miniature house in an orgy of coziness, but Helene kept stuffing her fat face, with leisurely solemnity. Her pocketbook lay beside her plate. When she was finished Annie gave her another slice and then Mrs. Rosen came in bringing Helene’s coat and said it was time to go.

“Say good-by to the little girl,” Mrs. Levine said at
the front door.

“Good-by,” I said, and then in German I called after her, “Are you coming again?” but Mrs. Rosen was leading her away down the path as if it were something at once fragile and not very appetizing that she had there by the hand, and Helene never turned around.

I asked Mrs. Levine if Helene could come again and she said, “You funny kid, first you pick a fight and then you want
her to come back!” But she said Helene could come back. I asked when. Mrs. Levine said maybe she could come again next Saturday.

Then it happened; starting hot between my legs, it ran down my stockings, and I knew that I was wetting myself. I saw Mrs. Levine looking at my feet where a wet spot was forming on the hall carpet, but I thought, “Maybe she isn’t looking at me. Maybe she is looking
at the dog, scratching at the front door.” I said, “Look at Barry at the front door. He knows somebody is coming.”