Most of what I learned about Werner, though, I didn’t learn from Werner. He would answer a question readily enough, but very precisely, very much within the limits of the question, and no overtones thrown in. I guess I learned about him because he was my friend, by sucking it out of the air the way kids do, during the times I was in his house before he was forbidden to hang around with me, and during the dozens of times before and after, when he sneaked up to our place. He was at our place as often as he could get away.
Up there, a casual visitor might have taken him for one of the family, since he was blond and short-featured, like my mother and me. He was a head taller than me, though, with a good build on him that was surprising if you had already seen his father’s sunken, nutcracker face and bent-kneed waiter’s shuffle. It wasn’t that he had the special quiet of the very stupid or the very smart, or that he had any language difficulty; he spoke English as well as I did and got mostly nineties at school, where he made no bones about plugging hard and was held up as an example because he had only been in the country five years. It was just that he had almost no informal conversation. Because of this I never felt very close to him, even when we talked sex or smoked on the sly, and sometimes I had an uneasy feeling because I couldn’t tell whether he was stupid or smart. I suppose we were friends mostly out of convenience, the way boys in a neighborhood are. Our apartments partly faced each other at opposite sides of the small circular rear court of the building; by opening his bedroom window and our dining-room window we could shout to each other to come over, or to meet out in front. I could, that is, although my mother used to grumble about acting up like riffraff. He was not allowed to; once, even before the edict, I saw the window shut down hard on his shoulders by someone from behind. After the edict we used to raise the windows very slightly and whistle. Even then, I never felt really close to him until the day after he was gone.
Saturday mornings, when I was that age, seemed to have a special glow; surely there must have been rainy ones, but I remember them all in a powerful golden light, spattered with the gabble of the vegetable men as they sparred with women at the open stalls outside their stores, and ringing with the loud, pre-Sunday clang of the ash cans as the garbage collectors hoisted them into the trucks and the trucks moved on in a warm smell of settling ash. It was a Saturday morning when I first went up to the Hausers’, to see if Werner could get off to take the Dyckman Ferry with me for a hike along the Palisades. I already knew that he helped his mother with deliveries evenings and afternoons after school, but I had not yet learned how prescribed all his hours were. The hall door of the Hauser apartment was open a crack; through it came a yeasty current as strong as a bakery’s. I flicked the bell.
“Come,” said a firm, nasal voice. Or perhaps the word was “Komm.” I was never to hear Mrs. Hauser speak English except once, when Werner and I, who had not heard her come in, walked through the parlor where she was dealing with a lady who had come about a daughter’s wedding. That was the occasion at which I saw her smile—at the lady—a fixed grimace which dusted lightly over the neat surface of her face like the powdered sugar she shook over her coffee cakes.
I walked in, almost directly into the kitchen. It was very like ours, small and badly lighted, but it had two stoves. Rows of copper molds and pans of all shapes hung on the walls. One graduated row was all of Bund pans, like one my mother had, but it was the first time I had seen utensils of copper, or seen them hung on walls. Supplies, everything was in rows; nothing wandered or went askew in that kitchen; even its choke-sweet odor had no domestic vagary about it, but clamped the room in a hot, professional pall. Werner and his mother, bent over opposite ends of a cloth-covered table, were carefully stretching at a large plaque of strudel dough which almost covered its surface. Both of them glanced up briefly and bent their heads again; the making of strudel is the most intense and delicate of operations, in which the last stretching of the dough, already rolled and pulled to tissue thinness, is done on the backs of the hands, and balances on an instinctive, feathery tension. I held my breath and watched. Luba and my mother made strudel about once a year, in an atmosphere of confused merriment and operatic anguish when the dough broke. As I watched, red crept up on Werner’s face.
Almost opposite me, Mrs. Hauser bent and rose, angularly deft, but without grace. I had expected some meaty-armed Hausfrau trundling an ample bosom smeared with flour; here was the virginal silhouette of a governess, black and busked—a dressmaker’s form collared in lace. From the side, her face had a thin economy, a handsomeness that had meagered and was further strained by the sparse hair spicked back in a pale bun.
Suddenly she straightened. The paste had reached the edges of the cloth; in a few whisked motions it was dabbed with butter, filled, rolled, cut, and done. She brushed her hands together, blew on the spotless front of her dress, and faced me. She was not handsome at all. Her nose, blunt-ended, came out too far to meet one, her eyes protruded slightly with a lashless, committed stare, and the coinshaped mouth was too near the nose. She wore no make-up, and her face had the triumphant neatness of the woman who does not; next to it Luba’s and my mother’s would have looked vital, but messy. Her skin was too bloodless though, and her lips and the nails of her floured hands were tinged with lavender, almost stone-colored, as if she suffered from some attenuation of the heart.
Werner mumbled out my first name, and I mumbled back my errand.
Mrs. Hauser, holding her hands lightly in front of her, still gave me her stare, but it was to Werner that she spoke at last.
“Sag ihm nein,” she said, and turning on her heel, she left the room, still holding away from her dress the hands with the stone-colored nails.
After that, I knew enough not to go to Werner’s unless he asked me to, usually on evenings when his father was on night duty in the restaurant where he worked, and Mrs. Hauser had an engagement, or on Sundays, when she had an especially fancy wedding and Mr. Hauser, dressed in his waiter’s garb, went along to help her serve. I never got used to the way their apartment looked, compared with the way it smelled. When there was no cooking going on, and the hot fumes had a chance to separate and wander, then it was filled, furnished with enticing suggestions of cinnamon, vanilla, and anise, and the wonderful, warm caraway scent of little pastries stuffed with hot forcemeat—a specialty of Mrs. Hauser’s, of which her customers could never get enough. Standing outside the door, I used to think it smelled the way the house in Hansel and Gretel looked, in the opera to which my parents had taken me years before—a house from whose cornices and lintels one might break off a piece and find one’s mouth full of marzipan, an aerie promising happy troupes of children feasting within, in a blissful forever of maraschino and Nesselrode.
Actually, the four dim rooms, curtainless except for the blinds which the landlord supplied—one yellow, one dark green to a window—had an almost incredible lack of traces of personal occupancy, even after one knew that the Hausers never thought of the place as anything but temporary. It was furnished with a bleak minimum of tables and chairs like those in hired halls. Mrs. Hauser had procured everything from a restaurant supply house, all except the beds, which were little more than cots, and wore hard white cotton spreads of the kind seen in hotels. Here, in the bedrooms, some of the secondhand surfaces were protected with doilies, on which a few European family photographs had been placed. Years later, when I was staying in the luxurious house of a family which had managed to keep on its servants in the old-fashioned way, stumbling inadvertently into the servants’ wing, one morning, I came upon a room that reminded me instantly of the Hausers’, although even its dresser had a homely clutter of tawdry jewelry, dime-store boxes, and letters.
Even so, when Werner and I hung around awhile in his room, we never sat on the drill-neat bed. Usually we sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. Except for the times we did our homework together, we either just talked or exchanged the contents of our pockets, for it was the kind of house in which there was simpl
y nothing to do. Once or twice we smoked cigarettes there, carefully airing the room and chewing soda-mints afterward. I supplied both the cigarettes and the soda-mints, since it was an understood thing that Werner never had any money of his own; the considerable work he did for his mother was “for the business.” The rows of cakes, frilled cookies, and tiny quenelles that we sometimes passed, going through the kitchen, were for the business too. I never got anything to eat there.
Usually, after we had been there a short while, Werner, wriggling his shoulders sheepishly, would say, “Let’s go up to your place,” or I would invite him up. I knew why Werner liked to be there, of course, why he could not keep from coming even after Mrs. Hauser had forbidden it. It may sound naïve to say so in this day and age, but we were an awfully happy family. We really were. And I never realized it more strongly than during the times I used to watch Werner Hauser up there.
I guess the best way I can explain the kind of family we were is to say that, although I was the only nonmusical one in a family that practically lived for music, I never felt criticized or left out. My father, although he tired quickly because of a shoulder broken when he was a boy and never properly healed, was the best musician, with faultless pitch and a concertmeister’s memory for repertoire. Nora played the cello with a beautiful tone, although she wouldn’t work for accuracy, and Carol could already play several wind instruments; it was a sight to watch that stringy kid of ten pursing her lips and worrying prissily about her “embouchure.” Both Luba and my mother had had excellent training in piano, and sang even better than they played, although Luba would never concede to my father that she occasionally flatted. My mother, contrarily, tended to sing sharp, which so fitted her mock-acid ways that my father made endless plays on words about it. “Someday,” he would add, striking his forehead with his fist, “I am going to find a woman who sings exactly in the middle; then I will steal the company’s payroll, and take her to live at The Breakers in Atlantic City!”
“Mir nix, dir nix,” my mother would answer. “And what kind of music would be at The Breakers?”
“A string quartet,” Luba would shout, “with a visiting accordion for the weekends!” Then the three of them would pound each other in laughter over the latest “visiting accordion” who had been to our house. All kinds of people were attracted to our house, many of whom had no conception of the professional quality of the music they heard there, and were forever introducing a protégé whom they had touted beforehand. Whenever these turned out to be violinists who had never heard of the Beethoven Quartets, or pianists who had progressed as far as a bravura rendition of the “Revolutionary Etude,” our secret name for them was “a visiting accordion.” Not even Carol was ever rude to any of these though; the musical part of the evening simply ended rather earlier than usual, and dissolved into that welter of sociable eating and talking which we all loved. When I say I wasn’t musical, I don’t mean I didn’t know music or love it—no one in that family could help it—I could reproduce it and identify it quite accurately in my head, but I just couldn’t make it with my hands or my voice. It had long ago been settled upon that I was the historian, the listener, the critic. “Ask Mr. Huneker here,” my father would say, pointing to me with a smile (or Mr. Gilman, or Mrs. Downes, according to whatever commentator he had been reading). Sometimes, when in reading new music the group achieved a dissonance that harrowed him, he would turn on me: “We should all be like this one—Paganini today—Hoffman tomorrow—and all safe upstairs in the head.” But the teasing took me in; it never left me out. That’s what happened to Werner at our house. They took him in too.
We had our bad times of course. Often my father’s supper-time accounts of his day on Seventh Avenue, usually reported with a deft, comedian’s touch, turned to bitter invective, or were not forthcoming at all. Then we knew that the mood in which he regretted a life spent among values he despised had stolen over him, or else the money question was coming up again, and we ate in silence. Luba and my mother quarreled with the violence of people who differ and cannot live without one another; their cleavages and reunions followed a regular pattern, each stage of which pervaded the house as recognizably as what was simmering on the stove. My sister Nora, eighteen and beautiful, was having trouble with both these contingencies; each month, just before her periods, she filled the house with a richly alternating brooding and hysteria that set us all to slamming doors and leaving the house. A saint couldn’t have lived with it. And Carol and I bickered, and had our pint-size troubles too. I can see how we must have seemed to Werner though. No matter what was going on, our house had a kind of ruddiness and satisfaction about it. Partly its attraction was because there was always something going on. If anyone had asked me about the state of my innards in regard to my family, I guess I would have said that I felt full. Not full of life, or happiness, or riches, or any of those tiddly phrases. Just chock full. I would have said this, most likely, because, as I watched Werner hanging, reticent but dogged, to the edge of our family, watched him being stuffed by my mother, twitted by my father, saw him almost court being ignored by Nora and annoyed by Carol, I had the awful but persistent fancy that he must be absolutely hollow inside. Literally hollow, I mean. I could see them, his insides—as bleak as the apartment where his parents were either oppressively absent or oppressively around, and scattered with a few rag-tag doilies of feeling that had almost no reason to be there. There would be nothing inside him to make a feeling out of, unless it were the strong, tidal perfume of the goodies that were meant for the business.
One evening at the beginning of that summer, Werner was with us when my father scooped us all up and took us to the concert at the Stadium, only a few minutes’ walk from home. We went often to those concerts, although, as everyone knows, open-air music can rarely have the finish of the concert hall. But there is something infinitely arresting, almost pathetic, in music heard in the open air. It is not only the sight of thousands of ordinary faces, tranced and quiet in a celebration of the unreal. It is because the music, even while it is clogged and drowned now and then by the rusty noises of the world outside the wall, is not contaminated by them; even while it states that beauty and the world are irreconcilable, it persists in a frail suggestion that the beauty abides.
Werner, at his first concert, sat straight-backed on one of the straw mats my father had rented for us, taking in the fragments of talk milling around us, with the alertness of a person at a dinner who watches how his neighbor selects his silver. During the first half, when an ambulance siren, combined with the grinding of the trolleys on Amsterdam Avenue, clouded over a pianissimo, he winced carefully, like some of those around him. But during the second half, which ended with the Beethoven Fifth, when a dirigible stealing overhead drew a thousand faces cupped upward, Werner, staring straight ahead with a sleepy, drained look, did not join them.
As we all walked down the hill afterward, Carol began whistling the Andante. As she came to that wonderful breakthrough in the sixteenth measure, Werner took it up in a low, hesitant, but pure whistle, and completed it. Carol stopped whistling, her mouth open, and my father turned his head. No one said anything though, and we kept on walking down the hill. Suddenly Werner whistled again, the repetition of that theme, twenty-three bars from the end, when, instead of descending to the A flat, it rises at last to the G.
My father stopped in his tracks. “You play, Werner?”
Werner shook his head.
“Somebody plays at your house?”
“Nein,” said Werner. I don’t think he realized that he had said it in German.
“How is it you know music?”
Werner rubbed his hand across his eyes. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were translating. “I did not know that I know it,” he said.
In the next few weeks Werner came with us almost every time we went. I didn’t know where he got the money, but he paid his own way. Once, when he hadn’t come to go with us, we met him afterward, loitering at the exit we usually t
ook, and he joined us on the walk home. I think he must have been listening from outside the Stadium wall.
He always listened with a ravenous lack of preference. Once he turned to me at the intermission and said with awe, “I could hear them both together. The themes. At the same time.” When I spoke sophomorically of what I didn’t like, he used to look at me with pity, although at the end of a concert which closed with the “Venusberg,” he turned to me, bewildered, and said. “It is possible not to like it.” I laughed, but I did feel pretty comfortable with him just then. I always hated those triangles in the “Venusberg.”
Then, one time, he did not come around for over a week, and when I saw him in the street he was definitely avoiding me. I thought of asking why he was sore at me, but then I thought: The hell with it. Anyway, that Sunday morning, as my father and I started out for a walk on Riverside Drive, we met Werner and his mother in the elevator. Mrs. Hauser carried some packages and Werner had two large cartons which he had rested on the floor. It was a tight squeeze, but the two of us got in, and after the door closed my father succeeded in raising his hat to Mrs. Hauser, but got no acknowledgment. My father replaced his hat on his fan-shaped wedge of salt-and-pepper hair. He chewed his lips back and forth thoughtfully under his large, mournful nose, but said nothing. When the door opened, we had to get out first. They passed ahead of us quickly, but not before we heard what Mrs. Hauser muttered to Werner. “Was hab’ ich gesagt?” she said. “Sie sind Juden!”
Anybody who knows Yiddish can understand quite a lot of German too. My father and I walked a long way that day, not on the upper Drive, where the Sunday strollers were, but on those little paths, punctuated with iron street lamps but with a weak hint of country lane about them, where the city petered out into the river. We walked along, not saying much of anything, all the way up to the lighthouse at Inspiration Point. Then we climbed the hill to Broadway, where my father stopped to buy some cold cuts and a cheese cake, and took the subway home. Once, when my father was paying my fare, he let his hand rest on my shoulder before he waved me ahead of him through the turnstile, and once he caught himself whistling something, looked at me quickly, and closed his mouth. I didn’t have a chance to recognize what he whistled.
Tale for the Mirror Page 13
