Other People’s Houses (24 page)

The following week, when Mrs. Montgomery and Herta called at Adorato, Herta and I compared notes. Herta said her Jewish family had asked her to spend every Saturday with them, but she wasn’t going.

“I know,” I said. “I’m not going back, either. Mine lived in one of those ugly new
apartment buildings.”

Milly came out to call us to tea. She had wheeled the trolley into the drawing room and set it before Miss Douglas. It was my duty to carry around the cups.

The beautiful thing about the drawing room was that it mirrored itself, distorted and precise, in the circular convex glass, gilt-framed and eagle-topped, that hung over the mantel. In it, the rich Turkish carpet rose
to a gentle mound. At the far side of the room, the bowl of delphiniums, the Hepplewhite table with its delicate square legs, the drop leaf raised against the wall, looked tiny, as if they were at a tremendous distance. Miss Douglas herself, in plum-colored jersey suit and dickey, sitting right below the mirror, appeared banana-shaped, arched into the circular frame; her real voice speaking out
of the real room said, “We won’t wait for Mrs. Dillon. She runs around all day, poor dear, always doing good. She has her refugee club today.”

“No, she doesn’t,” I said. “That’s Thursdays.”

“Take Mrs. Montgomery her cup of tea, dear, carefully,” said Miss Douglas. Her large, veined old hands presided with authority over cozy, pot, and hot-water jug, the milk, the little sandwiches, and the plate
of chocolate biscuits. “Take Mrs. Montgomery the sugar, dear. She has her church, you know, and there are her old people. Herta, a little kumquat jam for you?” Miss Douglas was spreading a generous dab of the jam on her own infinitesimally thin slice of brown Hovis bread and butter. She bent her head with deliberation and delicately licked a speck of the sweet stuff from the knuckle of her little
finger. “Did you know that Mrs. Dillon has a house, at the other side of town, that she has turned into a home for old gentlefolk? We feel so sorry for them, poor dears, having been gently brought up, to be poor in their old age. And now she has bought another house for her refugees. Why, there she is now.” The cocker spaniel had walked to the door. Even Ado, the cat, had risen, yawned, and was
sitting expectantly. Mrs. Dillon had entered the house.

Mrs. Dillon opened the door with a bounce of spirits. She greeted her sister, asked the visitors how they did, said hello to me, kissed the dog, noticed the cat, and sat down smiling and sighing.

“Poor dear,” said Miss Douglas, “you must be exhausted. A cup of tea will do you a world of good.”

“I spoke to your dear mother on the telephone
today,” Mrs. Dillon said to me, “and she sends you her love. I was trying to persuade her to come and work for my old folks, but she says your father is so poorly, poor man, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and she doesn’t want to bind herself. I was quite sorry. She is such a dear little person, and so reliable.”

The ladies then talked about the advantages of hiring refugees, expressed
their indignation at people who were prejudiced indiscriminately against German-speaking persons. Miss Douglas said she would hire one immediately to take the place of her girl if it weren’t for that dear little baby. “I have her from the Home for Unmarried Mothers, you know, where I do a little charity Tuesdays and Fridays. She is not at all a good servant, but I don’t have the heart to get rid
of her. It’s hard for these girls to get placed. I want you to see our little Lila.”

Miss Douglas asked me to ring for Milly, and she asked Milly to take away the trolley and to bring in her baby.

Lila was not an attractive infant. She was cross-eyed and slow. Miss Douglas set her on the rug in front of the fire, and placed her big hand tenderly over the baby’s head so that it fit her like a
cap.

“Up, up,” said Mrs. Dillon to her dog. “Up you come! There. You know you’re too big to sit on Mother’s lap, don’t you? Yes, you do. You know you are. Poor sweet,” she said, in an aside to Mrs. Montgomery, “he gets so jealous.”

At the time my parents moved to Clinton Lodge, Herta challenged me about it. “So now your parents live in their own place, are you going to live with them?”

I had
been worrying about this myself, but I said, “Of course not. You see, my father is not well. And my mother goes to work. Besides, they only have one room.”

Herta said, “If I had my parents living in town, I would live with them.”

“Well, I visit them,” I said.

These visits were not a success, though for my mother’s sake the Clinton Lodge refugees put up with me. Among the papers from those years
(the letters from my Uncle Paul in the Dominican Republic, the Red Cross letters from Vienna, the ration cards, the Alien Registration Cards, the receipts for the monthly one pound ten shillings my mother paid the Committee toward my schooling) I’ve come across a tribute written by the house poet to “Franzi on her Birthday, December, 1942”:

She busily at early morn

Goes to her work that’s never
done.

To cook and bake and scrub and stir;

A hundred mouths are fed by her.

Comes home at last and nurses Igo

Makes cakes for Lore to help her grow

And is amusing gay and bright,

In our small circle every night.

The poem to me on my fifteenth birthday reads:

Let us hope she’ll grow to be

Happy in this company

Neat and friendly, cause no strife,

But help us lead a peaceful life.

I was
not happy in their company. I came to Clinton Lodge like a native returning home after a lifelong absence. My German was uncomfortable in my mouth. The manners I had learned from my parents no longer felt adequate or proper. These people seemed to me underbred. They laughed too loud. They moved restlessly around the house. The Germans cleaned and the Austrians cooked. When I came over on Saturday
after lunch, my mother would be drinking coffee from the tablecloth in the kitchen, instead of tea from the knee in the drawing room. “Next time,” she said. “Today I’m in a hurry. I’m going to visit Daddy in the hospital.”

“What, in that dress?” I said.

“But this is my good dress. I had it made the winter before we left.”

“It’s those flaps hanging down from the belt. In England you don’t wear
things like that. Maybe if I cut them off—”

“You’re not cutting anything off,” said my mother.

“Yes, I am.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

My mother was in a hurry and she was tired. “So be quick, then,” she said. But even without the flaps my mother did not look like Miss Douglas or Mrs. Dillon or Mrs. Montgomery. It was the distribution of flesh underneath that was wrong.

“Why didn’t you go with your mother
to visit your father?” asked Mrs. Bauer.

“I can’t,” I said. “Miss Douglas is having people to tea, and she needs me. Good-by.”

But I stopped outside the door and heard Mrs. Katz say, “Poor Franzi. That child is getting as chilly as the rest of the English.”

The pain of their disapproval remained with me after I had forgotten the persons who had inflicted it, for by the time I reached the Clinton
Lodge gate Mrs. Bauer and Mrs. Katz had dropped away, as the country one has been touring drops behind the horizon into the past. As I ran up the hill and into the sight and presence of Adorato, there occurred a perceptible change. I came, walking more slowly, through the side gate, stepped quietly into the back hall, my jaw reset to speak English, my facial muscles to smile, my bones realigned
at the waist, the seat of politeness, and opened the door into the drawing room.

“There you are, dear child. Come and say hello to Canon Godfrey and Mrs. Montgomery. Take Mrs. Montgomery her cup, carefully, and the sugar.”

Mrs. Dillon beamed at me out of her sweet blue eyes. “How nicely she carries round the tea,” she said to Canon Godfrey, who sat beside her. “Doesn’t she? Almost like an English
girl.”

I watched them all in the round mirror under its eagle. Mrs. Montgomery was telling Miss Douglas that Herta had done very well at school and the headmistress was having her take the scholarship examinations for Cambridge next year. Herta was there, too, sitting upright in her chair, balancing the cup and plate as cleverly as any English lady, but she had grown quite stout, with a high
bosom. It exasperated me that she sat just far enough outside the circle around the fire so that her legs up to the knees were reflected in the golden mirror and the rest of her was not.

I asked her to sit on the rug with me, but Miss Douglas suggested that if we had finished our tea we could go and walk in the garden.

That winter afternoon Herta told me she was going to be converted.

“You’re
not!” I said, incredulous and revolted, assailed out of memory by an alien smell, by the forbidden regions of a housemaid’s bosom. “You don’t want to be a Christian!”

“Yes, I do.”

“Come on! You don’t believe all that nonsense about God coming to earth as his own son?”

“It’s not nearly such nonsense as our prayer book that does nothing but bless God,” Herta said with heat. “The people of Israel
this, and the people of Israel that, as if there were nobody else in the world!”

“Yes, and maybe you believe that a virgin can have a baby. Maybe you don’t know something.”

“Maybe I know more than you!” cried Herta. “Do you know about spiritual impregnation? With God, all things are possible.”

“If all things are possible,” I shouted, “why does he let wars happen, and concentration camps, and
why are your parents lost!”

“That’s because you don’t understand,” said Herta, with her brows very black. “There’s something Christ said. ‘I am the light.’ But I can’t explain it to you. It’s something I saw once when I was walking the dog on the Downs, in the evening, how light is everything. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” I said. “You think you are the only person who understands
anything. I knew that long before you—the time we walked up West Street.”

I looked into Herta’s fat face, but there was no fire flashing in Miss Douglas’s late-November garden, and I could see Herta’s eyes behind her glasses looking very small and pink-rimmed, with such sparse, stiff lashes, I was sorry they weren’t prettier.

“Anyway,” I said, “are you going to be Church of England?”

Herta
said she was going to be High Church.

In the following weeks, I became used to the thought of Herta’s becoming a Christian. The busy Christmas season was upon us, and I was helping Miss Douglas do good. I came along on her rounds, visiting her deaf and dumb and blind where they lived. If they were gentlefolk, we brought them handkerchief cases, or sachets that Miss Douglas had been making in
the evenings from dried lavender out of the garden. We sat with them and had tea. Miss Douglas would make conversation with sign language into their hands and tell them about me, and I would go and stand near them and shake hands. If they were poor people, Miss Douglas stayed in the car and I went and rang the doorbell and left a parcel of food.

I became very indignant, and was a Socialist again
for almost a week. It wasn’t fair, I said, that some people should be poor, as well as deaf and dumb, and I gave Miss Douglas an argument.

She was busy setting up the manger on the piano top in the drawing room and asked me to pass her the cotton wool for snow on the roof of the stable. “That’s the way things are arranged,” she said. “If everyone were well off, what would become of charity? I
do hope the snow doesn’t catch fire from the candle in the manger. Last year, the piano top was quite badly burnt. It’s a good thing we have insurance.”

I said, “If everybody were well off, then everybody would be equal. And nobody would have to eat in the kitchen.”

Miss Douglas said that would never do. Everything would be turned topsy-turvy. “The way things are arranged,” she said, “the lower
classes wait on me, or if I am giving a charity party for my poor deaf-and-dumb children I am happy to wait on them, and their mothers, too, but it would never do to sit down together.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” I said, and Miss Douglas told me to run along and see if I could help Mrs. Dillon.

Mrs. Dillon was never so happy as in this season, when to her year-round activities was added her Nativity
play, which she wrote, produced, directed, costumed, and sang in. It was done every year in St. Thomas’s, the fine Norman church, so old that it was half sunk into its little graveyard at the bottom of West Street.

The drawing room was full of splendid striped shepherds’ robes from Palestine. In the evenings, Miss Douglas sat before the fire sewing angels’ gowns out of Indian Head. I helped Mrs.
Dillon paste jewels onto the crowns of the Three Kings.

Mrs. Dillon said I could have been one of her angels to kneel around the manger, but she didn’t think the Jewish Committee would like it.

I asked her if Herta could be an angel now that she was converted.

“Herta converted?” said Mrs. Dillon. “What ever gave you that idea?”

“Well, she is,” I said.

“No, she’s not.”

“Yes, she is.”

“I
wish there were just one subject,” said Miss Douglas, “on which you would not contradict.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs. Dillon. “I was talking just yesterday to Mrs. Montgomery, who’s going to be my innkeeper’s wife, and she was telling me all about the trouble she’s been having with Herta, how Herta insists on going to religious instruction in school though she could have
been excused because of being Jewish, and then when one of the girls said that the Jews had killed Jesús, Herta went right over and smacked the girl’s face.”

“What, Herta did?”

“And when she was called to the headmistress, she said that Jesús was not the son of God, and that he was self-deluded, and that the Virgin could not have had a baby, and she was quite rude about it.”

“You mean Herta
Hirschfeld?”

“Herta Hirschfeld, Herta Hirschfeld. And they called poor Mrs. Montgomery, and when Mrs. Montgomery tried to talk to Herta, Herta said she didn’t want to talk about it, and she became quite hysterical, and poor Mrs. Montgomery doesn’t know what to do with her.”