Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  “I’m resting,” said my mother. “Darling, it’s very unrestful for me to have to sit doing nothing.”

  “Why don’t you at least sit in the middle of the chair.”

  “I forgot. But really I’m resting. Didn’t I sit in the drawing room this morning, Mrs. Hubert?”

  “Yes, after you swept the upstairs and made the beds,” said the old housekeeper.

  “But I’m feeling much better,” said my mother. “Darling, you will go and see Daddy in the convalescence home, won’t you?”

  “You’re not supposed to be thinking about Daddy while you’re on your holiday!” I shouted, almost in tears. “Rest!”

  When I got home that night, I heard Mrs. Dillon talking on the telephone in the dining room. “He’s quite impossible and they don’t think they can keep him. The servants say he’s always calling and then he talks to them in German,” she was saying. I knew she was talking about my father. “And the other patients are complaining they can’t sleep, because he calls for you all night.” Then I knew it was my mother she was talking to. I leaned my head against the door and cried.

  My mother came back that night and took my father home to Clinton Lodge.

  It was 1943. I had turned fifteen. The repeated suspense of my father’s relapses and partial recoveries, my mother’s helpless exhaustion, along with the nightly German rockets, had become the conditions of our life.

  Early in June of 1944, my father was back in the hospital. It was the week of the landing of the Allies on the French beaches. We told him about it, but he did not hear.

  Then one night my father died. I had one short, harsh paroxysm of grief, and even afterward I found I was able to produce a creditable pain in my chest by recalling how my father had wanted to amuse me with the story of Rikki-tikki-tavi, and to lend me his crocodile belt on all the important occasions of my life, and how he had wanted to make me a present of it the day I pushed him onto the floor.

  My mother and I sat in her room. Mrs. Katz brought our meals on a tray and stayed to talk—about how good my mother had been to my father, and how she had nothing to reproach herself with, and how this must be a comfort to her now.

  My mother shook her head and said, “Not so good. Not as good as you all think. You don’t know how often I lay in bed, with him right beside me, and my hands like this.” My mother interlaced her fingers and pressed them passionately together. “How I would long for him to be allowed to die, for his sake, but not for his sake only. For Lore’s and for my sake.”

  “But that’s only natural,” Mrs. Katz said. “You didn’t want him to suffer.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame myself for that,” my mother said. “I will tell you what I can’t forgive myself. You remember when he came back from his first day at the milk office, he was so ill he could hardly move his leg? I wanted to take a taxi up the hill to the house, but I kept thinking how silly to take a taxi for just two blocks, and I made him walk.”

  “It’s all over now,” said Mrs. Katz, for my mother had begun to cry, her face shrunken and red.

  “I could have taken a taxi for him,” said my mother. “It wasn’t even the money. I was afraid the taxi-driver would think it silly for just two blocks, and our being refugees. I made him walk those blocks uphill because I was afraid of looking silly to the taxi-driver. I’ll stop in a minute,” said my mother, sobbing out of the depths of her chest. “I promised Lore that if Igo died I would cheer up quickly. And you will see, I will.”

  One Sunday, about a week after my father’s death, I came back to Clinton Lodge and found the fat doctor having a cup of coffee with my mother. “Are you ill?” I asked her.

  “Goodness, no. Dr. Adler was so kind as to be worried about me.”

  “I was just passing the house on my way home from the hospital, and I thought I would look in on your good mother. She was making herself a cup of coffee and I asked her to give me one. As a friend, you know. As a doctor, I should tell you that you have no business taking so much caffeine.” He tapped her on the wrist with a forefinger. “I suspect you drink altogether too many cups of coffee, and it’s not good for your nerves.”

  “My nerves have been playing me tricks lately,” said my mother. “You can’t think what incredible mistakes I’ve been making at the restaurant. Poor Mr. Harvey! Yesterday I put salt in the peas twice, so today I put none in the potatoes. Don’t go to Harvey’s for lunch tomorrow, because they’re serving shepherd’s pie made with unsalted potatoes.”

  “I promise not to come to Harvey’s if you will promise someday to cook me a real Viennese dinner.”

  “Wiener Schnitzel,” said my mother. “Any time you like.”

  In the middle of that week, my mother said, “You’ll never guess what I did today. I bought myself a new dress. I left the restaurant half an hour early, went to the bank, took out twenty shillings, and went and bought myself a pink dress.”

  “How do you mean, pink? A sort of pinkish gray, you mean?”

  “Pink,” said my mother: “It was the only pretty dress in the shop and I put it on to see how silly I looked, but then I took down the knot in my hair and did it more loosely, like this. Look, you see—there is still a wave, and the pink brings out the red lights. It looked very well on.”

  I was pretty sure she was kidding me. “So where is it?”

  “It’s being altered for me. Now I can’t even take it back. I told them to go ahead, and I’ll have it for the weekend.”

  That weekend, Dr. Adler came and had Wiener Schnitzel with us. My mother wore the pink dress. It was very pink. I watched the doctor to see if he thought it strange, but he was in great spirits and said my mother looked like a girl. Her face had a high color; her eyes were too bright. After dinner, we went into the drawing room and she sat across from the doctor, making jokes and laughing in shrill, harsh bursts in her throat. Later, the doctor asked her to come for a stroll around the block.

  On Monday, Mrs. Dillon was waiting for me by the front door of Adorato. She asked me to come in a moment. “Come into the drawing room. Sit here on the sofa.” She sat down beside me.

  “Has something happened?” I asked in alarm.

  “Well, no, I don’t think so. Not yet. Guess who came to see me at the refugee office? Mr. Harvey. He’s worried about your mother.”

  “Why is he? Mummy is all right. I haven’t seen her laugh so much in years.”

  “Well, that’s what seems to be the trouble. Mr. Harvey says she is a changed person. He says even when things were worst she was always conscientious about her work, and now all of a sudden she doesn’t seem to care. He says she keeps making mistakes every day. He told her the restaurant just can’t afford to go on like this, and she laughed in his face.”

  “What’s going to happen, then?” I asked. Panic settled familiarly back into my chest.

  “He says he doesn’t know what to do. Today she forgot to light the oven under the roast and they had to take it off the menu. He says he took her aside to talk to her seriously, but she blew right up in his face. He says he never in his life heard her shouting before. She said why can’t she take it easy, like all the other people do all the time. He wants me to talk to her, but I think maybe you should. You can talk to her. You tell her she must be more careful and not make so many mistakes.”

  My mother was in the kitchen at Clinton Lodge. “Roast chicken and cucumber salad,” she said, “and not for Mr. Harvey and his customers but for you and me. Roast potatoes, too. Take off your coat.”

  “How are you doing in the restaurant?”

  “Fine,” said my mother.

  “Are you still making so many mistakes?”

  “What do you mean, mistakes?”

  “The way you were telling Dr. Adler?”

  “Sit down and eat before everything gets cold. Other people make mistakes,” she said. “Everybody does. Mr. Harvey ruined a whole fish dinner once. He told me so himself.”

  “Maybe you make too many mistakes.”

  �
�Did Mr. Harvey say something to you?”

  “No. Where would I see Mr. Harvey? He came to see Mrs. Dillon. I mean, it’s just that you should be a little more careful, and not make so many mistakes. And he says you’re not even sorry. He says you didn’t light the fire under the roast today and that the restaurant can’t afford to go on like this. Maybe if you stopped drinking so much coffee. Mummy!”

  My mother’s face was paling and shrinking before my eyes. Her mouth darkened to a red, sore look, with little unevennesses like lines up and down her parted lips. Her eyes increased in size as they filled with tears. She looked into her plate and put down her fork. When Mr. Katz came in with a friendly good evening, my mother got up and went out to the scullery. I heard her clattering the dishes, and in a little while she went upstairs and closed the door.

  In the weeks that followed, my mother kept herself to herself. The sound of a sudden voice could make her cry; we were all afraid to speak to her. She did not entertain the doctor again. She went to work every day. She has told me that those were the hardest weeks she has ever lived through because she had to focus every nerve, every minute of the day, to hold on to herself, because the moment she relaxed she could feel herself altogether scattered.

  I watched her strained face surreptitiously. I don’t know at what point I realized that the calamity for which I was set was not going to occur. My mother was making jokes and laughing again in her old way, from the chest, and with her head thrown back. She talked to the people who came to visit. Whenever she mentioned my father, which she did readily, I would look around for a book. My mother told everyone the story of how she had made my father walk up the hill instead of taking a taxi. She still tells it to me once in a while, but it is only quite lately that I have told her that the time my father fell on the floor in front of the wardrobe mirror it was because I pushed him with my hand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Allchester”: Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon

  One morning not long after I came to live at Adorato, when the two ladies thought I had gone off to school, I was standing in the dim carpeted hall outside the dining-room door listening to Mrs. Dillon gently scolding Miss Douglas for too harshly scolding me. She was saying, “That’s never the way to make a Christian out of her.”

  There had been a certain contest between the Jewish Committee, which saved me from Vienna, and the Church Refugee Committee, which had the care of my bodily needs in England. Each strove for my soul, without much passion.

  My early upbringing had been assimilated Austrian: Jewish mainly on the High Holidays. My mother might prepare the Passover table to celebrate the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt with a rich feast and all the ritual trappings, but she produced the hard-roasted egg (in remembrance of the joyous sacrifices made before the destruction of the Temple) clucking like a hen that had just laid it; my Uncle Paul wore his parsley dipped in salt water (in remembrance of the bitterness of the persecution of the Jews) jauntily in his lapel. During the prayer where we curse the Egyptians—“‘If He had merely brought us forth from Egypt … dayenu [it would have been sufficient]; if He had merely inflicted justice upon them … dayenu; if He had merely slain their firstborn … dayenu’”—my mother drew an imaginary line under the list of dayenus and totted them up.

  On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I sat in the white imitation-marble gallery of the synagogue with my mother and the other women. The men sat downstairs wearing their hats, chanting Hebrew and bobbing their bodies to keep time. Their lips never stopped moving, right fists striking their chests in the ancient gesture of contrition. A Yom Kippur service lasts from sunup to sundown. I fidgeted. I threw my cap into the air, and the shammes, the temple orderly, put me out onto the brilliantly sunny street. My grandmother said it was always fair on Yom Kippur, while it rained on Christian holy days.

  One sunny day, I got mixed up with a Palm Sunday procession. My parents and I were visiting my grandparents in Fischamend. I happened to be walking past the church just as the procession was coming out of it. At the door, Father Ulrich was passing out the palm branches. He put some in my hand, along with a little colored picture of Jesús holding his gown open to show where his heart was bleeding. I walked with the little girls. They were dressed all in white with garlands in their hair. I held one of the blue ribbons that streamed from the velvet sky carried on four poles over the blue-and-gold Madonna. Her crown and scepter came behind on purple pillows. The altar boys swung censers. The priest joined the end of the procession, singing in Latin out of his holy book. As we came through the arch under the tower into the open square, I saw my family looking down from the corner window of our house. I waved my palm branches in the air. They kept waving to me and gesturing. I did a little dance step for them.

  By the time the procession passed my grandparents’ house, my mother was standing at the door that led into the yard, and she hauled me inside. (This was in 1937, and Jews were already nervous.) My mother put the palm branches in a vase. As for the holy picture, she said why didn’t I take it up to Marie when she came back from church. I had been trying to decide if it was a very beautiful picture or not very nice at all—I took my cues from my mother, in those days, in matters of taste—and I could tell from her face that this picture was not nice. “I don’t even want it, anyway,” I said.

  The maid’s room was in the attic. Marie opened the door to me and I peered inside. It was dark. There was a lilac tablecloth pinned over the curtains. The room looked different from any other room in my grandparents’ house. It smelled different—of closed windows and a candle burning under a picture of the Virgin and Child. Marie made me sit beside her on the bed. I gave her the picture. She said it was lovely of me; she had a whole boxful, if I would like to see. She went and fetched an old tin candy box and spilled the contents onto the bed. There were holy pictures of the Virgin and the saints and the Child Jesús among the lilies. There were glossy picture postcards from a certain young man, Marie said, with red roses and hearts and ribbons, but she said she liked my picture the best, and she would show me where she was going to keep it next her heart. She unbuttoned her blouse till I could see the crevice between her elderly breasts, and pushed the picture down there. I said I had to go; my mother was waiting downstairs.

  Christians were comical people. My grandmother had lots of stories about them. There was the time handsome young Father Ulrich had asked his congregation to collect silver foil to be made into a great ball in aid of the church’s Winter Help Fund, and little Wellisch Greterl had spent the night with the fat, drunken sweetshop-owner Kopotski for a bar of chocolate wrapped in foil. The grownups found this enormously funny. In my grandmother’s stories, the Christians always spoke with peasant accents.

  After Hitler had come, while I was staying with Erwin in Vienna, I used to go to a Miss Henry, a young lady from London, to learn English. Miss Henry seemed quite intelligent. Her flat, on the Ringstrasse, looked much like our own. She lived with her mother, who gave lessons in the sitting room while Miss Henry gave me mine in the bedroom. The only pictures there were a black-and-white engraving entitled “Tintern Abbey” and a framed photograph of a young man in S.S. uniform whom I often saw in the hall waiting for Miss Henry as I came out from my lesson. I had asked my father if she was a Christian. My father said yes, but that English people were Protestants instead of Catholics, like Austrians. Now, when she was giving me dictation, I would peek curiously at this Miss Henry who was not a proper Christian. I tried to catch her off guard, for some sign.

  This was my preparation for deciding between Judaism and Christianity—my mother had always said I must make up my own mind—when I left Austria.

  When I wrote my parents from the camp that the two English Jewish Committee ladies had asked me if I would like to go and live with a lovely Orthodox family, my father wrote back by return mail, begging me to go quickly to whoever was in charge and tell them I was not Orthodox and should be assigned to a different family. He said “Orthodox” mean
t being very religious and following laws I knew nothing about, and that I would be doing everything wrong and people would be cross with me, but his letter did not reach me until after I had been settled with the Levines.

  They had been taken aback by my ignorance of the Jewish laws. Sarah explained the rules, and by the end of the winter I did her credit. I took easily to being religious. I was a purist. Mrs. Levine had to make me do up my shoes when I came down with the laces dangling, not having wanted to mar the Lord’s Shabbos with the work of my hands; I would not accept her offer of ice cream one second before the six hours after lunch when, the law said, milk might mix innocently with the meat in my stomach. One day I came into the scullery and found to my horror that Annie was washing the meat dishes with the milk swab. I hastened to point out her error. She took me by the shoulders with hands very wet from the washing water and shooed me out firmly, saying, “What the eye does not see …”

  Then, during my year in the south with the Hoopers and the Grimsleys, I lost the broad North Country accent I had picked up in Liverpool, and had become a Socialist, when circumstances made me once more mobile.

  My Kentish working-class accent distressed the Allchester ladies, and Miss Douglas took me in hand. In the morning, I walked with her around the dewy garden. I carried the watering can and filled up the birdbaths. Miss Douglas, in her wide straw hat and gardening gloves, walked with her basket and a pair of scissors and cut fresh flowers for the drawing room. In the evening, I changed my shoes and put on the green silk dress Miss Douglas had found at the church bazaar she had organized. She had put on new buttons for me. After dinner, I joined the ladies and the cocker spaniel and the big black cat in the drawing room. (I always took breakfast and lunch with the ladies in the dining room, but dinner was a grownup meal, which children took in the nursery or schoolroom; since there was no longer any such apartment at Adorato, Miss Douglas put my supper on a plate and I had it in Milly’s kitchen.)