Other People’s Houses (43 page)

“What, now he is coming up? At ten o’clock?” my grandmother asked. (She never got to approve of Abdullah and his strange hours.)

He came bringing a book he had to read for a term paper,
already two weeks overdue, and asked me if I would make a précis of it for him. He knew what he was doing: the more work I invested in him, the more attached I became.

Claire had become a part of the Pakistani students’ household, filling their shelves with crockery and their icebox with food that she cooked, and ate with them. Then “Elia” took her to dinner at Sardi’s, where she met “Harold,”
who lived in Stratford and was immensely rich. ‘He adores me, and his son-in-law is a V.I.P. in the Shakespeare company,” she told us.

“And you think this Harold can do something for you?”

“At eighty-three? Precious little, poor sweetheart, as you can imagine, but I adore him and he’s going to get me into the company next season. And I can live with him over the winter.”

Claire packed her suitcase
and took her mackintosh and borrowed traveling money from Abdullah—Muhammad was studying film making at the time and had no job—and we all took her to the Port Authority Terminal.

“What does your cousin think of the new plan?” I asked.

“What cousin? I don’t have any relatives.”

“I thought you said Vittorio de Sica …” I said, and blushed scarlet as a sudden sophistication tied into one neat
answer the many loose ends of Claire’s adventures.

“Vittorio de Sica!” Claire said. “He’s in Hollywood.” And she stared in surprise at the name I had pulled out of last week’s dream when she was already in the full flow of today’s. She kissed Muhammad and Abdullah and me, and, waving and weeping warm tears, she rolled out of my life as she had come into it, by bus.

About this time, I came to
the conclusion that not only was American design terrible, but I was a terrible designer. My austere and fastidious eye watched my very own hand drip lines and figures of helpless vulgarity that were not even commercially successful because my interior quarrel kept me from developing an honest professional touch. I gave up “originating” and began to perfect myself in the skill of “repeating,” the
technical part of textile design. It means the reworking of the designer’s painting in such a way that its top will meet its bottom without a break when engraved on the rollers that print it onto the lengths of fabric. Though I never became good enough not to be frightened of every new design, I began to free-lance so that I could make room for a few hours of writing.

In the fall, I enrolled
in a course in creative writing at the New School. The people sitting around the long table were none of them particularly bright-looking, but in the course of the first class they spoke with individual voices, and, as the term proceeded, turned into persons. There was a couple called Herb and Louise, both very tall and both blond, who sat side by side, looking not so much at one another as out together,
and they looked very kindly at me. After a story of mine had been read, they asked me to have dinner with them before class the following Thursday. We ate at a Mexican restaurant in the Village, and I talked a great deal. I said, “Do you know you are the first honest-to-goodness Americans I’ve ever sat down to dinner with?”

Louise said she had come all the way to New York from a small town in
Indiana to avoid having to eat dinner every day with honest-to-goodness Americans.

Herb, who came from the same town, said, “If Lore wants to meet Americans, you should take her home to visit your family next year.”

“Oh, I wish you would. I’m serious. All I’ve ever met in New York are Pakistanis, Indians, and Hungarians, and Israeli, German, and Austrian Jews.”

“Pakistanis, Indians, and Jews!”
Herb and Louise said with increased respect. “You must give a party and introduce us.”

In class, before the instructor arrived, I paraded this interesting inability I had discovered—the inability to penetrate America—for the benefit of the oldest of the students, a middle-aged Negro called Carter Bayoux, who dominated the class with his powerful presence and silence. He invited me to dinner for
the following week, after class. “We will go to a jazz place and give you an introductory course in Americana. I’m a great teacher,” Carter said.

He called the following day. “We made our date for next Thursday. We both forgot that it’s Thanksgiving and there won’t be any class.”

“I didn’t forget. I never knew.”

“You won’t be celebrating with your family?”

“We don’t celebrate anything any
more. No Christmas because we’re Jewish, and no Jewish holidays because we were assimilated Austrians, and no Austrian holidays because we got thrown out for being Jewish, and we haven’t acquired the American holidays yet.”

There was a silence, and then Carter said, “And I don’t have anybody to celebrate with, so you and I will put on the dog together.”

“This lady and I are going to put on the
dog because it’s Thanksgiving,” Carter Bayoux said to the waiter at the restaurant. “What will you have?”

“I didn’t think we had a choice. I thought it was turkey?”

“You may have the turkey. I’ll take
Tournedos de Boeuf.
”

“I’ll have that, too, whatever it is.”

“Two
Tournedos de Boeuf
, and bring us a Chambertin ’49,” Carter said.

“Have you noticed that brutal poster of a red-faced turkey running
in terror from a greedy-looking Puritan with a raised hatchet?” I asked Carter. “That’s American Thanksgiving for you.”

Carter was looking at me with very bright brown eyes opened so wide that the irises stood free of upper and lower lid. He seemed to be waiting for me to continue.

I said, “I’ve been too shy to tell you, but I did awfully like your story about the Negro journalist who marries
the white psychiatrist. I thought it was quite powerful.”

“And you also thought that because I’m a Negro and write bitter stories, you and I were going to sit here and make snide remarks about Thanksgiving together. I’m an American, you know. At any rate, there’s nothing else I am,” Carter said, keeping me impaled on his bright stare and staying with me through the rise of my blood to a full
flush and its fading, so that we seemed to come out together at the far end of my first lesson. “I may order a French dinner and wine, but I do it affectionately and with a bit of bravado, like an American. And I’m a sentimental about Christmas and Thanksgiving, too, and if I celebrate by getting a little drunk it’s because I’m alone. I left the Negro world when I married a white wife, but I never
married the white world. And then I divorced my wife.”

“That’s like a Pakistani friend of mine,” I said. “He’s lived in America for eleven years and he’s no longer an Oriental, and yet he’s not an Occidental, either.”

“No,” Carter said. “It’s not like that at all. I have not, like your friend, lost my culture, nor, like you, my country. My isolation is peculiarly American. When you told me that
you didn’t have any holidays to celebrate, I was moved for you.”

I looked at him amazed. I had been boasting when I spoke of our emancipation from public celebrations. Now, I was suddenly moved myself. “It
is
rather sad. There’s my mother working in the bakery because it’s one of their busiest nights, and my grandmother watching television of which she doesn’t understand a single word.”

“Then
we will take your grandmother some flowers,” Carter said.

“I’m afraid she’ll only think they’re an extravagance.”

“But that’s why we are taking them to her,” Carter said.

I had my fears about my grandmother’s reception of this large, portly, elderly brown man, but she rose from her chair and took Carter’s bunch of yellow pompons, and made him a small bow of politeness belonging to another style
of manners. She even made a try at conversation, pointing to the television and saying, “Liberace.
Spielt wunderbar.
”

Carter looked at me.

I said, “She listens to that horror every week. She says, heaven help us, that he plays wonderfully.”

Carter turned to my grandmother and said, “Beautiful, wonderful!” and played the air with his fingers, nodding his head up and down.

My grandmother had
discovered someone she could talk to. “Liberace
ist ein nobler Mann
” [literally, a noble man—a gentleman]. “He is always polite—not like the young people who dance in the afternoon. I watch them, but they have bad manners,” my grandmother told Carter in German.

Carter kept nodding and smiling. My grandmother nodded back with a bright, shy smile. After he had gone, she said he was a noble man.

The following week, I gave a party, pleased to find that I knew enough people in New York to fill my sitting room. My grandmother insisted on staying in the bedroom, but she had put on her best pewter-colored silk dress and looked out of her door every time the bell rang. When Carter arrived, she came and stood outside her door, making him a little smiling bow, but Carter seemed nervous and upset
and walked straight into the room already full of people and voices and did not notice her.

When I was a child, I used to sit on the blue-on-blue carpet in our
Herrenzimmer
in Vienna, trying to catch the small hand on our mahogany clock in the act of moving from one hour to the next, and I never could. Once in a while, and always by accident, I have caught that visual click of time advancing.
One day, I looked in the mirror and saw that though my nose was still long and sharp, it was newly accommodated by a softened cheek. The eyes behind my spectacles had lost their eager anxiety spelling hopelessness, thanks to Abdullah and to time. Simultaneously, I noticed my grandmother take a leap forward into old age. “It’s just that she’s been ill,” I said to my mother, when I saw by the way she
looked at my grandmother that she had noticed too. “You wait a week and she’ll be just the same.”

However, my grandmother remained visibly shrunken, with a new economy in all her motions. “Your mother is going to make the supper when she comes home,” my grandmother said.

“Are you going to the Bronx?” I asked. Paul had had a second son, called John. My grandmother said maybe next week she would
go.

“Then why have you got your silk dress on?”

“It’s time for Liberace.”

“So?”

“He always wears a tuxedo,” my grandmother said, and turned the knob and sat down facing the box and smiled as Liberace appeared, playing himself his own theme song. The camera panned onto that face cursed with a perpetual smile. With horror I saw my grandmother lift her hand and wave delicately with her fingers.

“Omama, do you know where Liberace is? In California. Do you know California is a thousand miles from New York?”

“But I can see him,” my grandmother said.

“You’ve been to the movies, Omama. You’ve seen figures moving on a screen.”

“But he is smiling at me,” said my grandmother.

“He’s smiling at the camera, Omama. Can’t you imagine a man standing in front of the camera and smiling into it?”

“Where is the camera?”

“Nowhere. In California.”

“Come here, Lore! Stand behind me. You see, he is looking right at me,” and my grandmother smiled at Liberace and nodded her head.

“Omama, do me a favor? Come over here just for a moment. Please.”

“I’m too tired.”

“All right, I’ll turn the television around. Look! How could there be a man inside this box? Omama! Imagine a piano!”

My grandmother
said, “Aren’t you going out with Abdullah tonight?”

“I haven’t seen Abdullah in a year. Where’s your
TV Guide?
Here, ‘Liberace.’ Look—in parentheses it says ‘film.’ That means he isn’t even live in California. This program was filmed days ago—maybe months.”

In the following days, I noticed that my grandmother was not watching television. “Do you want me to turn it on, Omama? It’s time for Liberace.”

She raised her right hand and then threw it away. It didn’t matter.

“Don’t you like him any more?”

“He’s on film,” said my grandmother.

“Omama, would you like to go down to the triangle?”

“I don’t want to get dressed. Maybe tomorrow,” said my grandmother.

“Come on, Omama. You have to get out sometimes. Would you like to go and see Paul and the little boys? Do you want me to go with you? I’ll
get your silk dress for you. Come on, Omama.”

My grandmother rose slowly. She said, “I’m going to die soon. What am I waiting for?”

“So am I going to die. So is everybody,” I said, for I considered this a malicious line on my grandmother’s part. If it was anything besides, I didn’t want to know. And I noted how in the street she waited for the lights to turn green more carefully than I, who
had my whole life to lose, and how cautiously she stepped off the sidewalk into the dangerous road.

We took a taxi. My grandmother said, “I’ve been thinking about God.”

“What have you been thinking? Do you believe in God, Omama?”

“God …” said my grandmother, and was silent, and in a moment she threw him away with the downward wave of her right hand.

Paul was looking skinny and tired. Earlier
that year, he had left his job as animal attendant at the research foundation and got one in the sales office of a numismatist, sorting coins. He was bad at the meticulous and uninteresting work, and got shouted at. At home were his two energetic little sons, aged four and three. Peter kept switching the television on and off and little John turned round and round. My grandmother, who could not
understand a word of the children’s English chatter, looked glad when it was time to go home.

When we left, Paul was sitting on a chair between the boys’ beds. He was playing a toy mandolin from Macy’s fifth floor and singing the children’s song that he had translated and transplanted from the German for them:

On the Hudson River

Swims a crocodile,

With his tail aquiver,

On his face a smile.

Do not use your gun.

Do not spoil his fun.

Catch him with a broomstick

Baited with a bun.

From time to time he laid down the instrument and, with no can opener, pressed two triangular holes into a nonexistent beer can and out of the larger opening fetched himself great refreshing draughts of the imagination.