The Oriental Wife (15 page)

Nothing happened on the first day, but at 8:30 the following morning, just after Gustav had left for work, the phone rang. “I’m calling about your ad in the paper,” a voice said. “This is Mrs. Sprague. Who am I speaking to?” But she laughed when Sophie said her name. “Well now, I could never pronounce that.” Her voice was girlish, but she told Sophie she was fifty-nine, with three grown children. “I got
plenty of energy for my age, though, don’t worry.” She was from Maine; her husband, a lobster fisherman, had died the year before. She was staying on East Seventy-first Street with a family she knew from back in Bucks Harbor: “They always came for the summers, and I used to help the Mrs. with the kiddies. Oh, they were lovely, real little lambs, the pair of them, but they’ve grown now, they’re too big for their old Aunt May to be much use to them, so the Watsons are just putting me up while I look around for a position. Now you tell me about your baby.”

It wasn’t her baby, Sophie said stiffly. She had not thought this through properly; she had not planned how to tell Louisa’s story to a stranger. “Look here,” she said. “I think it would be better if we met in person. Then I can tell you what’s what.” (
What’s what
was an expression she had heard Mrs. Timpson use.) And so, three hours later, they met at the Old Vienna Café on Dyckman Street, where Sophie managed to explain the situation.

“Oh, that poor woman,” Mrs. Sprague said, sighing. “My heart goes out to her. To all of them.” She was a large, handsome, oddly childlike woman in a shaggy brown fur coat with bald patches. Sophie was not convinced of her sincerity—she seemed to listen without really listening; a moment after speaking of her heart, she tucked with evident gusto into the cream cake that the waitress had brought her—but told herself she was being unfair. After all, why should Mrs. Sprague feel for Louisa, whom she had never met? She wished Mrs. Timpson had been there to pronounce judgment.

Anyway, as Mrs. Sprague said, the important thing was the child. That was why she had come uptown, so that Sophie could take her to meet the baby, and let the baby meet her. “Because
we’ve got to jell, her and me,” Mrs. Sprague had said on the phone. “It’s just like any two people, baby or no. There’s got to be chemistry. Though I’ve rarely met a baby I couldn’t take to. And they take to me pretty good too. You’ll see.”

It was plain when they got to the apartment—Sophie had phoned Louisa and told her to expect them—that that much at least was true. A girl called Hazel, a friend of Katy’s, was walking Emma up and down, back and forth, in the living room, with the baby’s head resting on her shoulder. “It’s the only way to keep her from crying,” Hazel said, sounding very fed up, and even with the constant movement, Emma was sniffling. But when Mrs. Sprague went and put her face close to the child’s, pursing her mouth as though for a kiss, Emma stopped her fussing and looked expectant; when Mrs. Sprague clapped her hands, Emma gurgled happily; pretty soon she was reaching out her arms, demanding that Mrs. Sprague take her, as though this was the person she’d been waiting for all along. Meanwhile Louisa sat watching from her green chair, with a look of dazed exhaustion.

“There you go,” Mrs. Sprague said happily, a rich coo in her voice. “Yes, I know. I know you want to see what this old woman is all about. You take a good whiff of your old Aunt May. And I’ll do the same.” She buried her nose in Emma’s neck, until the baby squealed with delight. She made loud smacking noises. “Don’t you smell delicious. Don’t you smell like the most beautiful little girl in the world.”

“And this is Mrs. Furchgott,” Sophie said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mrs. Sprague said, taking her eyes off Emma only very briefly. She dove again into Emma’s neck; Emma gave a loud laugh, and clutched at her hair. “Aren’t you a naughty thing,” Mrs. Sprague said, laughing.
“Isn’t she a naughty one,” she repeated to no one in particular. “Bright as a button, I can see that. The naughty ones are always the best.” And to Emma again, “Isn’t that true, my darling?” Now she turned her attention to Hazel. “How’s about you straighten things up a little while I’m tending to her?” She gestured with her free hand toward the mess of plates and bottles and tissues on the coffee table. “Go on, I’ve got the baby now, you might as well use the time to get the place tidied up.”

The same idea had occurred to Sophie; she could not have said why hearing it from Mrs. Sprague made her uneasy, except for the fear on Louisa’s face. Sophie went over and asked in a semiwhisper, “What do you think?”

“Rolf will be pleased,” Louisa said slowly, still without taking her eyes from Mrs. Sprague. “He hates finding everything in a mess when he gets home, he’s always telling me I must get them to clean up.” Suddenly she reached up with her good hand and gripped Sophie’s with startling force. “I don’t think so, Sophie, I don’t think I want her here. Please. Please make her go away.”

I
n that morning’s dream, they were demanding proof of his identity—his passport, his
Landkarte
, a letter signed by the consul general. He searched through his briefcase, while they stood at the barrier, blocking his way. Others, meanwhile, whom they had waved on, were streaming past him toward the exit. He had a panicked memory of setting down the papers on a ledge somewhere, even as he hunted through his case for the dozenth time. The officers detaining him, stolid red-faced men in badly fitting suits, kept shouting that he was wasting their time. He stood frozen, anguish spreading through his chest, until finally he woke up.

He did not think of Louisa right away. For some reason he remembered the story of the boy who had been dragged into a corner of the schoolyard by some of his classmates and castrated with their Hitlerjugend knives. Later, he’d heard, the boy had been taken away on
Kristallnacht
. Maybe it was best that way, the boy’s brother had told Rolf, in the very room where he was lying now. Who knows what his life would have been?

He turned on the light, to see what time it was: 5:42. At any minute, Emma would start crying, and he would go into the room she shared with Mrs. Sprague—what used to be his room, back in the days when he and Otto had lived there—and rescue her from her crib. He was sleeping on the
living room couch these days, so that Louisa, who had such difficulty sleeping now, could rest undisturbed. At least that was the explanation he had given, on the day he moved out.

He rose to fetch the bottle from the icebox, where Mrs. Sprague had left it the night before, and filled a saucepan with water, to heat it. This was his favorite part of the day: Emma was at her most cheerful in the mornings, patting her bottle happily with one hand in time to the arias he sang her in his tuneless voice. If he stopped for even a minute, she would let the bottle slip from her mouth and look at him in distress until he started again. Then she’d give a little gurgle of bliss, puff out her cheeks, and go back to sucking.

Already he had bought her, though he knew it was too soon, a huge furry teddy bear with a chocolate brown back and a ginger face. He found himself looking at dolls in the windows of toyshops with a covetousness he had never felt for any material object: there was a glossy blond one on Fourteenth Street, in a smocked yellow dress, with bright china-blue eyes, sitting beside a little table where a miniature pink-and-white tea set was laid out, with a tiny pitcher and sugar bowl. He wanted the tea set too.

That morning Emma woke while he was shaving, and by the time the sounds penetrated to the bathroom and he had rinsed his face and gone to her room, Mrs. Sprague was just lifting her out of her crib. As soon as he entered, though, Emma began wriggling toward him, swimming out of Mrs. Sprague’s grip with her arms held out to him. He lifted her over his head, feeling a flash of pure joy as she squealed with delight, though a moment later the panic from his dream was with him again, as if her tiny body were a great weight smothering him. But still he went on raising and lowering
her, gently, as Mrs. Sprague had shown him. With Mrs. Sprague making clucking noises behind them, he carried her into the living room, sitting with her on the green chair while with the other hand he groped in the box that held her toys, to find the red-and-white rattle, with hearts on it, that Louisa had bought before she was born. Meanwhile she clung to him anxiously, imprisoning his other arm, and when he tried to free it she wailed in protest.

“Look here,” he said, with a mock frown, “do you want me to stay here with you all day? Do you want me to be fired from my job? And then who will pay for your milk, little Emma?” He rubbed his face in her hair. “Who will keep you in arrowroot biscuits?” Immediately she smiled and gurgled, she was happy again, until he made the next attempt to rise, and she howled louder than before.

“All right,” he said, “two more minutes,” settling back down again. Beaming, she raised a hand to his face, knocking his glasses sideways. Everyone said that she looked like Louisa. “Thank God,” he always answered, but he didn’t really see it. It was in her baby smiles, her sudden swoons into happiness, that Louisa, the old Louisa, came back to him.

Sometimes, these days, he had to help her to dress and undress. On her first night back from the hospital, after the operation, he could not get her bad arm into her nightgown, the shoulder opening wasn’t large enough. He went to get one of his shirts for her to wear instead, and when he came back she was slumped on the bed, her stomach still distended from the birth, sagging over the top of her pants. Seeing him watching her, she tried to cover her body with her good arm. Before, she used to walk around naked, in only her high-heeled slippers, hunting for a bobby pin or a pencil to write something
down with. She had been just as easy in her body when she was pregnant, pushing her stomach at him and pretending to dance. Now she would never dance for him; she would never wear her black satin shoes or the green silk blouse, with the dozen tiny buttons in a diagonal line across the front, that she had bought to wear after the baby was born.

Mrs. Sprague came in to summon them to the breakfast table, where Emma finally consented to leave his arms for her high chair, and sat patting her bottle and kicking out her feet. He made faces at her while he drank his coffee and ate the bacon and eggs that Mrs. Sprague insisted he needed, being a man with a hard day’s work in front of him.

“And what will you girls be doing today?” he asked, swallowing a rubbery mouthful of bacon.

“Well, let me see. I think we’ll go shopping, won’t we, my little one, we’ll go and buy something nice for your daddy’s supper.”

“And then aren’t her grandparents coming this afternoon, to take her to the park?”

Mrs. Sprague looked annoyed. “They mustn’t take her out for so long, they really mustn’t. They’re overtiring her. Besides, the weather has been so changeable lately, she could catch a cold. The other day they brought her back with her hat half off her, and when I said something her grandmother said the fresh air was good for her. So I said maybe that was how they thought in Europe, but in America we keep our babies bundled up, and do you know, Rolf, I read somewhere that we have the healthiest babies in the world. Why don’t they just take Mrs. Furchgott? She needs to get out more, she ought to be practicing her walking. The little one can stay home with me.”

He had heard all this before, just as he had heard from Franz of the difficulties involved in getting Emma away from her. “She is immune to my charms,” Franz had said. “I believe she suspects I am a spy.”

“Try to be patient with them,” Rolf said now, to Mrs. Sprague. “They mean well. And she is their grandchild, after all.”

“Oh, he’s all right in his way. It’s her that gets my goat.”

“Yes, I know. Everyone feels the same. But we must be pleasant to her for his sake, otherwise we only make his life more difficult.” As he said it he remembered the look of pleading on Franz’s face the last time he had taken Louisa there, as though Franz knew, when Rolf took Louisa’s arm as she stumbled, the effort it cost him to touch her.

And then there she was, standing in the doorway, in her gray housedress with the zipper, staring at Mrs. Sprague, who seemed not to have noticed her. Mrs. Sprague had taken Emma on her lap now, she was tipping the bottle up so the child could get the last drops of milk. Usually he did not see Louisa in the mornings; she stayed in her room—asleep? hiding?—until after he had left. He met her eyes for a moment and looked quickly away.

Mrs. Sprague too looked up for a moment, before returning her attention to Emma. “Of course I’ll be nice to your granddaddy, won’t I, darling,” she said, “but I’ve got to make sure he doesn’t give my little girl a cold. You know your Aunt May will always do what’s best for you, she’s always going to look after her precious lamb. You know she loves you best in the whole wide world.”

H
e counted on having the office to himself when he got there in the mornings; he liked the silence in the hallways, the sense of undisturbed dust, which reminded him of his schooldays. Until the others arrived at nine, he could think undisturbed, far-seeing and satisfying thoughts about the future of the business, new avenues they ought to explore. He had begun asking for suggestions from the men on the factory floor, who understood the manufacturing processes better than anyone, and how they could be made more efficient, how the products could be improved. One of the foremen had come up with a very promising idea for coating the lead in the pencils to make them write more smoothly; together they were planning its implementation. He’d been costing it out and drafting a memo to Mr. Starin, to persuade him to fund it.

But that morning, as he stepped out of the elevator, he heard the clacking of a typewriter. Connie Maggiore, Mr. Starin’s new secretary, was seated at her desk in the corridor, her red nails striking out a sharp rhythm on the keys.

“Hi there,” she said, when she saw him. “I bet you’re surprised to find me here.”

He blinked at her, removing his hat as he did so.

“I had to get these reports done for the sales force before their meeting, so I got up at the crack of dawn and came on
in. I’ve been working since 7:45. I bet even you never get here that early.”