“I’d like to talk to this chap Rolf,” Phillip said, in a clipped, commanding voice, like the ship’s captain’s. “Could you arrange that for me?”
“He wasn’t terribly friendly when I spoke to him,” Louisa put in.
“He said you were very charming,” Otto told her.
“Well, he certainly didn’t seem charmed.”
“I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment. He tends to be suspicious of charm.”
“Perhaps I could interview some refugees,” Phillip said. “Do you think he’d help with that?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Splendid. Try to set up a meeting, then.” He got to his feet. “Come and dance,” he said to Louisa, though on the ship he had never wanted to dance with her.
Reluctantly, with an apologetic smile at Otto, she followed him onto the tiny dance floor, where three couples were moving uncertainly to the pianist’s rhythms. The music became slower and slower, until she and Phillip were simply standing there, clutching each other. A man in a black shirt appeared from the back and started shouting at the pianist, who stared at him with a look of intense dislike. “Play faster, goddamnit,” the man said, and the pianist stopped altogether, banging the piano shut.
“Well done,” Phillip said, nodding with satisfaction, and went back to the table and ordered another Scotch. “What’s wrong with you two?” he asked, smiling at them for the first time that evening. “You were supposed to have so much to say to each other.”
At eight the next morning, Otto phoned to report that Rolf would be glad to meet with them if they could come downtown during his lunch hour. Otto himself could not make it—it was too far from the dry cleaner’s he worked at uptown, where his crazy old boss made his real money taking bets on the horses—but Rolf had given him the address of a coffee shop next to his office. Louisa wrote it down. Phillip, wakened by the phone, groaned and rolled over. They had taken a taxi back the night before, Phillip having drunk four more Scotches after Otto left, and the taxi driver had asked her, in a strong Yiddish accent, why she didn’t find a man who would look after her, instead of the other way around: “Believe me, it’s the secret to happiness for every woman. I’m an old man, I know what I’m talking about.”
Rolf stood when she and Phillip entered—that was how she recognized him. His brown hair was already receding, and there were dark circles under his eyes, visible even behind his glasses. Louisa introduced the two men; Rolf shook hands with them both. “Please sit down,” he said, gesturing to the booth from which he had emerged. They sat facing him. “Would you like to see the menu?” He handed it to Louisa. “I can recommend the Reuben sandwich.” They both said that was what they would have. Then they were silent. Rolf folded his hands on the table. The waitress brought coffee and took their orders. When she had gone, Phillip pushed his cup aside and, as though remembering that Rolf distrusted charm, said brusquely, “So tell me: when do you think the war will start?”
Rolf did not even blink. “I don’t know. Soon. But the Americans will refuse to fight, and who can blame them? It’s not their mess.”
“Well, the English may not fight either,” Phillip said. “The government is handing out gas masks, and they’re building more airplanes, but people seem to think it’s to stop a war, not fight one. We’re about to run a piece from a fellow who was in Newcastle a fortnight ago. The shipwrights’ union is on double shifts, but nobody tells them why. ‘Hitler wouldn’t dare fight us,’ they told him. It’s what they all believe.”
“What about Churchill?” Rolf asked.
“He’s still seen as a warmonger. Anyone who says war is inevitable they call a warmonger.”
Rolf removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Otto said you wanted to know about the refugee committees.”
“That’s right. I thought I might do a piece on them while I was here.”
“What sort of information are you looking for?”
Phillip took out the handsome little notebook he had bought for the trip and began with the questions he’d asked Otto the night before. In fact, Congress had recently lowered the quotas for German Jews, Rolf told him, without any sign of emotion; he gave the figures for 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1937; he explained the most recent criteria for admission, and described how the committee set about finding sponsors. Louisa remembered her father, back in the old days, when men from the veterans’ organization would come, and they would talk about getting fresh milk to ex-soldiers in the TB clinic. Sometimes there would be other matters under discussion, nothing to do with the veterans; once, half asleep on the sofa, she had heard them make arrangements for somebody’s kitchen maid, who was pregnant with the coalman’s child. There had been something very comforting about it, the sense that all would be put right, the grown-ups were looking after things.
“I think I should meet with some of the refugees themselves,” Phillip said. “Get their personal stories. Can you arrange that for me?”
“If you like. You mean to write about them?”
“People ought to know what’s going on.”
“Nobody wants to hear such stories. Yesterday I met with a woman whose nose had been broken so badly she could pull the cotton wool up through the top as well as down through her nostrils. She showed me.” He looked over at Louisa. “I’m sorry. Your parents are still there, aren’t they?”
She nodded. “But Phillip says he’ll apply to get them out after we’re married.” She turned to Phillip, waiting for him to confirm this, but he was just biting into his sandwich.
“Mine are still there also. My father still thinks it will blow over, the Nazis will come to their senses.”
“It’s strange, my mother was the only one who predicted what would happen. And everyone thought she was crazy.”
“Get them out as soon as you can,” he told her. “But don’t let’s talk about it now. Tell me what you’ve been doing this morning.”
They had gone to the Frick, she said, she had loved the Vermeers, and Sir Thomas More … “But the John Singer Sargents were wonderful too. I’d never seen one before.” Rolf shook his head apologetically; he didn’t know them, he said, he had never been there. It turned out he hadn’t been to Tiffany’s either, or Saks Fifth Avenue, or the jazz clubs on Fifty-seventh Street (but she wished she hadn’t mentioned them).
“Tell me where you go, then,” she said, laughing. “Go on, tell me.”
He had been to the Metropolitan Museum, he said stiffly, several times, and the American Indian Museum, and of course to the Empire State Building; he had walked the whole length of Central Park.
“Do you never do anything frivolous?” she cried, and he turned pink. Phillip was making faces at her, signaling that she should stop, but a peculiar happiness had seized her; the pleasure of teasing him had gone to her head. “Never anything at all?”
“Sometimes I ride the Staten Island Ferry.”
“You like being on the water?”
“Yes. And also …” He stopped.
“What?”
“I like to see the Statue of Liberty.” At first she thought he was joking; she started to laugh again, and then, seeing that he was serious, tried to turn it into a cough. His eyes were so innocent of guile behind his glasses, she felt a sudden falling in her stomach, as though she might start to cry. She and Phillip, of course, had stood on the deck to see the statue as the ship pulled into the harbor. Phillip had quoted, in a mocking voice, the poem the Americans were so proud of, and told her of the signs that used to say NO IRISH NEED APPLY; some of them, he said, who had come to escape the famine, had starved to death in New York instead.
Now the cough got stuck in her throat, she was choking, and had to reach for a glass of water.
“Are you all right?” Rolf asked, alarmed, and she made ineffectual little hand movements, in between splutters, to show she was fine, while Phillip, taking out his notebook, asked Rolf to give him some names and numbers for the refugees.
“H
e’s an odd duck,” Phillip said, with a little snort, when they had parted.
“Do you think so?”
“What do you mean? You were the one who laughed at him back there. You were damn rude, actually.” She sensed him scowling at her, and looked across the street, at the crowds hurrying along; the hot-dog vendor on the corner, in a dirty apron, was bawling out indistinguishable words. A woman hurried past in a red, belted suit, her face emptied of expression. She imagined Rolf on his way to work that morning; he would not really see those people; he would carry an idea of them in his head.
“Come along,” Phillip said. “I need to get back to the hotel and phone some of the people on his list. We don’t have much time left here.”
But the only person he managed to reach was the pediatrician who had treated Louisa when she was small, a man she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. He used to recite nonsense rhymes while he listened to her heart, and sometimes, when he was finished, perform magic tricks for her, the joke being that they never worked. He’d put a pfennig behind her ear, inviting her to remove it and see what it had changed into, which was always just a pfennig; promising to produce a rabbit from his doctor’s bag, he brought out his hand with a flourish and peered in dismay at the stethoscope that appeared instead. “The clever devil,” he’d say, “he got away again,” and sigh loudly. It was his own enjoyment of this foolishness that made her giggle.
Phillip had offered to go to the rooming house where he was staying with his wife and daughter, but the doctor refused. He would prefer to come to their hotel, he said. So they waited for him in the lobby, where the chairs were covered in the same red-and-green plaid as the bedspread in their room upstairs. Louisa, keeping an eye on the revolving door, felt a childish excitement at the thought of seeing Dr. Joseftal again. A man in a loud blue suit entered—“What is it about Americans?” Phillip said. “They all look so newly hatched somehow”—and then two women in feathered hats and clanking gold bracelets. They did not look so newly hatched, it seemed to her, but she refrained from saying this. She was humming to herself, a tune the black pianist had played the night before, and thinking with pleasure of the length of embroidered ribbon she had bought at Saks that morning, when a gaunt shabby man came through the door, blinking, and looked around with the furtive air of a criminal. The desk clerk, his attention alerted to the presence of someone so clearly out of place, narrowed his eyes and watched his progress across the floor, to where Phillip and Louisa sat.
She jumped up, holding out both hands, babbling about how lovely it was to see him, and he parted his lips in a facsimile of a smile, showing two broken teeth. Phillip stood and thanked him for coming.
“Would you like some coffee?” Louisa asked. “Or some tea? I could ask them to bring it.”
“No, thank you,” he said, seating himself, very upright, in the plaid chair opposite. He pulled the too-short sleeves of his jacket down over his wrists. “It’s very kind of you, but no.”
“I was just remembering you and the rabbit,” she said, in the same bright social voice. When he looked puzzled, she repeated the words in German.
“Do you speak German?” he asked Phillip, and Phillip said no, unfortunately not.
“Then we shall converse in English.”
They sat looking at each other.
“What precisely is the information you are seeking from me?”
“I’d hoped you’d be willing to tell me about your experiences in Germany. Your impressions of what is happening there.”
“So you said on the phone. You are a newspaperman, I believe.”
“Of a sort. A journalist, anyway.”
“You are a Communist?” he asked, pronouncing it in the German way. “In my experience, it is only the Communisten who are interested in these stories.”
“Surely not. Would you tell me what happened to you?”
“It is not so very interesting. Two years ago I moved to München—you would say Munich—because I thought things would be better there. It was not so Nazi a city as Nuremberg. And for a while things were tolerable. I built up a practice. I could not see any Aryan patients, but the authorities did not interfere with me much. Then a little girl was hit by a car outside my house, which was also my office; her mother rang my bell, she was hysterical. I told her I could not treat the child, I was forbidden, but she pleaded with me, she wept and clung to my hands, until I brought the child upstairs to my consulting room. In fact she was not so badly wounded, it is only that head wounds bleed very much, but the mother thanked me over and over; she kissed my hands. I made her promise not to tell anyone what I had done, but she was a foolish woman, or maybe some of the neighbors had witnessed it. At any rate, the next day the Gestapo came and took me away.” He stopped, he crossed his legs; he was wearing the same sort of high, round-toed shoes, laced through hooks, that Louisa’s father had always worn. Dr. Joseftal’s were cracked but highly polished.
“Yes? And then?” Phillip asked, looking up from his notebook; he had been writing while the doctor talked.
“And then they did what the Gestapo does,” he said harshly. He breathed through his nose for a moment. “In Germany nobody would ask such a question. It is enough to say they came.”
“So they tortured you.”
The doctor made a face. “I would not use that word. To me it suggests something more … systematic. They shouted, they took out their Gummiknueppeln—their police sticks; they got to work. They were very thorough.” His attention became fixed on the women in the feathered hats, who had seated themselves at a table close by; they had removed their gloves and were being served coffee, with a plate of brightly iced cakes between them.
“How long did they detain you?”
“Just three days. But I was right to move to München, the police there are still imperfect Nazis. Sophie—my wife—took my war medals to a station and they filed a paper requesting my release.”
“Where did the Gestapo take you? Dachau?” Phillip asked, and he grimaced.
“Such interrogations do not take place in the Lager, they occur in the prisons. Look here, there is no interest in this sort of story. You are wasting your time.” He turned to Louisa. “So you are getting married,” he said.
“Yes. When we get to California.”
He nodded once; he did not congratulate Phillip, or wish her luck. “And are you keeping well? How is your health?”
She was fine, she said, just fine.
“I remember you used to have many colds when winter came.”
“Not for years. Not since I got to England.”
“Ah. You are someone for whom the English climate has been a curative. A medical curiosity.”
She laughed for longer than the joke warranted. “Will you be able to practice medicine here?”
“I’m afraid that is not possible. But your friend Rolf Furchgott hopes to obtain some work for me, proofreading for a medical journal that is published in German as well as English. I prefer it to being a butler. There are many of us, you know, many doctors, and lawyers too, who attended a school in München that taught the arts of butlery. For Jews trying to get visas. I had a friend who went to England on such a visa, he was quite comic on the subject.”
She asked after his wife and daughter. He coughed behind his hand. “They are working already. It is easier for women, it seems, to get employment here, in domestic service. My daughter has found a job cleaning in a cafeteria. When her English has improved she will hope to find something better. My Sophie has been hired by an elderly woman who requires someone to cook and clean. It is not so bad, she says, with just one person in the household. She is only very worried about our son, he is in Czechoslovakia, he went there in ’34, but now we think he must leave. Rolf Furchgott is trying to help with the visa, but it is more difficult than we had thought.” For a moment his fingers clawed at the arms of the chair. Then, collecting himself, he stood up. “I must really be going,” he said, and as Phillip began to rise, “Please do not troub
le yourself.” He turned back to Louisa. “Remember me to your parents, yes? In happier times your father and I served on a committee together, to help the veterans. I am sorry I had no chance to say good-bye to him.”
“Not exactly a charmer, is he?” Phillip said when he was gone. “Christ. I hope they’re not all going to be so bloody stiff-necked.”
“You can’t expect him to be like Emil,” she protested, referring to a denizen of the café. “He’s not a bohemian.”
“Thank you. I think I might have deduced that for myself. That doesn’t explain why he treated me like the enemy.”
She wanted to tell him how Dr. Joseftal had sat on her bed, patting her hand; she remembered his telling her mother, when she warned Louisa not to waste the doctor’s time, that he had all the time in the world. “I should have given him something to take to his daughter.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something. I bought that ribbon this morning, remember? I could have given that to her.”
“Yes, well, you could have, but you didn’t. I don’t suppose ribbons are what the poor cow needs, anyway. Let’s go upstairs, I want to make some calls. I think this piece could turn into something quite useful, despite the good doctor’s recalcitrance.”
But he could not get hold of anyone. “Let’s go to the park,” she suggested, but he waved this aside; she sensed that he was feeling aggrieved again. For a minute he went and stood by the window, staring at the crowds on the street; then he fetched a glass from the bathroom and dug the bottle of Scotch out of his suitcase.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said timidly.
“Why? Are you afraid I’ll climb onto my horse and start a pogrom?”
“That isn’t funny.”
“She is not amused,” he muttered, splashing some Scotch into the glass. He took a gulp. “You seem to care a lot more for all these people than you do for me.”
“Of course I don’t. It was only that he seemed so terribly sad. Sad and gallant. You don’t know what he was like before.”
The Oriental Wife Page 5
