The Oriental Wife (19 page)

N
aturally, as was customary, Sophie was going to phone Louisa the next day, to thank her for their lovely visit. What was less usual was her awareness that, it being Monday, Rolf would be at work: she could, if she wished, go beyond the dozen words she normally felt it decent to speak down a telephone and try to talk to Louisa a little bit, to get some sense, perhaps, of whether Gustav was right to think Louisa was afraid.

She hoped it wasn’t true—for Louisa’s sake, of course (mostly for Louisa’s sake, she told herself sternly), but also for her own, so she could stop wondering if Gustav was right to accuse her. She even asked herself if it could possibly be her lack of pity, of imagination, that accounted for the change in him, if people would look at her one day and say,
That woman drove her husband mad
.

Gustav had spoken to Kurt in his usual way the evening before, inquiring after his classes and the route the bus would take to New York as though nothing was wrong. She told herself she was glad—that had been her great fear, she reminded herself, that he would break down in front of one of the children. But it showed he could behave normally when he wanted, which made his loss of control less excusable. Once again, she had awoken to find him missing from
the bed, but this time she had not gone to find him; she had lain there rigid until he returned—it was past four—and pretended to be asleep. In fact, she had not slept for the rest of the night, though he had snored away beside her. She wondered what he would have done if she had gone and put her arms around him; she tried to remember if, in all their marriage, she had ever done such a thing, or if she had always waited for him to do it first. She could remember apologizing to him on various occasions, after a quarrel, when harsh things had been said on either side: she had not been so unyielding as all that. But whether she had ever put her arms around him, whether she had ever turned to him in bed and touched him before he touched her, she could not remember that.

And so, because it was connected with Gustav in her mind, she put off making the call to Louisa, telling herself she would ring in the afternoon. Then Rolf phoned her from the office.

At first she thought he was going to ask her about Gustav, she was afraid he had noticed something strange, but it was Louisa he was phoning about.

“I have a favor to ask of you,” he said in his measured voice. “I wondered if you would be kind enough to look in on Louisa while I am out west.”

“Of course,” she said, the old pride flaring up for an instant—she was the one he had singled out—before she quenched it. “I suppose it will be difficult for her to look after Emma by herself when Mrs. Sprague has her day off.”

“That’s not a problem. Katy has agreed to come.”

“I see,” she said, although actually she didn’t see. She no longer knew what he was asking of her. “But I will check
whether she might need assistance of any kind,” she went on, when he was silent.

“I am worried about her moods. She gets very despondent sometimes. Irrational. Mrs. Sprague has told me some alarming things she’s said.”

“What sorts of things?”

“About Emma,” he said after a pause.

“But what sorts of things?”

“She complains that Emma’s crying is driving her crazy. And one day when Emma would not go to sleep she said she was going to throw her down the incinerator.”

“Every mother feels like that sometimes, I assure you. I cannot believe Louisa was serious.” She remembered how reluctant Mrs. Sprague had been to hand Emma over to her the day she visited the apartment. She is trying to get rid of Louisa, she had thought. That’s why Louisa was so tense. “Look here,” she said, “have you considered that Mrs. Sprague might be jealous of Louisa, she wants the child to herself? She is very possessive of her. And perhaps she would like it better if there was no one there all day to oversee her.”

“I think you are doing her an injustice,” he said stiffly. “Her main concern is always for Emma.”

“I will see for myself,” Sophie said, more sharply than she’d intended.

“Yes, of course. If you would only look in once in a while, or telephone her.”

“I will do both. And I hope your trip will be very pleasant and successful.”

She decided not to tell Gustav about this phone call; she was not going to tell Gustav anything until she had made up her own mind. But she kept thinking of Mrs. Sprague, of the
jealous way she had taken Emma back that day, and her enthusiasm for Rolf. Perhaps she thought, why should a man like that be saddled with a crippled wife? Why should we have to have her here, when neither of us wants her around?

You don’t know, Sophie told herself. You are making up stories now. Be careful.

Later, when she had done the shopping and the mending and scrubbed the bathroom tiles, she phoned Louisa. First she thanked her, ritually, for a lovely time, and Louisa told her that she had just seen Franz, and Gustav had phoned him that morning, for which she was so grateful. “He’s such a kind man, your husband,” she said.

“He’s very fond of you,” Sophie told her.

“As I am of him,” Louisa said. “Would you thank him for me? And thank you so much for phoning.”

It was well known in their circle that Sophie never talked on the phone more than was necessary, Louisa was only respecting this fact, but now Sophie wanted to detain her.

“You will miss Rolf, I’m sure, when he goes to Oregon.”

“Emma will miss him dreadfully. She listens for him to come home at night, she listens for his key, truly. No wonder her grandfather insists she is a genius.”

“But you will manage all right with her? You and Mrs. Sprague?”

There was a pause. Then Louisa said drily, “I’m sure Mrs. Sprague thinks she’d manage even better without me.”

Sophie was silent. It made her uncomfortable to have Louisa say it outright like that; she wasn’t sure, after all, that she wanted to know what was happening on Bogardus Place. “I mustn’t keep you,” Louisa said then. “I’ll say good-bye for now.”

“Shall I visit you soon? We could take Emma to the park.”

“That’s very kind of you, but it isn’t necessary. My parents take her to the park with me.”

“But I would like to see you,” Sophie told her.

“We’ll talk soon,” Louisa said. Sophie had the strangest feeling that she knew about the conversation with Rolf.

She was conscious, as she busied herself in the kitchen afterward, that her phone was often silent recently. The other women—Rosa, Hilde, and the others—did not call on her for advice as they used to. She had never been one to phone them, waiting instead for them to seek her out, as they had always done, with questions, complaints, tears, wild pronouncements that they could not go on. Then it was her job to prop them up, either by recalling them to their duties or simply suggesting what they might do about their sons’ unsuitable girlfriends or their husbands’ bad feet.

She had always told them, when they complained of being lonely—for of course, with the housework to do, and without the rich social framework they had lived in all their lives, they got out a great deal less than they had been accustomed to, even in the Nazi years—that she herself was perfectly content with her own company, with a good book to read, or some embroidery and the radio to listen to. Now that they had evidently taken her at her word, she missed their need of her, which it seemed she had needed in her turn. They had taken to playing bridge, she knew, but after she had scoffed at the idea once or twice they had given up urging her to join them. No doubt they were all gathered at one of their apartments, serving up coffee and cake and scolding each other for the way they had played their hands. She wished that one of them would phone her now, needing her advice. She even
wished, though it was out of the question, that she could talk to one of them about Gustav.

She told herself not to be ridiculous, not to get morbid; it wasn’t her way. And so she decided to go to the greengrocer, though she had already done her shopping for the day, and see if there were any nice pears for Gustav’s dessert.

Mrs. Timpson was in the elevator when the doors opened, her shopping cart loaded with library books, and beamed at the sight of her. “Isn’t that something, Mrs. Joseftal, I was just thinking of you.”

“And why is that?” Sophie asked, smiling back.

“Oh, my son’s stationed in Germany now, waiting for his discharge, and there was a letter from him this morning about how terrible things are there. Half the Germans are starving, he says, and there’s rubble everywhere from the bombs, a lot of them don’t have homes to go to, and the children follow the GIs through the streets, begging for Hershey bars. He sent some photographs too, of buildings like skeletons, with the windows and the roofs gone, and you can see the remains of people’s furniture inside, it’s a sad sight for sure.”

“Yes, I too have seen such photographs, in the papers,” Sophie said warily, uncertain how Mrs. Timpson expected her to respond.

“Sure, so have I, but it feels different when you’re looking at someone’s actual snapshots. But what I was thinking was, how do Mrs. Joseftal and her people feel about this? I remember my husband, when there were all those pictures of London in the Blitz, how he said the English were finally getting what they deserved, but I just couldn’t feel like that.
It was the poor who were suffering there, that’s what I told him, not the oppressors. And then I wondered, how do you feel when you hear about the Germans starving?”

“I am afraid it is the same thing. Probably the decent ones are starving, the others have found some way to line their pockets.”

“I just hope Tom doesn’t decide to play white knight. The next letter might tell us he’s coming home with a German bride and her three brats from some dead soldier husband. That’d be just like him. Saving the world.”

Sophie laughed; she told her how Kurt was coming home for the university’s Thanksgiving break. She supposed—in fact it had just occurred to her—she should cook a turkey.

“Oh, you’ve got to. For his sake. With stuffing and sweet potatoes and the whole works.”

“Perhaps you could advise me on how to cook such things?” Sophie asked shyly.

“Mrs. Joseftal, I would adore to advise you. I’ll even give you my sister-in-law’s famous recipe for cranberry sauce, handed down from her grandmother. She’s third generation, and don’t we all have to hear about it. And then maybe you can advise me what the hell to do with the German delicacies that came from Tom the other day—maybe he should have given them to the starving Germans instead. But I guess he’s trying to turn us into cosmopolitans. There are some hard little sausages in cans, and flat chocolate cakes with paper stuck to them. What I can’t figure out is, do we eat the paper or not? Should I boil the sausages, or fry them, or are they already cooked enough, and I should just serve them cold? Do you think you could educate me on those questions?”

“I would adore to,” Sophie said.

O
n Thursday—seven days before Thanksgiving, two days after Rolf had left for Oregon—Sophie went to call on Louisa. She had spent an instructive few hours with Mrs. Timpson, who had not only shown her diagrams of how to truss and stuff a turkey, and given her the promised recipe for cranberry sauce with orange peel, but even demonstrated how to make sweet potato casserole with a brown sugar crust. She had also told a story that interested Sophie very much: her youngest brother, formerly a football coach at a school in New Jersey, had decided that kids should not be taught to play football. It only brought out their competitive instincts, he said, which was what made for wars. When Mrs. Timpson asked him what he was going to do with himself in that case he had said he might get a job as a gardener, at least that way he would not be harming anyone. And when she said he ought to go back to college and make something of himself he had shouted at her that that was how the world had gotten into this mess, he refused to think in terms of getting ahead.

“And what do you think caused this exactly?” Sophie asked her.

Mrs. Timpson, who was mashing the sweet potatoes, flicked a piece of tobacco off her lower lip; at first Sophie had been shocked that she would cook and smoke at the
same time, but now there seemed something delightful about it, something insouciant and American. “I suppose it must have something to do with what he saw in the Pacific, right? Something about all the cruelty he witnessed, he can’t stand any more. He won’t even go hunting with his buddies. It’s like he’s been rubbed raw. What do you think?”

“I think you are right,” Sophie said. Then she added, “My husband is like that also.”

Mrs. Timpson did not seem scandalized by this revelation, so momentous for Sophie herself. She did not seem curious, even; she just shook her head. “Not that it makes him any nicer to his friends and relations. His wife is getting frantic, she wants him to go to Rutgers on the GI Bill and be a history teacher, he’s always reading books on the Civil War, but no, she’s just thinking of the money, he says. Now he’s apprenticed himself to a gardener for five bucks a week or something.”

“This is nonsense, what he says. Just self-indulgence. What good does it do anyone if he wastes his brains also? Maybe he could help someone as a teacher.”

“Oh, I know. But when I tell him that, about wasting his brain, he goes lofty on me. Says that’s been the fate of most of humankind throughout history, what does it matter if it happens to one more Irishman?” She blew smoke out of her nostrils. “I suppose he’s kind of a Communist. But sometimes when he’s ranting away, saying I don’t care if people are dying in Africa, I think, ‘He’s right.’ I read about it in the papers and then I fry some eggs. So maybe he has a point.”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “Gustav also.” She did not go so far as to tell Mrs. Timpson that Gustav had accused her of having
no pity, no tenderness, no imagination, but she was thinking about it as she headed to Louisa’s through the cold, with a small bouquet of chrysanthemums she’d bought on the corner.

Mrs. Sprague greeted her at the door, exclaiming over the flowers as though they were meant for her. “Aren’t they beautiful! So thoughtful of you. But you shouldn’t have, you really shouldn’t. Here, just you give me your coat, and I’ll go put them in water.” She ushered Sophie into the living room, where Louisa sat on the sofa, in her crumpled green dress, waving a rag doll at Emma, who sat on a little pink blanket on the floor, clapping her hands. “You make yourself comfortable, and I’ll be back in a jiff with some coffee.”