How to Fall (19 page)

Eugene led her to a church. Sonya looked up at the organ loft. A few parishioners on their own lunch breaks settled into the empty pews. One slowly lowered his forehead onto the back of the pew in front of him, then lifted it, then lowered it again.

Downstairs, in a small chapel, a dozen people waited on chairs and two performers waited on a platform. The standing young man held a viola by its neck. The young woman sat at a piano, head bowed as if awaiting execution. A note on the mimeographed program mentioned that these twenty-year-old twins had recently
arrived from Czechoslovakia. The performance began. The sister played with precision. Eugene's fingers played along with her, on his own thighs. The brother made love to his instrument. In the intervals between selections the attentive audience was entertained by faint sounds of organ practice from above. The concert lasted less than an hour. When the twins and their guests filed upstairs, Sonya looked for the parishioner who had banged his forehead against the pew-back, but he was gone.

As Eugene had promised, Sonya was not very late getting back to work. Still, Mrs. Levinger had already returned from lunch. She was on the telephone. She gave Sonya a distracted nod and hung up.

“The next batch is here,” she said. “The French ones.”

 

The usual setup: at one end of a large function room volunteers stood at bridge tables; at the other end a trestle table holding loaves of bread, and biscuits, and plates of sausages, and jugs of milk.

Forty children who had been fending for themselves for six months now huddled in the middle of the room as if, were they to approach the food, they would be shot.

One girl's hair was the color of lamplight.

Mrs. Levinger hoisted herself onto a folding chair and grasped its back for a moment while her rump threatened to topple her. Then she stood up. Once standing she did not falter or shake.

Sonya made note of various details—it was part of her job. There was a small pale fellow who looked sick, but the doctors hadn't detained him. Hunger and fatigue, probably. Two little girls gripped each others' hands. Many children carried smaller children.

The fair-haired girl carried an instrument case.

Mrs. Levinger welcomed them in French. They were being sent
to villages in the Cotswolds, she said. Hills, she elaborated. They could keep their belongings. Siblings would not be separated. The host families would not be Jewish. But they would be sympathetic.

“I am not Jewish either,” said a dark boy.

“Ah, Pierre,” reproved a bigger boy. “It's all right, in this place.”

The children made their slow silent way to the trestle table. Soon all were eating—all except the tall blonde girl with the instrument. She seemed about to approach Mrs. Levinger. But it was a feint. She swerved toward Sonya. “Madame . . .”

“Oui,”
said Sonya.
“Voulez vous . . .”

“I speak English.” Her eyes were gray. She had a straight nose, a curly mouth, a small chin. “I do not wish to go into the countryside.”

“What is your name?”

“Lotte,” with a shrug, as if any name would do. “I am from Paris. I wish to stay in London.”

“Your instrument . . .”

“A violin,” said Lotte. “I tried to sell it when we ran out of food in Marseilles, but no one wanted to buy it. I am skilled, Madame. I can play in an orchestra. Or in a café—gypsy music.”

“I wish,” Sonya began. “I cannot,” she tried again. “There is no arrangement in London for refugee children,” she finally said. “Only in the villages.”

“I am no child. I am seventeen.”

Sonya shook her head.

The lids dropped. “Sixteen. Truly, Madame.”

“Call me Sonya.”

“Merci.
Madame Sonya, I am sixteen next month, if I had my papers I could prove it, but my papers were lost, everything was
lost, even the photographs of my father, only the violin . . .” Lotte swallowed. “I will be sixteen in three weeks. Please believe me.”

“I do.” Mrs. Levinger was glancing at them; other children needed attention. “You must go to the Cotswolds now. I'll try to make some better arrangement.”

Lotte said, “Empty words,” and turned away.

“No!” Was she always to be denied sentiment, must she be only efficient forever?—she who was moderately musical. “I love gypsy tunes,” she said. “Look, this is my address,” scribbling on some brown paper; “Look, I will try to find you a café, or maybe a . . . ”

Lotte took the paper. Sonya's last sight of her was on the train, a different train from the one Sonya was taking. Lotte was standing in the aisle, clasping the violin to her thin chest.

 

“I would like to give you a ring,” Eugene said.

“Oh!”

“I may be interned.”

“It won't happen,” fervently. But it was happening every day. Aliens suspected of being spies—Jews among them—were shut up in yellow prisons.

Eugene said, “My other suit, my piano scores—they can fend for themselves. But my mother's ring—I owe it respect. It eluded German customs, it eluded also my own conscience.”

She glanced at him. In the light of the gas fire his skin looked as dark as the geranium.

“I should have sold it to repay my rescuers,” he explained. “But it is only a little diamond. And it meant much to my mother.”

“Ah . . . your father gave it to her.”

“Her lover gave it to her. My mother was born in Lyon; in
Berlin she retained her French attitude toward marriage. And then, of course, my father was so much older.”

“Older?” A dozen years separated Sonya and Eugene—she had recently turned fifty-two without mentioning it.

“Twenty years older.” Eugene fished in his pocket. Something twinkled. He put it into her palm.

Two weeks afterwards he was taken away.

By the beginning of Sonya's second year in London she had acquired women friends and men friends and a favorite tearoom and two favorite pubs and several favorite walks. She had adopted the style of the women around her—cotton dresses, low-heeled shoes—but she spurned the brave little hats. She swept her gray hair back from her brow and pinned barrettes behind her ears. Her hair curved like annoyed feathers below the barrettes.

She knew where to get necessaries on the black market. Occasionally, for her small clients, she used that knowledge. Sometimes she used it for herself—a bottle of contraband cognac was stashed at the bottom of her armoire waiting for Eugene's return.

She went to lectures in drafty halls. She went to briefings with people who had recently returned from Vichy and Salonika and Haifa. She went to patched-together concert operas and to stunning theatricals—once, in a theater, she heard Laurence Olivier's voice rise above the sound of bombs.

She attended exhibitions of new watercolors. A few times, during the summer, she bathed at Brighton. “You must play!” ordered Mrs. Levinger. She received letters from friends in Rhode Island and her aunt in Chicago and the fat man in New York and the tenor and Eugene. She kept track of that first tubercular boy, visited him in his seaside sanatorium. The Yiddish of her childhood stirred during the early visits; but after a few months she discovered that new words were sticking to him like burrs. Soon they spoke only English. Together they watched the slate-colored sea. Sitting next to his little chaise, his translucent hand in hers, she told him about the hurricane that had sliced her own life in two. “A tall wave smashed onto our cove.”

“A hill of water,” he experimented.

“Yes, yes! A mountain.”

She kept in touch with the sister, too, in her berth in a cottage. A year after the boy was taken away Sonya and Mrs. Levinger presided over the reunion of the children, the girl rosy, the boy pale but free of disease. The foster mother agreed to take him too. “For she pines, she does,” said that kindly soul.

 

“Of course you remember Roland Rosenberg,” Mrs. Levinger said.

“Of course.” They shook hands. He was a little less fat, but it would be tactless to say so. They spoke of work in a unnecessary way—it was as if she knew by heart the papers in his shapeless briefcase, as if he could trace each line on her face back to the situation that had drawn it there. But they did talk, some, in a gloomy restaurant. His table manners were terrible. His handkerchief was a disgrace. His peculiar smile recurred now and again—upturned
lips, a look of wonder. Mark Twain, he told her, was a passion with him. Some day he wanted to follow Twain's journey around the world.

“And the composers you like?” she idly asked.

“Franz Lehar is my favorite.”

Lehar: beloved by Hitler. “Oh, dear,” said Sonya.

“Shameful, isn't it. The Joint should fire me.”

There was no cab. When was there ever a cab? He walked her home. “I will be back some day.”

“Good.” Good? What were they doing to Eugene?

 

“The
New York Times,
please,” she said one evening, and took the paper from the distinguished gentleman. Standing at the kiosk, she looked at the front page. The War occupied most of it, though there were City scandals too. The Dakotas were suffering a drought. She folded the paper under her arm—she would read it by lamplight, at home; there were no air raids nowadays.

From his recess he rumbled: “How are you, Miss Sofrankovitch?”

She turned back. “. . . Okay, thanks.”

“I have newspapers from Belgrade today, a rare event.”

“Ah, I don't read Yugoslavian.”

“No? You read French, perhaps. I have . . .”

“Not really; and not German either,” she anticipated. “I can read elementary Hebrew, Mr. . . .”

“Smith.”

“Smith.” She peered at him, and at the darkness behind him. “My own parents sold newspapers,” she confided.

“Indeed.”

“Yes, in a store. They sold cigarettes also, candies, notions. Notions; an Americanism; perhaps you are not familiar with it.”

“Haven't a notion!” He turned his attention to the next customer. Business first, of course; but how urgently Sonya now wanted to describe to him that small round couple, her parents, that pair of innocents to whom she had been born long after they had given up the idea of family. By then the store itself was their issue—a close, warm cave. In it she grew into a tall girl; graduated from high school, from Normal school; from it she married a handsome and untrustworthy boy. She kept the marriage going and the store too until both parents were safely dead.

Mr. Smith disposed of his customer. Sonya leaned across the shelf of newspapers. The interior, big enough for two if the two were disposed to be friendly, was adorned with magazines clipped to bare boards, and advertisements for beer. The place was redolent of tobacco, the fragrance of her childhood. Eugene's bad teeth were made browner still by his cigarette habit. She inhaled. “I sold the place during the Depression,” she told Mr. Smith. He leaned against a poster:
Loose Lips Lose Lives.
She withdrew her upper body from the booth and again stood erect, continuing her history. “I sold the living quarters too. I rented an apartment and also bought a . . . house, a house on the shore, it was destroyed by the hurricane, but perhaps here you didn't know of the hurricane.”

“Oh, we knew of it. We saw photographs.
Comment donc!”
he said, turning to another patron who must be familiar, a little Frenchman in a floorwalker's frock coat and polished shoes.

Sonya turned away and walked up the High Street toward home.

Home? A wallpapered room with a gas fire. A round table and turn-up bed and desk and armchair and radio and lamp and battered armoire. A little locked jewel box in which reposed her mother's wedding ring; the silk handkerchief from the tenor which he himself had received from a famous mezzo; Eugene's diamond. Yes, home. Her home was wherever she was. “You have no nesting instinct,” her husband accused when he was leaving. “Lucky for us we never had a child. You would have kept it in a bureau drawer.”

No mail for her. Up the stairs, then. She boiled two eggs on the cooker and put a slice of bread on the toasting fork. She had no butter and no jam but she did have a glass and a half of wine in yesterday's bottle, and she uncorked it gratefully. She read the paper during this repast, saving the obituaries for last, nice little novelettes, it was unlikely that she'd ever recognize anybody on that page until Rolypoly Rosenberg burst a blood vessel; no, really, he wasn't the apoplectic type, and he was losing weight anyway... she read of the tenor's death.

He had collapsed while singing to a large audience of soldiers at Fort Devens. He was seventy-three. His career had spanned six decades. He had sung all the great roles, though never at the Met. His radio program was popular during the thirties. Its signature song was “The Story of a Starry Night.” He left three daughters and eight grandchildren.

There had been only seven grandchildren when she left; otherwise she could have written the obituary herself.

That night she wept for him. Of course she had been wise not to join her destiny to his. She was not meant for the settled life—not she, not Sonya, not this human leaf that had appeared unexpectedly in an overheated notions store and gotten popped as it were into a
jelly glass by the proud but bewildered storekeepers. Oh, they had loved her, Mama and Papa; and she had loved them; and she had loved her husband for a while; and some others after him; and she had loved the tenor, too. But her love was airy, not earthbound; and so she could be scooped up like a handful of chickweed by Roland Rosenberg and flung onto the stones of London, there to send out shallow creepers into this borough, that block of flats, the derelict basement over by the river. The children. Sleeplessly she counted them. Some were in the city now. There were two small boys living with a mother who had become deranged when the oldest son was shot dead at the border; those tykes took care of her. There was a family with a dimwitted daughter who herself had borne a dimwitted daughter. “That shouldn't happen; children tend toward the mean!” Sonya objected, as if statistical epidemiology would acknowledge the error and revise the little girl's intelligence. Mrs. Levinger ignored her outburst. There were teenaged girls from Munich working as waitresses who refused to confide in Sonya though they allowed her to buy them dinner. And . . .