Other People’s Houses (14 page)

The drawing-room tongue was waggling frantically.

My mother got up, called me to her, quickly pulled a comb through my hair, and straightened
the collar of my cotton frock. “That’s Mrs. Willoughby, and I want you to look nice. Remember to thank her for letting you come and stay with us.”

We walked along the stone floor of the back passage, through the baize door, which closed noiselessly behind us. The front hall was carpeted and hushed. A door stood open. Inside the drawing room was a profound order, a still, sweet light. A thin lady
in a flowered dress sat in a deep armchair. The lady said, “Mrs. Groszmann, there’s a bit of a chill in the air. I thought I might have a little fire.”

“I’ll light it at once,” said my mother. “Mrs. Willoughby, this is my Lore.”

“How do you do,” said the lady. I saw the blue eyes my mother had written about. The room was full of flowers. The patterned-damask chairs stood on delicate bowlegs
on soft, patterned carpet.

I said, “Very well, thank you.”

My mother had bent to put a match to the sticks in the fireplace. The polished wood of the mantel reddened with the jumping flames.

I said, “I came by myself all the way from Liverpool. Except the guard of the luggage van was supposed to look after me.”

“Isn’t that nice,” said Mrs. Willoughby. She told my mother that Miss Elizabeth
was staying in town, so there would be only three for dinner.

I looked at my mother and said, “Thank you for having me.”

Mrs. Willoughby said, “I’m very glad you could come.”

Back in the kitchen, my mother cleared the table and said, “Now, before we do anything else you better sit down and write to the Levines.”

“Can I tomorrow?”

“Right this moment,” said my mother. “You don’t want them to
think that as soon as you are with your parents you forget all
they
have done for you. You don’t want to be ungrateful.”

I was not ungrateful. At times I had felt a good deal. (There had been the first Friday night, during the unfamiliar Orthodox lighting of the ritual candles, when I had been struck with the oddness of my being there at all. It seemed wonderful to me that these Levines should
have taken my strange, uncomfortable self into their inmost house. I was moved to tears, which exasperated Mrs. Levine, who kept asking me what was the matter
now
, and I couldn’t tell her.) But this evening I was moved by other things. “Can I go out and see the chickens?” I asked.

“As soon as you have finished your letter,” said my mother.

I squirmed and sighed and complained that I didn’t know
what to put in the letter, and wrote and blotted and wept to have to do it over. And so passed the first evening.

Next morning, I breakfasted with my father at the kitchen table while my mother cleared the dining room and washed the dishes and collected her brooms, dustpan, and polish. My father invited me to come with him to feed the chickens, but I chose to go with my mother, who was going
to “do” the drawing room. I liked the front part of the house.

We were alone in the drawing room. I went and stood in the bow window that looked over the lawn through the row of damson trees at the rounded hills beyond. A great bowl of roses stood on a small inlaid table. I knelt to see my green-and-golden image elongated and monstrous-nosed in the copper bowl. “Don’t touch the flowers,” said
my mother from the hearth, where she was kneeling to clean out the ashes. I tiptoed away across the carpet and stuck my face among the sweet peas and saw them and myself mirrored, pastel-colored and pretty, in the high polish of the piano top. “Leave the piano alone,” said my mother, who was dusting the mantelpiece. I sat in Mrs. Willoughby’s armchair, feeling my fingers across the patterned silk
and scrolled wood, with my feet in the air so that my mother could vacuum underneath me. I dreamed I was Mrs. Willoughby’s youngest daughter. “Can I buzz the servants’ bell?” I asked. My mother said I certainly could not and why didn’t I go into the garden to find my father, but I said I wanted to come upstairs with her.

Upstairs, I stood by Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby’s bedroom window and watched
my father down below walking through the gate into the field. He was mobbed by chickens. The hysterical brown birds flapped so thickly about his feet that he had to pick his steps carefully, holding the bucket aloft and shooing them gently with his other hand.

“There he is,” I said to my mother, who was making up the bed.

“Who?”

“Daddy.”

My mother came and looked, and she smiled.

I said,
“Why doesn’t
he
ever get up when the bell rings?”

My mother said, “Because I always do … because I know what they want. Lorle! You and I must have a talk.” I felt her looking at me, but I didn’t want to talk. I knew whose side I was on.

“I want you to know that I don’t mind working. I like to move about and to work; I do really. And Daddy is not a strong man.”

“He’s not ill now,” I said.

“Not so as to have to go away to the hospital, but he is not strong. He never feels completely well, and he’s always afraid of getting ill again.”

I said, “There’s Mrs. Willoughby in her straw hat,” but now my mother could not stop.

“I keep wondering if I’m doing wrong to take all the responsibility away from him, but I did let him do everything in order to get you on that children’s transport.
It was he who went to the Committee and the consulate and the emigration office and did everything, and I thought he seemed stronger than he’d been in years. Even after you had all gone inside the station and they wouldn’t let us in, he wouldn’t leave till the early morning, when they told us the train had left. But then we got home and he collapsed, you see, and it was too much for him. And then
I start taking over, and when he gets better it still seems easier and quicker for me to do things. I get in the habit, and I may be doing him a great wrong.”

I watched Mrs. Willoughby with her basket and gardening shears walking among the rose beds.

“Do you think I am wrong telling you all this—but you will be gone soon, and then I will have no one to talk to again, and you are my friend, aren’t
you?”

I said, “Yes. Can I go upstairs now and read a book?”

“Lore,” said my mother, “try and spend a little time with your father. He loves you very much.”

But I did not want to hear about my father’s love, which so outweighed my light return.

“Ask him to tell you a story.”

“Later,” I said.

“Yes,” said my mother. “You go up now and read. I’ll call you down for lunch.”

From the attic window
I watched my father walking after Mrs. Willoughby, who had called him to put down his bucket and bring the basket full of cut roses and the gardening shears into the house behind her. I felt sorry for him because I did not like him enough. I thought it must be lonely for him outside the friendship that bound my mother and me. I practiced feeling how it would be never to feel completely well. I
thought of the day I had vomited in Mrs. Levine’s house and tried to remember the sensation and then imagined it going on all day and the day after. Was
that
how my father went around feeling? I watched, that summer morning, and created a knowledge of my father’s walking—circumspectly, his lips slightly parted and his eyes straight before him, concentrating every nerve to avoid a jolt in his own
movements or a sudden change in direction, as if he were guarding some fragile moment of well-being against a return of his nausea.

My father and Mrs. Willoughby disappeared under the veranda roof below me. I promised myself to be loving to my father in the afternoon and to ask him to tell me a story, but by lunchtime he had succumbed to an attack of weakness so profound it operated like a paralysis
and he dragged himself up the stairs to bed.

My mother and I were left alone in the sunny kitchen. She was whistling, clearing the table, carrying dishes in to the scullery sink. The scullery was full of sunlight. The taps flashed silver. The steam rose over the sinks like a bright mist in which my mother stood, and the Viennese song she whistled sounded incomparably sweet and gay. I could tell
that she really did not mind working.

Afterward, we sat at the table dreaming together; one day we would all be living together again in an apartment of our own. And then my father came back down; he was feeling better. Mrs. Willoughby rang for tea, and after that my mother started dinner.

Sunday was our Sunday off. My father wanted to show me Mellbridge, half an hour’s bus ride away. By the
time the three of us, in our Viennese best, came down the stairs, it had begun to drizzle.

“And it’s a twenty-five-minute walk to the main road, where the bus stops,” said my mother. “What do you think?”

My father stood waiting for my mother to reach a decision and answer herself.

“We have plenty of time to catch the 3:10, so we can take it easy,” my mother said.

We felt ourselves in luck
that we had only a minute to wait for the bus and that the rain began to pour hard as soon as we were settled. We almost expected it to clear the moment we were to be set down at the bus stop in the center of town; however, it did not. The cinemas were closed on Sundays, my mother said, but we would walk up the High Street and see if there were any cafés where we might get a hot cup of coffee. The
streets were deserted. It poured heavily and steadily. “All the English people are staying at home,” I said.

There was a little teashop open, just off the High Street. It was pretty inside. The tables had clean white cloths. A fire burned in the grate. It was quite empty. The waitress wore a black dress and white cap and apron. My mother smiled at her, but she looked sour and long-faced. They
did not serve coffee, so we had an English tea of tea and scones and marmalade. We spoke English loudly while the waitress was near, but when she had walked away we whispered in German. The waitress was looking genteelly into space.

My mother kept looking at her. “I think maybe she is not allowed to sit down while there are guests, do you think?” my mother said. We called for our check and got
back into our damp coats and left.

“Let’s stop in this doorway and think what to do. The next bus back is not till 5:40.” My mother asked my father if his feet were wet. He said he couldn’t tell. I said that I could tell mine were wet. “And there’s the walk at the other end,” said my mother. “I suppose a taxi would cost pounds. I know what we can do now. Let’s start walking back to the bus stop.
There’s a waiting place there and it’s covered, and we can sit down. We can play twenty questions. Are you tired, Igo?” she asked my father, who was walking along with his back very bent and his feet dragging so that he kept almost tripping himself. He said he thought he was rather tired. “Well,” said my mother, “it won’t be long. You see, we are already here.”

“Where?” my father and I said,
looking around us.

“Why, right ‘here,’” said my mother. “And soon we’ll be ‘there.’” She made little jokes all the way and kept looking at my father. I could tell that she was frightened.

Back at Illford House we went upstairs to our room. It was damp, and we got under the blankets. My father fell asleep almost at once. My mother and I pretended this was all fun. We whispered together—next year
perhaps I might move to the south of England and be near my parents and we could spend all the free afternoons together. We wondered if there was a likelihood of finding another home for me as good as the one I had with the Levines in Liverpool.

Miss Joanne opened the curtains at the door. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know there was anyone here,” and she stepped into the room and walked on through
into the attic storeroom beyond. My father wakened and sat up. She stayed in the storeroom, scrabbling around, for half an hour. A couple of times she came through, carrying boxes. I watched her narrowly. I could not tell if she had even noticed me.

On Monday came a letter from the Levines. It seemed that Uncle Reuben might be having to have another of his eye operations. Mrs. Levine was very
upset and feeling very poorly with a pain in her side, but she was happy, she said, that I was having such a happy time with my parents.

My mother made me write by return mail, with a special message to poor Uncle Reuben. “Don’t mention anything about your leaving them,” she said. “We can’t bother them at such a time.”

Another letter came at the end of the week. The crisis with Uncle Reuben’s
eyes had passed for the moment, but a cousin of Mrs. Levine’s was down with something very damaging, and Mrs. Levine, despite the pain in her side, went almost every day to nurse her. If my parents would like to have me stay with them longer, this would be all right with Mrs. Levine. Mrs. Levine was sure my parents must be very unhappy to have me living almost the other end of England. The Levines
would always think of me with the greatest affection.

Now it came to us that I was not to return to Liverpool and that when my visit at Illford House ended on Thursday I had nowhere to live. My father began to cry. My mother took Mrs. Levine’s letter in to Mrs. Willoughby. Mrs. Willoughby called the vicar, who gave her the address of a church ladies’ committee in Mellbridge for the assistance
of refugees from Europe. The next day the chairman of the committee called; she had found a home for me with a nice family called Hooper, in Mellbridge—if my parents did not mind my living with Christians. My parents did not mind. We kept saying wasn’t it lucky and just what we had hoped for; everything was turning out for the best.

On Thursday my parents took me to my new foster family.

The
Hoopers lived in an orange brick street of identical semidetached houses with narrow alleys between them leading to the back doors. In front of each half house there was a square yard of grass surrounded by a neat privet hedge, with a little iron gate and a tidy flagstone path leading to three white steps and up to the front door. The Hoopers’ front door, during the time I lived there, was never
used except that first Thursday afternoon, for my parents and me.

Mrs. Hooper opened to us. She was a large, soft woman with fine black eyes. She must have been thirty-five or -six, a few years older than my mother. Mrs. Hooper’s upper lip was shrunken because of her missing teeth. “Hello,” she said. “How do you do. I’m very glad t-t-t-t-t …” Time stood suspended. We waited on the front steps
watching Mrs. Hooper’s tongue twist against her palate, her whole face working. “… t-to meet you.” We followed her into the little front parlor, which had the chill air of a room that is not lived in. It had the bluest wallpaper I had ever seen. Mrs. Hooper made my mother and father sit on the matching settee and armchair. She herself perched on the piano stool, smiling shyly and trying to wrap her
left hand into a corner of her apron. I looked all around. In the narrow bow of the window stood a closed writing desk with an ornately framed enlarged snapshot of two little girls in white dresses screwing up their eyes against the sun.