Other People’s Houses (26 page)

“So what good did it do Lizzi to meet him?” my mother said.

“It’s just that she, at least,
tries!
” I countered. “One of these days I’ll be going out … with someone,” I said, thinking of the young man with the Kings College scarf, whose back I had seen this morning disappearing into
his door on the floor below. “And all the time I’m out, I’ll be thinking of you sitting here alone! You know that’s the one bad thing about you,” I explained to my mother. “You don’t even
try
to have a life of your own.”

“Yes, I have that from my poor father,” my mother said. “We are both very dull. We’re no good at anything except doing our duty. But you don’t have to worry about my sitting
alone. Lizzi has asked me to go to the Viennese Club with her the next time she comes to London. Just let me wait till the professor is feeling better.”

The next day my mother was home by five-thirty. The professor was much better. “He wanted to give me his dead wife’s gold watch,” my mother said.

“Where? Let me see!” I said.

“Of course I couldn’t accept such a valuable present. It belongs
to his son, and to his grandchildren. He says he wants to marry me,” my mother said, blushing and laughing self-consciously.

“So?”

“Lorle! You wouldn’t want me to marry a sick old man! Besides, he doesn’t really want
me
. He feels grateful that I stayed with him while he was ill. He is afraid to be alone.”

“And why can’t you consider the possibility that he actually likes you for yourself?”
I lectured my mother.

“Anyway,” said my mother, “we want to go to the Dominican Republic as soon as you’re through with your studies.”

“Mummy,” I said, “do we really want to go to the Dominican Republic?”

“But don’t you want to see Paul and the grandparents again?”

“Yes, but not in the Dominican Republic. Do you know I was asking around among my friends at college and no one except an American
girl there has ever even
heard
of the place?”

“But we’re not going to stay there. We’re going to wait there till our American quota comes through.”

“Mummy,” I said. “Do we really want to go to America?”

I had found a paragraph in Joyce Cary’s
To Be a Pilgrim
about England:

On summer days like this, in Harvest, the rich essence of the ground seems charged upon the air so that even the blue
of the sky is tainted like the water of a cow pond, enriched but no longer pure. It is as if a thousand years of cultivation had brought to all, trees, grass, crops, even the sky and sun, a special quality belonging only to very old countries.… The shape of a field, the turn of a lane have had the power to move me as if they were my children.

It seemed to me that by the power this had to move
me I was, at least by adoption, English. I copied it out, and what Cary wrote about “the new lands where the weather is as stupid as the trees, chance dropped, are meaningless,” and showed it to Monique. “My trouble is that I can’t apply for British nationality till I’m twenty-one and by that time I may be in America!” I complained.

“You may like America better than you intend,” Monique said.

“But I
don’t want
to like it,” I said. I kept bringing Monique examples of the naiveté of American politics and the crudity of its commercialism; I came across an American article about the Soviet Union illustrated with the kind of brutal line drawing that made every Russian into a monster.

Monique said, “Ah, but I don’t think America need stand or fall by a weekly picture magazine, do you?”

“No, but …” I said, outargued and amazed that an American should prove superior to me in sophistication.

The Kings College student and I finally met at the corner of our block and walked home together. He said he had just this afternoon finished the last of his exams and now he couldn’t think what to do with himself. He was a Canadian, he said, on a year’s scholarship, and had spent all his time
with his nose in a book. He wondered if I would show him around London, before he left for home, but the suggestion seemed to me to come too abruptly, out of too short an acquaintance; it didn’t seem a proper invitation. So I said, “Actually, now I have my exams coming up and should put my nose in a book. I’ve done nothing all year except walk around London.”

Nevertheless, next day we went to
the Tower. He said, wouldn’t London be nice if it didn’t rain all the time.

“Well, I like London so much I even like the rain. I must have an affinity for damp and fog,” I said. I was afraid that I might be sounding too intelligent and he wouldn’t like me and would go away, and at the same time I was afraid that if I didn’t think of something intelligent to say he would get bored and go away.
I wished I had stayed quietly at home.

The following week we did Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Each time he came to pick me up I stalled, saying I ought to stay home and do some work, so as not to appear over-eager.

On Sunday it stopped raining and we took a walk along the Embankment. He was leaving for home at the end of the week. “Soon you’ll be going to the Dominican Republic,”
he said. “With all this traveling, who knows, we might meet again.” He turned me around so that we stood face to face and put his hand on my shoulder, which embarrassed me. I said, snippily, “And if not in this life, we’re sure to meet in the next.” After a moment he dropped his hand. We walked on.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you,” he said. “What nom de plume are you going to use, so I can look
out for your first book?”

I looked at him as if he had been clairvoyant. “But how fascinating you should say that!” I cried. “How did you know I was going to be a writer?”

“Why, you kept telling me and telling me!” he said.

The next evening the Canadian student knocked at my door and asked if he might come in. I said, “Of course,” feeling awfully urbane, for I was alone—my mother was staying
late with Professor Schmeidig, who was having another of his sick spells. “You’ll have to excuse me if I go on with my work. Exams start Wednesday.”

“That’s all right. I’m dead-tired myself,” he said, flopping down on one of our brownish sofa beds. “I was packing all morning and running around London all afternoon, picking up my ticket, dispatching my luggage … Tomorrow morning I leave. Bring
your book over here. Sit down by me.”

I said no, I had to sit at the table where the light was better.

He laid his head back against the pillow. I got out my book and writing things with a deal of fuss. When I turned around next time, the Canadian student was asleep. I was deeply offended and when he left, later, I said good-by offhandedly and would not look at him.

Then I was in the middle
of the end-of-year exams. Professor Milsom, who handed me back my papers, asked me if I had happened, in the course of my reading, to have come across the word “asyntaxis.” I had not.

“Ah! No. Well, ‘asyntaxis’ describes a pathological condition which prevents the sufferer from organizing ideas into sentences.”

“Yes, yes,” I cried excitedly, “I know just what you mean. I’ve been aware for some
years of a progressive softening of my mind so that now, when I would
like
to pull myself together, there’s nothing to get hold of in the general consistency of much, except my own bootstraps.” I was delighted at my own description of my predicament, but Professor Milsom continued, with his head bent noddingly over my papers. “Well, well, well, interesting concept, ‘asyntaxis’! You might look
it up in the dictionary. I do recommend to your notice, Miss Groszmann, the dictionary! I wouldn’t say that your paper is altogether without merit. I feel there might be interesting ideas here, if I could read them, and if they were expressed between periods with a full complement of verbs. Do let me recommend to your attention, Miss Groszmann, the full stop and the verb.”

Toward the end of 1946
my grandfather had a heart attack. Paul wrote that it was not serious, my grandfather was recovering well, but my mother decided to go to the Dominican Republic without waiting for me. I was to follow in two years, after my finals.

“You see how little good and nice I am,” my mother said. “Professor Schmeidig is feeling so miserably sick these days and I’m preparing to leave him without a second
thought.”

“That’s because you’re in such a hurry to get to the Dominican Republic to nurse your sick father.”

“Talking of sick fathers,” my mother said, “yesterday, for the first time, the professor complained to me about his son. Do you know he hasn’t been to see the poor old man in three weeks? How alone he will be after I’m gone!”

The evening of the day my mother left Professor Schmeidig’s
employ, the professor called on the telephone. He had some funny, vulgar things to say about the new housekeeper his son had taken for him. Then he wept. He asked my mother to reconsider and stay in England and marry him. My mother said she could not do that, but she had another idea. Her friend Lizzi Bauer was coming up from Allchester tomorrow, and we would all come over and my mother would cook
dinner at his flat.

The evening was a huge success. Lizzi was an ugly, worldly woman of enormous charm. She had a large mouth with large, tobacco-stained teeth, vital, very black hair, and intelligent green eyes. She invariably dressed in navy blue sparked with something crisply white, a collar, or chiffon scarf, or piqué flower, at once chic and feminine. Her figure was small with a high plump
back that was almost a hunch; she wore her breasts flattened in the fashion of her own well-to-do and successful twenties in the Vienna of the twenties of the century.

While my mother was getting dinner ready, Lizzi sat at the piano and entertained her host with the naughty cabaret songs of their pre-Hitler days. “Johnny, on your birthday, I’ll stay with you the whole night through …” she sang,
undeterred by her complete lack of voice. She rocked her shoulders, looking toward the professor through the smoke that rose from the cigarette in the ash tray by her hand. She laid her head back laughingly, without releasing the old gentleman’s eyes. “Ach, Johnny, if only you had a birthday every day.… Johnny, I dream of you so much,” Lizzi half sang, half spoke. “Come to my door some afternoon
at half-past four.” (I thought I would never dare to look into any man’s eyes with such an intimate look; it embarrassed me. Maybe there was something wrong with me!) The professor’s shoulders were rocking faintly inside his old smoking jacket and his eyes were fixed fulsomely on Lizzi’s face. Later, the professor insisted on our all taking Frau Bauer to her train. As the taxi drew up in front of
Waterloo Station I thought I saw something: I thought I saw the professor’s right hand letting go of Lizzi’s left; I would have put it down to some trick of my vision if Lizzi had not intercepted my glance and smiled and raised her shoulders as much as to say, “What do you want me to do—he’s an old man.” The professor drove my mother and me home to our lodgings and came upstairs to have a cup of
coffee. After that he came every evening and stayed to eat whatever my mother had prepared for us. Once he asked if we weren’t expecting our charming friend to pay a good-by visit.

“All the way from Allchester!” my mother said. “That’s an expensive visit, you know.”

“Call her up and say good-by on the phone. I want to pay for it,” the professor said very kindly. “And tell her to come and see
me when she happens to be in London again. Do you think she would?”

“Thank you, but Lizzi and I have said good-by,” my mother said. “But
you
can ask her to come and see you. I will leave you her number.”

That was the day before my mother’s departure. The professor wept so bitterly it left him weak and ill, and we had to take him home. On the way back my mother made me promise to go and see him
once in a while. “For me,” she said. “He will be so miserably alone!”

Going to see Professor Schmeidig became, like studying, something I was always going to do tomorrow. Then my mother wrote me that she had had a letter from the professor in which he said he was so lonely he lay down nights praying he would not wake again, and the next day I rang his bell. The door was opened by Lizzi Bauer.
“I was going to call you later,” she said. “I happened to be in London.”

“And she came to see me,” the professor said from the kitchen door. He was dressed smartly in his best gray suit. He seemed so healthy he looked positively gay, and I felt angry for my mother’s sake. I said, “Mummy wrote me that you were not well and I just happened to be in the neighborhood.…”

“Come in, come in. And how
is my good Frau Groszmann? Come into the kitchen with us. It’s my horrid housekeeper’s day off, very fortunately. I was just boasting to Frau Lizzi that I make a famous cup of Viennese coffee.”

Lizzi leaned in the doorway, ankles crossed, her elegant left hand with its outsize agate ring holding her cigarette. Her intimate, teasing eyes followed the professor on his bumbling way around the kitchen,
and once in a while I caught her naughty glance directed toward me.

After coffee Professor Schmeidig led her to the piano and she sang to him. When I got up to leave, she rose as well. The old gentleman fetched her coat and held it for her. As we were going out of the door I saw him put some pound notes into her hand.

“He can afford it,” Lizzi said to me in the elevator going down, “and I can’t
keep coming into town for nothing. I’ve got an hour till train time. Stay with me and talk.”

At the little table in the corner teashop, Lizzi said, “Today I really had him up to here. This afternoon he made me sit on his bed and pulled the drawer out of his night table and emptied the whole thing into my lap! He wanted to give me
every
thing in it, though I don’t know what he expected me to do
with his old silk handkerchiefs, his bone shoehorn, his old key chain! Finally he came up with this,” and Lizzi pulled her white cuff back from her wrist to show me a handsome, old-fashioned gold watch. “It used to belong to his wife,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “He wanted to give it to Mummy once, but she wouldn’t take it. He wanted to marry Mummy, did you know?”