Other People’s Houses (33 page)

When my grandparents came downstairs at half past two, my grandmother stood in the door looking with pity and
something of her habitual anger at her sleeping son. Then she laughed. Paul opened one eye. My grandmother said, “I wish you would come over here and look how uncomfortable you look sleeping over there.”

Paul laughed and sat up.

The heat had imperceptibly lessened. One could forget to think about it. The
merengue
had started up outside. The street was coming awake—not commercially, as in the
morning, but socially, like an outdoor drawing room. Little Señora Molinas, a child-sized, gray-faced woman, came out and rocked on her pink
galería
next door, watching Mercedes, the little seven-year-old servant girl, feed a plate of rice and beans to Señora Molinas’ baby, América Columbina.

“You see that skinny woman all in black on the
galería
across the street, talking to Doctor Perez?” Paul
asked me. “They are nodding to us.—
Cómo está?
—She is known as ‘La Viuda,’ ‘The Widow,’ though she has never been married. She lived in that house with a younger brother, an anti-Trujilloist, who talked too much and was fetched away, the story goes, seven years ago and is in jail in the city. She’s been wearing mourning, in protest, ever since. On the veranda next to her, rocking in the chair,
is Señora Perez, the doctor’s wife, with her daughter Juanita.”

“Did you notice the Molinas baby’s crooked foot?” Paul asked me over our coffee. “There’s so much of that here, and they’ve never heard about remedial exercises. I have thought of applying for a correspondence course that one of the Southern universities in the United States is giving. With a diploma and my medical background, I
could make myself a small clientele here, and later, perhaps, give up the shop and move to Ciudad Trujillo.”

“We’re not going to move to Ciudad Trujillo,” my grandmother said. “And you don’t need any diploma.”

“Don’t, Omama!” I whispered.

“What ‘Don’t, Omama! Don’t, Omama!’”

“Don’t discourage Paul when he wants to do something.”

“Paul has always wanted to do everything except what he was
supposed to do. He never passed his exams in medical school, because he was writing poetry and messing with politics. Now it’s remedial exercises.”

“Well, what is he supposed to do here?” I said, enraged.

“Concentrate on the shop, which is going into the ground, just as every business his father ever started went into the ground,” said my grandmother. “When we had our stationery shop in Vienna
after we were married, I said to him, ‘Joszi, if you don’t have the courage to borrow capital and stock up properly, you may as well close down.’ Of course, we went bankrupt and had to move to Fischamend, where we were the only Jews and I had to send my children away to Vienna to school. In Fischamend, I said to Joszi, ‘If you keep giving credit upon credit to these anti-Semites, the shop will
go into the ground.’ But the Nazis repaid him—they took the whole shop away before it could go bankrupt.”

I had gone to my grandfather’s chair. From behind, I clasped my hands around his thin chest to shield him from my grandmother’s words, but he said, “Your Omama is perfectly right. She was always a better businesswoman than I.”

“Ah, you think I am being cruel to your grandfather,” my grandmother
said, with her bright black eyes on me. “Many people have thought so, but they have not been married to him.”

Later in the afternoon, Señora Rodriguez came to take a piano lesson from my mother. She was a German woman, married to the Dominican diplomat. They had a large summer home just outside Santiago. The señora carried herself very straight and wore her hair in a complex and perfect coiffure
of interwoven braids. Her eyes were bright blue and her lips looked thin, as if she were feeding inwardly on them. While my mother was out of the room, Senora Rodriguez told me how much she valued her. “She is a wonderful human being. When you have lived in this country awhile, you will understand how necessary it is to have someone with whom you can really talk and make music. I’ve been trying
to persuade her to come to the capital. I could get her piano pupils. I was telling your daughter, Frau Franzi, how you could come to town and stay with us till you got settled.”

My mother made Señora Rodriguez play Czerny, and outside the window the neighbors gathered to listen. She played a Bach prelude and fugue, and the neighbors took one another by the hands and danced.

Before she left,
Señora Rodriguez invited all of us to come to tea on Sunday, but my grandfather begged off on account of his health, and Paul on account of my grandfather. Afterward, Paul told me the Rodriguezes were Nazis.

“Are all Germans Nazis? Are there no exceptions?” I asked.

“All Germans have the tendency, and, yes, there are exceptions,” Paul said. “But Rodriguez was made consul-general in Frankfurt
in his twenties and fell in love with Germany and married it and brought it back here intact.”

I was ready to argue, but the shop was filling with the afternoon rush of business.

After supper, when there was only a trickle of customers, I said, “Let me sell something.”

Paul showed me where the butter was kept, and presently came little Mercedes from next door. She looked, from her gray bare
feet and washed-out rag dress to her laughing gray-black face, as if she were covered with a layer of dust, out of which her two eyes shone with an unnatural brightness. She curled herself up on the floor under the counter, giggling and making faces at me behind her spread fingers.

“All right, Mercedes,” Paul said, leaning over the counter to pat her on the head. “No time to play.
Que quieres,
tú?
What do you want?”

“
Cinco centavos de mantequilla.
”

“Mercedes wants five cents’ worth of butter for Señora Molinas’ boy friend, Lore!” I weighed out the pat of butter under Paul’s direction, and my grandmother came and checked it and found it overweight and shaved off the hair’s breadth that made it exact.

“Omama!”

“With these small quantities,” my grandmother explained, “always weigh
correctly, because our profit gets eaten up with waste and work and wrapping. The people who buy a lot have to get extra weight.”

“But that’s not fair!” I cried.

“When I was a boy, my father has had an inn,” my grandfather said from the door in his slow Hungarian voice. (I remember that it was always a surprise to me to hear my grandfather speak and that his speaking lips were always turned
up in the faintest smile. My mother says he once told her that he sometimes thought of things to say, but when he thought of saying them it seemed too much trouble trying to say them in German.) “Every market day the farmers come back from town and they get drunk. My father said, ‘Körmöczi, you had nine slivovitzes,’ when he had only eight.”

“But that’s robbery!” I cried.

“Yes,” said my grandfather.
“Have I ever told you when I was a boy the chieftain of the robbers took me to school? There was a robber band in the forest between our village and the town, and in spring and autumn my father left a barrel of Tokay at the edge of the forest, and in return Betyár Bácsi—Uncle Robber, I used to call him—fetched me and put me in front of him on his horse and took me to school. In the evening,
he brought me back.”

In my mind’s eye the shop in Santiago with its counter and cash register had faded into a deep-green forest out of the Brothers Grimm, with a dozen robbers in green hunting suits.

“All right, Joszi, go inside. You don’t have to stand,” said my grandmother.

“
Ja so,
” said my grandfather and went and sat down inside.

The rest of us moved out on the
galería
together, leaning
on the balustrade, talking.

“What did your father do, Omama?” I asked my grandmother.

“Produce children,” my grandmother said. My grandmother had a goiter, and whenever she was angry it swelled, setting her head back with a handsome look of pride.

“He was a wine merchant, wasn’t he?” Paul asked.

“Later. When we came to Vienna, he was nothing and he had nothing—a wife and five children. Ibolya
must have been seven, and there was Sari and I and Kari and poor Ferri, who was only a baby. Him we had to leave in Hungary with the grandparents, and Mother cried all the way to Vienna. Three weeks later, she had Wetterl, who is in Paraguay now. We had two rooms and a kitchen, and every year Mother lay down in the big bed in the back room and had another baby and gave it to us girls to look after.
After Wetterl there was Pista and then Hilde, who is in Canada now—” and my grandmother went down the gallery of her thirteen brothers and sisters. “There were little children everywhere,” said my grandmother. “The night before Mother died, I dreamed about a child in a white gown, and so I knew what was going to happen. At forty-five she had to die. Poor Ferri and I were the only ones who grieved
for her. I remember he stood at the foot of the bed and cried and cried. He was always a skinny little boy,” my grandmother said. Then she added, “Mother was bad to him.”

“What do you mean, bad? Bad how?”

“She shouted at him. He used to hang around her all the time, and she shoved him. Father told me once that even in the train when they brought him to Vienna when he was five, Mother didn’t
like him to touch her. Once he had chilblains,” said my grandmother, and stopped as if she were not going to tell the story after all. However, in a minute, she said, “Mother said she was going to bathe his feet—only she used boiling water. After that, the older children wouldn’t speak to her. Once I took the little children to the park, and Mother ran after us without a coat. She had a scarf, and
she put it on Ferri and she knelt and she hugged him and kissed him and called him pet names in Hungarian, and then she ran back into the house. But in the evening poor Ferri splashed his spoon in the soup, and she sent him to bed.”

“You loved her, didn’t you, Mutti?” my mother asked.

“To me she was kind,” said my grandmother. “She always told Ibolya and Sari to take me along where they were
going. They used to say I was her pet. They never liked me, and they were angry with Mother because of all those babies. I asked her once, after I was married and pregnant with my first baby and she was carrying Heini and already so ill, I asked her, ‘
Warum haben Sie so viele Kinder gehabt?
’ [‘Why have you had so many children?’]—we never said ‘thou’ to our parents—and she said she was afraid
if she didn’t, Father would go to other women. Everything was always for Father. He was the only one who had meat for supper, and he would take one of the children on his lap and feed him from his plate.”

“I remember Grandfather after he came to live with us in Fischamend,” my mother said. “He was a beautiful old man—always clean.” (The German word my mother used was “
appetitlich.
”)

“And a woman’s
man to the last,” said Paul. “When he was eighty-seven and bedridden, I once saw him pinching the maid.”

“Every man pinches the maid,” said my grandmother.

“Not Opapa, I bet,” I said.

“What do you know about your Opapa!” said my grandmother. “I’m going up. Come, Joszi. Paul, don’t forget to lock the cash register, and the shop and the back door. When are you coming up?”

“As soon as I’ve done
the Sosua order for tomorrow,” Paul said.

“But Omama, it’s only half past nine.”

“Paul is tired,” said my grandmother. “He needs his rest. Don’t forget to turn out the lights.”

After noon, on Thursday, came the red Sosua truck, driven by Otto Becker, who put his arm around Paul’s shoulder and said, “Well, Professor?”

“Well, Otto?” Paul said, and put his arm at an awkward angle around his friend,
who was two heads taller and twice his diameter.

“You’re getting fat, Otto,” my grandmother said.

“I like to eat,” said Otto. “Not like Professor Skin-and-Bones here.”

“I like to eat,” Paul said, “but every time I let myself go I get a stomach upset and end up thinner than ever.”

“And I like to sit,” Otto said.

“I would be a great sitter myself, if I had the opportunity,” Paul said. “How
did Churchill put it? ‘Never has so much work been done by such a lazy man, with so little success.’”

When Otto had unloaded and sat down for his cup of coffee, my grandmother questioned him about everyone in Sosua. “How’s that Frau Halsmann? Is she living with her husband again? I said to her once, ‘Frau Halsmann, imagine if you had an extra pair of eyes—one in each ear—how you could flirt with
three men at the same time!’ And how’s your wife, Otto? Does she still spend all her evenings with that Dr. Marchfeld who has been dying these last five years? She reminds me of my sister Sari. Whenever I came to visit in Vienna, she was washing a sick neighbor’s floor or doing a neighbor’s shopping while her children got their own dinner. Ibolya didn’t marry till later, but Wetterl was like me—all
for the family. Hilde would have liked to eat her dinners in the restaurant, and her breakfast and supper, too.”

My grandmother would have gone down the gallery of her seven sisters, discussing each with regard to her household habits, but Otto had another five hours’ drive to the city markets. When he had gone, my grandmother still sat at the table with a charming and malicious smile. “Pauli,
can you think of anyone in Sosua whom I didn’t insult?”

At supper, I argued with my grandmother and had a run-in with Paul. My grandmother sent me to turn out the kitchen light, and I said, “But we’ll be going out with the dishes in ten minutes.”

“We can always put it on again,” said my grandmother. “Why should we make the electric company rich?”

I said, “Just how much do you think it costs
to burn one seventy-five-watt bulb for ten minutes?” and found myself confronted by Paul, rearing up.

“Go out into the kitchen and turn off the light!” he said, with a snarling mouth, and I went and turned out the light.

My mother came out after me and said, “Lorle, try not to quarrel with Omama.”

“Me quarrel with Omama! It’s Omama who quarrels with everybody! It’s all right for us to be stingy
with our butter, but when the chicken man puts a price on his chickens,
he
’s taking advantage! When Pastora makes herself a new dress, she’s a slut! Omama has no sense at all of other people’s points of view!”