Ghost Waltz: A Family Memoir (P.S.) Read online

  Later a clergyman prayed, and while wolfing down the last piece of orange I watched flags, alive in the wind, and hummed the “Star-Spangled Banner” with my mouth full of crumbs scraped from this night’s box of Lorna Doones. Then I crawled into bed, nauseous. The following night I would repeat the process, insatiable, and the night after that and the night after that. I did not understand half the English lines, but I understood the clatter of machine guns, and I concentrated on how ludicrously these supposed Germans mispronounced their mother tongue, in order to hold at bay a panic that cookies could not assuage.

  Finally, there was an American History book belonging to Helen, who sat next to me in Algebra. She wore sweaters buttoned up the back and gloriously tight black skirts. Her name, in conjunction with a variety of boys’ names, was embroidered in ball-point inside the front cover, underneath a stamp proclaiming the book to be the property of Eastwood High School. Having deciphered its title out of the corner of my eye, I wrote her a note asking if I might borrow the book for the duration of the period. Next day I sent her a similar note. From the third day on she handed me the book automatically until, three weeks later, she was transferred to a different class. At the end of the school year she handed me her history text, Helen & Bob/Jerry/Bill/Roy etc. intact. “Keep it,” she said. “I’ve never met anybody who was so crazy about a dumb schoolbook. But you’re a sweet kid, don’t forget me when you’re back in Australia.” I threw the book overboard the Groote Beer, an old Dutch battleship converted into a students’ boat, between Montreal and Rotterdam, halfway home.

  Chapter 7

  But for three weeks I studied the section on the Second World War. The first time around it took me four days to get all the way through, but soon I could read the chapter in a single period, undisturbed by the teacher writing numbers on a blackboard that in this country was green. I had neither oranges nor cookies at my disposal and held on to Helen’s book instead, flexing my fingers once class was over and I was released to hurry on to Public Speaking.

  Those were not “just” movies, then. The textbook dryly repeated, in essence if not in flamboyant detail, what I had already seen enacted: Nazi atrocities, Allied duty to end atrocities, American victory. A bland textbook was in accord with my brutal midnight tutors. This war had not merely been one army’s victory over another, it had been the victory of Good over Evil.

  Every day after school I threw myself across the pink chenille spread on my bed and cried. The throwing-oneself-across-a-bed was a gesture I had read about in books, but the homesickness (for the way my father held a cigarette, how my mother pushed my hair off my forehead, for the ease with which my brother jumped off a moving streetcar, for myself as I had been only weeks ago) was real. It was also limited. I would sit up again and go to wash my face in the lush, pink bathroom that I shared with only one other person. And I would become engrossed in fussing with my hair, which had taken on a never-imagined importance in a country where girls washed theirs daily and spent many waking hours in curlers, a habit that astonished and delighted me. And I became engulfed in the myriad nuances—subtle enough to mystify and baffle a foreigner—of cotton socks and wool, and tennis shoes and saddle shoes and loafers, and where a pin was placed on a Peter Pan collar, and being one in a senior class of hundreds as opposed to the class I had left behind, and to which I would return, consisting of eighteen. And girls wearing boys’ rings, and belonging to a sorority, sitting in a circle on the floor of someone’s “family” room as opposed to a “living” room; trying to decode a process consisting of “reading the minutes” and “old business” and “new business” and potato chips and talk about girls who drink and girls who go all the way.

  A new world indeed, increasingly attractive the better I found my way around in it. And throughout, the nightly forays on the refrigerator—not once did the woman I called Mom complain or ask; she merely replenished the stock of oranges and Lorna Doones and to this day I don’t know what, if anything, she thought of their rapid disappearance—and the immersion into my reliably raging war. Two days before leaving I met a very recent Princeton graduate. Then the year was over.

  Chapter 8

  I no longer have an accent. People I meet comment on that when they first hear that I grew up in Austria, and I am vain about it and love hearing the magic phrase, “But you don’t have. . . .” Some consonants were tricky longer than others, the v in “elevator,” for instance, and while I was teaching I had to be careful when I introduced “weak verbs.” I was lucky with the initial letters j and g, pitfalls for many Austrians: Jell-O, German, jewelry, and ginger presented no obstacles. The one common English word that continues to be hazardous for me to pronounce—I have to concentrate a split second before saying it, each and every time—is Jew.

  Chapter 9

  My mother cried and my father told me how proud he was of me and wanted, first off, to show me what progress he had made on the house during my absence. My brother had grown nearly two inches and had dismantled my bicycle, using its parts to fortify his own, which had blossomed into a much-endowed vehicle while mine was not to navigate again. And the first effort, three days into the homecoming, a question after dinner. “What was the war about?” And my father’s calm reply, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And the same question and similar ones stretching over languid, end-of-summer evenings, when I would follow him to the Grund.

  That’s what we still called his nightly destination—“I’m going to the Grund now,” “Is he back from the Grund yet?”—a holdover from the days when it was still a plot of land, before he had put up the provisional fence, and dug the provisional sewer, and connected the water, and put up the real fence, all along pacing out the floor plan again and again, until he was finally ready to ram a spade into the ground and begin the basement. Grund means “plot of land,” also “earth,” “soil,” “reason,” “motive,” and “cause.”

  He was laying more bricks that summer, bent over his trowel in baggy old pants held up at the waist with a piece of string, sandals tied to his feet with more bits of string where leather straps had given way years ago, sweat running ribbons down the dusty skin under his arms.

  I stood behind him, talking at his back. I had bathed in midafternoon in preparation for the nightly confrontation, and would wear a pair of white, patent-leather pumps and one of my pink Lady Bryant shirtwaist dresses, glamorous prizes from another continent, meant to lend to my interrogations the formality they deserved.

  Not once did my father ask me to pass a trowel, or to hand him a brick, or to get him a tin cup of water. Nor did I offer to lift a finger. I stood up straight, tight-lipped and prim, the marrow of my bones turned to zeal.

  As the sun went down my questions became louder. My father’s answers stayed the same in tone and content, bland variations of his first reply. “You wouldn’t understand,” and “It’s no use talking about it now.” “Did you gas any Jews?” finally prompted a different answer, at dusk, on the last hot Sunday of the year. Carefully setting a brick into place on wet mortar, my father, enunciating as one does one month into a beginners’ foreign language course, said, “If you care to leave my house, forever, right now, you need only repeat what you just said.” I did not care to leave his house. But the following evening I asked in a raised voice, “Do you have any idea what the Americans say—do you?” and my father said, without looking up, “If you want to believe the pap the Americans feed you, go ahead.” “I don’t want to believe them,” I cried, “tell me your side, tell me our side,” and he said, “It’s too late.”

  My mother kept repeating, “How I wish you had never gone over there, we thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for you, we should never have let you go. Don’t upset your father, he knows what he’s doing, be grateful, why do you upset him so, think about his ulcers.” “His ulcers, my God,” I would yell; yelling at her was permissible. “Do you know what the Nazis did? There were concentration camps right here in Austria, how come there aren’t any
Jews around, none in my school, none in this neighborhood, did every last one get knocked off? I want to know what he had to do with that, it’s my right!”

  And my gentle, always sickly, overweight, and overworked mother, who cried often and easily—at newspaper headlines: Lost Toddler Found Safe in Neighbor’s Yard—would say, dry-eyed, fierce, “No. If your father chooses not to talk about something, that is a right. You have no right whatsoever. He is your father.”

  A true Austrian—“facts are facts,” “that’s how it is,” “what you can’t change you live with”—I kept at it for no longer than two weeks. After that I concentrated on how satisfyingly Graz rye bread stills the vaguest appetite, the fiercest hunger; how the fog, that autumn, would drift through my hometown’s streets, while the tops of surrounding hills glowed bright by midmorning; how my brother, day by day, became less the stranger he had been at the airport, if not yet a friend an ally, handsome, too—I had never thought of him in terms of looks—with his easy, brash toughness among peers, his brittle, guarded lack of either amiability or its opposite around my father; and how my mother would look at me, sideways, and how those glances soon were no longer expressions of fear alone (fear for me? for herself? for him? for us?) but mixed with a sort of pride, a hint of “my daughter, who has been to America.” And I concentrated on schoolwork, of which there was a large amount to make up, back again in a quiet room with eighteen desks, students and teachers familiar to me since the age of ten. I told a few stories about America when other girls reported on their summer vacations, and tried to pretend to myself it had all been no more than the type of holiday my classmates were accustomed to every year: the south of France, or St. Moritz, or, at the very least, northern Italy.

  Chapter 10

  My mother looks up from the magazine she is reading. “Will you look at the picture of this pretty Swedish girl, she is marrying an African. He’s black as coal, how can she do this to her poor family?”

  My parents spoke openly about their distrust of blacks and abhorred the idea of “mingling” with them, though there was no chance of that in Graz. For whatever reason, their example did not affect me the way my parents intended. Blacks don’t haunt me. Like men, they are “other” and there. I love this one, don’t like that one, give little thought to most. Jews are a different story. Yet as often and as diligently as I have sifted through my brain, I cannot remember my parents, my teachers, my friends—anyone while I was growing up—saying a word about Jews. Not pro, not con, not ever.

  Chapter 11

  In order to graduate with my class, a goal inordinately important to me, I had to make up my lost academic year by Christmas. Public Speaking was of no help, nor was American History. My English had improved, of course, but English was only one subject among thirteen. They had done Central and South America in Geography, had read vast material in German class, I could no longer keep up with what they were doing in Latin, French, Chemistry, and Physics. Math seemed hopeless. “Well, Seiler,” our math teacher said on the first day of school before a hushed class, “I hope you had a pleasant time. Better hang on to those memories—skyscrapers and whatnot—because you’ll flunk my course, you’ve always been stupid in math.”

  They had conquered calculus while I had learned about the importance of being asked to football games and the victory of Good over Evil, and my prospects were poor. But a math student at the University of Graz bicycled to our apartment at the outskirts of town every evening to coach me. It was a major effort for which my parents paid him a very small sum, while I accompanied him to several Sunday morning symphony concerts.

  Throughout the year, the now-not-so-recent Princeton graduate back in the United States wrote romantic letters to me. I was happy to receive them and answered each one. A month after I had graduated from the Erstes Bundesrealgymnasium für Mädchen (being nearly physically aware of how the principles of calculus melted from my brain) he came to Austria. We sat on a park bench surrounded by roses when he told me he intended to marry me. That evening he formally asked my father for my hand.

  My father said no, she has to go to college first, and the young American said, I give you my word I’ll put her through school myself. My mother cried and repeated at length that America did not have socialized medicine and what if she gets sick, and the young American promised to take out more than an adequate amount of health insurance.

  I said little and my brother said nothing. He sat behind the kitchen table eating peanuts from a large china bowl, looking at whoever was speaking, winking at me whenever the others were talking at once. Each time the negotiations reached an impasse he halted the cracking of shells, as if he saw his contribution to the proceedings to consist of keeping humdrum noises under control. And the idea of getting married seemed lovely to me, and my suitor struck me as romantic and valiant, argue as he did with my father. Besides, how contrary to all the books I had read on the subject, that this man had not asked me to marry him, but had merely stated his intention; here was a man who knew what he wanted. What I wanted was to get out.

  Austria, my family, had transmuted from home-taken-for-granted into a vicious undertow. Nothing, so I was convinced at the time, will ever be explained to me here. Whatever sucks at me with such force will continue to be unnamed, unspeakable. It will suck at me and suck and suck some more and will not stop until I am back where I belong, where I was less than two years ago, when Syracuse was a Greek city, not automatically followed by an appendage, an amalgam said in one breath: Syracuse New York. The exchange student had returned a changeling, its crib someone else’s, the comfort it found in this foreign crib meant for the child “snatched,” as Austrian folklore had it, “by the Gypsies.” Out then, to find and rejoin whatever unknown tribe had put me into a foreigner’s, an Austrian child’s crib, warm and close though it was and smelling of chamomile, its sides at times indistinguishable from my skin, my mother’s skin, my father’s. What I wanted and needed was to get out.

  Chapter 12

  So we were married and spent close to a decade in small Midwestern towns. My husband, who loved me and who was a man of his word, did indeed put me through school, driving me to class every morning and picking me up again in the late afternoon, uncomplainingly, for the years it took until I graduated once more, having fulfilled my history requirement by taking a course called “Intellectual Survey of Western Civilization,” which stayed away from the Second World War entirely. And we had two children. A girl first, it gave me deep pleasure to choose her name, Ursula, a traditional Austrian name backed up by a saint for good measure. And I was busy, content, and most often happy, although the second child, the boy, had been ill at birth and stayed ill.

  I taught German in high school, where I borrowed another American History book, this one from one of my juniors. It was marked, discreetly and only on the first page, Amy & Walt. The book’s perusal more than sufficed for my citizenship examination, which consisted of two questions: Who is the governor of Wisconsin? And: Who freed the slaves? A month later I swore that I had never been nor was then a Communist, and that I had never supported myself either through illegal gambling or prostitution. Another month after that I swore that during the four weeks since my last oath I again had been neither Communist, prostitute, nor gambler, and became an American citizen.

  A few years later I fell deeply in love with a man very different from the one I had married, and left my husband. My father wrote me an anguished letter, telling me about his sorrow, reminding me that his grandchildren would now grow up without a proper set of parents, that marriage was a commitment no one in our family had ever reneged on, and that he felt personally implicated: I was rejecting not only my own choice, but one of which he had approved. The letter ended with the sentence, “If you do not return to your husband immediately, I shall never speak to you again.”

  My mother, though deeply upset, did continue to write to me after the divorce. More than anything she wanted me to come home, so that her grandson could be treated
by Austrian doctors. The dilemma was that while he could have been taken care of for free by Austria’s exemplary socialized-medicine machine, there was also the fact that this apparatus did not, at the time, perform kidney transplants, while America’s nonsocialized medical machinery did them as a matter of course. What’s more, when my son’s money-conscious doctor first told me that a transplant would be necessary within a year, he added this suggestion: “Your insurance probably won’t cover that—dependents’ transplants are a little esoteric. Even if you could get the money together, through loans or whatever, you’d be in debt for decades. So why don’t you go on welfare? You’re divorced, two kids, one’s always sick, you won’t have any trouble at all.”

  I quit my job and did as advised, and within a year—Mark was seven—one of my kidneys had been slipped into place in my son’s small abdomen. The transplant was faultless, a success. However, Mark’s heart gave up three weeks later.