Other People’s Houses (22 page)

My mother was in the kitchen at Clinton Lodge. “Roast chicken and cucumber salad,” she said, “and not for Mr. Harvey and his customers but for you and
me. Roast potatoes, too. Take off your coat.”

“How are you doing in the restaurant?”

“Fine,” said my mother.

“Are you still making so many mistakes?”

“What do you mean, mistakes?”

“The way you were telling Dr. Adler?”

“Sit down and eat before everything gets cold. Other people make mistakes,” she said. “Everybody does. Mr. Harvey ruined a whole fish dinner once. He told me so himself.”

“Maybe you make too many mistakes.”

“Did Mr. Harvey say something to you?”

“No. Where would I see Mr. Harvey? He came to see Mrs. Dillon. I mean, it’s just that you should be a little more careful, and not make so many mistakes. And he says you’re not even sorry. He says you didn’t light the fire under the roast today and that the restaurant can’t afford to go on like this. Maybe if you stopped
drinking so much coffee. Mummy!”

My mother’s face was paling and shrinking before my eyes. Her mouth darkened to a red, sore look, with little unevennesses like lines up and down her parted lips. Her eyes increased in size as they filled with tears. She looked into her plate and put down her fork. When Mr. Katz came in with a friendly good evening, my mother got up and went out to the scullery.
I heard her clattering the dishes, and in a little while she went upstairs and closed the door.

In the weeks that followed, my mother kept herself to herself. The sound of a sudden voice could make her cry; we were all afraid to speak to her. She did not entertain the doctor again. She went to work every day. She has told me that those were the hardest weeks she has ever lived through because
she had to focus every nerve, every minute of the day, to hold on to herself, because the moment she relaxed she could feel herself altogether scattered.

I watched her strained face surreptitiously. I don’t know at what point I realized that the calamity for which I was set was not going to occur. My mother was making jokes and laughing again in her old way, from the chest, and with her head
thrown back. She talked to the people who came to visit. Whenever she mentioned my father, which she did readily, I would look around for a book. My mother told everyone the story of how she had made my father walk up the hill instead of taking a taxi. She still tells it to me once in a while, but it is only quite lately that I have told her that the time my father fell on the floor in front of the
wardrobe mirror it was because I pushed him with my hand.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Allchester”: Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon

One morning not long after I came to live at Adorato, when the two ladies thought I had gone off to school, I was standing in the dim carpeted hall outside the dining-room door listening to Mrs. Dillon gently scolding Miss Douglas for too harshly scolding me. She was saying, “That’s never the way to make a Christian out of her.”

There
had been a certain contest between the Jewish Committee, which saved me from Vienna, and the Church Refugee Committee, which had the care of my bodily needs in England. Each strove for my soul, without much passion.

My early upbringing had been assimilated Austrian: Jewish mainly on the High Holidays. My mother might prepare the Passover table to celebrate the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt
with a rich feast and all the ritual trappings, but she produced the hard-roasted egg (in remembrance of the joyous sacrifices made before the destruction of the Temple) clucking like a hen that had just laid it; my Uncle Paul wore his parsley dipped in salt water (in remembrance of the bitterness of the persecution of the Jews) jauntily in his lapel. During the prayer where we curse the Egyptians—“‘If
He had merely brought us forth from Egypt …
dayenu
[it would have been sufficient]; if He had merely inflicted justice upon them …
dayenu;
if He had merely slain their firstborn …
dayenu
’”—my mother drew an imaginary line under the list of
dayenus
and totted them up.

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I sat in the white imitation-marble gallery of the synagogue with my mother and the other
women. The men sat downstairs wearing their hats, chanting Hebrew and bobbing their bodies to keep time. Their lips never stopped moving, right fists striking their chests in the ancient gesture of contrition. A Yom Kippur service lasts from sunup to sundown. I fidgeted. I threw my cap into the air, and the
shammes
, the temple orderly, put me out onto the brilliantly sunny street. My grandmother
said it was always fair on Yom Kippur, while it rained on Christian holy days.

One sunny day, I got mixed up with a Palm Sunday procession. My parents and I were visiting my grandparents in Fischamend. I happened to be walking past the church just as the procession was coming out of it. At the door, Father Ulrich was passing out the palm branches. He put some in my hand, along with a little colored
picture of Jesús holding his gown open to show where his heart was bleeding. I walked with the little girls. They were dressed all in white with garlands in their hair. I held one of the blue ribbons that streamed from the velvet sky carried on four poles over the blue-and-gold Madonna. Her crown and scepter came behind on purple pillows. The altar boys swung censers. The priest joined the
end of the procession, singing in Latin out of his holy book. As we came through the arch under the tower into the open square, I saw my family looking down from the corner window of our house. I waved my palm branches in the air. They kept waving to me and gesturing. I did a little dance step for them.

By the time the procession passed my grandparents’ house, my mother was standing at the door
that led into the yard, and she hauled me inside. (This was in 1937, and Jews were already nervous.) My mother put the palm branches in a vase. As for the holy picture, she said why didn’t I take it up to Marie when she came back from church. I had been trying to decide if it was a very beautiful picture or not very nice at all—I took my cues from my mother, in those days, in matters of taste—and
I could tell from her face that this picture was not nice. “I don’t even want it, anyway,” I said.

The maid’s room was in the attic. Marie opened the door to me and I peered inside. It was dark. There was a lilac tablecloth pinned over the curtains. The room looked different from any other room in my grandparents’ house. It smelled different—of closed windows and a candle burning under a picture
of the Virgin and Child. Marie made me sit beside her on the bed. I gave her the picture. She said it was lovely of me; she had a whole boxful, if I would like to see. She went and fetched an old tin candy box and spilled the contents onto the bed. There were holy pictures of the Virgin and the saints and the Child Jesús among the lilies. There were glossy picture postcards from a certain young
man, Marie said, with red roses and hearts and ribbons, but she said she liked my picture the best, and she would show me where she was going to keep it next her heart. She unbuttoned her blouse till I could see the crevice between her elderly breasts, and pushed the picture down there. I said I had to go; my mother was waiting downstairs.

Christians were comical people. My grandmother had lots
of stories about them. There was the time handsome young Father Ulrich had asked his congregation to collect silver foil to be made into a great ball in aid of the church’s Winter Help Fund, and little Wellisch Greterl had spent the night with the fat, drunken sweetshop-owner Kopotski for a bar of chocolate wrapped in foil. The grownups found this enormously funny. In my grandmother’s stories,
the Christians always spoke with peasant accents.

After Hitler had come, while I was staying with Erwin in Vienna, I used to go to a Miss Henry, a young lady from London, to learn English. Miss Henry seemed quite intelligent. Her flat, on the Ringstrasse, looked much like our own. She lived with her mother, who gave lessons in the sitting room while Miss Henry gave me mine in the bedroom. The
only pictures there were a black-and-white engraving entitled “Tintern Abbey” and a framed photograph of a young man in S.S. uniform whom I often saw in the hall waiting for Miss Henry as I came out from my lesson. I had asked my father if she was a Christian. My father said yes, but that English people were Protestants instead of Catholics, like Austrians. Now, when she was giving me dictation,
I would peek curiously at this Miss Henry who was not a proper Christian. I tried to catch her off guard, for some sign.

This was my preparation for deciding between Judaism and Christianity—my mother had always said I must make up my own mind—when I left Austria.

When I wrote my parents from the camp that the two English Jewish Committee ladies had asked me if I would like to go and live with
a lovely Orthodox family, my father wrote back by return mail, begging me to go quickly to whoever was in charge and tell them I was not Orthodox and should be assigned to a different family. He said “Orthodox” meant being very religious and following laws I knew nothing about, and that I would be doing everything wrong and people would be cross with me, but his letter did not reach me until after
I had been settled with the Levines.

They had been taken aback by my ignorance of the Jewish laws. Sarah explained the rules, and by the end of the winter I did her credit. I took easily to being religious. I was a purist. Mrs. Levine had to make me do up my shoes when I came down with the laces dangling, not having wanted to mar the Lord’s Shabbos with the work of my hands; I would not accept
her offer of ice cream one second before the six hours after lunch when, the law said, milk might mix innocently with the meat in my stomach. One day I came into the scullery and found to my horror that Annie was washing the meat dishes with the milk swab. I hastened to point out her error. She took me by the shoulders with hands very wet from the washing water and shooed me out firmly, saying,
“What the eye does not see …”

Then, during my year in the south with the Hoopers and the Grimsleys, I lost the broad North Country accent I had picked up in Liverpool, and had become a Socialist, when circumstances made me once more mobile.

My Kentish working-class accent distressed the Allchester ladies, and Miss Douglas took me in hand. In the morning, I walked with her around the dewy garden.
I carried the watering can and filled up the birdbaths. Miss Douglas, in her wide straw hat and gardening gloves, walked with her basket and a pair of scissors and cut fresh flowers for the drawing room. In the evening, I changed my shoes and put on the green silk dress Miss Douglas had found at the church bazaar she had organized. She had put on new buttons for me. After dinner, I joined the
ladies and the cocker spaniel and the big black cat in the drawing room. (I always took breakfast and lunch with the ladies in the dining room, but dinner was a grown-up meal, which children took in the nursery or schoolroom; since there was no longer any such apartment at Adorato, Miss Douglas put my supper on a plate and I had it in Milly’s kitchen.)

If the weather was particularly fine, we
would move to the veranda and I would be sent to fetch Miss Douglas’s sewing basket. The English-summer daylight lasts far into the night hours. Long after the veranda and the lawn lay in shadow, the sky remained radiant, very high, the color of light. Miss Douglas stopped hemming the new bib for Milly’s baby; Mrs. Dillon rested the counterpane on which she was embroidering flowers with a hundred
colored strands of silk. “How perfectly lovely!” she cried out. “What a glorious day!” Miss Douglas lifted her nose into the pale-gold air and pointed where a rose had blown since our morning round, where the light caught the two last poplars, where three birds with golden underbellies, tilting on the wing, showed their backs in shadow, and then Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon took up their work once
more, and, seeing me lolling in a chair, Miss Douglas would tell me to sit up straight or make me fetch work for my idle hands lest the Devil find mischief for them to do.

In September, I was sent to the private high school, where I took, or made, opportunities to tell every new acquaintance that I was a Jewish refugee and that my mother was a cook and my father a gardener.

When I saw my mother
on Thursdays at the refugee club, she would ask me if I had written my thank-you letters to my old foster families yet, and I would say, “No, but I will.” The necessity of those letters, I remember, hung like a small but constant shadow over my adolescence. “Tomorrow I will write them,” I said. “Stop worrying about everything.” But my mother continued to worry about that, as she worried about
my father and about my grandparents, and she was working too hard, which worried me so that I began not to look forward to Thursdays.

One morning at breakfast, Miss Douglas told Milly that she might set the porridge on the sideboard. “We will help ourselves. Lore, perhaps you will serve us, like a dear child.”

Mrs. Dillon made signs for me to bring the dish around Miss Douglas’s left side, and
as soon as the door closed behind Milly, Miss Douglas said, “Curious, isn’t it, the way they always get their backaches on a Friday. Yesterday was her afternoon off and I never heard anything about a strained back, did you? If she had rested yesterday, instead of gadding about town all afternoon, I suppose she might be fit to do her work this morning.”

“But she has only one afternoon a week off,”
I said, “and there are seven days for work.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” said Miss Douglas. “Duty comes before pleasure.”

“What do you mean?” said Mrs. Dillon at the same time. “She has every other Sunday afternoon as well.”

“But only afternoons,” I said. “And then we leave the supper dishes for her. Maybe Milly is run down—”

“Maybe you had better run off to school,” said Miss Douglas.

“Goddam slave driver!” said Milly in the evening. She stood with her palms flattened against the small of her back. Milly was a big, powerful girl, and efficient in a slapdash way. “I’d like to see
her
, just once, put in a useful day’s work.”