The Oriental Wife

by Evelyn Toynton

  Stooping to retrieve a bundle of letters curling inside a rubber band, he noticed, jammed up against one leg of the dresser, the little cameo brooch that his mother, shortly before she died, had wrapped up for him to give to Louisa on her tenth birthday. Unlike all the rest, it seemed unharmed. The girlish profile was as smooth and unblemished as before, the pin on the back still sat securely in its clasp. He fumbled a small piece of tissue paper out of the drawer he’d just replaced and, folding it around the pin, placed it in his jacket pocket.

  It was still there, still in its flimsy wrapping, when he and Jeannette boarded the SS Manhattan in Hamburg three months later. In December 1938, their visas had arrived from the U.S. Consulate, the affidavits Rolf had obtained being deemed sufficient. At the end of January, in 1939, Franz had been summoned to an interview at the Office of Reichs Emigration above the police station, where the Herr Präfekt, a gloomy man who smelled of schnapps, examined his papers suspiciously, holding them up to the light and peering at the stamps on the visas through a magnifying glass. But finally, as though sick of the whole business, he had produced two exit permits from his desk, slammed the drawer shut, and handed them over with a grimace.

  They were allowed to take two trunks with their possessions. In addition to warm clothing, a German–English dictionary twenty years out of date, two leather-bound volumes of Goethe, and several large envelopes full of photographs, Jeannette had packed the vast lace-edged tablecloth, embroidered with lilies and peacocks, that had been the pride of her trousseau, a set of gold-handled fish forks, and the portrait of her brother.

  As the ship pulled away from the dock, a small boy in a fur hat came running up to Franz and pummeled him on the leg. “Now I’m in America,” he shouted, in German. “I’m going to be an American.”

  “Good for you,” Franz said, but already the boy had whirled away from him, racing up and down the deck. On the shore too, men were running, pointing excitedly at a vast crane lowering a railroad carriage onto a flatbed truck. A gust of wind rippled through the red and black banners lining the pier, making their swastikas dance. Meanwhile the seagulls were circling the ship, closer and closer. As it pulled away, Franz heard a woman sobbing behind him, but having no comfort to offer he went on staring ahead—at the banners, the gulls, the railway car—willing his heart to turn to stone.

  PART II

  CHAPTER ONE

  The army rejected him not, as he had feared, because he was German, although the examining sergeant seemed suspicious about that, but on the grounds of his myopia and the punctured eardrum he had suffered in a football game twenty-two years before. They did not even let him finish the physical, but told him to get dressed halfway through, when he was still holding his arms stiffly by his naked sides and trying to stand straight. It was almost a relief when the navy turned him down, since he had been seasick all the way to New York on the boat. The air corps was out of the question for someone with his eyesight. In desperation, he tried the merchant marine, but even they refused him.

  By early 1942 Otto and the others had all enlisted or been drafted, and had scattered to training camps around the country. Alex Starin was working in army intelligence in Washington; even the hysterical Gruenbaum, who had managed to train as a taxi driver in the intervening years, had been taken by the navy, despite his mental imbalance. Drunks on the street accosted Rolf to ask why he wasn’t in uniform; at Rexall’s on Fourteenth Street, where he sometimes went for his lunch, the waitresses, hearing his accent, gave him dirty looks and slapped down his sandwich without speaking. He did not try to defend himself. However much blood he gave, however many war bonds he bought, however many chocolate bars and copies of True Detective he shipped to GIs overseas (the American Legion provided lists of those without families to send them parcels), he would still remain safe, while every other man his age was in danger. For the first time in his life he felt morally compromised.

  Even his mother seemed ashamed for him, perhaps remembering his father’s Iron Cross for bravery, though it had not saved Sigmund at Dachau. Her sister’s boy, Hans, having escaped to England with his parents and sister just in time, had been released from internment as an enemy alien and was serving with the British Army in the Middle East. But Trudl, though she spoke of him proudly, seemed to brood about that also. The English had made him anglicize his name—he was no longer Hans Metzger but John Mercer—but she still worried what would happen if he were captured by the Germans.

  Three times a week, on his way home from work, Rolf went to visit his mother in her tiny apartment around the corner from his and Louisa’s. These visits always followed an identical pattern: she served him cake and coffee at the little round table in front of the window, on the same blue-and-white Meissen and with the same swift decisive movements he remembered from childhood. She sat with him as he ate and drank, asking how his work was going and telling him any war news she had heard on the radio that day, her voice particularly brisk when reporting battles in the Middle East. Then, after exactly fifteen minutes, she would stand. “I mustn’t keep you any longer. Your wife will be expecting you.” If he suggested that she come back with him for supper, she always shook her head. Not today. Today she was feeling a little tired. Some other time.

  Louisa was allowed to pay longer visits, during which they sat at the little table playing Chinese checkers. Louisa was with her on the day the telegram arrived from her sister, announcing that Hans was missing in action; it was Louisa who phoned Rolf at his office and told him. When he got there that evening, the two women were bent over the star-shaped board. His mother let him in in silence and listened in silence as he told her she must not despair; Hans might have been taken prisoner, and the Germans would know him only as John Mercer. Yes, she said, with a flash of scorn, Louisa had mentioned that already. “If he is a prisoner, they will realize soon enough that he is Jewish. They will see that he is circumcised.” Now if he wouldn’t mind she would return to their game.

  Two weeks later, a letter came for Trudl from her sister; Hans had been confirmed dead. “At least he died with honor,” Trudl said to Rolf that night. “At least there is that. He died as a soldier. Not as a prisoner in the Lager.” And Rolf, whose clearest memory of his cousin was of Hans telling him that his missing cat was probably hanging in a butcher’s shop, felt that she was reproaching him.

  On the morning the Allies took Cologne, Louisa went to Trudl’s apartment and, getting no answer to the bell, used her key to let herself in. She called her mother-in-law’s name several times before opening the door to the bathroom, where she found Trudl, her hair neatly covered by a hairnet, lying in the tub, wearing her wedding ring and the pearls her father had given her when she was married, the skin of her narrow body shriveled and puckered from the bathwater in which she had drowned.

  “I didn’t want you to see her like that,” Louisa said, when Rolf asked that evening why she hadn’t called him right away. Instead she had managed somehow to lift Trudl up, carry her to the bed, dry her off, and cover her with her robe and a blanket. After she phoned Rolf and told him to come, she had also phoned the doctor, even the funeral parlor. When he got there, she was waiting for him in the doorway and led him by the hand into the apartment; she made him sit down on the couch. “She was so unhappy,” she said. “At least now she won’t be unhappy any more.” But he could not accept this as consolation. His mother had never spoken of being unhappy. Only later, when he could not sleep, did he wonder if Louisa had meant something else. Maybe Trudl had drowned herself deliberately. Maybe she had left a note, and Louisa had hidden it. When he asked Louisa, the next morning, he thought she hesitated for a moment before she said no.

  “What did you talk about with her? You can’t just have played checkers all the time.”

  “Once,” Louisa said, smiling at the memory, “she told me about the first time she met your father. About how she was strolling with her sister in the park, and he rode up beside them on a chestnut horse and doffed his hat to her.”
Rolf tried to remember if his mother had ever told him that story; he thought not. She had never been demonstrative with him; he and she had been alike that way. His father had been the emotional one. Even as a child, he understood that Sigmund, and the effort to keep him calm, required too much of her attention for there to be much left over; he himself had better not trouble her too much. Now he wished he had found more for her to do in New York; he should have encouraged her to find some outlet for her energies, her organizational skills. He had bought her German books sometimes, from the stalls on Broadway, near his office, but she never gave any sign of having read them. Louisa brought her American ones from the library, but she never spoke of those either. He saw that as the war had dragged on, and especially after the telegram about Hans, she had spoken less and less, as though speech itself were an effort for her.

  At the funeral, in the unfamiliar synagogue on Dyckman Street, the young rabbi, who had never met Trudl, tried to compare her to the children of Israel. Like them, he said, she had been forced to leave her homeland and wander in the desert before arriving in the promised land. Then, as though realizing that the analogy would not hold, he hurried the eulogy to its end.

  A dozen of the refugees who had known his mother were in attendance, seated on the opposite side of the sanctuary. After the service several of them came up to him to offer their condolences. A small lean woman with bright blue eyes, whom he could not place for a moment, approached him. She had spoken to his mother only the previous week, she told him.

  “Our apartment is very near here. Will you come back and have some coffee and cake? Then we can speak truthfully of your mother.” He must have looked startled, because she clucked her tongue. “I do not mean I am going to tell you ugly secrets. I meant to remember her. After a funeral one should remember the dead.” At this she nodded swiftly, with a birdlike motion of her chin. He had remembered by then who she was: Sophie Joseftal, the doctor’s wife. He had seen her once or twice at his in-laws’ place over the years. And so he and Louisa, with Louisa’s parents, went back to the one-room apartment on Inwood Avenue where she and the doctor lived, with its neat rose-colored couch that served as their bed at night, the furniture unadorned except for photographs of their two children. Their son, whom Rolf had helped get out of Czechoslovakia, was in his U.S. Army uniform. On the wall was a single painting, of a dark, gingerbready-looking house in the Black Forest.

  “That was my family’s summer home,” Sophie said. “Your mother visited us there one year, when we were at school together. She sketched all the scenes in the vicinity, and painted them too, she was very artistic.” He had never known that, Rolf said. “Oh, yes, even my father, who knew something about art, thought she was quite talented. We used to tease her that she would be famous one day. But her father would not permit her to attend art school; that was something young ladies didn’t do then. And then she was married, and the war came, and Sigmund became very moody. Perhaps she had no more time for such things.”

  “Did you see much of her here in New York?” Rolf asked. His mother had never mentioned Sophie to him.

  “No … I invited her many times, for lunch and supper and to come with me to the park, but she rarely agreed to come. So I did not press her any more. But I continued to phone her, every week.”

  Meanwhile Jeannette, twisting her hands in her lap, was telling Dr. Joseftal how she had never really cared for her English governess, or developed any love for the language; she had always preferred French, she said fretfully, though Emmy Loeb, her best friend at school—who lived on Indian Road now—used to make fun of her accent. She blamed Emmy (whose husband had been killed on Kristallnacht, whose two sons, hiding in France, had been denounced and deported) for the fact that she had given up her French studies after the second year. But perhaps it was for the best; what good would French have done her here in America, where nobody spoke anything but English? “I have a cousin who emigrated to the Dominican Republic. I am sure that Spanish is a much more gemütlich language than English. But it would be too late for me to learn it now.”

  Sophie, overhearing this, said briskly that she must show more gratitude to her new country, she must not be so discontented. “You spoke of Emily Loeb,” she said. “We must think of what she has to endure, and not make so much of our small troubles.” Jeannette became agitated; she half rose in her chair, as though propelled upward by her indignation at being addressed this way. The doctor, who up till then had been almost silent, told her gently, “Don’t be offended. My Sophie is a great one for enjoining us to gratitude. And of course she is right. I myself need these reminders, I have a tendency to melancholy. We should not read the newspapers too much, I think.”

  “One must naturally keep up with the war news,” Sophie said. “But there is no necessity to read some of the other stories they carry.”

  “Like what?” Louisa asked.

  Sophie looked at her husband, who sat with his head bowed, still smiling faintly, as though to remove himself from the discussion. “These sad stories about animals that die in the zoo. About old women found dead in their apartments.”

  “I didn’t think they carried such stories in the New York Times,” Rolf said.

  “Yes, they do. On the inside pages. They upset Gustav very much.”

  “I am afraid I am not the soldier my Sophie is,” Gustav said, smiling at Jeannette. “But she is right, we must try to be grateful, to America especially. You would not find the Dominican Republic more congenial than New York, I am sure of that.”

  Three weeks after Trudl’s funeral, reports began appearing about the Lager the Allies had liberated in their march through Europe. The women read the accounts, in German, in the Washington Heights paper, the men in the New York Times. But they were afraid to say too much. Did you see the pictures in the Aufbau, one woman might ask another, and the other would nod; they would both fall silent for a moment, before telling how the butcher on Dyckman Street had failed, once again, to trim the fat off the stewing meat.

  Even husbands and wives could not talk of those things; when they turned off the light, they lay silent, their backs to each other, and did not shut their eyes. The thoughts they had then might be of trivial things, petty squabbles they had had with neighbors, fallings-out with second and third cousins in Stuttgart or Frankfurt that had caused them to cut off contact years before the trouble began—people they had loved once, and now saw that they loved still, whose fate they did not know. They wondered if friends they had lost touch with when they came to America had perished, or if the visas they had been waiting for, to Singapore or South Africa or Argentina, had come through. And some of them thought with shame of scornful remarks they used to make about the Ostjuden, the immigrants from Poland whose rusty black jackets, long beards, and guttural Yiddish had embarrassed them so when they still thought of themselves as good Germans.

  In search of their relatives, they went to the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee to look at the lists of the dead, which grew longer every week—another thousand names, another hundred thousand. But still they did not speak of these things to each other; they grieved in the dark, remembering the photographs in the newspapers, the mounds of skeletons, and hoped crazily that maybe Rosa or Gottfried or Friedrich had survived after all.

  Shortly after Germany’s surrender, when the whole world reeked of death, the word circulated among the refugee women that Louisa was pregnant—a piece of news that might have seemed just ordinarily cheerful a few months before but now took on almost a holy resonance. In the midst of the horror, the nightmares, the thoughts of what the dead had suffered before their end, here was a new life beginning, an American child would be born from the ashes. It was enough to make them hum the tunes they used to sing to their own children as they went about their chores, enough to make them stop and smile at the children in the playground at Isham Park.

  Many of those women had never cared for Louisa: they remembered their first, terrible weeks in the city, when
they had looked to her for succor and been disappointed. She had shown up, breathless and late, in their near-empty apartments, with useless gifts of lace doilies or French soap, when what they needed was to be shown where to find brown bread and lightbulbs. They had also needed an audience for the stories they’d brought with them, and she had not provided it; instead she had told them her own stories, amusing little anecdotes about America they could not quite grasp. They suspected that they bored her; they suspected she preferred her new, American friends, the Park Avenue matrons who worked on the committees with Rolf and invited her to their grand apartments for cocktails. No doubt her frivolous stories, her breathless laughter, went over much better in their drawing rooms; no doubt those rich women were relieved to have found one émigré, at least, who was not grim and reproachful, who did not insist on telling them things they would rather not hear.

  But now the refugees drew around her, ready to forgive her everything, even the way she spoke about her baby. For she was no more serious than ever. She joked that the child seemed very bad-tempered, and threatened to knock it out with brandy if it didn’t stop its kicking at night. Whereas they began knitting tiny sweaters—they dug out their embroidery silks too, their fingers, stiffened with arthritis, remembering how to make baby bonnets, how to stitch little flowers and leaf patterns—Louisa had given up on her own knitting after a single attempt. It would be cruel, she said, holding up a tiny red scarf, still on its needles, that was curling into a tube, to inflict such a gruesome object on a helpless child, even one with a vile temper.

  It was just a manner she had, Sophie told them, when the others shook their heads and rolled their eyes—something she must have picked up in England, where everybody talked that way. She wasn’t really unfeeling. Look at how much milk she was drinking. Look at how happy she was. But later the women would say she had been too happy; that there’d been something feverish about it, as though she’d had a premonition all along.