Hans and Sonia Regenstein had plunged into the culture of their adopted country with a passion. They had written several books for young people, What Our Colonists Wore and What the Pilgrims Ate, as well as Musical Instruments and Interests of Colonial People. They had written monographs on corn-husk dolls, chain-gang songs and quilting styles.
What interested me most about them was why two cultivated Europeans from the Old World would come to this country and find themselves in a Studebaker with a lot of primitive recording equipment, listening to old blues men and women in the middle of the Deep South.
“I will tell you something,” Gertje said. “Bernard’s aunt and uncle came here and they fell in love. You Americans have no idea what this country looks like to a European. The old world was crumbling. They felt that terrible things were about to happen. They did not think Hitler would simply go away. Hans was in the first war—a Jewish war hero. His comrades believed that no one would harm a Jewish war hero—they all perished! Hans and Sonia came here and they saw a big, open country with lots of room and lots of food. Bananas! Pineapples! I myself was a grown woman before I ever tasted such things, and I was rich as a girl. A huge country where everyone speaks one language! The army does not try to overthrow the government! A constitution! No kings or royalty! Paradise.” She took a sip of coffee from a blue and red cup.
No matter how long Gertje had lived in this country, no matter that she had raised an American son, she remained exotically and essentially European. She wore a kind of heavy stocking I had never seen before (sent to her from Germany by a cousin), and white shirts she bought on her yearly trip abroad, and heavy yet elegant shoes.
The things she kept in a cupboard in the inner office were a European’s emergency larder: raspberry jam, imported biscuits, a flat, round tin of herrings rolled up with pickles, and four cartons of cigarettes.
“Someday I stop smoking,” Gertje said. “But until that time … when I am down to even two or three packs, I begin to feel anxious. You know, in the war cigarettes were gold. They were diamonds! To have a cigarette meant that for a little time everything was all right. Of course, everything was not all right. You cannot imagine what it is like to come here and see cigarettes everywhere! I used to go by a tobacconist’s near where I lived and I would stare at such abundance. Boxes and boxes of cigarettes! You cannot imagine, Geraldine, what an amazing sight a cigarette machine is, that spits out the cigarettes, so! But now I keep my little stockpile and it makes me feel calm.”
She also kept a small tea cloth for the table, in case of guests, and a pack of fancy paper plates, but she could not abide plastic forks and so, in a little wicker basket, was a set of silverware. There were wineglasses, too, for special occasions. In a tiny office refrigerator, the size of a doll’s house, were a few bottles of sparkling water, a tin of peach nectar and a bottle of champagne, lying on its side.
As the months went by, I felt more and more at home at the Regenstein office. Gertje was sincerely interested in Little Franklin, who came to visit once or twice on his way to the dentist. But Gertje, Bernard and Dr. Frechtvogel were as exotic to me as the Reverend Willhall. They were all from a world I had never known and to which I had only the most minimal access.
Bernard and Gertje were often out. They went to Europe, they had business lunches, they spent four-day weekends at their house in Vermont. Often I was left alone with Dr. Frechtvogel.
Dr. Frechtvogel’s occupation was to sit in the back office dispensing advice to Bernard. Once he had opened the mail and finished his coffee, he waited for Bernard and Gertje to come in. Then the three of them sat smoking and arguing in German until I came in and threw the window open to let the smoke out.
Gertje told me that Dr. Frechtvogel had been a lawyer in Vienna and that he had made a pledge never to work again once he came to this country, although a good many elderly Europeans came to the office for consultations with him. He had dozens of lady friends who called the office all day long and he claimed, as a young man, to have lived with a trapeze artist who, because of a scar, had never taken off her face paint for the duration of their affair. My happiest moments came when Dr. Frechtvogel and I were alone and he would talk to me.
We had lunch every day in the back office, providing he was not out with one of his ladies. Each day I ordered him the same thing: roast beef on dry toast with black coffee. Each day he gnawed his sandwich and then made terrible noises about the terrible coffee, until I was moved to get up and make a fresh pot for him. I lit his cigars and brushed the ashes off his clothes. I found his glasses for him when he lost them, and remembered to have the mail stacked neatly at his place on the coffee table. I discovered that he adored those hard black Dutch toffees that come in a tin and bought them for him. When he was angry he called me a brainless American, but I noticed that it was crucial that I kiss him goodbye before I left each day. He was the grandfather I had never had.
“You were a singer,” he said one day. “Why do you no longer sing?”
I explained that I hadn’t really been a singer, I had been a backup. He had no idea what this was, so I explained it to him. I told him that my purpose was to punctuate the lead singer but that every once in a while I got to sing a very small solo.
“Sing something to me,” Dr. Frechtvogel said.
“I’ll sing you Brahms’ Lullaby.”
“Stupid girl!” he said. “I mean something you sang on your job.”
“Okay,” I said. I was sitting on the sofa and he sat in his big leather chair. I sang “You Don’t Love Me Like You Used to Do.” He sat quite still, allowing the ash on his cigar to grow. I sang, fixated on the cigar. When I finished, the ash was scattered all over his jacket.
“That is an extremely stupid song,” he said. “Brush me off. Now, do you know this song called ‘The Tennessee Waltz’?”
I said I did.
“And do you know how to waltz?” he barked.
I said I didn’t.
“You must learn. I will teach you. You sing,” he said. “I will keep time.”
He stood up and held out his arms. I put my arm around his waist. He held me away from him. “Sing,” he said.
I began to sing and he began to count: one two three. He lumbered and shambled like a bear, but he pushed me around the floor. “Sing it again,” he said.
I took about ten steps to his one as I pivoted around him.
“They don’t teach American girls to waltz,” I said, slightly out of breath.
“Sing more,” said Dr. Frechtvogel.
He spun me around and, when I opened my eyes, I saw a man standing in the door of the office watching me.
“There’s someone here,” I whispered. The person was tall and dark, with horn-rimmed glasses and a camel hair coat. The faintest smile played across his otherwise serious features.
“Hello, Ludwig,”. he said.
“Ach! Leo,” said Dr. Frechtvogel, dropping my arm. “Geraldine, this is Leo Rhinehart. You are just in time for our dancing party. Leo, here is Mrs. Geraldine Miller who works in this office. She was at one time a singer and I am now teaching her to waltz, as American girls are deficient in this skill.”
Leo shook my hand. He had dark brown eyes and seemed to be a few years older than I was. My heart seemed suddenly to flop around in my chest, but of course I had just been dancing.
“Take your coat off, Leo, and dance with this person,” Dr. Frechtvogel said. “Leo is an excellent waltzer.”
“Oh, no!” I said. “I’ve got to run. I’ll be late to pick up my little boy at school. Goodbye, Ludwig.” I turned to Leo and extended my hand. Europeans seemed to shake hands at every turn: hello, goodbye, nice to meet you, sit down. His hand was strong.
“I’m glad to have met you,” I said. “Goodbye. Goodbye.”
I took a deep breath and bolted from the office. The sight of Leo Rhinehart had unscrambled me. I felt hot and cold and shaky, and I hoped it would be a long time before I ever saw him again.
48
In the back office, in a special cabinet, was the original album of photos documenting Hans and Sonia Regenstein’s first trip to the rural South.
In these photos, many of them sepia prints, Hans wears striped suspenders and a straw hat, and smokes the kind of enormous curved pipe you see in travel posters of Switzerland. Sonia, in her flowered print dress, garden hat and lorgnette, does not look like anything indigenous to these shores. In many photos they stand with one bluesman or other against the background of a field or shanty. They recorded field hands, chain gangs, sharecroppers, old women sitting on their porches.
For many years these recordings were pressed and issued by Hansophie Records, but after Hans and Sonia died, and record technology improved, Bernard sold the archive to the American Folklore Society, which kept it intact. Bernard and Gertje, through the Hansonia Society, were still executors.
In several of the photos, a tall, extremely handsome, dark young man stands off to the side. This, Gertje told me, was the great Felix Kindervater, often called “the Heinrich Heine of the twentieth century,” and one of Hans Regenstein’s closest friends. Kindervater was a poet, author of The New Hebrew Melodies. His account of his American trip, An Austrian in Dixie, had been a best-seller here and in Europe. Hans and Sonia begged him to stay: as a Jew and a socialist, they felt him to be in danger.
He left anyway. His two most famous books, always published under their German titles, Es Kommt Mir Vor (It Seems to Me) and Es Tut Mir Leid (It’s Too Bad), his forebodings on the European landscape just before the war, had been published secretly and eventually caused his imprisonment. Es Tut Mir Leid was smuggled out of Buchenwald, across the border and finally to England, and then to the office of Hansophie Records, where Hans Regenstein decided to publish it himself under the imprint Vogelweide Publications (after Walter von der Vogelweide, the medieval poet and author of “Unter den Linden”). The rights to this work had been sold by Bernard and Gertje in almost every language. One entire bookshelf was taken up by editions in every known, and several unknown, languages.
On quiet days, of which there were many, I sat in the front office reading. I read my way through the works of Hans and Sonia and through Felix Kindervater, just as I had worked my way through female blues singers of the thirties. I began to feel that someday I would put all this together and it would yield some sense. In the meantime, I was happy in the way of a fulfilled graduate student, and I was always pleased to be interrupted by one or another of the Regenstein regulars.
For example, Mr. Ratlitz, a tiny, stocky Pole who wore flashy socks and sandals. He had been in the underground in the Vilna ghetto and had written a novel about Auschwitz. He believed he had been swindled by an Off-Broadway producer who had an interest in an adaptation of the novel for the stage, and who had died. Ratlitz was suing the producer’s son on some grounds I could not quite understand, but every other Monday morning he appeared with a large sheaf of documents to be copied on our primitive and often out-of-order copying machine. These he thrust at me and said, “Copy, please,” and retreated to the back office to schnor a cup of coffee and one of Dr. Frechtvogel’s cigars.
I never minded standing in front of our copier, feeding sheet after sheet of paper into its maw. Frequently the thing misfired and I would have to take it apart and pull a piece of slightly charred paper out from underneath the rollers. When this happened, I swore loudly, which called Ratlitz’s attention to me. He stood watching with his mild, expressionless blue eyes as I sweated over this infernal machine.
I did not mind making up address labels for him, or typing letters for him to sign. I did not, in fact, mind anything. For the first time in my life, I felt totally useful. These people were Europeans and they had suffered. I was an American, as round, untouched and pure as a cotton puff. Nothing bad had ever happened to me—at least not in global terms. I had never seen a country blown up or my family loaded into a boxcar (as described in Ratlitz’s autobiographical novel). Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence. I often felt like a nurse on a battlefield, capable, in my freshness, of dispensing cheer to wounded people. I did not flinch during a thunderstorm as Gertje did. To see her face—the face of an old child—was to understand everything. No matter how jolly, how eager, how life-embracing she was, the matter of cigarette anxiety, or thunderstorms, gave her away.
Every second Wednesday the Regensteins’ accountant appeared, a well-groomed and elegantly dressed woman named Hannah Hausknecht. She had red hair, always freshly set, and pink cheeks. It was hard to tell how old she was. Her coat came from Saks Fifth Avenue. I saw the label when I hung it up for her, and I always brought her a cup of coffee and one of Gertje’s biscuits, for which she was lavishly grateful. When I admired her clothes, she was voluble. Saks Fifth Avenue, it turned out, was one of her favorite subjects.
“You know, Geraldine, I will tell you something,” she began, just as Gertje always began. “When I first came here I went to Saks and, you know, there are really such excellent lingerie fitters there. And then, such a surprise! I went one day to buy a brassiere and a lady looked at me for a long time. This woman was the head of the lingerie department, and you cannot imagine! She was the aunt of my best friend! I did not even know she was still alive.”
She took off her suit jacket and rolled up the sleeve of her striped shirt. I could see a series of blue numbers on her wrist; she was the first person I had ever seen with a concentration camp tattoo.
“This suit,” she said. “Drastically reduced—isn’t that how you say? But not drastic enough. Geraldine, I will tell you. Shopping is like hunting. The hunter must creep with great patience and must also take the risk that someone will get the beautiful red suit before she does. I watched this suit for weeks and finally I see that a button is missing and a tiny smudge is on the lining. So for the lost button and the smudge, the suit is mine very cheap!” She broke off because she saw me staring at her wrist.
I was mortified. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, Geraldine. Please do not be silly,” she said. “Why should a nice American girl not look? These things do not happen here, thank God.”
“Where were you?”
“Auschwitz,” Hannah said. “I will tell you something. I only remember the good times. I was in the children’s section and it was near the end of the war. We made up songs about cakes—big chocolate cakes with thousands of sugar roses and whipped cream, and almond horns and petit fours with pink icing and little silver balls. Then we were liberated and went to Israel. My mother had survived, my father and brothers not. We looked everywhere for a baker. However, the Israelis are not such good bakers. But in New York! Ach, New York is the true promised land. A land of milk and honey and almond horns and beautiful Danishes such as I had as a child. Please don’t look so upset! Here is my handkerchief.”
She gave me a little flowered square and I wiped my eyes. There is nothing so morally tepid, I thought, than weeping over something horrible that happened to someone else and will never happen to you.
“But look!” she said. “I have grown up so plump and happy. The day we are made citizens, my husband and I and my friends, some who survived the war like us, all celebrated at the Little Vienna Pastry Shop, at a big table, and we ate all the things we dreamed about! Delicious coffee and hot milk! No, really, I am very content.”
I asked her how she had stood it.
“You have no idea how much people can stand, she said, smiling.”
I asked her if she understood why Hans and Sonia Regenstein had been so enamored of the kind of music many Americans had never even heard.
“I have read their books,” said Hannah. “Obviously their subject is music, but they are also about the idea of this place. Myself, I have been unable to connect with this music—we have all the records, you know. But to listen to them is to think that you are having the experience of America. It is like nothing else. You know, Geraldine, last spring m
y husband and I were in Paris and I said, ‘Even Africa must be like Europe. All those handsome Africans in business suits!’ It is the Old World still. But here! Here it is always new!” She broke her biscuit in half.
“Some people come here to reinvent themselves,” she said. “But, you know, exiles and refugees are forced away from the things that invented them. Coming here is like climbing into a nice clean bed after a terrible series of nightmares. Now I must get to work and not chatter all the morning away.”
49
After a while I noticed that Buddy never seemed to be around until lunchtime, so I supposed that he either slept late or had some other business ventures to attend to.
I was still reading my way through the files when I came across a somewhat battered blue folder marked BUDDY: PERSONAL, in Bernard’s handwriting. There was another file for Gertje, which held photocopies of her naturalization papers and various medical forms. Although I never thought of myself as a snoop, I could not help myself. There, on the top, was Buddy’s birth certificate, and it said he was seventeen years old. I naturally assumed that this was a mistake, but a further look revealed report cards which seemed to corroborate this mystifying information.
I went to my desk, which faced Gertje’s. I had originally assumed it was Buddy’s desk.
“Gertje, why is Buddy never here in the morning?” I said.
Gertje’s face fell. She lit a cigarette. “So,” she said. “You have discovered the big secret.”
“You mean it’s true? I thought he was a grown-up.”
“Ach, Geraldine,” said Gertje. “He is a grown-up. When he was fourteen he started a little business on his own, a little newsletter and mail-order service to find various out-of-print books. He began this with our friend Leon Weiss, who has a bookshop near our house. Some people have music prodigies, and some people’s children are over developed at math, but mine is a business genius, and I can tell you that before he is twenty-one years old, he will make a million dollars. It is hard to believe. Both my parents were painters. When I was little, we lived in a big house in the country and we thought that America was like a vast forest full of red Indians. Now I am a citizen and my child will be a tycoon! One never thinks that life will be so strange.”
Goodbye Without Leaving Page 16
