Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.)

by Ingeborg Day

  But there is a surprise at the end. A procession forms down the aisle behind a man carrying the Torah, as intricate and shiny and decorative as the monstrance carried by the priest, he walks under an embroidered canopy, little girls run ahead to throw floppy peony petals in his path, each of us had a basketful and we hoarded them, the procession was a lot less fun once you’d run out of petals; kneeling at the side of the road in last year’s First Communion dress with the hem let out; the night before, my mother would moisten my hair with sugar water and braid it tightly while fireworks rumbled on the hills behind Graz, dreadful Good Friday was over and that limbo of a Saturday too, Easter tomorrow; it would hang to my waist in a cloud, sticky and popular with flies, licentious, the only day of the year when I’m allowed outside with my hair hanging loose, I feel it float behind me as I run.

  The reception is next. “I hope you don’t mind,” Andy has said, apologetically but firmly. “You’re only invited to that, the lunch is just sort of for the family.”

  The small, upstairs room is filled with smiling and chattering people. I spot a chair between the end of a long table and the wall, with a wall behind it. Perfect, I think. But though this method of making myself unapproachable has served me well at many parties, it does not work here. A white-haired man smiles at me broadly and offers me a glass of wine, an elderly woman hands me a plate with something whitish on it. “Gefilte fish,” she says as I wince inside. Her smile is as warm as her predecessor’s. What a speech, she says, and didn’t he do well with his Hebrew? Such a lovely boy! She used to teach, Andy’s father had been one of her pupils, why aren’t you eating? she says, eat! I gobble the dreadful stuff as if it were vanilla pudding. Across the room, Andy seems in the grip of a powerful drug. It gives a reckless shine to his eyes and robs him of all expressions but a dazed smile.

  When I notice that the rabbi is putting on his coat I introduce myself and tell him how thoughtful I find it that he had taken the pains to preach an hour-long sermon so uniquely appropriate for Andy. “Oh, really?” he says, tucking a scarf around his throat. “I wasn’t aware of that, I don’t really know him very well.” In an effort not to laugh out loud, I watch him rumble down the stairs. When I find Andy’s mother to thank her, she says, “Oh, well, we really would like you to come to lunch, a restaurant near here, do come.”

  The adults sit at a long table, Andy and his friends at a small one. How nice, I think, he has a separate party, but why is he made to sit at a kiddie table today, of all days? (“Becoming a man, I ask you, what is that supposed to mean? Right then? Right there? How can I be a boy one day and a man the next?”) I do not ask either Andy’s father to my right or his former teacher to my left about the philosophy behind the seating arrangements, I ask no questions at all, I am determined to blend in as best I can. This is not just another lunch celebrating someone’s birthday or raise. Most of the Jews I know are my age and single, I see them at work or at parties or over small dinners. I have never been at a gathering as intimate as this one, young Jews and old ones, family and friends.

  Drinks are ordered, more drinks, appetizers, soup, wine, we’re on our way. The party has been animated from the start and soon turns very lively. Joke follows joke, now there seem to be several in progress at once. Clusters of people burst into laughter in short succession, the bantering on one end of the table blooms into heated argument as diners join in one by one, the level of excitement in the voices around me spells impending melee. Yet throughout, there is a curious lack of edge to it all. These noisy exchanges herald neither fistfights nor broken friendships. I have no memories of such a gathering, none. Instead, I carry with me a string-wrapped parcel of longing for just such a table, just such raucousness and ease. The mute meals at my grandparents’ farm, physical exhaustion as palpable as food, the adults around me battered into silence as if by Thorazine; a plate on my mother’s nightstand; wordless meals later, my brother (fresh from another thrashing by his father) aloof as if dining on Mars; my first lunch with a classmate, a uniformed maid waiting on two eleven-year-olds, a room just to eat in and a cloth napkin for the first time, my equal at school a remote princess now, formidable . . . This is what I’ve missed? A table of Jews annoying other restaurant patrons with their exuberance? They give us sidelong glances, one man catches my eye and frowns, I wink at him and grin, he turns his back. One voice booms above all others. A large man from the other end of the table has begun to squeeze his bulk in my direction, balancing his heaped plate and silverware above his head, roaring, “Ingeborg my wife wants us to trade seats, she loves writers and wants to talk to yoooo-hoooo!”

  Fake an upset stomach, a leg cramp, a forgotten appointment, too late. I pick up my plate, murmur “Excuse me” to my neighbors, and find myself ensconced between Andy’s mother and the woman who loves writers. She has a florid face and wears a low-cut blouse dripping with lace. “My husband is right,” her voice is as resonant as his. “I do love writers. Now tell me all about it, what kind of book are you writing?”

  Panic manipulates my vocal cords. “It’s, I’m, uh . . . it’s an erotic epic poem.”

  I want to kiss everyone around me. They’ve burst out laughing, a man proposes a toast, the woman across from me raises her eyebrows and repeats my words, slowly drawing out each syllable, there is a new round of laughter, someone begins to tell a joke, a toast now to the Bar Mitzvah boy. But Andy has been sitting on a banquette, the table before him is heavy, the boys across from him have wedged their captain’s chairs against it, he cannot straighten his knees. “Get up, Andy,” says his father and, more loudly, “Get up!” Andy, in a half crouch that gives him no leverage, pushes against the table. His face turns red. I stand still and upright, glass in hand. “Come on,” shouts his father, “damn it, straighten your knees, son, stand up!” The boy lets his hair fall over his eyes. Two men finally move the table. “A toast to my son on this great occasion, to my wonderful son.”

  When we sit down, the mood has changed. Until I leave, the first guest to do so and taking with me an extra piece of Andy’s mother’s cake, I listen in silence to stories about relatives fleeing Poland.

  Toward late afternoon Andy calls. “Can I come up? My parents are taking a nap.” He brings along a stocky, slow-spoken friend, the two boys are each other’s perfect foils. Andy talks incessantly and at great speed, swiveling in my typing chair until he has to hold his head in his hands. The comparative merits of teachers, does God exist? a brief excursion on the topic of hookers, life after death, science fiction, he is in extraordinary form. “How can you believe that Jesus came back to life?” he asks his friend, who frowns but does not answer. “Do you really believe that? Really, truly?” “Yeah,” says the friend. “But how can you?” says Andy, and launches into a series of concisely presented logical arguments against such an occurrence, a body’s tendency to decompose figuring as leitmotiv. I do my best to keep my expression bland. The stocky boy has refused to take off his heavily padded parka and eyes me sideways from under heavy lids. No counterargument is forthcoming. Andy pushes. “Come on,” he says, “say something, come on, what do you say?” The other boy looks up and says, carefully enunciating each word, “Get off my back.” “But why?” insists Andy, he is flying high, if he has not become a man today he might temporarily be an angel disguised as a slender boy on speed, adrenaline has set him afloat, a beatific speed freak smiling a beatific smile, swiveling maniacally, his insinuating voice at odds with a rapid-fire delivery, “Just tell me why. . . .” “The Church says so,” growls the stocky boy. “My mother says so, get off my back.” “Oh,” says Andy, and, “Well,” and, “Even so, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it, does it?” But his friend is sullen now and a few minutes later he has to go home.

  Any other time I would have sent Andy on the errand I need done before the neighborhood stores close, but somehow that doesn’t seem appropriate today. Since he does not appear ready to leave, I ask him to come along with me. The errand is accomplished in a few
minutes. We stand on a sloshy sidewalk, our hands in our pockets, I thank him again for his invitation. Does he want to go someplace and have dinner? No, he says, he’s been eating all day. A soda then? Yes, he’ll have a soda. Our table is slick with grease, the floor littered and sticky. You could have bought him a glass of wine somewhere, I think, what a paltry way to end the day, sitting in a miserable Burger King. He tells me about his latest finds, gleaned during hours spent in secondhand record stores. “You have to read the titles on the spines, sideways, that’s how they’re lined up on the shelves, it gives you a pain in the neck.” He often buys a record for the sound of a group’s name, Arkansas . . . Lonely . . .

  Chapter 80

  My daughter, Ursula, and I are spending Christmas in Graz. There is the tree, bare, having been brought into the apartment on the morning of Christmas Eve. It is being decorated by my sister-in-law and her two children and my remaining one. There are the candles (“What? Fire hazard? Who ever heard of a Christmas tree catching afire . . .”), there is tinsel, there are intricate homemade ornaments of woven straw. Toward evening my brother’s parents-in-law arrive with their son. My brother lights the candles. My niece, who has my mother’s and my son’s light hair, recites a poem, shy and exuberant at once. My nephew, who has my color hair and my son’s mouth and chin, plays a violin so tiny it seems made for a doll. My brother smiles at his son steadily and encouragingly, and when he winces, only once and with amusement, the boy does not notice. My niece plays a Christmas carol on the piano and her mother accompanies her on the flute. Finally, my brother plays the guitar as we all sing “Stille Nacht.” Here this song is sung only once a year, on Christmas Eve, it is not just any carol; a village schoolmaster and the organist of the local church had concocted that song in December 1818, when the organ in their snowed-in Austrian mountain village had broken down and they’d been determined to have special music for Christmas, after all. I think, but do not say, that a continent away, beginning the day after Thanksgiving, this song repeats itself every hour on the hour, an integral part of Holiday Season Muzak in New York City’s office-building elevators.

  We open our presents then, and while the children finger their new toys amid capitalist-size heaps of wrapping paper the adults drink a Bowle made by my sister-in-law. “You start it in the spring,” she says, “and you add whatever fruits you like, as they come into season, apricots, berries.” The brew slides down easy as the most harmless of wines, deceptive and potent.

  My daughter is entranced, it is her first Austrian Christmas. So am I, it is my first as an adult.

  Chapter 81

  On New Year’s Eve we celebrate early. Ursula and I need to return to our hotel, our plane is scheduled for nine in the morning, our train to Vienna leaves Graz at six a.m. The first snow of the winter has started to come down in midafternoon. By late evening (Ursula packs methodically, occasionally throwing a disapproving glance at my more haphazard methods but refraining from comment) the snow has become the snow of my childhood. Fat flakes descend in a profusion so dense that looking at it coming down, trying to focus on it, makes your head spin.

  Toward midnight I order a small bottle of champagne. The room-service clerk is flushed and amiable, I tip him recklessly. We open the window wide, its two tall wings fold back into the room. We wrap a down comforter around us and lean out into the snow, a few flakes melt into our champagne. To our right we can see a portion of the Main Square and half of my Rathaus, no flags. The bells start to ring, every church bell in Graz rings, it’s midnight. Windows all around us are flung open, parties are at their height behind each of the glowing squares, revelers shout New Year’s greetings to strangers leaning out of windows across the street, down the block, to us; firecrackers pop and dazzle, the bells clamor on.

  In front of the Rathaus—we just miss seeing it but we can hear it clearly—a band begins to play. At a streetcar stop nearby, a group of people huddles in the snow. We watch two figures glide off the sidewalk and onto the streetcar tracks, they put their arms around each other and begin to waltz. The group dissolves as if on stage, on cue, it’s all couples now in heavy boots and coats and hats, waltzing. The bells ring, the invisible band plays, the small, bundled-up figures twirl as if weightless in the deserted street. When the streetcar comes along its driver stops his engine a distance down the tracks, he waits while the waltz rouses and spins to its end. Ursula, her champagne gone and possibly gone to her dear, half-Austrian head, leans far over the edge of the windowsill, checking the sidewalk below. Then she smiles at me and winks and throws up her arm, the sleeve of her nightgown falls back from her round and smooth little elbow, as smooth and round as only my mother’s has ever been. She flings the empty glass up and out into the air. By now there is too much snow on the ground for us to hear it land.

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  About the Author

  INGEBORG DAY published Ghost Waltz in 1980, two years after she published Nine and a Half Weeks under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill. She was an editor at Ms. magazine when both books were published. She died in 2011 at the age of seventy.

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  Copyright

  Cover design by Andrea Cardenas

  Cover photograph © Imagno / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1980 by The Viking Press.

  GHOST WALTZ. Copyright © 1980 by Ingeborg Day. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2014.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows:

  Day, Ingeborg.

  Ghost waltz.

  1. Day, Ingeborg. 2. Austria—Biography. 3. United States—Biography. I. Title.

  CT918.D39A3 943.6’052 80-16411

  ISBN 0-670-29485-3

  ISBN 978-0-06-231000-2 (pbk.)

  EPUB Edition JUNE 2014 ISBN 9780062310019

  14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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