“Oh, that’s very easy, Madame,” she had said right away. “All you have to do is see to it that you are always a little fuller above than below. Then you will just look stout, that’s all.”
“But, Mimi, how can I possibly arrange that?” I had asked a little helplessly.
“Let me do that for you,” she had answered somewhat cryptically, and told me to come again in a week.
On the appointed day she had presented me with three sizes of supplements to my upper width. Number 3 was perfectly enormous. Unbelieving, I glanced from the pinkish things on the table to Mimi, who nodded approvingly.
“Yes,” she said, “I mean it. You put them on in due time. Number 3 will even take care of twins, and no one will ever get an inkling.”
It was now September, and I was wearing Number 2. With a sigh of great relief, I noticed that the contraption seemed to work. Mr. Wagner didn’t give the slightest sign of astonishment at finding me so portly. Three cheers for Mimil
Very happy, with money in our pockets, we took our leave. No, thank you, we would not need a guide any more. We had learned how terribly simple it was to get around in New York. After Fifth Avenue comes Sixth, and Seventh; and the streets are not named after flowers, birds, trees, or famous people as they are in Europe, but they are numbered.
Now we were out for a really good meal. Months ago we had learned to read a menu from right to left; and whatever it said on the menu of the hotel dining room, which was fastened inside the elevator, it was too much. We discovered an eating place opposite the hotel called “Cafeteria.” The prices were very reasonable, and the people who owned it were Chinese and very friendly. There we assembled three times a day. The limit we could each spend for lunch was thirty-five cents; breakfast, fifteen cents; and supper, fifty cents. But at that time, in choosing wisely, one could get plenty—except me. I was always hungry. I tried so hard to restrain my appetite because a glance in the mirrors and the show windows had shown me that I was slowly taking on the dimensions of a chest of drawers. But on that first afternoon I soon felt ravenously hungry again, and went out to look for some inexpensive food. In the window of a delicatessen it said: “Sandwiches five cents.” The size of a sandwich in Europe is decided by the degree of elegance. The more elegantly you want to serve it, the smaller it will be, until it reaches the size of a silver dollar. Thinking of the size of an elegant European sandwich, I ordered ten. I had to wait a little while, and then a friendly girl came with a big tray holding ten American sandwiches! Ashamedly I must confess, I ate six.
Next morning we couldn’t find Rosmarie and Lorli. They were in none of our rooms, they were not in the lobby—where could they be? After half an hour’s frantic search, when we had almost reached the point of announcing to the police that they had been kidnapped, one of the bellboys came and notified us that they were riding up and down in the elevator.
“Yes, Mother,” and Lorli’s eyes sparkled, “up to the twenty-seventh floor. Now I can write to Susi, this is nine times as high as she lives!”
None of the people we had met on the boat lived in New York. We had no acquaintances and no friends, no letters of introduction to anybody. We discovered the New World by ourselves. We learned the difference between uptown and downtown. We found out that museums and galleries could be visited free of charge. We discovered the vast possibilities in a drug store, where on a Sunday, when everything else was closed, you could buy anything from pencils and stationery to hot water bottles, alarm clocks, and jewelry of any kind and description. We learned to sit at the counter with poise and order in the tone of an old-timer: “Ham on rye,” or “Two soft-boiled medium.”
Wherever we met fellow countrymen, we learned of true adventure stories. There was, for instance, the lady who wanted to buy cauliflower.
“How much?” she asked the grocer.
“Ninety cents,” was the answer.
“What?” She was outraged. “Behold your cauliflower. I can become cauliflower myself for forty cents around the corner!”
(Such things happen when you take words from your own language and translate them into similar-sounding words in English, thinking they mean the same thing. The word for “keep” in German is behalten, and if we want to “get” something, we say bekommen.)
Another incident happened to a priest friend of ours. When he first arrived in this country, he went to a religious house.
The lay brother who showed him to his quarters asked:
“Is there anything else you would need, Father?”
“Well,” said Father thoughtfully, “a set of new bowels every Saturday. Just hang them on the doorknob.”
The lay brother seemed so startled by this request, that Father had to point to a towel in his room to illustrate his wish.
Every morning we walked through the ravine of 55th Street out into Fifth Avenue and over to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which is as large as one of the largest cathedrals of Europe; but there on the corner of 50th Street, it was overshadowed by skyscrapers. After Father Wasner’s Mass there, we walked back to the Chinese Cafeteria.
We needed a laundry. As with everything else, it was a question of money. One morning the boys, who had walked back from Mass a different way, told us triumphantly they had discovered the cheapest laundry in town, a Chinese man who asked six cents for a pound. We collected all our dirty laundry, the Chinaman came and smiled and nodded. Two days later he came back, and we couldn’t believe our eyes. He must have boiled everything at once in one tub, and since one of our blue aprons was not color-fast, everything, every blouse, every white shirt, every handkerchief, was of the same deep blue.
We didn’t want to take the little girls on the concert tour. We looked for an inexpensive boarding school. Mr. Wagner’s office helped us. We found the Ursuline Academy in the Bronx for thirty-five dollars a month apiece. For the second time in my life, I took a trip on the subway, with fingers in my ears, eyes closed for entry and exit. When we left Rosmarie and Lorli in their new school, we felt sorry for them. They had grown up in the country surrounded by meadows and trees, and there in the Bronx there was only asphalt; not a single blade of grass was to be seen. But the Sisters were very nice and kind, and the children would learn English faster than we.
Once I wanted to visit the children and find out how they were doing; and in a transport of courage, I walked myself down to the subway. Although I had learned that there was more than one drug store, I had not learned that there was more than one subway line in New York. I also disregarded the warning signs: “Uptown—Downtown,” and felt proud to see myself finally sitting in a fast train because, so I decided, that would bring me there quicker. When the train stopped for good and all the people got out, I learned that I was far away from the Bronx. The funniest thing of all was that the subway had been metamorphosed into an elevated, and instead of walking up to the street, I had to walk down. There I was completely forlorn. But again to my rescue—a policeman. This time he was sitting in a car.
“Dear Mr. Cop Inspector,” I said confidently, “help! Children in school. Bronx. How come?”
This he couldn’t possibly know, but he understood me perfectly.
“You want to go there? Come on, get in my car.”
We drove and drove.
All of a sudden he turned around and said:
“Tunnel, river above.”
I closed my eyes, and I’m sure I went pale. What a terribly dangerous place this New York was with elevateds, escalators, subways, and tunnels. He got me safely to my Bronx convent, and the New York policemen had another jewel in their crown.
This whole trip was a mistake. When my little girls saw me, they clung to me and didn’t want to let me go, crying bitterly at the final farewell so that I could hear them for more than a block. It was heart-breaking.
We really didn’t need any organized sight-seeing trip through New York. Every time we stepped out of the hotel it became a sight-seeing tour. There were, for instance, the fire escapes, those e
nchanting, winding stairs outside of the houses. The trolley cars and the buses were different from the ones at home. There were news stands with so terrifically many different papers and magazines, and the newspapers themselves of the size of sheets for a baby’s bed. Enchanted, we watched men climbing on something like a throne and cute little colored boys falling over their shoes in a holy fury until they were as shiny as mirrors—and this right on the street! Why didn’t people all stop and watch? Well, and then the people! There were Negroes, men, women, and children. Oh, and what cute children! There were Chinese people—maybe they were Japanese, one didn’t know. Most of them talked English, but we also heard Italian and German, Yiddish and Greek. And there was the climate. Although it was now October, it was hot and damp, quite different from Salzburg. Then there was the speed. What an experience to go down Broadway for the first time when the movies were over. What a noise, what light, what a rush; or to cross Fifth Avenue around noon, or Wall Street at five o’clock. All this first and most overwhelming sight-seeing in New York didn’t cost much. It was thrilling and frightening—it was wonderful and terrible—these first steps into a new continent: our discovery of America!
While the others explored the city, finding places like the Public Library, Central Park, Radio City—Barbara and I preferred to stay home in the hotel. My mind was stubbornly set on learning English. I read every advertisement in subways, on buses, on street corners, and in elevators. I memorized the menus, and with the help of a small dictionary, started to read a copy of The Reader’s Digest. I was envious of Father Wasner, who already read without a dictionary. Rupert was outrageously good. He had been presented by one of the ladies on the boat with a fat book, called Gone With the Wind, and he was already half through it. I wanted so badly to catch up with them.
I invented a method all my own, in which I wanted to apply what I had learned about one word to as many like-sounding words as I could find. This proved later to be fatally wrong, and it still haunts my English of today. For instance, I had learned: freeze—frozen. I wrote underneath in my precious little notebook: “squeeze—squozen,” and “sneeze—snozen.” Proudly I talked about someone being a “thunkard,” explaining wordily that I had thought if drinking much makes a person a drunkard, so thinking much, like that professor I had in mind makes him a “thunkard.” When I admired the tall “hice” in New York, I got quite offended because they seemed to overlook the logical similarity between “mouse—mice” and “house—hice.” I talked about the “reet” of my teeth, feeling perfectly correct in doing so. Wasn’t it “foot-feet,” after all?
Especially is it bad if you translate the Bible literally. The effect was tremendous when I informed a group of people with whom I had come to talk in the lobby, that: “The ghost was willing, but the meat was soft.”
But what a triumph you have after so much trouble and work, after so many unexpected fits of laughter, after hours of spelling and learning by heart, when one day the nice colored man in the elevator says to you:
“Ma’m, yo’ English is getting better every day.”
From then on you can hardly discover any trace of an accent in your speech. You feel rewarded for all the blood, sweat, and tears of the last weeks’ English battle.
Then comes the great day when you feel like graduating. The man at the desk asks you sincerely and confidently:
“How many years did you study English before you came to this country, Madam?”
Mr. Wagner must have made a mistake when he said, “The first ten years are the hardest.” He must have meant the first ten days!
III Getting Settled
THE day arrived when a big blue bus with the inscriptions “Special Coach” and “Trapp Family Choir” quivered in front of the Hotel Wellington, swallowing the fifty-six bags and the ten members of the Trapp Family Choir. As we had no home in America, we had to take all our luggage with us. A friendly, broad-shouldered driver greeted us. Very soon he grasped the idea that his was the noble task of introducing us into American ways of thinking and living, as we were the greenest greenhorns he had ever driven over American soil.
He did a perfect job. From time to time he used to holler:
“Let me explain something to you!”
That was a warning which made everyone stop doing whatever he was doing whether it was eating, sleeping, reading, or merely looking out the window, and listen enraptured to an explanation such as, for instance: “This is the largest airplane factory in the world” or, “Now we are coming into Kentucky—hillbillies and moonshine.” Remarks like this were somewhat mysterious to us. In my little dictionary I could find neither “hillbillies” nor “moonshine,” but somehow it was an impression of the State of Kentucky which stuck with me for years.
But all that came later. First the blue bus drove to Easton, Pennsylvania, up the steep hill to Lafayette College for our first concert. Mr. Wagner and all his office staff had come. All of a sudden we became conscious of the fact that this was not just another country—this time we had crossed an ocean; this was now a new continent, and tonight was the first concert. Would it be a success or a failure? These reflections made us more and more solemn, and when finally the great moment came and we had to step out into the footlights, we felt again as miserable and self-conscious as we had way back in Salzburg. But there was no Lotte Lehmann sitting in the first row. A thinnish applause greeted the bashful newcomers.
Applause! A whole book could be written about it. The innocent reader might think that applause is applause. How wrong he is! If he only knew how many shades of applause exist, and how finely the ear of the artist is tuned to it. There is the thunderous applause of the later years, when you come back to a hall which is packed with people who are looking forward to your return. How heartwarming and inspiring! There is the polite, thin applause, lasting not long enough to let you get to the middle of the stage to make your bow—the mild applause for the newcomer or beginner—not very helpful. There is the hardly audible applause delivered by society ladies in gloves at morning musicales, and sustained by politely covered yawns. You don’t care much because if you have advanced to morning musicales, you don’t mind any more. There is the warm, lengthy, enthusiastic applause after a good concert from a sincere audience, demanding encores. That makes you forget your tiredness and makes your encores the best numbers of your program. There is the routine applause of well-educated people, the concert public, people whose ancestors had attended the goings on of Symphony Hall, Orchestra Hall, or Town Hall; who, while they applaud, mildly and steadily, gaze with raised eyebrows into their programs, questioning: “Who was that fellow Palestrina, or Vittoria, or Thomas Morley? We have never heard of them before, but it was quite nice.” These are the staunch supporters of musical life, the ones who give a newcomer a chance.
Later you learn to accept applause as a challenge, and to work up a concert from the “thinnish” to the “enthusiastic” response—at all cost.
But that is later, and this was our first performance in the New World. In looking over the program now, we know: first, it was much too long; second, too serious. What helped us to perform the miracle, to reap at the end some really enthusiastic applause, must have been our wholehearted sincerity. The people in the packed auditorium simply couldn’t help feeling, whatever they saw and heard on that stage—brilliance of performance or mistakes in stage presence—it was all a hundred per cent genuine. It came from the heart, and that’s why they took it to heart. After each group when we came backstage, Mr. Wagner’s face looked a little less tortured, and Georg finally even whispered:
“He said it’s going fine.”
But at the end of this evening we were perfectly exhausted. After a whole concert tour nowadays we are not so “out” as we were in Easton, Pennsylvania, on that memorable October day.
But you get that excited only once. Slowly it becomes a routine, the bowing and smiling, coming and going.
Very soon we found out that the concerts were not the hardes
t part of the evenings. That started with the receptions. The very word we learned to dread. We were lined up in a row, and people started to file by, murmuring their names and insisting that they were very glad to meet us, or that they had enjoyed every minute of the concert. You try very hard to meet each remark with a genuine smile and say something intelligent. After a few dozen times you have exhausted your meager vocabulary, and even the smile on your face freezes into a permanent wave. You forgot to change the rings from your right hand to your left, and you don’t dare do it now, but regret bitterly this grave mistake. You wonder how many inhabitants Roanoke, or Springfield, or Lexington has. You start wondering whether these are all newcomers, or whether the first ones have lined up again and are coming for a second round of hand-shaking. You inhale deeply the fragrance of fresh coffee, and you become conscious of the queer varieties of ladies’ hats. All of a sudden you feel a deep affection welling up in your heart for the one person whom you see approaching: the last one.
For a moment you look down on a limp member of your body which was once your right hand. The ordeal is over.
Georg especially hated that kind of torture with all his heart. I hardly dared look at him when, after a concert, the chairman of the Ladies’ Committee would announce cheerfully:
“And now we have a little reception.”
Who could describe my astonishment, however, when one evening as we were lined up as usual, I noticed a mischievous light in my husband’s eyes after we had already greeted at least a couple of hundred ladies. He simply beamed and said something to each one. I had to find out, and moved closer and closer, until I had, all of a sudden, to use my handkerchief to suppress a severe attack of coughing. I had heard him say in our native tongue:
“376, 377, 378…”
And each lady answered, quite flattered:
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers Page 15
