by Anne Raeff
“Maybe after you die, they will become true Christians.”
“And what, Mrs. Mondschein, is a true Christian?”
“Like Jesus.”
“Jesus was a crucified faggot. That’s why they crucified him. Because he was an annoying little fag. Only a fag would have been content roaming around with a bunch of men, telling people to love each other and get rid of all their dumb rules.”
“And he was a Jew, don’t forget that.”
We both laughed over that. Tommy laughed so hard that he started coughing, and then it seemed as if he was having trouble breathing, so I called the nurse, who said he needed his rest and shouldn’t be riled up. That just made Tommy laugh even more.
“So, Mrs. Mondschein, tell me more about your doctor.”
“My doctor. I suppose he was my doctor, though I don’t like to think of him that way.” I paused and imagined Karl in his green Loden coat and leather gloves, standing in the doorway, waiting for me to get ready. “Karl started taking me for walks,” I began again. “He always wanted to head towards the center of town and end up in a clattering, well-lit café. In the evenings, we ate big bowls of spicy, unkosher goulash and went to the opera—standing room always. Karl knew the words to all the arias, both male and female, of every opera we saw. He was always talking about music. During the emotional finales to his favorite operas, he would take my hand and press it hard. He taught me everything he knew about music, and I developed a sweet ritual out of learning the names of all the composers. Sometimes melodies would stay with me for a few days after a concert or after the opera, and I would be surprised to find myself humming while I dressed in the mornings. I devoured all the books he gave me to read, pausing only to imagine him rushing around the hospital in a white coat healing people, arriving just in the nick of time to save a woman almost dead from self-inflicted wounds or taking the time to wipe the brow of a little boy with scarlet fever. I tried to think of making love to the doctor with music playing in the background, but I could never really get an image of it. I just heard music, and if I closed my eyes, all I could see was my tall first husband smirking at me.
“Karl brought me vitamins to strengthen the baby growing inside me, although we never mentioned my condition, and he brought my sisters candies. I think they were both a little bit in love with him, too. Sometimes, when we were not going out, he sat with them in the living room and told them stories about the rich children he had tutored and the luxurious dinners he had eaten in their houses. My sisters’ mouths watered with delight as he described forbidden foods such as venison with sherry cream sauce and oysters. Afterwards, we would laugh at my sisters’ fear of food while we ate pork Wienerschnitzel and drank wine in a little cellar restaurant frequented by students who talked drunkenly of communism. “But every day my child became more visible, and it was like a barrier between us. We watched my stomach grow without either of us ever mentioning it. Instead we discussed music and medicine. He told me I was his only friend. He never once tried to kiss me; we never talked about the future, and I tried not to think about what would happen when the baby was born. Only my father talked incessantly about what was to come and about how there was so little time left. Now that I look back on it, my father’s warnings were truly extraordinary. He never read the newspapers; he never listened to the radio. Sometimes Karl would tell me about the rising tide of fascism, but he was not that interested in politics. He was concerned with saving lives and he loved music, and, for some reason, I was his friend.
“Then my water broke in the sixth month. We were sitting with my father, my sisters and I, not saying a word, my father staring at his clock, my sisters knitting, when I felt everything give inside me, and then I was sitting in a pool of water. My sisters panicked. They screamed and screamed while my father just kept staring. I tried to get up, but fell, and my sisters screamed even more. Finally, I had to order them to help me to the couch, to go out and find a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to Karl’s hospital, praying—in those days I still prayed—that he would be there.
“When I awoke, I was in a clean, white room. A nun was sitting in a chair next to my bed, reading. She was very kind, asked me how I was feeling, smiled. I was afraid to ask about my baby, afraid that it was dead and afraid that it was alive, so I said nothing, just smiled and asked for water, which Karl brought me himself, rushing into the room in his white coat just as I had so often pictured him doing. He sat on the bed, took my hand, and started crying. ‘I couldn’t save her,’ he said.
“‘It was a girl?’ I asked.
“‘Yes.’
“‘It’s not your fault. She wasn’t ready for life,’ I said, feeling neither sadness nor relief.
“Karl had performed the Caesarean himself, and then he had sat up all night with my dying daughter. She lived for six hours. I had almost died too. They had to do a transfusion—there was so much hemorrhaging.
“‘What did she look like?’ I asked.
“‘Tiny,’ he said. ‘She never opened her eyes. Like a little chick. That’s what she was like—a little chick.’
“I was in the hospital for two weeks, and Karl was with me whenever he had a moment. He slept on a cot in my room, and he brought me a radio so I could listen to music. When it was time for me to go home, he took me back to my father’s apartment. My sisters had not visited me once while I was away. They couldn’t leave my father alone. It was understood. Neither of my sisters ever said a word about my child. They didn’t say they were sorry, and my father said it was better this way since there was so little time left for all of us. I wasn’t angry at any of them.
“Weeks went by, and I refused to get out of my bed. I felt as if the world were over for me. What was I to do? I had even lost the ambivalent feeling of waiting to give birth to an unwanted child. I lay in my bed and planned gruesome ways to kill my first husband—by fire, by dagger, by blows to his head. I could hear his skull cracking in my dreams. Karl still came to visit, but I refused to go out with him. He brought me flowers, and I let them die. Later, he told me he thought I was punishing him for killing my baby. I guess he was the only one who ever loved her, but we never talked about that then.
“My father and I both got weaker and weaker. The blankets were piling up on him while I could hardly spend more than a few hours a day with my eyes open. Karl started spending the night, sleeping fitfully on the living room couch. And then, one day he burst into my room and told me that I would never see him again unless I got out of bed immediately and joined the living. I had never seen him agitated before—crying, yes, agitated, no. He had always had that doctorly calm about him, so his behavior almost frightened me. He stood in the middle of the room with his arms crossed and waited. I had no choice but to get out of bed. ‘Get dressed,’ he ordered me, and I took off my nightgown and began dressing slowly with him standing in the middle of the room, watching angrily. When I was dressed, I said, ‘And what, Doctor, am I to do now?’ because I really could not think of a thing that I could do. My sisters were taking care of my father; my sisters were cooking and cleaning; my sisters were budgeting. I had absolutely no purpose, like my dead baby.
“‘I have thought about what I am going to ask you long and hard,’ he said. ‘I can’t offer you a normal life, but if you agree, I would like for us to be married.’
“I laughed. I will never forgive myself for that laugh, even though Karl told me hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times that he was not hurt by it.
“‘You are right,’ he said. ‘It is an absurd proposal since I will never love you as a husband should love his wife.’ And then I felt my stomach sink. For the first time I felt my stomach was empty, that there was no life inside it anymore, that life was dead.”
“So you were in love with him,” Tommy said, and there were tears in his eyes that I wanted to wipe away but didn’t.
“Perhaps. Or
perhaps I was in love with his kindness.”
“Kindness! Proposing to a woman by saying he will never love her?”
“That is a form of kindness, which is so much more complicated than most people are willing to admit.”
“So you agreed? You agreed to marry him?”
“I agreed, and I didn’t even ask him why he couldn’t love me. It was a question of faith, and I knew he would tell me when the time was right. If he had told me then, I would have had to refuse.”
“Mrs. Mondschein, you are crazy.”
“I would have died in that house, Tommy. I would have followed my father to my own grave.”
“Did you have a wedding?”
“Wedding? Oh yes, there was a little ceremony at my father’s house. My father laughed like a drunken gambler who had lost all his money. He thought it was odd that we were carrying on with things when the world was so close to its end.”
“What year was it?”
“Thirty-seven still. We had not quite one year left.”
“So when did he tell you that he was a fag?”
“You knew?”
Tommy laughed and started coughing.
“Did you know all along, right from the beginning?” I asked.
“Almost right from the beginning.”
“What was it that gave him away?”
“Nothing specific. I can just tell these things. Never been wrong in my life, not since I was eleven and I first figured out there were two worlds—the straight one and the gay one.” And then he looked up to the ceiling and said very dramatically, “I can feel myself falling in love with your husband.”
“Ah, Tommy, even now you are making me jealous,” I said only half-jokingly.
“Now Mrs. Mondschein, two people do not stay together all those years if there is no love.”
“I have always observed the opposite: lovers become estranged, the others get too tired of looking for passion and grow old together.”
“If I believed that, I wouldn’t be sick.”
“Now it’s my turn to laugh. Do you really think that if you had found the right man, the two of you would be living happily ever after?”
“It’s a nice thought—helps dull the pain.”
“Does it really?”
“So when did he tell you?”
“He didn’t tell me. He showed me. He took me to a cabaret, which was more beautiful than the opera. He knew everyone, and they all called him Herr Doktor. He introduced me as his wife, and no one tittered. They bought me drinks and taught me to dance the tango. Karl preferred to watch. He would sit very elegantly at our little round table, sipping cognac, smoking, following the dancers round and round the dance floor with his eyes, smiling at the master of ceremony’s off-color jokes, nodding politely to acquaintances, clapping at the end of each cabaret number. He was very solicitous, always making sure I was comfortable, asking if I were tired. ‘Are there any Jews here?’ I remember asking him, and that was the only time he laughed at me.
“‘This is the only place where counts, officers, Jews, Englishmen, and Hungarians share the same dance floor,’ he said. When we went to the opera, we saw many of the same people. Some of us nodded quietly at each other, while some refused to nod at all; with others we exchanged a few words before settling into our separate worlds—Karl and I to the standing room section, the Count to his private box.
“Karl had a small one-room apartment with a tiny sitting room near the hospital in the Ninth District. He went about his work as a doctor while I tried to busy myself cooking French recipes and cleaning. But cleaning and cooking, I discovered, take much less time than most are willing to admit. I couldn’t figure out how these tasks could fill my two sisters’ days. But I didn’t want to bother Karl about my boredom because he was busy and because he was kind and he brought me gifts—novels, a French grammar, Egyptian cigarettes. I visited my father dutifully and invited my sisters to visit me, but they never did. They were afraid to take the trolley alone, and when I offered to pick them up so we could go together, they said they couldn’t leave my father.
“I lived for our outings to the opera and concerts and to the cabaret. I practiced dancing in our dark little sitting room, and when Karl came home tired, with stories of dead children and the lack of hospital beds, I made him dance with me until he could no longer keep standing. He never refused.”
“Were there women at the cabaret?” Tommy asked.
“Do you mean lesbians?”
“Yes, I just couldn’t say the word.” Tommy giggled.
“Yes, there was one I remember in particular—Lotte. She always sat alone in a corner and I always wanted to ask her to join us, but I never did.”
“Did you ever think about women?”
“Frankly, I never knew quite what to say to them.”
“Mrs. Mondschein, you have to remember that I am on my deathbed and dying men are allowed certain liberties, but, did you and Karl have sex?”
“Not at that time. But you are rushing me. I was enjoying the memory of my cabaret. I can practically taste the smell of French cigarettes and wet fur coats. There was a lot of snow that winter of 1937. Karl and I took long walks in the Jewish cemetery. He showed me his parents’ graves jammed in like two unnecessary teeth with all the others. That’s what those old Jewish cemeteries looked like—an old man’s mouth.”
“How could you stand it?” Tommy said.
“Stand it? It was the happiest I had ever been. I was free of my mother’s memory and the dusty apartment and the incomprehensible prayers in a language I was not allowed to study and my father’s torturous dying and the neighbors who whispered about how lucky it was the baby died.”
“Did he have lovers?”
“You are rushing me again. All in good time.”
“I’m jealous already.”
“Jealous for me or jealous for yourself?”
“Ah, Mrs. Mondschein. Jealous for both of us.”
St. Teresa’s Finger
I think my mother wouldn’t agree with me, but Mercedes kind of looks like Marisol. The one time my mother met Mercedes was when Mercedes was early picking me up to go to Bergen Youth Orchestra practice. Usually I would be waiting and as soon as I saw her car, I would run out so my mother wouldn’t see her because I knew she wouldn’t be open-minded about the leather jacket and piercings. But one time Mercedes was early, so she rang the bell and my mother answered the door and told her to come in, and then we all had to stand around chit-chatting while my mother stared at her clothes, but I don’t think Mercedes noticed my mother’s staring. She doesn’t really pay attention to that sort of thing since she’s one of those people who knows what to say to everyone, even my mother.
Mercedes has Marisol’s arms and is always wearing sleeveless T-shirts even in the winter, so everyone can see her arms. I wonder what would happen if I went up to my mother’s room right now and asked her if she thought Mercedes looked like Marisol. I wonder if that would make things worse or if she might talk. I could just go up there and ask her if she remembers that day she walked into the Barbieri with Marisol and I was there with George Liddy and then they left without me. I guess I would talk to her about it if I thought it would make a difference, but I know it won’t either way, so why bother. Maybe I should get all dressed up in my black concert dress, knock on her door, enter the room slowly so as not to startle her. Maybe all it would take is a nice dress to make her snap out of it, but I’m not in the mood for putting on a show. She, in my opinion, pays too much attention to clothes. I wouldn’t care about it at all if she kept her obsessions to herself, but she has always tried to spark a similar interest in me and we’ve had screaming, door-banging arguments about clothes. It’s so stupid, really; she has this thing about looking your best,
but she won’t accept my philosophy—that some people look their best unadorned. Of course, what makes the whole thing even more ridiculous is that she spends half her life lying around in a graying polyester nightgown and can’t even get up enough energy to put on a pair of jeans. Whenever we have the clothes argument, I remind her of this and she tells me that it is unfair to bring her illness into the argument. I think my mother would have been happiest if I were really beautiful—strikingly beautiful like a Brazilian actress instead of just normal-looking without any distinguishing features, no long legs or craggy nose or violet-green eyes. My mother is always talking about how there is so much ugliness in the world that we should try to surround ourselves with beauty to counteract it. I think she almost believes that evil can be eradicated by beauty but if I told her I thought she believed that she would just laugh and go on about all the high-ranking Nazis who played Mozart on their gramophones all through the war. Still, there are all kinds of beauty. Some are just simpler than others. And what about all the beautiful things that are also horrifyingly ugly like Francis Bacon paintings and medieval icons of Christ on the cross? Not that I have any leanings towards Christianity, but so much of my favorite music was created as a devotion to Christ—to the passion on the cross, I guess. It’s sickness and ugliness and suffering that seems to move people the most. Only today all these Christians don’t want to harp so much on the blood and gore. These days Christ on the cross looks like he’s sunbathing and kids like Jennifer Cameron smilingly make points about the power of prayer and Jesus’ love in English class no matter what we’re talking about, whether it be grammar or W. H. Auden. If only Jennifer Cameron and my mother bothered to really look at one of those paintings of Christ being taken down from the cross or listen to one of Bach’s Passions. Stare Christ in the eye. Then maybe they could see it for what it really is instead of engaging in all this worshipping and demonizing, but people seem to have a need to believe in things.
