The Oriental Wife

by Evelyn Toynton

  “I don’t know. But he barely spoke to her. He was very amusing with me, very lively, telling stories about all the mad people who wrote for his magazine. And drinking, and urging me to drink. There’s a kind of vengefulness in him. It makes me worried for her.”

  Rolf aligned the folders meticulously with the edge of the desk. At the best of times, he was uncomfortable speculating about such matters. “Do you think they love each other?” he asked, trying to sound casual. All thoughts of Louisa had become disturbing.

  Otto gave a sigh that ended in a hiccup. “Who knows? I think she’s desperate for things to work out. But she’s not very happy, that’s plain.” He let out a groan. “I must go to bed, I’ll feel like death in the morning.”

  Rolf, waiting for him to finish in the bathroom, read a report on potential sponsors in Philadelphia and made a note to himself about checking the production figures for the lumberyard. It was only when he was in the bathroom himself, brushing his teeth, that his thoughts returned to Louisa. As he replaced the cap on the toothpaste, it occurred to him that if things were really going wrong with Phillip, she might decide not to go out west with him after all, but stay in New York for a while instead. He felt a rush of blood through his body at the thought.

  But she left on schedule. Three postcards arrived for Otto from Chicago (“Give my best to Rolf,” she wrote, under the signature). They had toured the stockyards, she wrote; Phillip was thinking of writing an article about conditions there. The second card had a Gauguin on the front. “This is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen,” she wrote; “I’ve been to visit it in the Art Institute twice now. Phillip has gone to a meeting of the packinghouse workers. He says they’ve been swindled by the bosses.” Then there was a card with a picture of Lake Michigan, covered in ice: “We’re leaving here next week, to take the train out west. They say they’re having snowstorms in the Rockies—imagine me in the Rockies! I don’t even have the proper shoes.” That was the last mail to arrive. The next time they heard from her, it was seven in the morning. When Rolf answered the phone she said, in a high thin voice, “May I speak to Otto, please?” He went and got Otto and then returned to his bedroom, where he had been getting dressed. A moment later, Otto knocked on the door. It seemed she had gotten off the train in Butte, Montana, and waited in the station until a decent hour to call them. She couldn’t talk long, she had said, there were two men outside the phone booth staring at her, and besides she had used all her change. But it was over with Phillip, she was coming back. She was very sorry, but could she possibly stay with them for a while, just until she could earn her fare back to England?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rolf was having trouble sleeping, something that hadn’t happened since the hunger days of his childhood, when he’d lain awake with visions of stars swirling in his head, the vast blue-black skies over Montana. Since he had arrived in New York, even the most worrisome problems had not kept him from dropping off promptly after his scheduled half hour of English reading.

  Now there were no swirls and no skies, only a certain disturbance in the atmosphere that kept him wakeful. On the surface, everything had been done to preserve his routine. Otto, who had vacated his bedroom for Louisa and now slept on the living room couch, never prepared for bed until Rolf had finished with his work in the alcove and gone to his room. When he spent the evening in what had become Louisa’s room, they kept their voices considerately low, so that Rolf could hear only a faint murmur through the wall.

  Nevertheless, everything was different. Sometimes, as he was preparing his evening sandwich in the kitchen, Otto came in—Louisa remained closeted in the bedroom like an invalid—to make tea or coffee, or fetch a hunk of cheese to carry back with him, and would impart to Rolf, indignantly, some further detail of Phillip’s iniquitous behavior on the trip. He seemed to be piecing the story together bit by bit; at first Louisa had been too ashamed to tell him much, but gradually he was dragging it out of her.

  In Chicago Phillip had accused her of flirting with everyone from the conference delegates to the Polish slaughterers at the stockyards; he had been drunk almost every night, and would keep her up till all hours, shouting at her, demanding confessions and apologies. “It was terrible for her, frightening,” Otto said. On the very morning they were boarding the train to go out west, she awoke in their boardinghouse to find Phillip sitting beside her, in a chair he had pulled up next to the bed. He had not been to sleep all night, he told her, a note of triumph in his voice; he’d stayed up watching her in the light from the streetlamp, wondering how it would feel to put his hands around her throat and squeeze. It might do wonders for his state of mind, he said; one of these days he might not be able to resist the temptation. “Can you imagine how she felt?”

  Rolf did not care to imagine it. He confined himself to noncommittal shrugs, to cut these explosions short. There was something almost unseemly, he felt, about Otto’s wrath; it seemed out of proportion to what Louisa had suffered. Rolf could have told him a hundred, a thousand more tragic stories gleaned from the refugees. And unlike Louisa, the refugees had not brought their troubles on themselves.

  But he was prudent; he kept that thought to himself.

  “He said monstrous things to her on that train ride west.” Otto was piling Ritz crackers on a plate. “Things no human being should say to another.”

  Rolf cut him off. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear.”

  “No, you’re right,” Otto said glumly. “But she asked me to phone his brother in California for her. To make sure he arrived safely.”

  Rolf thought it over. “She’s right,” he said. “The man is ill.”

  “I want you to do it instead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. What if the brother puts him on the phone?”

  Rolf wondered if Louisa knew of this request; he almost hoped it had been her idea, but he couldn’t very well ask her. Since she’d been there, she had spoken to him only about the butter she’d used but would replace, or whether he wanted anything from the shops when she went to Dyckman Street. She seemed embarrassed in his presence; she had said to Otto that Rolf must think her a fool.

  “Give me the number,” he said. A woman answered the phone, and Rolf identified himself as a friend of Louisa Straus’s. “She wanted to know if Phillip arrived all right, she’s concerned about him.”

  “I should think she would be concerned, after what she did,” the woman said. “I suppose she didn’t have the courage to phone herself. You tell her he’s fine, thank you very much, we’re all fine, and we don’t need her poking her nose into our business.”

  “She said he was fine,” Rolf reported to Otto, who sighed and went off to the bedroom with the plate of crackers. They were going to have cockroaches in the apartment if those two kept eating in the bedroom.

  Finally Otto went out alone one evening, to join some friends at the poor excuse for a café on Dyckman Street. Rolf heard him asking Louisa, from the doorway of the bedroom, if she was sure she wouldn’t change her mind and join him; there was a murmur from inside the room, and then Otto left. After that Rolf might have been alone in the apartment for all the noise she made, but he was always conscious of her on the other side of the wall. Sometimes his concentration was disturbed by a sudden, startling image of himself getting up and walking into the bedroom. He forced his thoughts back grimly to the papers in front of him: the figures provided by the owner of the lumberyard had some suspicious gaps.

  Though he had not paid much attention when Otto spoke of her over the years, he seemed to remember there had been another Englishman before Phillip. As he frowned down at a quarterly report with the operational expenses all lumped together, he wondered if he should get in touch with Hilde. She had been a cellist with the Stuttgart orchestra until the Nazis came to power, but in New York she worked as a secretary to a musicians’ union. They had gone to concerts together on the weekends; once she had even taken
him to the ballet, a strangely unsettling experience; he had found himself close to tears at the end, while Hilde, gathering up coats and scarves from under their seats, commented briskly on the deficiencies of the orchestra. Everything about her was admirable: she never wasted words or time, or made unreasonable demands, she was as competent in her way as he was. And yet he had felt, from the beginning, a secret disappointment, the sense of some lack that could not be made good. He had examined his conscience and asked himself if it was wrong to sleep with her, feeling as he did. Nonetheless he had been wounded when she confessed to the same absence of enthusiasm. “Our problem is we don’t love each other,” she said, staring at the ceiling; he had gotten out of bed a moment before and was getting dressed. “What shall we do about that?”

  He didn’t know, he said, before it occurred to him that it would have been better to lie. He went and sat on the bed, touching her shoulder, but she only glanced at him briefly, with such loathing in her face that he was shocked. He would phone her later in the week, he said, but, remembering that look, he never did.

  A few nights later, Otto insisted on taking Louisa to the café. Standing in the vestibule as she waited for Otto to fetch his coat, she smiled wanly at Rolf. “I don’t suppose you’d like to come too.” He would enjoy that very much, he said stiffly, but unfortunately he had work to do. “You wouldn’t really like to,” she said. “But thank you for saying so.”

  Ten minutes after they had left, he got up from his desk and headed for the bathroom; the door of what had become Louisa’s room was half open, with the light on inside. Going to switch it off, he stood in the doorway for a moment, halted by the sight of the objects scattered over the bare surfaces Otto had left for her. A library book was open on the bedside table, a woman riding sidesaddle on its red cover; next to it were a pink glass jar and a crumpled handkerchief. The top of the dresser was crowded with a profusion of tangled beads and half-squeezed tubes and smeared brushes surrounding an oval mirror on a swivel stand. There were three stockings—he wondered at the odd number—draped over the radiator and a bright green blouse flung over the single chair. Hilde’s room had never looked like that; it was as tidy as his own, with her cello case propped in the corner.

  Seated at his desk again, he picked up his Number 2 pencil and began making notes in the margins of the memo he was reviewing: What internal resources do we need to manage this business? Who will manage the relationships with our competitors? He leaned back and found himself moving the pencil along the back of his fingers; as he looked down at his hand, it occurred to him for the first time that it was not a very handsome one.

  She might remember that she had left the light burning; he had better turn it on again. Retracing his steps, he entered the room just far enough to reach the switch, and then, blind with shame, took three paces forward and opened the closet.

  Two of Otto’s suits, one blue, one brown—he was wearing the third—hung in the exact middle of the rod, as though placed there with deliberate courtesy. There was an inch of space on either side, and then a green Chinese-looking thing that fell all the way to the floor; it made him think of kept women, of diplomats and long staircases. The rest was a confusion of pale and dark: something tweed, with a velvet collar, a gray shiny something, a dangling pink sleeve crammed between two blacknesses. A gray hat with a multicolored feather sat on the shelf, a fluffy black thing curled round and round it in an untidy heap. Looking down, he saw a pair of black high-heeled sandals lying on their sides, facing each other in curious intimacy, and had a sudden, shocking urge to stroke them, as though they might still bear the imprint of her feet.

  Back in the hall, with the door restored to the exact position in which she had left it, he made for the kitchen and gulped down a full glass of water, standing by the sink. Still standing, he ate the liverwurst sandwich he had bought for his supper, discarded the wrapping in the garbage pail, washed his hands thoroughly, and returned to the desk. How flexible are their cutting facilities? Can they be adapted to other uses if our competitors refuse to buy from us? he wrote on the top of the memo’s front page. I don’t think we have given this sufficient thought. But he had lost momentum; he no longer felt able to tackle the issues he had raised. CONCERNS, he wrote, in capital letters, on a sheet of lined yellow paper. Number 1: Then he stood up. He did not want to be sitting there when they returned. He went to his room and sat on the chair in the corner, as he did every night, for a short session of reading. He was halfway through Woodrow Wilson’s autobiography. Usually he only managed a few pages a night, but he got through the whole chapter describing the negotiations at Versailles before remembering that he hadn’t brushed his teeth. He was safely back in his bedroom when he heard the front door; he changed quickly into his pajamas and switched off the light.

  The next evening, when he got home from work, she was sitting with Otto in the living room, talking in her old, animated way: it seemed she had gotten a job, a fact she found inexplicably amusing. She even mentioned Phillip: thank God, she said, he’d gotten her working papers for America. Lord & Taylor had hired her for the pre-Christmas season, putting her at the glove counter on the main floor. She had been instructed to wear nothing but navy blue or black, she was telling Otto breathlessly, and to behave in a ladylike way at all times; she was also expected to catch the eyes of customers as they were passing, to encourage them to stop at her counter. It was this she found particularly comical.

  After her third day of selling gloves she forgot to whisper as she was regaling Otto with stories in the kitchen, where she was making an omelet for their supper. It seemed her supervisor had complimented her on her English accent; a Texan had bought a dozen pairs of gloves for the ladies back home and offered to buy her a pair also. A woman in a fur coat had told her a long story about a ruby ring belonging to her mother-in-law, who had failed to leave it to her as promised, which just proved, she said, how duplicitous women could be. “You seem like a very sweet person,” she’d said to Louisa, “that’s why I’m telling you this. To spare you a lot of heartache later on.”

  All this she recounted delightedly, changing her voice to play the different parts. Rolf, who was working at his desk, pretending not to listen, felt obscurely wounded, the more so as she was succeeding so well at making them all seem ridiculous.

  Louisa glanced over just as he raised his head. “Oh, I’m sorry. We’re disturbing you, aren’t we? I’ll be quiet now.”

  “You shouldn’t talk about them like that,” he said, before he could stop himself. “They were nothing but kind to you.”

  “Oh, God,” Otto said, and then, to Louisa, “He thinks you’ve insulted his precious Americans.”

  But her face had softened. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “These are the people who have taken us in. All of us. We owe them some gratitude.”

  Now she was contrite, she said it had been very wrong of her, but he imagined the two of them discussing him in private: “The problem with Rolf,” Otto might say, “is that he has no sense of humor.” And maybe it was true, maybe it had always been true. Certainly there were fewer and fewer things he found comical lately. On his desk, at that very moment, was an account of a Jewish boy in Fürth who had been trapped in a schoolyard by some of his former classmates and castrated with a knife. An elderly woman in Wuppertal, the widow of a professor of logic, had been beaten senseless in the street. “What is alarming,” he had just written to the junior senator from New York, “is that these are no longer extraordinary events. Such things have become commonplace in Germany.”

  And then one day, forwarded to him from the committee, was an inquiry from Louisa herself. Should she, she asked, try to stay in America, would it be easier to get her parents into America than England? How would the committee advise her to proceed? He went and knocked on her bedroom door; she was lying there reading one of those endless fat novels she took from the library, with a girl in a wimple on its cover. She swung her legs over the side of
the bed as he entered, and sat looking at him.

  “May I speak to you for a minute?” he asked, holding out the letter. She nodded.

  “Why didn’t you ask me about this yourself?”

  “I don’t know … I didn’t want to burden you with it.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a burden. I would have been glad to tell you anything I could.”

  “It’s just that I don’t know what to do.” She looked around the room; she got up and removed a black slip from the back of the chair. “Please sit down.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you some questions,” he said when he was seated. “Is that all right?”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  He cleared his throat. “How much money do your parents have, do you know?”

  She shook her head, watching his face intently.

  “Can you find out for me? Can you find out what they would be allowed to take out of Germany?”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “For people of their age, it’s important. It helps a great deal. But there are other things too. Have they got any relatives here besides yourself and Otto? Anyone who is an American citizen?”

  Again, she shook her head. “Does that mean it’s hopeless?”

  “Not hopeless, no. But it would make it easier if they did. You’re sure there is nobody, no long-lost cousins who emigrated years ago, people they might have lost touch with, that I could write to? Or old friends, business acquaintances, anyone?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Would you ask them, just to make sure?”

  “Of course. But wouldn’t they have told me if there’d been someone? They would have mentioned it when I was coming to America.”

  “Not necessarily. They might not have had an address.”

  “Then what good would it do?”

  “I might be able to find them.”

  “But you might not … I should have married Phillip. I should never have got off that train.”