The Rags of Time Page 10
Oh, how Papa lectured Inga and Otto that the failed artist with the comic mustache would never . . . I was too young to fully understand what might never in Catholic Austria. It happened right in front of Papa’s nose.
And on another day Louise turned the page of a coffee-table book sent years back to Sylvie, gift from Inga to her daughter intended to enforce her tale of Bauhaus good taste. A glamour shot of a slim crystal carafe (Otto Wagner, date uncertain) faced off with a silver broach set with moonstones (Josef Hoffmann, 1919).
You understand I was shamed by my mother’s claim that such objects were part of our life. I was ten years old when we finally left the villa, escaped through the garden wall huddled in Inga’s fur coat, the two of us linked together like kids in a three-legged race. Kinderspiel. Martha latched to her brother. Gerald.
Gerald?
The other Waite child, not my son.
But the story not told—one woman to another, working girls who found their way in the big city—was of Sylvie’s lonely investigations of the vanished life on the river Inn. She had wanted more than a postcard world of cuckoo clocks, a lost realm of kitsch and personal memory—Otto in lederhosen. When she was well enough grown in New York, Inga took off, made her way out to the émigré movie crowd in sunny California. Then Sylvie designed a course of study outside the curriculum at Hunter College, carefully tracing the marriages and bloody wars that redrew the borders of Austria again and again, adding and subtracting Venetia, Dalmatia, Lombardy, Bohemia. Her father had turned the page in his atlas back to the Holy Roman Empire. Poor Papa: the borders he finally believed in were erased. His repeated claims for the honor of Catholic Austria now seemed more than an annoyance to his daughter, more than a scratch in the record of his wife’s favorite Strauss waltz stuck in three-quarter time. It was far too late when he changed his tune. That is what she presumed, too late defending the Jewish bankers, and Rosen, who sat on a high stool over his ledgers, green shade sheltering his eyes as he once figured the ounces of silver mined by the elder von. The mines now property of the Reich. She further imagined that her father spoke up for his teachers at the University who were relieved of their posts, that he defended his café companions not practicing Aryan science. Now he became the elder; the line had run out save for his son, Otto, and why, she would ask, taking notes in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library, why turn through pages and pages of the Nuremberg Trials, the verdict clear as to crimes against humanity, but with no hope of the answer? Why take a boy? A miscalculation from hell, his name set down with his father’s, by a simpleton following rules? Simple is evil, is death by paperwork, damnation filed away. By the year Papa Neisswonger’s daughter graduated with honors from a city college in New York, the map he honored, give or take a slice of northern Italy, was in place once again. But his lectern by the study window was no longer in her dreams.
She had taken to the books. March 12, 1938, the date on which Austria was annexed by the Reich. The players who led to Austria’s downfall—Chancellors Dolfuss, Schuschnigg, the German ambassador, Papen—could not answer her question: when did Papa wake to the nightmare of Catholic compliance? Did he speak against the very prelate who laughed at his Dürer story? They ordered him to work his mines for their benefit two years before the Polizei led him out the front door with his son. The camp where she presumed her father and brother were taken was enlarged early, December of ’39. She worked on in the library at 42nd Street until the lights dimmed, then took the subway uptown to a rented room, the maid’s room in a big drafty apartment. The accounts of the war were not sorted into the arguments and fables of history. She discovered a portrait, Marie Elizabeth of Austria, radiant child who, disfigured by smallpox, became an abbess, d. Innsbruck, 1808; Emperor Ferdinand I required a yellow patch to be worn by all Jews, 1551. Protestants denied citizenship, their lives endangered with the punishment of heresy, 1527, according to Catholic state law.
Searching for a family story, Sylvie copied down notes in her neat hand: the operation of silver mines, Hapsburg political marriages, the Vienna Boys’ Choir (est. 1498, held in contempt by Otto, an athletic boy). Her ledger was thick as a poultice to sooth the pain of her father’s fate. Had she really expected to discover a record of that meeting in the Silver Chapel, the nature of the documents passed to the old priest? The chapel with the luminous silver altar was carefully preserved in memory. She went to mass every Sunday, obedient to her father’s political belief. There came one night when she discovered that titles were passed out liberally by the Hapsburgs long before they settled into their palace in Innsbruck. Best not pass that item to Inga, or that von, often a mere honorific, was now prohibited by the Austrian government.
Want these books put aside?
She had turned back three volumes on the Treaty of Versailles and a rant claiming Hitler was indebted to Nietzsche, and to Descartes’s Meditations in which the philosopher questions if we can ever come up with the answers. Bright Sylvie said clearly—No thank you. She walked the long block to Broadway, took the bus uptown. A couple with theater programs, flirting madly, just out of a show, or perhaps, in the heat of desire, they’d left during intermission. Cut out to make out at home. Well, her home was that narrow maid’s room in the apartment of an old refugee couple. Each week, she paid twenty dollars in cash, passing an envelope to them before sunset on the Sabbath. They had little to say to their boarder with a cross on her neck in search of a family story, reading history to solve yesterday’s crimes when any day she might see that Solomon’s watchband did not fully conceal the numbers on his wrist. Inga had discovered their vacant maid’s room through a friend of a classy friend, then gone off to California, where yet another friend dealt her secretarial work for swank émigrés. Later Sylvie would understand that she took a page from her mother’s book, Inga writing her own script, a quick read that instructed: get on with your life.
Wo, o wo ist der Ort—ich trag ihn im Herzen—,
wo sie noch lange nicht konnten, noch von einander
Study your languages, pass the exam to translate.
Oh where is the place—I carry it in my heart—,
where they still were far from mastery, still fell apart
from each other, like mating cattle that someone
has badly paired;—
The UN was plain and sturdy, no mirror tricks of Versailles. No more fiddling with lines of Rilke, better treaties securing the here and now. Her inner ear could not connect with the poet’s feeling. It was a sort of deafness that plagued her, more troubling than the deafness that would come upon her late in life.
The altar of the Silver Chapel with its shimmering zodiac was not revealed to Louise on the day she flipped the pages of an extravagant book, a storybook really: how superb the Austrian designers before the First World War at the modernist game, how their artifacts—beautifully photographed—vases, candlesticks, gems worked into silver, each crafted with the vision of the maker upon it—predicted a future unburdened with the sodden bourgeois trappings of the past.
The villa, you see, was as my father must have it, as it had always been in his time. Biedermeier curves of each sofa, his ashwood desk. My room of the spoiling was kitsch, Tyrolean cute. He had no anger against his privilege or trappings of his class, not a dollop of sour schlag. Not a worthless Austrian mark. Turning now to the page with: Silver clip in the form of a maple leaf for a fräulein’s hair, and: a slim Wiener Werkstätte mirror. Unburdened with a view of the past. Meine Mutter so clever—refurnishing memory. How we do live the life set forth by our tables and chairs.
Sylvia Waite is on her way to JFK, then on to the white house on a hill in Connecticut. Her late husband, an airline executive, had been a pilot in the war—their war, she calls it. He led his squadron of Spitfires halfway to Dresden. Then we turned back.
Turned back?
We had only enough fuel to escort the bombers off on their mission. Escort them through dog fights. I lost half my squadron one night. Bob Waite
gave no personal details, which she found troubling, the way the firebombing of a city could be no more than an order carried out. It’s all in the books, he said.
In time she came to believe in her husband’s reserve, though answers she sought were not in the books. She had married something of a hero, a widower with a ready-made family, enjoyed his gentleness in the old bed with creaking wooden slats. Passion would not come until she met Cyril O’Connor, shared a cab on a rainy day at the UN. Cyril had served in the Korean Conflict. Their emotional extravagance might have been shot as a war movie—lovers on Waterloo Bridge, tearful parting. They returned to their dutiful married lives until Sylvie, of all the unimaginable things, came back into his life. The sleeping prince—ailing eyesight, sparse white hair—was kissed back to life. Not her boldest move; that would always be the flight through the garden wall with Mommi. Still, finding their loved ones had passed, she took a chance that in matters of the heart there might be a second chance duty-free. Now their caresses were tender, the way kids courted a millennium ago. Sylvie runs the story off. Her visions—the love of her men in varying degrees. Of her father who she mourns in the full knowledge of his folly.
Soon after they met, Bob Waite took Sylvie to his house listed as a historic treasure. She raised his kids, lives on there in comfort though carpenter ants are back at their mischief. It is not truly her house: never can be. Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. Translate to the language you live in. Whoever has no house now, will never have one. How her beautiful mother of the grun-grau eyes came to quote Rilke with ease though she had no education to speak of. But that was in California, where Inga took tea with Thomas Mann, did more than frolic with Peter Lorre by the pool. Then Inga Meyer, moving on, was married to Billy Ray Boots by a Baptist minister in Houston and must be put to rest with many artifacts of genuine beauty, forgiven at last by her daughter. Wer jetzt allein ist . . . Translate: Whoever is alone will stay alone.
As they prepare for descent, Jed tells all, fesses up. He’s not on his way home to the baby girl on the laptop screen. Going to visit the teenage boy he left behind. Sylvie, pert with an encouraging smile, yes, the fairy god-mother with a halo of white hair, is comfortable hearing his familiar story of ambition gone wrong, midlife crisis, the office affair. She has listened carefully to the security guards at Martha’s Institute, how one Perez son is premed, the other hijacks cars. Lola visits him in prison. Bonfilio must keep at the course in bookkeeping to get on with his life. His heart is invested in tango. Weekends he competes. Mrs. Waite has seen the head shot, hair slicked, throat gleaming with sweat in the passion of the dance. Jed has no picture of his boy left behind—a moody dropout, will not welcome this visit from his father. Below the clouds now, ordered to turn off all electronic equipment. Jed back to business. His personal story now seems impersonal. Sylvie recalls the name of the actor he resembles, a sentimental fool in old movies, eyes tearing up, the flesh wobbling on his moon face. Jed cutting her off, scribbling numbers on a scratch pad, reminds her of Gerald Waite, never her son. She feels the flight has been a waste of her seatmate’s time, not finishing his thriller, chatting up an old lady, movie out of mind before the credits run. Perhaps it will never come right, these awkward visits with his son. Gerald Waite has written himself out of his stepmother’s life, that little prince of his private school who never took to Sylvie. Each year on the Christmas card, he covets the Rhode Island highboy, though inappropriate for his high-rise in Hong Kong. Gerald is corporate, self-posted to Asia.
Martha put it simply: Gerald needs money the way we need air. The whole nine yards. You know the expression?
I know it. Gerald needs more than his father’s considerable salary, more than his grandfather’s take from a distinguished legal practice in the city.
The little plane has nibbled to the very end of its trail on the screen. Pressure pops in her ears, and for a moment Sylvie’s hearing seems restored, that same baby crying above the pilot’s landing instructions—advice for descent, Bob called it.
Offering a stiff apology, Jed’s jowls quiver. Sorry for the personal stuff, laying it on.
Not at all, carry-on baggage.
Returned to the strained silence of her deafness, she thinks this is what we have, perhaps it is all—the telling, telling each other our stories. In the quarter hour that remains, she sets her watch to Eastern Daylight Time, flips pages in the airline magazine that offers, for a price, comforts never imagined: a robot vacuum, an electric corkscrew and a miniature trident, the three prongs of Neptune’s weapon to spear lint. Lint? Your clothes dryer may be clogged. Are you aware of this danger? Now the darkening sky wavers through Sylvie’s tears. It is too foolish, this fear of fluff, yet she finds it so sad, the claims of this product offering a life free of weightless debris. She remembers he was called Cuddles, the Hungarian actor who made you laugh when you should have cried. The plane is waiting for a runway, circling the city. She sites the Triborough, Ran dall’s Island, buildings along the East River—the towers of New York Hospital, the brick of old Bellevue and in between the UN, where she worked as a young woman, a translator double-speaking the principles and arguments of international agreement. In that upended matchbox of hope, she met both her husband and her lover. She can’t remember which committee Cyril, still in uniform, reported to, but she was translating areas of dispute between French and German fisheries. She must tell Martha: the commission was called Law of the Sea.
The neighbors have turned on the porch light, left the door off the latch. The mail of the last two weeks lies in the Chinese export platter on the hall table—catalogs pushing Christmas before the first frost, Doctors Without Borders, Coalition for the Homeless and Peace Folk, as Louise calls the many organizations begging money, as well they should, given the headlines Sylvie glanced wheeling her suitcase through the airport. FAMINE, GUANTÁNAMO TORTURE. DEATH TOLL RELEASED.
She is suddenly bone tired, speaks the phrase aloud to the heavy silence of the house. Now, what does that mean? It’s the spirit that’s tired; still, she must call the neighbors who doused the plants to death, thank them for their kindness. They have turned up the thermostat, set her tea mug next to the electric kettle, propped up a card of a smiley cat—Welcome! Sylvie sits by the fireplace where the Waite cradle resumed its proper place. A pale patch on the floor reveals where the Connecticut clock stood for nearly two hundred years, a grandfather clock that now ticks its inaccuracies in California. Alas, the finials have been taken off to accommodate the low ceiling in Martha’s cottage. Gerald Waite, the banker still building his firm’s business in Hong Kong, is the only one who gives a damn about the antiques, in particular their value. Last Christmas card went beyond the highboy to the Pilgrim hutch and Dun-can Phyfe chairs. In a frivolous moment Sylvie sent Gerald the Canton punch bowl, never heard if it arrived back home in one piece. She’d as soon ship him every spindle and scrap, the sampler ill stitched by some long-forgotten girl, the coverlet sturdy as the day it was woven pre- Jacquard loom. Her very life is overfurnished. Alone in the house, deafness her companion, she listens to herself through worn bone. Well, there is not much flesh on her though the limbs are sturdy; didn’t she make it uphill with a spring in her step, up from the parking lot to Perez and Bonfilio, to their courtesy each day? Now she must call Louise. She gets Artie. Maisy is ill again. Each night plagued with that cough. His voice—low-pitched, solemn.
Sylvie in a whisper: Tomorrow I will drive into the city. I should never have gone away.
She prepares a tray of white toast and tea. For the first time, the stairs are not easy. She sets the tray on the lowboy next to the pencil-post bed. Oh, it has a verified date, this uncomfortable bed where she slept beside her late husband and with her lover, Cyril O’Connor. The call to Martha’s A-drive is not forgotten.
I’m in the lab, Martha says, making up for lost time. She does not say time lost with Sylvie’s visit, their weekend jaunts up to the mission in Santa Barbara, down to the Baja Peninsula. M
artha is working on a pet project, classifying sea cucumbers that thrive in a frigid canyon deep down in the sea.
Sylvie says, Well, it’s cold here, too. The leaves are turning.
Remember? Martha asks. Home again, home again, jiggity jig.
The last line of a ditty she chanted to the Waite children when they came from the beach in wet bathing suits, sand in their shoes. They were beyond such nursery jingles, but what did she know?
Yes, she remembers. Home again, home again, all in a day.
BUG BOX
And so Gregor did not leave the floor, for he feared that his father might take as a piece of peculiar wickedness any excursion of his over the walls or the ceiling.
—Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
On Riverside Drive the wind whips up from the Hudson. Artie takes his son’s hand. First real Fall day!
His exuberant words blow away. The boy looks puzzled. Dad walking on air? They are both on their way to school: that’s Cyril’s delight. His father will leave him off, go on to his classroom, where he writes numbers and squirrelly letters on the blackboard. His father has homework most nights. Sometimes Cyril pretends he has homework. Last night he wrote his name on his backpack, wrote it all out—Cyril Moffett Freeman, a name like no other kid at his school. Cyril is the name he comes by from the grandfather who is dead. His father had no father. He was not supposed to know that. When he asked, his mother said, You’re ours. Well, of course. What did that have to do with the man who disappeared off the face of the earth? Moffett was in there because his mother must not leave out her parents in Wisconsin. They lived on a farm he visited every year of his life. That grandfather had almost no hair and a loud voice like a man his parents watched every night on the news. Too loud when he came to New York, showed a movie at school telling about the rows and rows of cows hooked up to his milking machines. A calf sucked milk from its mother’s udder. Direct Delivery, his grandfather said, laughing in case you didn’t get it. Milk was pumped into a big steel tanker to travel to the next machine, boil it up and ship it to market. He knew more than anyone in his class about pasteurizing when Grandfather Moffett ladled milk from a can for every teacher and student. The farm was cleaner than anything in New York City, so Grandpa said. He taught dairy. That was just weeks ago when Professor Moffett passed out ice cream cups for the whole lower school. For some days Cyril was made much of, then taunted by older kids—Cyril 2%, Fat Free. Well, he was skinny, and besides, his teacher, after a conference with his mother, advanced him to reading and math with the second grade. It was still early in the school year, and one day he broke from his class line after recess, to watch a chess game, to advise a third-grader how a pawn could block a bishop. Before he fully understood the kid’s mockery, much mooing was what he put up with. Now the best part of the day was walking hand in hand with his father.