“That ought to cover it,” I said. “If we don’t leave a tip.”
“If we don’t leave a tip, that guy will come out and spank us.”
We stretched our legs and watched a group of well-dressed people walk past us on the way to their tables.
“I guess they all have baby-sitters,” Ann said, staring at them. “How did we come to this? I mean, motherhood.”
“Oh, in the usual way,” I said, filching one of her cigarettes. “Unless you and Winnie did something weird.”
“It’s like a costume party,” Ann said. “You put on some silly dress and you get married. Then you put on an even sillier dress when you’re pregnant. You find yourself wearing the same thing day after day and you’re a mother.”
“I often wonder about my own mother,” I said. “I remember her closet. Blue tissue paper. Ostrich shoes. Little shoe trees made of some kind of stuffed fabric. Those things you hang on hangers that make your closet smell good. Lingerie bags.”
“Life was different then,” Ann said. “We missed out on the silver tea services and the frilly aprons. I remember my mother sitting with us when we played with clay and she was wearing a dress.”
“My mother cooked with a white pinafore over her suit,” I said. “I guess we don’t make it as real adults. For instance, do you remember your mother coming back from the hairdresser?”
Ann blew a smoke ring. “I haven’t been to the hairdresser since I had that green streak put in.”
“How I loved your green streak,” I said. “I’ve been so hoping you’d put in another.”
At the exact moment our glass and cup were empty, the waiter reappeared.
“Is there anything else I could possibly get you?” he said.
“You could get us a different waiter, but we’d be happy to have the check,” Ann said.
Out on the street she said, “Well, we’ll never be welcome in there again.”
“Oh, to hell with them,” I said. “They’re open for lunch. We’ll take the boys. That’ll show ’em.”
We ambled around the neighborhood. Our usual haunts were closed. The park lay quiet and still. In the dark the jungle gym looked like the bones of a prehistoric creature. The C&P Cafe was closed and the gates were locked over the windows. The evening dog walkers were out, wandering down the street with the abstracted look that seems to go with dog walking. The air was misty and still and there were haloes on the streetlights.
“It’s so mournful here at night,” I said. “I guess it’s time to go home, or perhaps you’d like to invite me in for a sleep-over.”
“Swell,” Ann said. “I’ll send Winnie over to Johnny. Gosh, look at us. Renegade matrons on the loose.”
We walked around the corner. The street spread before us, house after house full of yellow light. Carefully parked cars. Carefully planted front gardens. Fuzzy buds on the trees.
“I used to live in a loft in Chinatown,” Ann said, yawning. “Can you imagine?”
“And I spent my youth in a tour bus,” I said. “And now look.”
Johnny was waiting for me outside on the stoop.
“I gave your mother a lecture,” he said. “She apologizes. I told her she should be proud to have such an upstanding daughter with such intact values. I told her you find compromise intolerable and because of that Little Franklin will grow up to be another Abraham Lincoln.”
“My hero,” I said.
“It’s easy for me,” he said. “She’s not my mother.”
As we went up the stairs I felt a warm surge of optimism. I would call the Hansonia Society. They would hire me because of my intact values. Little Franklin would grow up to be another Abraham Lincoln. I would find my place in life. It seemed, for the moment, a total snap.
PART FOUR
Goodbye Without Leaving
45
The office of the Hansonia Society was a series of small, connecting rooms. I had called up and a man’s voice said that they were in fact looking for someone to do part-time work and told me to come for an interview. I set off on a fine morning, a week after Franklin’s school started.
The door to the office was frosted glass. Painted in gold letters, backed in black, was a list of names:
THE HANSONIA SOCIETY
HANSOPHIE RECORDS
BERNARD REGENSTEIN, AGENT AND EXECUTOR
THE KINDERVATER TRUST
VOGELWEIDE PUBLICATIONS
I opened the door. There, sitting at a calculator with a scowl on his face, was a person I took to be somewhat my senior. He was wearing an expensive cashmere sweater with a silk ascot, and he ran his fingers through disarranged, thinning hair.
“Yes?” he said without looking up.
“I came about the job,” I said. “I’m Geraldine Coleshares.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, still fixated on his calculator. “Can you type?”
“Oh, well enough,” I said airily.
The young man finally looked up.
“Well enough for what?” he said.
“Well enough for a graduate student, I guess I mean.”
“Are you a graduate student?”
“I’m a mother,” I said.
“Really? The mother of what?”
“I mean, I’m not a graduate student at the moment. I used to be one. I have a little boy who’s three.”
“Do you also have any office skills?”
I had never asked myself this question and now I found I had to think about the answer.
“I was a researcher,” I said. “At the Race Music Foundation. The Reverend Willhall sent me to you.”
The man looked totally blank.
“Are you Bernard Regenstein?” I said.
“I am Bernard Regenstein, Junior.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “Well, then I must have spoken to your father.”
“My father is in London.”
“But didn’t I speak to him on the telephone?”
“You spoke to me. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got the job.”
I stared at Bernard Regenstein, Jr., who, I began to see, was gazing intently at the front of my sweater.
“This is very confusing,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me what this job is?” I had never had a job interview before but it seemed to me that this could not possibly be a normal one.
“We need someone to answer letters, answer the telephone and, in general, help out. This is a very small office. It’s just me, my mother and my father.”
A loud series of barking coughs could be heard from an inner office.
“That’s Dr. Frechtvogel,” Bernard junior said. “He doesn’t really work here. He kind of sits here.”
“I see,” I said.
“What we really need is someone who doesn’t have a lot of fixed ideas about how an office should be, because we get a lot of crazy types in here. My father also represents a lot of writers and illustrators. Mostly they’re refugees and they sort of hang around. A lot of people would find that strange in an office.”
I said it sounded fine to me and that I had no fixed ideas whatsoever about offices. At that moment a very old man, of medium height and a shuffling gait, appeared. He wore an aged blue suit, a sweater vest, white shirt and skinny black tie. Stuck in the corner of his mouth was a little cigar which shed ashes down his front. His skin was as translucent as parchment, with the same sheen, but his hair was brown, and his immense eyebrows shot up from his little eyes, giving him the look of an astonished beaver.
“Who is this voman?” he said. He pronounced his w’s as v’s.
“Ludo, this is Geraldine Coleshares, who is going to work here.”
“How do you do?” he barked, extending his hand. His hand was pale and soft and had probably never done anything more strenuous than hold a pen or a cigar.
“This is Dr. Ludwig Frechtvogel,” Bernard junior said.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked.
“In Vienna everyone is a doctor,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “I am a d
octor of law. Are you capable of hard work?”
“I think I am,” I said.
“Yes, but what can you do? Anyone can work hard,” Dr. Frechtvogel said.
“I used to be a researcher,” I said. “I researched female blues singers of the twenties and thirties. I did archive work.”
Dr. Frechtvogel peered at me. A cloud of blue smoke hung between us. Never since my days on tour with Ruby had I seen anyone able to talk, yell and never once take the cigar out of his mouth. I had once stood in absolute wonderment when a blues belter named Bones O’Dell who opened for us did an entire set without removing his cheroot.
“And before?” demanded Dr. Frechtvogel. “These are the things Buddy has forgotten to ask you.”
“Are you Buddy?” I said to Bernard, Junior, who was clearly embarrassed.
“It’s my family nickname,” he said.
“And before?” barked Dr. Frechtvogel. “What did you do before, or did you do nothing?”
“I was a backup singer for a rock and roll act called Ruby and Vernon Shakely,” I said, looking Dr. Frechtvogel straight in the eye. “I was a backup singer and dancer. I was a Shakette.”
“Very nice!” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “A Shakette. What is this?”
“It’s not the sort of thing you might put on your résumé,” I said, although I had no résumé.
“This is not an office,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “It is a lunatic asylum. You will see. Dancing experience may come in handy.”
“He likes you,” Buddy said. “You’ve got the job.”
“What about money?” I said. “What about your parents?”
“Oh, money,” said Buddy grandly. “Come over by the calculator and we’ll work out what you want. As for my mother and father, they’ll be happy to have someone here. Our last office person just quit.”
“A catastrophe,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “A nice, steady young man.”
The telephone rang. “Answer it,” said Buddy. “Let’s see how you do.”
“What do I say?” I asked.
“You figure it out,” said Buddy.
“Hansonia Society,” I said. “Good morning.”
A sweet, girlish voice asked for someone called Ludovic. I covered the receiver with my hand. “Is there someone called Ludovic?” I asked.
“This is myself!” said Dr. Frechtvogel, snatching the telephone from my hands.
“Hello!” he barked, and continued the conversation in what sounded like angry German. Then he shouted “Servus!” and slammed the telephone down.
“Mrs. Rosenstiel,” Buddy said to me. “One of his girlfriends.”
“What does ‘servus’ mean?”
“It’s a sort of sign-off from old Vienna,” Buddy said. He looked down at the papers on his desk. “Can you start tomorrow?”
I was unprepared for this, but why couldn’t I start tomorrow? I would take Little Franklin to school, and then what? I could start my job. I could go up to the office at school and give Bernice, the secretary, an actual work number. What a statement! Then everyone could tell me how I was endangering the welfare of my child by working, just as they had once told me that he was being warped by my not working. Three days a week I would be wearing grown-up work clothes, as opposed to grubby child-care clothes. Sure, I said.
Out in the street, I did not call Johnny. I called Mary Abbott from a pay phone to tell her my interesting news and then I went off to pick up my boy.
46
“I’ve never heard of these people,” said my mother. “Who did you say they were?”
“I said they were called Regenstein. And I can’t imagine why you would have heard of them. They started out as collectors of delta blues singers.”
“I suppose you’ll have to get some sort of baby-sitter for Franklin,” my mother said, stirring her coffee.
“I won’t!” I said brightly. “Because I’m only working part-time.”
Oh, mothers! What did they mean to say? Did she mean it was a good thing or a bad thing that Franklin would not have a baby-sitter? Was I doing the right thing or the wrong thing by going to work?
A baby-sitter—if I had said there would be no baby-sitter—would have been a better choice in my mother’s eyes, because my job would take up my energy and I would be tired and therefore unable to give Little Franklin the full attention he deserved when I came home from work. Had I said I had decided to get a baby-sitter, my mother would have doubtless told me how bad for Franklin this might be, since no baby-sitter can ever love and console a child as a mother can, and so on. This, of course, was the conflict of my mother’s generation, lavishly handed down to mine. Why hadn’t I seen it before? I remembered the baby-sitters I had had as a child—older women I and my little friends had tried to torture as my mother sat in her studio, torn between her desire to paint and her responsibilities as a parent. There was no end to these things—they were like laundry. You felt that you had gotten them clean and folded and put away and suddenly there they were—a tangled mess, everywhere you looked.
I said, “You know, Ma, you were lucky. You had work you loved to do and you could do it at home. The work I loved to do I had to go on tour to do. You can’t do that sort of thing and have a child and a husband.”
“That’s all in the past, darling,” said my mother. “Now you ought to find something you can be happy with. This new job sounds very minimal. What about going back to school?”
Or going to law school or writing a book or consulting on a documentary film about rock and roll? How about deciding on a singing career? What about finding someone like Doo-Wah and putting together an act? How about finding something that would put my heart at rest?
“It’ll come along,” I said. “Right now I’m going to work part-time and hang out with Little Franklin, since my days are numbered in that regard.”
“Well,” said my mother. “What are your other friends up to? I never hear you mention Mary anymore. Did you two have a falling out?”
“She’s going to be a nun,” I said.
“Oh, good gracious!” said my mother. “You girls! What next? Why ever is she doing that?”
“Well, Ma, she is a Catholic, you know.”
“Darling, there are millions of Catholics. That’s hardly a sufficient reason. Oh, her poor parents!”
“She feels she’s being called,” I said. “She’s going to enter a monastery upstate. They keep a farm and spin their own wool.”
My mother looked pained. “Farming and spinning,” she said. “Why?”
“They live by the rule of St. Benedict. Work and pray, live self-sufficiently. I’ve done a lot of reading about it. It sounds very nice. I find it restful to think about.”
“I’m sure they don’t let Jewish women with children into monasteries,” my mother said.
These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture—a picture you did not have to paint yourself.
“Perhaps this new job of yours will lead to something else,” my mother said.
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps I’ll get the Nobel Prize in physics.”
“Now, Geraldine,” my mother said.
“Now, Mom,” I said. “My instinct tells me this is the right job for me.”
“But you say that young man hired you the minute you walked in the door. He knows nothing about you.”
“It’s just as well,” I said. “Maybe his instinct told him to hire me.”
“Oh, you young people,” said my mother. “Instincts. Monasteries. What does it all mean?”
From down the hall we suddenly heard Little Franklin. “Mama,” he called. “Can I have some ice cream right this minute?”
“Our little prince is up,” said my mother. “Darling,” she called to him. “Your Nanny is here and she has hazelnut ice cream for you.”
At these words Little Franklin came bounding down the hall. Hazelnut ice cream was my mother’s ace in the hole. She led Franklin, who had
not bothered to acknowledge me in any way, into the kitchen. Several minutes later I found them deep in conversation.
“Is there any ice cream left for me?” I asked.
“Not too much,” said Little Franklin putting his little hand over his dish.
47
My first meeting with Bernard Regenstein, Sr., was not auspicious. He had coughed in my direction and then disappeared into his office. For a long time, if he wanted me, he called to Gertje (who instructed me not to call her Mrs. Regenstein) to fetch me. I often felt he was unclear about my name, and for months after I had been hired I would find the occasional note to me addressed to the man I had succeeded.
Bernard was tall and cranelike, and he stooped like a crane. He had a beautifully formed, egg-shaped head, bald and polished. He wore old, tweed jackets with a long silk opera scarf around his neck. In winter he wore a beret and an enormous old raccoon coat. He was delicate in his lungs, Gertje said, although he smoked a pipe. The imported tobacco he preferred was kept in stock at the smoke shop in the lobby.
Gertje was a big, handsome woman who wore a cape. Her hair was cut rather like Franklin’s, but longer and gray. She had a bobbed nose and hazel eyes. Her face was a mesh of fine, distinguished lines. It was clear she had been a great beauty in her youth.
On my first day she had held out her hand and said, “How lovely to meet you!” as if I had been a tea guest. “How clever of Buddy to hire you! Our dear Paul Robinson left us just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “He was studying science. And when his fellowship came through … pffft! Vanished!”
She had a sweet, girlish voice. Her accent had mellowed, but not much. After a month or so at the Regenstein office I began to think that it was a feature of all German women to have beautiful voices.
I answered the telephone, typed letters, made photocopies and filed letters. I also began the task of reading my way through the files. In the Regenstein office was a copy (or a photocopy) of everything Hans and Sonia Regenstein had ever written. An entire file drawer was devoted to contracts concerning another of their classic texts, Music of All People, a book every schoolchild in the Western Hemisphere had been brought up with.
Goodbye Without Leaving Page 15
