Children Are Bored on Sunday Page 7

  Frau Reinmuth then returned to Mr. Andreas, but it was plain to see that her mind was only half with him. She said, “I envy you to hear Flagstad. Our pain is that there is no music now,” and in a lower voice she added, “I have seen August bite his lip for sorrow when he goes past the opera house in Mannheim. It’s nothing now, you know, but a ruin, like everything.” Glancing at her, Evan wondered whether she were older than her husband or if this marriage had been entered upon late, and he concluded that perhaps the second was true, for they were childless—the downright Mrs. McNaughton had determined that before the canapés were passed—and Frau Reinmuth looked born to motherhood. But even more telling was the honeymoon inflection in her voice, as if she were still marveling now to say the name “August” as easily as she said “I” and to be able to bestow these limnings of her dearest possession generously on the members of a dinner party. It was not that she spoke of him as if he were a child, as some women do who marry late or marry men younger than themselves, but as if he were a paragon with whom she had the remarkable honor to be associated. She, in her boundless patience, could endure being deprived of music and it was not for herself that she complained, but she could not bear to see August’s grief over the hush that lay upon their singing country; she lived not only for, she lived in, him. She wore her yellow hair in Germanic braids that coiled around her head, sitting too low to be smart; her hands were soft and large, honestly meriting the wide wedding band on the right one. She was as completely a woman as Virginia, in spite of a kind of ravening femaleness and piquant good looks, had never been one. He shuddered to think how she must be maligning him in Nevada to the other angry petitioners, and then he tried to imagine how Frau Reinmuth would behave under similar circumstances. But it was unthinkable that she should ever be a divorcée; no matter what sort of man she married, this wifely woman would somehow, he was sure, quell all disorder. Again he felt a wave of affection for her; he fancied drinking tea with her in a little crowded drawing room at the end of one of these warm days, and he saw himself walking with both the Reinmuths up through the hills behind the Philosophenweg, proving to the world by their compassionate amity that there was no longer a state of war between their country and his.

  But he was prevented from spinning out his fantasy of a friendship with the Reinmuths because Mrs. Crowell was demanding his attention. Her present servant, she told him, was an aristocrat (“as aristocratic as a German can be,” she said sotto voce, “which isn’t saying much”) and might therefore be expected not to steal the spoons; now, having brought him up to date on her belowstairs problems, she changed the subject and drew him into the orbit of her bright-eyed, pervasive bustling. She understood that he had just come from Nuremberg, where she and the Judge had lived for two years. “Isn’t it too profoundly triste?” she cried. “Where did they billet you, poor thing?”

  “At the Grand Hotel,” said Evan, recollecting the Wacs with their mustaches and their soldierly patois.

  “Oh, no!” protested Mrs. Crowell. “But it’s simply overrun with awful Army children! Not children—brats. Brats, I’m sorry to say, is the only word for them. They actually roller-skate through the lobby, you know, to say nothing of the ghastly noise they make. I used to go to the hairdresser there and finally had to give up because of the hullabaloo.”

  At the mention of Nuremberg, Dr. Reinmuth had pivoted around toward them and now, speaking across Mrs. McNaughton, he said dreamily, “Once it was a lovely town. We lived there, my wife and I, all our lives until the war. I understand there is now a French orchestra in the opera house that plays calypso for your soldiers.” There sounded in his voice the same note of wonder that he had used when he acclaimed the decanters that he could not own; neither could he again possess the beauties of his birthplace. And Evan Leckie, to whom the genesis of war had always been incomprehensible, looked with astonishment at these two pacific Germans and pondered how the whole hideous mistake had come about, what Eumenides had driven this pair to hardship, humiliation, and exile. Whatever else they were, however alien their values might be, these enemies were, sub specie aeternitatis, of incalculable worth if for no other reason than that, in an unloving world, they loved.

  Mrs. Andreas, tactfully refusing Dr. Reinmuth’s gambit, since she knew that the deterioration of the Nuremberg Opera House into a night club must be a painful subject to him, maneuvered her guests until the talk at the table became general. They all continued the exchange that had begun with Frau Reinmuth and Mr. Andreas on the Salzburg Festival; they went on to speak of Edinburgh, of the Salome that someone had heard at La Scala, of a coloratura who had delighted the Reinmuths in Weimar. Dr. Reinmuth then told the story of his having once defended a pianist who had been sued for slander by a violinist; the defendant had been accused of saying publicly that the plaintiff played Mozart as if the music had been written for the barrel organ and that the only thing missing was a monkey to take up a collection. This anecdote, coinciding with the arrival of the dessert, diverted the stream of talk, and Judge Crowell, whose interest in music was perfunctory and social, revived and took the floor. He told of a murder case he had tried the week before in Frankfurt and of a rape case on the docket in Stuttgart. Dr. Reinmuth countered with cases he was pleading; they matched their legal wits, made Latin puns, and so enjoyed their game that the others laughed, although they barely understood the meanings of the words.

  Dr. Reinmuth, who was again fondling the decanters, said, “I suppose every lawyer is fond of telling the story of his first case. May I tell mine?” He besought his hostess with an endearing smile, and his wife, forever at his side, pleaded for him, “Oh, do!” and she explained, “It’s such an extraordinary story of a young lawyer’s first case.”

  He poured himself a little more Chablis and smiled and began. When he was twenty-three, in Nuremberg, just down from Bonn, with no practice at all, he had one day been called upon by the state to defend a man who had confessed to murdering an old woman and robbing her of sixty pfennig. The defense, of course, was purely a convention, and the man was immediately sentenced to death, since there was no question of his guilt or of the enormity of his crime. Some few days after the trial, Dr. Reinmuth had received an elaborate engraved invitation to the execution by guillotine, which was to be carried out in the courtyard of the Justizpalast one morning a day or so later, punctually at seven o’clock. He was instructed, in an accompanying letter, to wear a Prince Albert and a top hat.

  Mrs. Andreas was shocked. “Guillotine? Did you have to go?”

  Dr. Reinmuth smiled and bowed to her. “No, I was not required. It was, you see, my right to go, as the advocate of the prisoner.”

  Judge Crowell laughed deeply. “Your first case, eh, Reinmuth?” And Dr. Reinmuth spread out his hands in a mock gesture of deprecation.

  “My fellow-spectators were three judges from the bench,” he continued, “who were dressed, like myself, in Prince Alberts and cylinders. We were a little early when we got to the courtyard, so that we saw the last-minute preparations of the stage before the play began. Near the guillotine, with its great knife—that blade, my God in Heaven!—there stood a man in uniform with a drum, ready to drown out the sound if my client should yell.”

  The dimmest of frowns had gathered on Judge Crowell’s forehead. “All this pomp and circumstance for sixty pfennigs?” he said.

  “Right you are, sir,” replied Dr. Reinmuth. “That is the irony of my story.” He paused to eat a strawberry and to take a sip of wine. “Next we watched them test the machine to make sure it was in proper—shall I say decapitating?—condition. When they released it, the cleaver came down with such stupendous force that the earth beneath our feet vibrated and my brains buzzed like a bee.

  “As the bells began to ring for seven, Herr Murderer was led out by two executioners, dressed as we were dressed. Their white gloves were spotless! It was a glorious morning in May. The flowers were out, the birds were singing, the sky had not a cloud. To have your head cut off on su
ch a day!”

  “For sixty pfennigs!” persisted the judge from Ohio. And Miss Dean, paling, stopped eating her dessert.

  “Mein Herr had been confessed and anointed. You could fairly see the holy oil on his forehead as his keepers led him across the paving to the guillotine. The drummer was ready. As the fourth note of the seven struck in the church towers, they persuaded him to take the position necessary to the success of Dr. Guillotin’s invention. One, he was horizontal! Two, the blade descended! Three, the head was off the carcass and the blood shot out from the neck like a volcano, a geyser, the flame from an explosion. No sight I saw in the war was worse. The last stroke of seven sounded. There had been no need for the drum.”

  “Great Scott!” said Mr. Andreas, and flushed.

  Captain McNaughton stared at Dr. Reinmuth and said, “You chaps don’t do things by halves, do you?”

  Mrs. Andreas, frantic at the dangerous note that had sounded, menacing her party, put her hand lightly on the lawyer’s and said, “I know that then you must have fainted.”

  Dr. Reinmuth tilted back his head and smiled at the ceiling. “No. No, I did not faint. You remember that this was a beautiful day in spring? And that I was a young man, all dressed up at seven in the morning?” He lowered his head and gave his smile to the whole company. “Faint! Dear lady, no! I took the tram back to Fürth and I called my sweetheart on the telephone.” He gazed at his wife. “Liselotte was surprised, considering the hour. ‘What are you thinking of? It’s not eight o’clock,’ she said. I flustered her then. I said, ‘I know it’s an unusual time of day to call, but I have something unusual to say. Will you marry me?’”

  He clasped his hands together and exchanged with his wife a look as exuberant and shy as if they were in the first rapture of their romance, and, bewitched, she said, “Twenty years ago next May.”

  A silence settled on the room. Whether Evan Leckie was the more dumfounded by Dr. Reinmuth’s story of a majestic penalty to fit a sordid crime or by his ostentatious hinting at his connubial delights, he did not know. Evan sought the stunned faces of his countrymen and could not tell in them, either, what feeling was the uppermost. The party suddenly was no longer a whole; it consisted of two parts, the Americans and the Germans, and while the former outnumbered them, the Germans, in a deeper sense, had triumphed. They had joyfully danced a Totentanz, had implied all the details of their sixty-pfennig marriage, and they were still, even now, smiling at each other as if there had never been anything untoward in their lives.

  “I could take a wife then, you see,” said Dr. Reinmuth, by way of a dénouement, “since I was a full-fledged lawyer. And she could not resist me in that finery, which, as a matter of fact, I had had to hire for the occasion.”

  Judge Crowell lighted a cigarette, and, snatching at the externals of the tale, he said, “Didn’t know you fellows used the guillotine as late as that. I’ve never seen one except that one they’ve got in the antiquarian place in Edinburgh. They call it the Maiden.”

  Dr. Reinmuth poured the very last of the Chablis into his glass, and, turning to Mrs. Andreas, he said, “It was nectar and I’ve drunk it all. Sic transit gloria mundi.”

  The Home Front

  In the back yard of the lodging house, in the top of a dead tree, glib blackbirds swung in the wind on their individual twigs. Now and again, at some signal, they dropped to the ground but presently returned in a flutter of wings. Then the fancy would strike them to clear the tree, every man jack of them and off they would go like a whole company of hysterical busybodies. All the while they were fussing, big silver gulls sailed at their ease, high above them, descending occasionally to sit on the edge of a moored fishing boat that slowly turned round and round at the head of the little harbor. Some of the gulls set out to sea, as straight and sure in their flight as though a great hand carried them out beyond the causeway to the Sound. A savage sunset ignited the windows of defense plants across the water, caused derelict heaps of rubbish to glitter blindingly, smote the khaki wings of helicopters which all day long gyrated over the disheveled land.

  Although it was late in April and the day had been warm, the room was chilly and the stout doctor, shivering, drew the heavy Paisley shawl closer about his shoulders, sighed, and settled more firmly into the rocking chair by the window. Steadfastly he stared out. It would be self-indulgent to turn away in displeasure from all the symbols he read in his prospect, unprofitable to admit the intrusion of homesickness or vexation. (He had, of necessity, come to this twilight discipline; in days past he had been so imprudent in his revery that he had often lost all perspective and had thought of the war as a deliberate insult to himself.) And, indeed, it was not so much sad or vexing as it was puzzling that he, a homeless man, native of a distant country, was willy-nilly a part of the “home front,” sharing richly in the spoils. As he followed the ascent of a helicopter, he marveled as frequently he did at the wonderful aptness of the phrase, “the home front.” Here people lived as headily and impermanently as soldiers on battlefields. There seemed to be no natives unless the babies born here during this long pause could be called such. No indigenous architecture was visible. Probably it existed but it was hidden away behind blocks of temporary structures, by barrack-like apartment houses, sprawling into the yards of churches, huddling in the sulphurous shadows of factories. And although everything was new, made freshly for this especial period in the world’s history, it had a second-hand look. Houses, oil drums, buses, people seemed to have been got at a fire sale.

  There was a perpetual stirring in the lodging house. All the other tenants were defense workers, and the walls of the corridors were hung with warning pennants: “QUIET! BULLARD WORKER! HELP HIM HELP WIN THE WAR!” At the most unseemly hours—eleven at night, four in the morning—alarm clocks shrieked, taps gushed, feet crunched over the gravel of the driveway to the never ending stream of buses. The lodgers ranged from late adolescence to early senility and they came from all over the country, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Pueblo, Colorado; Mobile; Galveston; Wilmington, Delaware. They lived three to a room and six to a bathroom and because there were so many of them and their existence was so migratory, it was impossible to tell them apart, to give them more specific designations than “old” and “young,” “male” and “female.” Dr. Pakheiser from time to time received bits of information about them from the Hungarian manageress, Mrs. Horvath. She tossed them to him, dry and meatless, and did so without the least good humor. On the first floor there was (or had been) a Sikorsky worker who owned a fishing boat and on Sundays went to the Sound for bass. A lady accountant at Remington Arms had left her electric grill on for six hours and the pan that had been on it melted down to nothing, creating a fearful stink. A foreman at the Bunner Ritter plant had been rejected by the Army for ulcers of the stomach. A girl at Chance Vought had, returning from a weekend in Massachusetts, seen a trainload of prisoners of war passing through the station in Providence and she had reported that they grinned shamelessly as if they were on a holiday. But the doctor did not know whether these adventures belonged to current tenants or to former ones, and if he had inquired further and had correctly assigned the histories to the right names and faces, it would have served no purpose; by the time he was sure of his ground, they would have packed up their suitcases and moved away and immediately been replaced.

  He was sympathetic with their restlessness but sternly held himself detached from it. Had he not done so, he, too, probably would have wandered from one boarding house to the next like a sick person constantly shifting about in his bed trying to find a comfortable position for his aching bones. Refusing to think of himself as a “transient,” pretending that there would never be an end to the war or to this exile, he had put up with the chilliness of the house, the unpleasant manner of the manageress, the excessive rent, and had furthermore doggedly transformed the room into his room as if he were going to live in it the rest of his life. It was the first time in his three years of residence in America that he ha
d accomplished the transformation, and it had not been easy. In former rooms, though, it had been impossible. This was like one in a hotel which defied any eccentric impress, and in the beginning he had almost despaired, had been convinced that like all the others, it would remain inviolably and complacently itself and that when he finally went away, if his signature were there at all, it would be nothing more characteristic of him than of the tenants before him or the ones to follow: a half-used box of toothpowder and a rusted razor blade in the medicine chest, or on the desk a bottle of ink or a glass ashtray bought for a dime. There was, upon everything, the mark of an absolute and wholly impersonal vulgarity. The furniture was mongrel. The walls were cream-colored plaster that could offend no one; fastened to them here and there were besilvered lamps containing bulbs shaped like fat candleflames that shed a pale and genteel light. The rugs were scrupulously unobtrusive. The sturdy column of the standing lamp was embellished with twists of iron that represented nothing on earth, and the shade, seemingly designed to diminish illumination by exactly half, was silk of a color that could not be named, a color like one acquired by an amateur chemist or by a child experimenting with crayons. The ample bed (too ample for his understanding. It was called a “three-quarter” bed and he wondered whether it was meant for two children or for someone prodigiously obese) was covered with a faded counterpane made of two Indian prints sewn together.