Other People’s Houses (19 page)

My mother walked in front of me into the huge hospital ward and around a screen. Gerti and Kari were standing
at the foot of the bed in which my big father lay neatly under the hospital blankets. I could see the hump of his feet. My mother walked around to the right side of the bed. She sat down on a chair and leaned her sad, red, smiling face over his pillow. “Here she is, in her terrible school hat,” my mother said in her bright, ordinary voice. “Daddy has been asking for you all afternoon.”

My father’s
eyes looked straight up at the ceiling. His face was white and he was frowning, seemingly preoccupied with the struggle to free his right hand from under the blankets. My mother helped him get it out. The hand looked bloodless, white, and soft, as if even the nails were soft. He waggled the fingers impatiently toward the headboard behind his pillow. He said, “Tell her to come out. She should
come out from behind there.” He seemed to be trying to turn his head to look behind the headboard.

“She’s right here. Look. Come forward, where Daddy can see you,” my mother said to me.

I stepped up until my face was between his face and the ceiling. His mouth twitched. He began to cry with the right side of his face without the left side moving. When he stopped crying, he was looking right
at me, and he said, “If it’s Miss Douglas behind there, she should come out.”

I looked at my mother in horror. She said, “Come out from behind there, Miss Douglas.”

My father relaxed. In a minute, he said in a conversational tone, “Franzi, before I forget, the papers are in a niche behind the stove in the
Herrenzimmer
. The rel … rel—papers.” He lay frowning in puzzled irritation at the lost
word. “The rel … the rel—those papers,” he said, waggling his impatient fingers.

“The release papers, yes,” said my mother. “They are all right.”

“They want to see them at the police station,” said my father.

“I’ll take them.”

My father closed his eyes, exhausted.

“Go outside,” said my mother, “and wait for me.”

As I turned away, I noticed the weight of Kari’s hand on my shoulder and knew
that it had lain there all the time. When I looked back, I saw my mother tuck my father’s hand under the sheet. The right side of my father’s face had begun to cry again.

My mother went to see my father every day. She did the MacKenzies’ housework in the morning and got their lunch and then took the bus into town and stayed with him till five. Then she took the bus back to cook dinner. Thursdays
and every other Sunday, which were her days off, she stayed all evening.

One day, she was massaging his paralyzed left foot and felt a slight curling of the toes. Dr. Adler said it was a good sign. This doctor was Jewish, too, but not a refugee. He was fat and old and had a square, grizzled head. He patted my mother’s arm and said she was a good woman and told her to try and take it a little
easier. “Have a little holiday for yourself once in a while,” he said.

My mother asked me to visit my father in the hospital for those hours she could not be there, and I wondered while I sat beside him that I should be feeling nothing but excruciating boredom. Later, when he was better, it seemed all right to bring a book.

“What are you reading?” my father asked.

“It’s homework. In a way.”

My father said, “I don’t want to stay in the hospital any more. I wish your mother would take me home.”

“You know you can’t climb the wooden steps at the Mill. You’ll have to stay here until you are better.”

“I’m not going to get better as long as I have to stay here. The nurses don’t understand when I talk to them. I asked your mother to write to your Uncle Paul. He studied medicine in Vienna.
Vienna has the best medical school in the world.”

“Firstly, Paul never got finished with his studies, and secondly, he is now in the Dominican Republic doing farm work. What would he know that your doctor here doesn’t know?”

“These English doctors don’t know anything.”

“They’re good enough to look after a hospitalful of English people,” I said, and then bent quickly to kiss the rude words away.
My father’s skin felt unpleasantly chilly, flaccid under my lips. It seemed wicked in me that I did not like to kiss him and I kissed him again.

He looked for a moment as though he might be going to cry, but he only said, “Look!” and moved the fingers of his left hand lying on top of the blanket ever so slightly.

“There, you see,” I said. “You couldn’t have done that a few weeks ago, could you?”

“No,” said my father. He lay quietly.

I surreptitiously picked up my book.

My father said, “The doctor recommends physical therapy. Paul once took a course in therapy in Vienna.”

I said nothing.

My father said, “The doctor didn’t even come to see me today.”

“Because you’re getting better. He doesn’t have to come and see you every day.”

“So, if I’m better, why can’t your mother take me home?”

“Because she will have to give notice to the MacKenzies and find a room for both of you,” I said, with my irritation rising again. “She’ll have to go to work for both of you, won’t she? So you will have to stay here till you can look after yourself.”

“You could come and look after me,” said my father.

“And what about school?” I had been fourteen in March, which was the legal school-leaving age,
and I did not want to think about this.

“After school you could come,” he said.

“And what about homework? And what would you do for the rest of the day? Who would get your meals for you?”

“You and your mother could manage if you really wanted.”

“Daddy!” I leaned forward and looked into his face, and I was trembling. “Promise me something. Promise you won’t tell Mummy that you don’t want to
stay in the hospital. It will only make her worry more. Will you promise? For me. I mean, there’s nothing she can do about it.”

“She can take me away,” said my father. “Are you going to read again?”

“I’m just looking at my book.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“No.”

“Franzi!” said my father.

I hid my book.

My mother came smiling between the beds down the long ward, kissed me, and sat on a chair
at my father’s left side. She massaged his hand, and told us stories. “Did you hear the explosion around nine o’clock last night? Well, it was a stray bomb, and it fell right at the end of the MacKenzies’ field—a direct hit on Mr. MacKenzie’s vegetable marrow. It broke all the west windows. We spent the morning cleaning up the mess.”

“Franzi,” said my father, “did you write to Paul?”

“Not yet.
I will bring pen and paper tomorrow, and we will write the letter here.”

My father avoided my eyes and said, “When are you going to take me out of the hospital?”

“As soon as the doctor says you are well enough. Lore, did you tell your father about the school concert?”

“We are having an end-of-term concert, and I’m going to play the Mozart fantasia.”

My father looked at me and said, “You can
borrow my best crocodile belt to wear for the concert.”

“But it’s much too big for me,” I said, “and besides, it’s a man’s belt.”

My father had begun to cry. “Look, Franzi,” he said. “That’s all I can do,” and he wiggled his fingers on the blanket.

My mother found a job as cook in Harvey’s restaurant. The kitchen was in the basement, and there was a grating in the pavement for a skylight. I
would see the steam coming up by the time I walked to school. On the way home, walking with a friend, I would say, “Down there is where my mother works.”

My mother fetched my father from the hospital. He was dressed in his good herringbone suit from Vienna. The pants hung like gray elephant skin around his thin legs, and the collar of his shirt stood away all around his neck. His face had the
sick no-color of a plant that has sprung up in a cellar. He had shaved, but small islands of white stubble stood on his upper lip and his left cheek. He smiled his embarrassed one-sided smile.

The room my mother had found on the London road, at the far side of town, distressed me. I asked Miss Douglas if I might take some flowers, and she gave me three roses and an iris. They were a great disappointment.
They neither raised the ceiling nor pushed out the walls nor cheered up the green linoleum; they were four flowers stuck in a milk bottle in a mean room. “Why, at least, can’t we have a teapot?” I asked my mother. “Why do you have to bring the kettle to the table?” “Maybe next time you come I’ll see if I can get at my china,” said my mother, “but I think it’s in that bottom trunk and
I don’t want to unpack. I don’t think the landlady likes us.” We came upon this landlady in the hall, and made her jump. She was nervous. She was a tall, skinny working woman, with brown teeth. After two weeks, she told my mother that Mr. Groszmann made her nervous, being so quiet all the time and then all of a sudden there he would be on the stairs, and she had a daughter coming to town in two weeks
and would need her room.

My mother came to Adorato to speak to Mrs. Dillon. They had tea in the dining room, but before my mother left, Miss Douglas invited her to sit with us in the drawing room awhile. Mrs. Dillon called my mother “Franzi,” and it seemed she had asked my mother to call her “Mary.” After my mother left, Mrs. Dillon and Miss Douglas had an argument about this in very low voices.

Soon afterward, Mrs. Dillon bought a house around the corner. It was called Clinton Lodge, a smaller, less elegant version of Adorato. She rented the front bedroom to my mother and father, and the other rooms to other refugees who were having trouble finding places to live, for people did not care to have German-speaking aliens in their houses, in those days. There were Mr. and Mrs. Katz from
Munich, who had a brother in the U.S.A. and were waiting for the American quota. There were two elderly women from Berlin, who shared a room. There was a Viennese widow, Mrs. Bauer, whose small son had left by the same children’s transport as I but had stayed in Holland. She was waiting for the end of the war. Their bedrooms were piled high with trunks, which contained their total possessions, disguised
under tablecloths or hidden under bits of carpeting; the rooms had an air of permanent temporariness.

The seven refugees lived kindly together. German and Austrian accents mingled good-humoredly. Clinton Lodge came to be known around town as an example of strangers living in one house without hostilities, except for my father, who quarreled with everybody. One night, I went over to warm up the
supper my mother had prepared for him in the morning, before she went to the restaurant. She was out playing the piano for a Viennese singing teacher. Mrs. Bauer intercepted me in the hallway. “I wish you would get your father out of the kitchen. Mrs. Katz and I want to get our supper and set the table. I’ve asked him to move, but he pretends he doesn’t hear me.”

My father was sitting at the
kitchen table with his notebook, ink, pencils, and erasers spread around him. The doctor had said he could not do any more gardening, and he was taking a correspondence course in English accounting, writing the answers in his bad grammar, meticulously underlined in red.

“Hello, Mrs. Katz. Hello, Daddy. Come into the drawing room. They need the table out here.”

“I need the table, too,” said my
father.

“Come on, Daddy, I’m taking the dishes inside,” I said, in the irritable voice that had become habitual with me when I spoke to him. I wondered how he was going to disentangle the partially paralyzed left leg that was twisted as if it did not belong to him around the chair leg, but I thought, He manages all day when I’m not here, and walked away into the drawing room.

Presently I heard
him limping after me down the hall. “I can’t eat anything tonight,” he said.

“You can at least try, can’t you? The doctor says you’ve got to eat.”

“The doctor, the doctor—always the doctor,” said my father.

“Why didn’t you let them have the table for their supper when they asked you?”

“I have as much right to the table as they have,” he said.

“But you have no right to make things harder for
Mummy. She works nine hours in the restaurant and three hours playing the piano, to make extra money, and when she comes home she has to listen to complaints and make excuses for you. You never think of her, do you?”

“I think of her. I think of her,” said my father, with his head drawn back from my yelling. His vest stood away from his collapsed chest. “I’m not feeling well tonight,” he said.

“So don’t think about how you feel all the time. Think of all the thousands of people who are being killed every day.”

“What’s that to me?” said my father.

“Daddy! What would you rather have—your health or the end of the war?”

“The end of the war and my health,” said my father, with a faint smile.

“No, but seriously, Daddy! Say someone gave you only one wish: either the war will be over tomorrow
and you will be ill for a year or you can be well tomorrow and the war will last another year. Which would you have?”

“I want to be well,” said my father. “So, are you angry? Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry.”

“Take this away, please,” said my father, looking miserably at the piece of meat loaf speared on his fork.

“Not until you’ve eaten at least what’s on your fork.”

My father put the
forkful into his mouth, and vomited.

Mr. Katz helped me take my father upstairs, and I helped him to bed. He lay exhausted and smiled embarrassedly with his half face. I sat on the edge of the bed and massaged his left hand. “You’re better now, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Are you going to stay with me till your mother comes?”

“Of course. Do you think I would leave while you are feeling ill? Show me
how you can move your fingers.”

My father wiggled his left fingers for me.

“You want to go to sleep?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Daddy,” I said, “let’s not tell Mummy about your being sick. All right?”

“All right.”

But when my mother came home, I met her at the door and said, “Daddy vomited. Mr. Katz helped me take him to bed and when I came back Mrs. Katz had cleaned everything up. You don’t have
to go up. He’s asleep now.”