Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  The maid knocked at my door.

  “Señorita, that lady called again.”

  “Oh, she did, did she. You gave her my message?”

  “Yes, Señorita. She said, ‘Damn and blast the goddam shawl, what I want to know is when she’s coming to dinner again!’”

  “Oh. Thank you, Julia.”

  Julia still stood in the doorway on her splayed feet, her skimpy dress pulled tight over her swollen stomach like the women I had seen yesterday in the doors of their shacks.

  Julia said, “Señorita, you remember you said you would teach me how to write?”

  “So I did. You mean now? Oh! All right. Sit down here.”

  I gave her a pencil and the notebook I had bought (thinking I was going to write a story I had in mind about a girl in a refugee hotel on a tropical island) and I said, “All right. Open it. No, no! Why in the middle? On the first page. Here: I will draw you a line of loops, like small e’s. Now you copy them here. No, Julia! Start on the left-hand side. I will lie down on my bed and you call me when you have finished.”

  It was beastly hot. The turkey was crying and Julia sat with her nose within three inches of the pencil, which she held painfully in a cramped fist.

  “Why are you turning over, Julia? You can’t have finished the page. Let me see.”

  Julia had done three loops where I had shown her, and she had done a giant loop in the middle and two more and now she was turning over. I stood and looked at her: I was trying to empty my mind of the concepts “page” and “book”; to imagine what it was like not knowing pictures, not having lived in England—it was as difficult as trying to imagine knowing what I did not know—the passionate life that Julia must know, behind those black doorholes of her home. I said, “Julia, where do you live?”

  “Way out, Señorita, in the country.”

  “The other side of town, near the airfield, isn’t it?”

  “Oh no, Señorita. Near the airfield is where the bad women live.”

  “No, I mean beyond the army barracks.”

  “Beyond the army barracks, this side of the airfield, is where they live.”

  “No, no. Where there is a new road, and buildings going up.”

  “That’s where they are building a sporting house and houses for the girls, and a new road for the gentlemen’s cars.”

  “Ah, I see …”

  I saw in one of those backward revelations—as if I were watching the replay of a movie I had seen before—Don Indalecio’s chauffeur bending over the back of the car; only this time I saw that he was removing a small blank shield that had hung over the number plate.

  “There goes the telephone again, Señorita.”

  It was Señora Ferrari, for me, calling from the middle of her canasta party. “My dear, I have such a thing to tell you, you have no idea. I must see you. It’s so terrible I can’t tell you over the telephone!” Señora Ferrati sounded happy.

  “Wait,” I said. “You are going to be at the Jaragua tonight? I can come and meet you there.”

  “Oh, dear Señorita, meet me there! I have to fly back to my table. What an absolutely awful thing! Good-by.”

  “Good night, Señorita,” said Julia out of the darkness as I left my hotel that evening. I looked around and could just make out her cotton dress a shade lighter than the night bushes. Julia was leaning over the hedge, watching the people go by; and I knew with a shock that black Julia’s Saturday evenings were as lonely and her poor nights as innocent even as my own.

  The new girl behind the glass counter of the cigarette stand wore a deep décolletage and shoulder-length hair. On Saturday nights, the lobby was full of well-to-do Dominicans who came to dance in the open-air patio, skinny men in light, loose-fitting suits with padded shoulders, and their well-fleshed women, in tight skirts and draped bosoms, wearing flowers in their hair.

  I stood in embarrassed solitariness, wearing the mask of one who watches life tumbling about her, and was so glad to catch sight of my ambassador standing at no great distance that I waved enthusiastically. He came over to shake hands, smiling horribly with his teeth only. “Ah, you come here! You say you not come!” Now Señora Ferrati, in a gay, grand, flowered gown, was coming toward us. The ambassador bowed over her hand. He kept saying, “My wife is somewhere around. Ah, you know the Señorita! She is my English teacher. Won’t you and Señor Ferrati join my wife and me in the patio.”

  The señora promised to join him, but first she walked me away to the ladies’ room, and under pink neon lights, sitting on beige leather stools, surrounded by walls of mirror, we put our heads together.

  “Dear Señorita, you will never guess. This Señora Lopez at the canasta party has known the Aguirres forever and, my dear, he has a wife and two grownup daughters.”

  “I know. I even told you this morning I thought he must be married. You remember I told you that?”

  “Wait! It seems there is this woman, Pilar Cruz, who was his mistress, my dear, for fifteen years! Can you imagine?”

  “You know something! That’s what I thought at first, that Don Indalecio and Doña Piri were lovers, but now I am sure she planned for him to meet me.… I mean, you don’t mean my Doña Piri?”

  “Doña Piri. Piri Cruz. Everybody knows her. It seems he kept her for fifteen years,” said Señora Ferrati with her happy greedy eyes.

  “Maybe they were in love!” I said.

  “Oh, Señorita! Anyway, it seems since she has got too old she makes a living getting girls for him. Señora Lopez told me her husband told her that Don Indalecio told him that the girl he had now was getting difficult, crying all the time and demanding …”

  “I know,” I said, “a painter and a very sensitive one. You remember I told you about the painter.”

  “Well, anyway, Don Indalecio promised this Doña Piri this house, or she asked him for a house, I forget which, if she got him a new girl. Isn’t that just awful? I mean, can you imagine? I have to run. My husband will be looking for me.”

  “Are you going to sit with the ambassador?” I asked, hoping she might ask me to join them.

  “Yes, and I want to look for Señora Lopez. She said she might be here this evening and she was going to try and find out more from her husband. So? What kind of a detective do I make?”

  I went and stood in the door of the patio. The merengue band was playing at the far end of the dance floor. Waiters in white coats passed among the tables, under the colored lanterns. A group of English people I knew from the Café Madrid sat at a table so near me I could see the whisky glasses between their elbows and hear the clipped, precise accents just like my own.

  “Hello Ticher,” said the three young girls in chorus.

  “Why, hello! How do you do?” I said to their stout mother, hovering and smiling behind them. In the semidarkness their sweet, pale dresses gleamed and rustled, and their six black eyes watched me.

  “Good-by, Ticher,” they said.

  “Hey, hello!” called Janos, the painter. “Come and join us.” He was sitting with “Doctor” and “Madame” Levy, Frau Bergel, the piano teacher, and her daughter Lilli, lately come from New York, who had begun to give English lessons like me, but with an American accent. I saw them for a dreary group of foreigners, professionals, like latter-day courtiers living off the city’s dogeared aristocracy.

  “Sit down,” they said. “Stay with us.”

  After that, Janos and I began to go about together. He was very much like me—self-involved, unhappy, and arrogant—and I could not stand him. He complained a lot about his talents wasted in this uncivilized outpost of the world, but I thought his talents rather minor. It was my social talent, I thought, that was going curiously undiscovered: Doña Piri had seen how I would do for Don Indalecio and Don Indalecio had thought me entertaining enough. I could never figure out why the English colony, or the Dominicans, or the diplomatic set failed to “take me up.”

  Soon even Doña Piri stopped calling me. She never came for another lesson. A month aft
er the dinner party, I met her in the street and started toward her. I was ashamed of the trouble she had taken to set a trap for me, that there had never been the slightest chance I should fall into it. I thought I had made a fool of her. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I still have that shawl of yours,” and found myself smiling, for a split second, into a look of pure, straight hatred, before she averted her eyes and passed by as if she had not seen me. During the next two years, I ran across her frequently. She must have moved back into town. From the progressive shabbiness of her dress, I judged that she had fallen upon bad times. I’m sure she blamed me, for she never again gave evidence of our acquaintance.

  Don Indalecio’s picture appeared in the papers again. The caption said that Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre, President of United Pictures Cia., was going on an extended business trip, and Señora Ferrati asked if we might have just English conversation. “I have such a thing to tell you. Remember that Don Indalecio and his girl friend? Well, it seems he went back to her and things went from bad to worse. It seems he has this cottage in the country …”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And there was a fight and his gun went off, my dear Señorita! And the girl is in the hospital and Don Indalecio has to go away to the United States until it all blows over, can you imagine? Isn’t that terrible? I wouldn’t speak to that man for the world. Do you mind if we just have half an hour? I have to run. The Lopezes are giving him a good-by dinner. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. You remember how I told you not to get involved!”

  “I remember,” I said. I saw in my mind’s eye the violent scene in that place, among the objects where I myself had stood holding my handbag over my bosom and my arms around my handbag, so that nothing had been able to happen to me. It frightened me that I had not been tempted. I began to fear that I might be incorruptible forever.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  New York: My Own House

  In 1938, when Austrian Jews understood the meaning of Hitler’s coming, we ran to the American Consulate. Each one was given a number, as customers are in some New York bakeries, to insure their being served in the strict order of arrival. But the “American quota”—as the system was familiarly known—resembled a bakery system gone awry, and issuing a separate series of numbers to people who came from different streets.

  My grandparents’ numbers, on the quota allowed to persons born in Hungary, came through first, in 1949, nearly a year after my grandfather’s death. My grandmother, who was then seventy-five years old, went on to New York alone. She wrote that America was no good. The Jewish Committee had found her lodgings with one Amalie Kruger, an old witch who couldn’t even cook a proper soup, and when my grandmother had wanted to show her, she had told my grandmother to get out of her kitchen, and my grandmother was never going to speak to her again. God alone knew if she would live to see the day of our coming to America, for she was ill with longing.

  Paul’s number came through in 1950, and he followed my grandmother to New York. One evening, as he was taking her for a walk on Riverside Drive, they happened to run into the Freibergs, who had been in America for over a year and were about to return to Vienna. “The New York summer is nothing for us people. Worse than Santiago. You wait and see! And there is no culture in America,” they said, and they turned down the corners of their mouths in unison and shook their heads. They offered Paul the remaining lease on their apartment on West 157th Street. It consisted of a narrow hallway leading to a kitchen, with a room for my grandmother on the left side and a room for Paul on the right. When my mother and I arrived in May of 1951, Paul moved his bed into my grandmother’s room and bought two couches for us and a piano for my mother, and the right-hand room became a sitting-dining room, with a plastic-topped kitchen table for the four of us to eat on. The place was shabbily furnished with a number of large rickety chests of drawers from the Salvation Army, but I was on the whole gratefully surprised—the rooms were of decent size, the ceilings high. In my mind’s eye, I redisposed the furniture, painted it; I could see the couches covered in some rich fabric. The place had possibilities. Paul promised that some day he would help me rearrange it.

  The first evening, Paul walked me one block down to Riverside Drive.

  “Why, it’s pretty!” I said. “It’s as pretty as the Thames Embankment. Prettier—if it weren’t for all that horrible advertising.” I pointed beyond the highway with the twin white lights coming, red taillights going in both directions. Road without end, I thought. (I was pleased with the thought—must remember to put it in a letter to my university friends in London.) The New Jersey shore threw its commercial neon messages in shivering paths of prime color across the water. “So garish,” I said. “The sky is positively purple with it. Look!”

  The next morning, my mother and I set out for the employment agencies. My grandmother stood in the hall door, saying, “Have you your handkerchief? Money? Keys? Have you got your lunch bag?” she asked Paul, who was leaving for work. “Come back soon!” she said to each one.

  The sun was shining straight up 157th Street as we walked down, shielding our eyes against the flashing windows of the Republican Club over the Rexall’s at the corner. The sleazy Broadway small-town shops and the green-and-yellow taxis gleamed, freshly washed by the early May morning sun. We went down into the subway and climbed out at Forty-second Street. I came bringing my London University B.A. Eng. (Hons.), a prize in a short-story contest, and my talent in drawing, “looking,” I told the interviewers, “for an interesting job.” They asked me to fill out a card, and when they had looked it over they told me to go and learn shorthand and typing, get a year or two of American experience, and to come back again. As Paul put it that evening, “America, the land of unlimited opportunity for people who can work the I.B.M. machine.”

  Paul was working in a well-known New York research foundation. He had applied for a laboratory job, where his medical training might be useful, but his degree from the University of Vienna was not recognized in the U.S. However, the personnel department had expressed interest in his experience with livestock in Sosua, and he got a job as animal attendant. He had asked if there was any chance of being promoted to the laboratory, and they said you could never tell what opportunity might turn up.

  My mother found work in the kitchen underneath the Fifth Avenue branch of a famous restaurant chain, helping prepare hors d’oeuvres. My mother says she did not know most of the house specialties, and even after she had learned how to make them she did not recognize their American names coming distorted down the speaking tube, and the angry Negro woman at the next worktable would not tell her. My mother was afraid she was going to lose her job and came home evenings crying from nervousness and exhaustion.

  I got a job as a file clerk in a shoe factory in Queens at forty dollars a week. I sat with the girls at a long table, transferring incoming orders onto pink cardboard sheets. On my left sat an obese pimply blonde named Charlene. I told her that I had just arrived from the Dominican Republic, where I had taught English, that I was Austrian but had lived ten years in England. Charlene leveled unblinking blue eyes insultingly at me and said something to her friend about people with accents going back where they came from. It was Charlene’s job to make up the list of lunch orders, which it was my job to fetch from the luncheonette downstairs. She waited till precisely twelve so that I was bound to lose ten minutes of my lunch hour, till I discovered that by dawdling a little I ran into the crowds from the other floors at the pickup counter and could waste fully twenty minutes of hers. I remember the thrill of my victory, which was short-lived, for she retaliated. We got cleverer each day in mutual meanness.

  In my dreams at night, Charlene and I embraced and explained ourselves to one another, but mornings, before I went to work, I vomited. At lunch time, to avoid the sight of her obscene back turned toward me, I went out. I walked around the factory district, stepping over abandoned railway lines, seeing no one for minutes on end. Then two workmen in blue overalls, sitting on the s
teps of a rusty railway wagon drinking coffee out of Thermos flasks, waved to me. I felt happy. Presently I found myself at the edge of water, on the far side of which the huge slab of the United Nations building stood on its reflection. I ran back to the factory writing a mental letter to my London friends.

  In the evening, as I came up the street, I saw my grandmother at the kitchen window, and when I stepped off the elevator she was holding the hall door open. I kissed her and said, “Why do you have to stand around waiting for us? You could sit down.”

  “Your mother is late!”

  “How late? Eleven minutes!”

  “What could have happened to her!” my grandmother said in distress.

  “Well, let’s see.” I held up my hand and counted the possibilities on my fingers. “Maybe she got into conversation with her supervisor; maybe she walked up Fifth Avenue to look in the shop windows; maybe the subway got stuck between stations—”

  “You think something happened on the subway?” my grandmother asked and went back to the kitchen window. “There she is!” she said. “And there’s Pauli, too,” and she waved to them until they disappeared into the house door below her. Then she went to stand in the hall door to watch the red light of the ascending elevator bringing her children home.

  “I made some poppy-seed strudel,” my grandmother said. “The table is all set.”

  But Paul said he was going to shower and change and go over to have dinner with Dolf. One of the first things Paul had done when he arrived in New York was to look for Dolf in the Manhattan telephone book. He found him, too. Dolf had married. He was still writing poetry—in German—with no one to read it. Paul went to see him once in a while, to take great draughts of friendship and conversation, and each time my grandmother was unhappy and tried to dissuade him.

  “Your wonderful friend Dolf, thoughtless as ever, making you go out again after a day’s work. You look exhausted.”