by Lore Segal
“No, she doesn’t,” I said. “That’s Thursdays.”
“Take Mrs. Montgomery her cup of tea, dear, carefully,” said Miss Douglas. Her large, veined old hands presided with authority over cozy, pot, and hot-water jug, the milk, the little sandwiches, and the plate of chocolate biscuits. “Take Mrs. Montgomery the sugar, dear. She has her church, you know, and there are her old people. Herta, a little kumquat jam for you?” Miss Douglas was spreading a generous dab of the jam on her own infinitesimally thin slice of brown Hovis bread and butter. She bent her head with deliberation and delicately licked a speck of the sweet stuff from the knuckle of her little finger. “Did you know that Mrs. Dillon has a house, at the other side of town, that she has turned into a home for old gentlefolk? We feel so sorry for them, poor dears, having been gently brought up, to be poor in their old age. And now she has bought another house for her refugees. Why, there she is now.” The cocker spaniel had walked to the door. Even Ado, the cat, had risen, yawned, and was sitting expectantly. Mrs. Dillon had entered the house.
Mrs. Dillon opened the door with a bounce of spirits. She greeted her sister, asked the visitors how they did, said hello to me, kissed the dog, noticed the cat, and sat down smiling and sighing.
“Poor dear,” said Miss Douglas, “you must be exhausted. A cup of tea will do you a world of good.”
“I spoke to your dear mother on the telephone today,” Mrs. Dillon said to me, “and she sends you her love. I was trying to persuade her to come and work for my old folks, but she says your father is so poorly, poor man, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and she doesn’t want to bind herself. I was quite sorry. She is such a dear little person, and so reliable.”
The ladies then talked about the advantages of hiring refugees, expressed their indignation at people who were prejudiced indiscriminately against German-speaking persons. Miss Douglas said she would hire one immediately to take the place of her girl if it weren’t for that dear little baby. “I have her from the Home for Unmarried Mothers, you know, where I do a little charity Tuesdays and Fridays. She is not at all a good servant, but I don’t have the heart to get rid of her. It’s hard for these girls to get placed. I want you to see our little Lila.”
Miss Douglas asked me to ring for Milly, and she asked Milly to take away the trolley and to bring in her baby.
Lila was not an attractive infant. She was cross-eyed and slow. Miss Douglas set her on the rug in front of the fire, and placed her big hand tenderly over the baby’s head so that it fit her like a cap.
“Up, up,” said Mrs. Dillon to her dog. “Up you come! There. You know you’re too big to sit on Mother’s lap, don’t you? Yes, you do. You know you are. Poor sweet,” she said, in an aside to Mrs. Montgomery, “he gets so jealous.”
At the time my parents moved to Clinton Lodge, Herta challenged me about it. “So now your parents live in their own place, are you going to live with them?”
I had been worrying about this myself, but I said, “Of course not. You see, my father is not well. And my mother goes to work. Besides, they only have one room.”
Herta said, “If I had my parents living in town, I would live with them.”
“Well, I visit them,” I said.
These visits were not a success, though for my mother’s sake the Clinton Lodge refugees put up with me. Among the papers from those years (the letters from my Uncle Paul in the Dominican Republic, the Red Cross letters from Vienna, the ration cards, the Alien Registration Cards, the receipts for the monthly one pound ten shillings my mother paid the Committee toward my schooling) I’ve come across a tribute written by the house poet to “Franzi on her Birthday, December, 1942”:
She busily at early morn
Goes to her work that’s never done.
To cook and bake and scrub and stir;
A hundred mouths are fed by her.
Comes home at last and nurses Igo
Makes cakes for Lore to help her grow
And is amusing gay and bright,
In our small circle every night.
The poem to me on my fifteenth birthday reads:
Let us hope she’ll grow to be
Happy in this company
Neat and friendly, cause no strife,
But help us lead a peaceful life.
I was not happy in their company. I came to Clinton Lodge like a native returning home after a lifelong absence. My German was uncomfortable in my mouth. The manners I had learned from my parents no longer felt adequate or proper. These people seemed to me underbred. They laughed too loud. They moved restlessly around the house. The Germans cleaned and the Austrians cooked. When I came over on Saturday after lunch, my mother would be drinking coffee from the tablecloth in the kitchen, instead of tea from the knee in the drawing room. “Next time,” she said. “Today I’m in a hurry. I’m going to visit Daddy in the hospital.”
“What, in that dress?” I said.
“But this is my good dress. I had it made the winter before we left.”
“It’s those flaps hanging down from the belt. In England you don’t wear things like that. Maybe if I cut them off—”
“You’re not cutting anything off,” said my mother.
“Yes, I am.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
My mother was in a hurry and she was tired. “So be quick, then,” she said. But even without the flaps my mother did not look like Miss Douglas or Mrs. Dillon or Mrs. Montgomery. It was the distribution of flesh underneath that was wrong.
“Why didn’t you go with your mother to visit your father?” asked Mrs. Bauer.
“I can’t,” I said. “Miss Douglas is having people to tea, and she needs me. Good-by.”
But I stopped outside the door and heard Mrs. Katz say, “Poor Franzi. That child is getting as chilly as the rest of the English.”
The pain of their disapproval remained with me after I had forgotten the persons who had inflicted it, for by the time I reached the Clinton Lodge gate Mrs. Bauer and Mrs. Katz had dropped away, as the country one has been touring drops behind the horizon into the past. As I ran up the hill and into the sight and presence of Adorato, there occurred a perceptible change. I came, walking more slowly, through the side gate, stepped quietly into the back hall, my jaw reset to speak English, my facial muscles to smile, my bones realigned at the waist, the seat of politeness, and opened the door into the drawing room.
“There you are, dear child. Come and say hello to Canon Godfrey and Mrs. Montgomery. Take Mrs. Montgomery her cup, carefully, and the sugar.”
Mrs. Dillon beamed at me out of her sweet blue eyes. “How nicely she carries round the tea,” she said to Canon Godfrey, who sat beside her. “Doesn’t she? Almost like an English girl.”
I watched them all in the round mirror under its eagle. Mrs. Montgomery was telling Miss Douglas that Herta had done very well at school and the headmistress was having her take the scholarship examinations for Cambridge next year. Herta was there, too, sitting upright in her chair, balancing the cup and plate as cleverly as any English lady, but she had grown quite stout, with a high bosom. It exasperated me that she sat just far enough outside the circle around the fire so that her legs up to the knees were reflected in the golden mirror and the rest of her was not.
I asked her to sit on the rug with me, but Miss Douglas suggested that if we had finished our tea we could go and walk in the garden.
That winter afternoon Herta told me she was going to be converted.
“You’re not!” I said, incredulous and revolted, assailed out of memory by an alien smell, by the forbidden regions of a housemaid’s bosom. “You don’t want to be a Christian!”
“Yes, I do.”
“Come on! You don’t believe all that nonsense about God coming to earth as his own son?”
“It’s not nearly such nonsense as our prayer book that does nothing but bless God,” Herta said with heat. “The people of Israel this, and the people of Israel that, as if there
were nobody else in the world!”
“Yes, and maybe you believe that a virgin can have a baby. Maybe you don’t know something.”
“Maybe I know more than you!” cried Herta. “Do you know about spiritual impregnation? With God, all things are possible.”
“If all things are possible,” I shouted, “why does he let wars happen, and concentration camps, and why are your parents lost!”
“That’s because you don’t understand,” said Herta, with her brows very black. “There’s something Christ said. ‘I am the light.’ But I can’t explain it to you. It’s something I saw once when I was walking the dog on the Downs, in the evening, how light is everything. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I said. “You think you are the only person who understands anything. I knew that long before you—the time we walked up West Street.”
I looked into Herta’s fat face, but there was no fire flashing in Miss Douglas’s late-November garden, and I could see Herta’s eyes behind her glasses looking very small and pink-rimmed, with such sparse, stiff lashes, I was sorry they weren’t prettier.
“Anyway,” I said, “are you going to be Church of England?”
Herta said she was going to be High Church.
In the following weeks, I became used to the thought of Herta’s becoming a Christian. The busy Christmas season was upon us, and I was helping Miss Douglas do good. I came along on her rounds, visiting her deaf and dumb and blind where they lived. If they were gentlefolk, we brought them handkerchief cases, or sachets that Miss Douglas had been making in the evenings from dried lavender out of the garden. We sat with them and had tea. Miss Douglas would make conversation with sign language into their hands and tell them about me, and I would go and stand near them and shake hands. If they were poor people, Miss Douglas stayed in the car and I went and rang the doorbell and left a parcel of food.
I became very indignant, and was a Socialist again for almost a week. It wasn’t fair, I said, that some people should be poor, as well as deaf and dumb, and I gave Miss Douglas an argument.
She was busy setting up the manger on the piano top in the drawing room and asked me to pass her the cotton wool for snow on the roof of the stable. “That’s the way things are arranged,” she said. “If everyone were well off, what would become of charity? I do hope the snow doesn’t catch fire from the candle in the manger. Last year, the piano top was quite badly burnt. It’s a good thing we have insurance.”
I said, “If everybody were well off, then everybody would be equal. And nobody would have to eat in the kitchen.”
Miss Douglas said that would never do. Everything would be turned topsy-turvy. “The way things are arranged,” she said, “the lower classes wait on me, or if I am giving a charity party for my poor deaf-and-dumb children I am happy to wait on them, and their mothers, too, but it would never do to sit down together.”
“Why wouldn’t it?” I said, and Miss Douglas told me to run along and see if I could help Mrs. Dillon.
Mrs. Dillon was never so happy as in this season, when to her year-round activities was added her Nativity play, which she wrote, produced, directed, costumed, and sang in. It was done every year in St. Thomas’s, the fine Norman church, so old that it was half sunk into its little graveyard at the bottom of West Street.
The drawing room was full of splendid striped shepherds’ robes from Palestine. In the evenings, Miss Douglas sat before the fire sewing angels’ gowns out of Indian Head. I helped Mrs. Dillon paste jewels onto the crowns of the Three Kings.
Mrs. Dillon said I could have been one of her angels to kneel around the manger, but she didn’t think the Jewish Committee would like it.
I asked her if Herta could be an angel now that she was converted.
“Herta converted?” said Mrs. Dillon. “What ever gave you that idea?”
“Well, she is,” I said.
“No, she’s not.”
“Yes, she is.”
“I wish there were just one subject,” said Miss Douglas, “on which you would not contradict.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs. Dillon. “I was talking just yesterday to Mrs. Montgomery, who’s going to be my innkeeper’s wife, and she was telling me all about the trouble she’s been having with Herta, how Herta insists on going to religious instruction in school though she could have been excused because of being Jewish, and then when one of the girls said that the Jews had killed Jesús, Herta went right over and smacked the girl’s face.”
“What, Herta did?”
“And when she was called to the headmistress, she said that Jesús was not the son of God, and that he was self-deluded, and that the Virgin could not have had a baby, and she was quite rude about it.”
“You mean Herta Hirschfeld?”
“Herta Hirschfeld, Herta Hirschfeld. And they called poor Mrs. Montgomery, and when Mrs. Montgomery tried to talk to Herta, Herta said she didn’t want to talk about it, and she became quite hysterical, and poor Mrs. Montgomery doesn’t know what to do with her.”
I saw Herta at Mrs. Dillon’s Nativity play, where she sat near the altar, strangely lighted by the lantern behind the manger, half in the shadow of the immense round pillar. She looked odd—bloated and fat, and as if her brows had grown together. I waved to her when I went up front to help Mrs. Dillon with the wings and halos, but Herta was deeply absorbed in her prayer book and did not see me.
In the course of the following year my headmistress took a group of sixth-form girls who were thinking about going to the university on a day’s excursion to Oxford, and I fell in love. Oxford seemed everything that I was not: at ease with itself, at one with its own past—upper class, English.
Mrs. Dillon talked to me in the drawing room, sitting beside me on the sofa. She said, now that I was sixteen, didn’t I think that at the end of the year I should leave school and get a job.
“But I’m going to try for Oxford,” I said. I explained to her about the stacks in the Bodleian, the sunny High and the students in black gowns riding their bicycles to lectures, about paneled halls, bell towers, and the still, green quadrangles with fretted arches, fanned ceilings, and moldering stone faces. “There’s something Henry James wrote about ‘the ache of antiquity,’” I said, catching myself on the edge of tears.
Mrs. Dillon, in her blue flowered cotton frock, blinking her eyes in anxiety over me, obviously did not understand about beauty and history. She said, “It’s just that I was thinking, darling, now that your father has passed on, I mean about your mother having to work in that dreadful restaurant kitchen.”
“But Mummy wants me to go to college,” I said. “And Herta is going. She got her scholarship to Cambridge.”
I met Herta on the street and told her about my planning to go to Oxford. Herta, in her tweed suit, which she filled out in a new stout, grownup way, looked through her spectacles and said, “And you think Oxford will make a Christian out of you?” It seemed her parents had turned up in Hong Kong and she was only waiting for passage to be arranged to join them in Palestine on her brother’s kibbutz. She said she was very excited.
I think that was the last time I saw Herta, but one day, not long afterward, Mrs. Montgomery came to see Mrs. Dillon at the refugee office. Herta had confessed that she did not want to go to Palestine. She wanted to stay and be baptized into the Church of England. Mrs. Montgomery was disturbed—it seemed unnatural in a girl, she said. After all, they were still her parents.
I was now engrossed in my own plans, cramming for the exams, waiting for the results, and assumed that Herta had gone up to Cambridge. I didn’t know until a year later, when I came back to Allchester for the Christmas holidays, that Herta had jumped out of her bedroom window on the third floor into Mrs. Montgomery’s garden, and was dead.
I was accepted at Oxford, but for the year following. It had taken me only minutes to understand that my circumstances would not allow me to wait, but it was years before I overcame the pain
of having to accept a second-choice university. I remember my sense of having been maimed for life, and I lay it to Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon, who wielded their influence for five years, when I was impressionable, trying to bring a new soul into the Church of England, and, instead, turned out a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
London: Frocks, Books, and No Men
My college was an all-women affair, a member of the University of London. It was housed in a complex of unassuming modern brick, without beauty, but the afternoon I first walked through the little gate in the black iron railing that set off its grounds from the rest of Regents Park, a sudden mild golden light emerged capriciously, unbelievably, out of the drizzling autumn; the students walking along the paths between the wide lawns, under old plane trees, took off their mackintoshes and shook their hair free from their kerchiefs. I thought, This is me going to college!
The girl who stood next to me in line for registration looked interesting, with her large white face and straight hair drawn severely back. I told her my name was Lore and that I was Jewish. She said she was glad to meet me. Her name was Monique and she was American. I had thought she was English, and I was quite disappointed.
A good proportion of the students lived in the college dormitories, but for economy’s sake my mother and I had taken a room together. Outside the window were the scrappy grounds of Primrose Hill. Inside, the brownish, tweedy wallpaper and the heavy, dusty green of the ancient curtains created a khaki drabness—I kept trying to offset it by odd arrangements of the drab furniture—but in the downstairs hall, in front of the table where the lodgers’ mail was laid out, I had seen a young man. He wore a scarf showing the colors of Kings College. He looked around at me, but I had on my unbecoming green blouse and looked away and ran upstairs where I rapidly changed into my white silk blouse, saw it needed ironing, changed back, combed my hair, wished it were longer and my nose shorter, wished I didn’t wear glasses, and ran back down. By that time, of course, the young man had gone, but on the mail table I found the envelope with my scholarship check.
