The Oriental Wife (21 page)

“It doesn’t matter,” Otto said, “of course it doesn’t.” He asked Rolf about his trip out west; he asked about the business, and many other questions. He was going to see Franz
and Jeannette the next morning; then he had to go downtown to make some purchases; he wondered if he could meet Rolf for lunch. Louisa put down her fork and looked tensely at Rolf, as though much hinged on his answer. Of course, he said. That would be very nice. Mrs. Sprague scraped back her chair and stood.

“Well, I’d better get on with things.” His purpose accomplished—that was how Rolf saw it—Otto remembered his manners and insisted on helping her, complimenting her on her cooking. Meanwhile Louisa was still watching Rolf.

He got to the coffee shop seven minutes early the next day, but Otto was there already, in a corner booth. “How was your visit this morning?” Rolf asked him.

“The usual,” Otto said lightly, although Rolf knew it would have been different in at least one respect: the talk would have been of Louisa, and then of his own behavior. “Jeannette complained, and Franz wanted to know all about my life, he wanted to see pictures of Margaret, and the apartment, and the cat. But he doesn’t look at all well.”

“I know.” Neither of them said what both were thinking: when Franz’s life was shattered, when his brother died at the hands of the Nazis, when he came to America with nothing, cooped up with Jeannette in two dismal rooms, eking out a living by dealing in old stamps, when the news came after the war that his sister and her family had been gassed at Auschwitz, the one thing still left to him had been the certainty of Louisa’s happiness.

Otto looked around at the other diners. “Do you think they are enjoying themselves?” He gestured toward the booth opposite, where a young couple were hunched over ice cream sundaes. They looked weary beyond their years, drained of
hope; perhaps they had just had a fight, they had come out for ice cream to try to salvage something.

“No,” Rolf said reluctantly, as though this admission would compromise him. “Not at this moment.”

“When I first came to America I half the time wished Americans would not smile so much and the other half wondered why they didn’t smile more, why they weren’t smiling all the time.”

“Some of them do.”

A freckled waitress in a striped apron appeared to pour them coffee and ask what they wanted. Rolf said the BLTs were good there, and they ordered two. They stirred cream into their cups in silence. Otto rearranged, meticulously, the knife and fork the girl had placed on the chipped Formica in front of him. Then he said, “She will never be able to do what’s necessary for the child, all the practical things, in these early years especially. But to be there with her, to see her, to touch her … they have such wonderful smiles for each other.”

“Of course.” Rolf glanced at the young couple again. The girl had put down her spoon and was leaning across the table, talking in a low urgent voice, while the man went on callously shoveling ice cream into his mouth. And all the while he could feel Otto’s eyes on his face.

“If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t be so worried. I’d think, well, he’ll take a mistress, that’s how it will be managed. But you won’t do that. You virtuous ones are more dangerous than the rest of us.”

It was intolerable, indecent, that Otto of all people should speak of it. “That’s enough,” he said, “I won’t sit here and listen to this,” but his voice, instead of being stern, was hoarse
and cracked like a madman’s. For a moment they stared at each other, frozen, until Otto reached over and touched his hand.

“Forgive me. It’s none of my business. You will do what you have to. But I ask you, please, don’t give up on her completely. Not yet.”

“I haven’t,” Rolf said, clenching his teeth.

“I think the idea of it has become possible to you. But the other is also possible. You don’t know how much she will recover, not her arm, her walk, but her old self. I still see flickers of it, I feel it alive in her. It hasn’t died, she just can’t inhabit it in the old way any more. But she might. She might. You don’t know. She could still come back to herself.”

Rolf took a deep breath, steadying himself. “I don’t see that happening, frankly.”

“Because you see only the other things, the clumsiness, the veins that show in her forehead. How can you help it? But I tell you, there is grace and grace … Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I was thinking you sound like a preacher. Did you find God in the trenches, Otto?”

“There were no trenches where I was. I’ll shut up if you want me to.”

“You’re not saying anything I haven’t told myself dozens of times. In my own more pedestrian way. I’m doing the best I can. I’m sorry it’s not good enough. As sorry as you are.”

“I’m thinking of you as well as her. About what will become of you afterward.”

“You think my guilt might kill me?”

“No. But you will carry it with you, it may be too heavy a load to bear. Heavier than she would be.”

The waitress arrived with their sandwiches. Rolf sat staring at his, Otto picked up the pickle from his plate and took a careful bite, seeming to signal a return to normalcy—he would speak of something different next—but this time it was Rolf who could not stop. “What if I can’t love her the way she is?”

“I don’t know,” Otto said sadly, the pickle still in his hand. “But you haven’t tried yet.”

Rolf went on looking at the lettuce curling out of his sandwich; he was not sure he’d be able to eat the thing. He wanted no more of Otto’s wisdom, if wisdom it was, not when it meant the zippered dresses, the bristles of hair, the lopsided mouth. Alone with her that morning, with Mrs. Sprague and Emma in the kitchen, he had felt she was about to say something he would not want to hear; he had begun talking about the snow they were expecting, about Emma’s checkup next week, about the Congress, the UN. And she had sunk back into herself again, successfully warded off, her eyes full of misery.

What was Otto telling him, if not that he must live like an old man, resign himself to his duty, which it seemed to him he had been doing for most of his life? (He forgot the joy there had been, the Sunday outings with Louisa, the picnic on Bear Mountain, the night she had told him she was pregnant.) He stared at his hands on the table, remembering Miss Maggiore’s scarlet nails. She had brought him a yellow rose in a water glass when he got back to the office on Monday. “There you go,” she said, without quite looking at him, “the yellow rose of Texas. Except it’s Oregon you’ve been to. But it’s the thought that counts, right? It’s from all the girls, not just me. But it was my idea.”

“It’s very sweet of you,” he said gravely.

“Oh, I’m awfully sweet. Sweet is just my middle name.” She seemed to be watching him with a special alertness. “Well,” she said finally, “can’t stand here talking all day. Or not talking. There’s work to be done, right?”

She was the secret he was keeping from Otto. Nothing had happened between them, apart from those curiously charged encounters, but more and more the thought of her interfered with the workings of his conscience, made him mutinous in the face of reason. And he sensed that she knew this, and was excited by her power; she knew she had awakened in him some avidity that was dangerous. She may even have understood how foreign it was to what he had always believed was his nature. For all her brash innocence, she was shrewder than he was; that too was part of her charm.

But here was Otto, trying to sell him on Louisa as surely as the man who had come to his office that morning had tried to sell him on a new line of graphite. Delight, adventure, all that would be deferred for one more generation, something for Emma, not for him. Certainly that was Franz’s view of it. At the thought of Franz he knew he was trapped; in a minute he would pick up his sandwich and start to eat, and when he was dead they could write on his tombstone,
He saw it through
.

A
s it turned out, it was Louisa who left him, if a woman with a crippled arm and a pronounced instability to her gait can be said to leave anyone. It happened late on Thanksgiving, after their dinner, prepared of course by Mrs. Sprague, with Otto in attendance, and Emma blowing out her cheeks and making rude noises as Otto had taught her, then shrieking with laughter. Otto had brought two bottles of wine; Mrs. Sprague was too good a Baptist to partake, but the others toasted her with it, complimenting her on each dish in turn. Afterward Sophie and Gustav were coming with Kurt, just for a cup of coffee, and to say hello.

When they had eaten their turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie Louisa, with the confidence lent to her by the wine and Otto’s presence, had insisted charmingly that they would clean up. Mrs. Sprague had done enough for one day, she should go to the living room and rest. Rolf had put Emma down for her nap; it was just the three of them in the kitchen, with Rolf washing and Otto drying and Louisa wiping the table and high chair and putting things away, maneuvers she managed by a painstaking exertion of effort. She had improved, Rolf saw, she could do more with her right hand than he had supposed.

Even of old she had never really been graceful; she was too physically careless for that. She might turn around too
quickly with a full cup of broth in her hand and spill some on the floor; she might set the jar of cinnamon too close to the counter’s edge and catch it with her sleeve. But her movements had always seemed so emphatic, so swift and certain, that it didn’t matter. He would sit in the kitchen in the evenings and watch her, smiling as much at her lack of method—she was always forgetting things, always having to open the oven door again and add one more thing to the casserole—as at the stories she told him, about something ridiculous that had happened to her that day. Chatting, she called it, a word she had picked up in England; he did not know anyone else who used it. And then she might burn the rice, and have to scrape it off the bottom of the pot.

Now here she was, picking up a wine glass laboriously with her good hand, wrapping the fingers of her other one around the stem, using her free hand to open the cupboard door, then prizing the crippled fingers off the glass to set it down.

“Look at her!” Otto cried, flinging out his arms, the dish towel snapping. “Isn’t she wonderful?” Rolf turned around for a moment and then went back to wiping the sink.

“Stop it, Otto,” Louisa said, her voice rising.

“But you are, you’re wonderful.”

“You’re embarrassing Rolf.”

“Then damn Rolf.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “you mustn’t say that, you can’t damn Rolf. Rolf is … he’s the model citizen. And I, you see, I’m no earthly use to the state. To nation-building.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rolf told her, turning around fully now. “Nobody’s ever suggested such a thing.”

“No,” she said hysterically, “of course not. Nobody would ever say a thing like that. But then nobody talks to me much,
nobody talks to me at all. Except Mrs. Sprague, she tells me lots of things. While you were away she told me about a widow lady who lives in a house on Park Terrace West, and rents out rooms to invalids. Such a very nice lady, she said, she just happened to strike up a conversation with her in the supermarket one day. Mrs. Rafferty is her name, she’d love to take me to meet her. Why do you suppose she said all that?”

“I presume because she was trying to make conversation.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “God. What a coward you are. Even Mrs. Sprague is more honest.”

He stalked out without looking at either of them. In the living room, Mrs. Sprague had fallen asleep on the sofa, her head lolling on her flowered apron. For a few minutes he sat opposite her, taking deep breaths, and then the doorbell rang. Sophie and Gustav had arrived with Kurt.

Afterward, Rolf could hardly remember a single thing that had been said. They must have spoken of the usual subjects—the political situation, Kurt’s studies, Franz and Jeannette (they had come that morning, Otto was going to see them later). Gustav must have asked him about his trip out west. But only Kurt, a stocky untidy young man with a cowlick, spoke to him with normal kindness; the others all seemed to sit up straighter when he talked, they were stiffly correct, tight-lipped, while bestowing all their warmth and smiles on Louisa. He and Mrs. Sprague were cast out.

She tried to press her pumpkin pie on them, but they refused even that. Sophie had also made a pumpkin pie, Gustav told them proudly, patting her hand, a magnificent concoction; she was becoming a real American now. Rolf had never seen him so cheerful, or Sophie so girlish; only when they addressed themselves to him did the old severity return. Louisa,
meanwhile, was part of the general radiance—Louisa, who a few minutes before had been shouting insults in the kitchen, beamed at them, leaned forward excitedly on her chair, told a funny little story about Emma with the old breathlessness. Mrs. Sprague got up and disappeared in the direction of the room she shared with Emma.

A few minutes later, when Sophie, too, rose and said they must be going, Louisa pushed herself off her chair and went over to her. “I’m so glad,” she said, clutching Sophie’s hand. “I’m so glad for you both.” It was the sort of thing people said to a young couple who’d just announced their engagement, but neither Gustav nor Sophie seemed at all embarrassed; their faces were alight.

Then it was just the three of them again. Otto announced to Louisa—he still had not looked at Rolf—that he must be going, Jeannette and Franz were expecting him. Louisa told him to bring them the rest of the pumpkin pie. “Perhaps we should ask Mrs. Sprague about that,” Rolf said, with careful mildness.

“Leave a piece for her,” Louisa said to Otto. “Cut a piece and put it on a plate.” The whole time Otto was in the kitchen, busying himself with the pie, she did not speak, though she stared fixedly at Rolf, forcing him to meet her eyes. Only when Otto had left, promising to come in from New Jersey again on Saturday, did she break the silence. “Please sit down,” she said sharply. Just at that moment there was a wail from the bedroom.

“Mrs. Sprague must be asleep,” he said, when it did not stop right away. “I’ll go get Emma.”