Love and Treasure (38 page)

I said, “I imagine that so many women speak the language that you are run off your feet.”

She laughed. “Not at all. I mean, yes, yes, I am working very hard. But it’s wonderful. You’d never believe who I’ve met, Dr. Zobel!”

She proceeded to enumerate a long list of Teutonic ladies, none of whom I’d ever heard of but all of whom were “very important” to the cause of universal suffrage. In the previous forty-eight hours, all the
greatest female minds of the German-speaking world had apparently asked Nina’s help in finding the toilet.

“And the lectures, Herr Doctor!” She moaned, near rhapsodic. “I have learned more in the past days than in all my life until now.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. Did you know that one of the first female physicians was a woman named Agnodike in ancient Greece? She practiced gynecology and obstetrics in Athens, at a time when it was forbidden for women to practice medicine at all.”

“I had not heard of her.”

“It’s true! Oh, one moment!”

“
Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?
” she said, turning in response to a small hand laid on her arm. But it was not in fact a lady in need of
Hilfe
. Her interrogator was none other than Miss Gizella Weisz, the tiny creature who had arranged for Nina’s employment at the congress. Nina bent to kiss her friend’s cheek and then, clutching her hand, turned to me.

“Dr. Zobel, let me introduce Miss Gizella Weisz, my friend. And more important, private secretary to Mrs. Schwimmer herself!”

“Ah, that great lady,” I said, my tone teasing. It is not that I didn’t admire Mrs. Schwimmer. She was held in general high regard in those days before her devotion to the cause of radical pacifism became widely known, before she was forced to leave Hungary for Vienna and ultimately, as I understand it, the United States. I teased Nina and her diminutive friend because their admiration of Mrs. Schwimmer reminded me of my sister’s. So devoted as to be nearly hagiographic.

“Mrs. Schwimmer is indeed a very great lady,” Miss Weisz reproached me.

“Yes, of course she is. Forgive me. I meant no disrespect.”

“What are you doing here, Dr. Zobel?” Nina interrupted. I flattered myself that she desired to distract her two intimates from the possibility of altercation.

“I came to see what it was all about,” I said.

“And what do you think?” said Miss Weisz, still stern.

In a voice as serious as the small woman obviously believed the occasion demanded, I said, “It’s wonderful. Inspiring. So many gathered to further one exceptional cause.”

“And you are a supporter of woman suffrage?” she said.

“There are women of my acquaintance who are far better suited to cast a ballot than many of the men who are currently at liberty to impose
their ignorance on the nation.” I was indulging in a moment of self-admiration for my adroit nonresponse before I noticed that neither Miss Weisz nor Nina had been fooled.

At that moment, a gentleman in a long duster coat approached. He was carrying a camera, the legs of its tripod clearing a swath in the crowd before him. “A photograph, sir?” he asked. “Of you and your”—he hesitated a moment—“your daughter? And the midget?”

I roused myself to my full, admittedly unimpressive, height and said, “Sir, this ‘midget,’ as you call her, is none other than the private secretary of Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer.”

He gratified me with a look of surprise and mollified me with a tip of his hat. “Very sorry, sir. And ladies. Might I offer you a photograph at a discounted rate?”

The girls protested, but I could tell that despite the manners of the photographer they were eager to immortalize their participation in the glorious event. The photographer urged Nina to remove her sash in order to look “harmonious” with her friend, so she handed me the sash and her sign to hold. They posed, Gizella on an overturned apple box the photographer’s assistant provided for the purpose. Though they tried to maintain expressions suited to the seriousness of the occasion, their joy could not be suppressed. Their smiles were wide, their eyes bright, and their faces aglow.

I gave the photographer a portion of the cost up front, took his card, and made arrangements to pick up the pictures at the end of the month. The girls were then whisked away by Nina’s fellow pages. Apparently their services were needed at the far end of the square, where the morning meeting of the executive session of the congress was coming to a close.

•
35
•

WHEN SHE RETURNED TO
my consulting room on Monday, June 23, Nina was exhilarated. She recounted to me in great detail the rest of the goings-on at the congress, most particularly the opening speech by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the American president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Had Nina told me of her reaction to this speech when we met that day at the square, I would have encouraged her to refrain from further participation in the congress. Roused to a neurotic frenzy by the exhortations of the American woman that all women of education, refinement, and achievement should take to the streets not to beg for but to demand their right to vote, Nina and Gizella, clutching copies of their feminist newspaper, rushed through the streets of the city, ignoring the solicitous concern of the Boy Scout guides. They needed no one to walk them home, the girls insisted. They did not need a hansom cab or directions to the trolley car or the electric subway that ran beneath Andrássy Avenue. In fact, they would not go home at all.

Their scheme, harebrained and thoughtless, the product of overheated imaginations and overstimulated nervous systems, was to storm the opulent New York Café, to stride manfully between the gilded pilasters and demand to be seated on their own, without chaperones. As rebellious as she was, I am confident that Nina would not have alone made such a spectacle of herself. It was Miss Weisz who encouraged her, who claimed that she had often taken coffee with Mrs. Schwimmer unescorted by a man and that there was no more reason for two young women to need a chaperone than for two young men.

I can only imagine the scene of the girls sweeping into the coffeehouse: Nina a bridal vision in white lawn and lace, Gizella similarly clad, but looking by virtue of her size more like an infant at her christening than a bride. Ignoring the disapproving sniffs of the older male denizens of the café, the two girls sat themselves at a table in the very center of the room.

Nina sat stiffly, her shoulders back, her chin raised. She busied herself gazing at the opulent drapery, the clock above the doorway, the friezes on
the walls, anything to avoid catching the eye of someone she might know or, worse, someone who might report her presence to her parents. Nina and Gizella were by no means the only women in the café. There were tables along the galleries of the New York that were habitually occupied by “actresses” and other young women of a type who seek employment of a kind that would have shocked my determinedly sophisticated patient had she but known of its existence. What Nina and Gizella did horrified me. Even in cosmopolitan Budapest, even among the enlightened bourgeoisie, even as unmarried young women and girls gained hitherto unimagined freedoms of education and association, it was unheard of for a girl of good family to be out in so public a place with only another young lady for company.

Within a few moments of their arrival, a young man approached their table. He wore a crumpled and shabby jacket and had an ink stain on his cardboard collar, as if to advertise his status as a writer, one of the young talents for whom the headwaiter kept a ready supply of “dogs’ tongues,” long sheaves of paper on which they could jot their caffeine- and alcohol-fueled thoughts.

“Miss Weisz!” he said. “How delightful to see you.” He reached for her small hand, bent over it with a flourish. “I kiss your hand.”

“Good evening, Endre,” Gizella said. Gizella Weisz, though of typical achondroplastic somatotype—oversize head with prominent forehead, normal-sized trunk, shortened limbs, broad hands in trident configuration, with short metacarpals and phalanges—was quite beautiful. Or, rather, she managed despite her deformity to project a certain magnetism. She wore her luxurious dark hair coiled high on her head. She outlined her thickly lashed eyes with kohl and rouged her lips, a dramatic style that would have been cause for consternation in a young lady of average stature. But for all her feminist and radical ideals, her face paint, her reform dress, and her cigarettes in their silver case, Miss Weisz was, like Nina, a properly brought-up young Jewish woman, of good, if not wealthy, family. Later on, I was to learn that she hailed from a village in northern Transylvania, her father, though also a dwarf, a rabbinic scholar of some renown. She should have known better.

The young man asked Gizella, “Won’t you introduce me to your lovely friend?”

“I absolutely will not. You’re a menace and the last person she should know,” Gizella said.

“Please do come to join us at our table.” He pointed to one of the
alcoves along the wall of the café, where a few tables had been pushed together and a group of resolutely literary types sat smoking cigarettes and gossiping. As if in response to the young women’s gaze, one of them leaped to his feet, took up a scrap of newsprint from the heap of journals and books littering the table, and began to recite a poem at full volume.

“Shall we?” Gizella asked Nina. “They’re a very entertaining claque, though I can’t promise they won’t ravish us. Endre is a complete cad.”

The young man flung his hand over his heart and shouted, “I will defend your honor to the death!”

“Foolish boy,” Gizella said.

“No, look!” He pointed to a white line pleating the dark hair of his left eyebrow. “A dueling scar! Honor is everything to me.”

“Last week you told me that poetry was everything to you. Which is it?”

“Both!” he said. “Honor and poetry. Come!” He swept Gizella’s chair back and lifted her lightly to her feet. Nina stood up on her own but took his proffered arm and allowed him to escort her to the alcove, where the crowd of young men happily made room for them.

For the rest of the evening and late into the night Nina and Gizella were entertained by the young men. Endre in particular attached himself to Nina, sitting close to her and at one point leaping up onto his chair to recite a section of János Arany’s poem “Dante.”

At this point in Nina’s account of the events of the evening, I interjected, “ ‘Dante’? A strange coincidence, no?”

A pretty flush stained Nina’s cheeks. “How do you mean?” she asked.

“That this young man should recite Arany’s ‘Dante’ only a month or so after another young man gave you a copy of
The Inferno
.”

Nina bit her lip. I waited. Finally she said, “It wasn’t a coincidence.”

“No?” I asked, hiding from her how thrilled I was that she trusted me with what was obviously a significant and even embarrassing confidence.

“I told Endre—er, Mr. Bauer—about Mr. E.’s gift.”

“Why did you tell Mr. Bauer about a gift you received from another young man?”

She shrugged. “I thought he would find it amusing.”

“ ‘Amusing’?”

She fumbled with her reticule, pulling out a silver compact, snapping it open and shut a few times before blurting, “It was such an absurd present! Dante’s
Inferno
! Of all things.”

“You don’t care for Dante?”

“I haven’t read him. I’m not interested in him. I’m interested in contemporary poets!”

“Like Arany?” János Arany, as we both well knew, died more than thirty years ago.

“Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Like Anna Akhmatova!”

“Did you enjoy the young Mr. Bauer’s recitation of Arany’s ‘Dante’?”

“It was amusing.”

“How so?”

“He did it very dramatically. Sarcastically, I suppose.”

“Your young Endre does not approve of Arany?”

“Endre is not mine, and I don’t know what he approves of or doesn’t approve of. It was a game. Nothing more. He recited his own poetry as well.”

“And was that to your liking?”

She again opened her compact and snapped it closed. “Yes. Yes, it was. Certainly more than Dante’s
Inferno
.”

Nina and Gizella remained at the café until after 1:00 a.m., at which point their young suitors attempted to walk them home. The girls wisely resisted, however, consenting only to allow the young men to hail them a cab.

“Weren’t your parents very concerned about you? Surely it’s not usual for you to be out so late.”

“ ‘Concerned’?” she said. “Perhaps. My father was certainly angry.”

I did not need Nina to tell me this. I had, by coincidence, seen her father on Saturday morning, at the Dohány Street Synagogue. I do not regularly attend services—I’m afraid I am one of those three-holiday Jews our Israelite leaders spend so much time bemoaning—but every year on my father’s
Yahrzeit
, I escort my mother and sisters to synagogue so that we might all say Kaddish for the man to whom religion was so much more important than it is to any of us. Even my sister Sarolta joined us on this occasion, though the poor woman was forced to hide her face beneath a heavy veil to keep from being recognized and having her crime reported back to her priest or, worse, to her unpleasantly striving children.

My mother and sisters went up to the lower of the two women’s galleries, and I attempted to take an inconspicuous seat about three-quarters of the way back in the palatial nave, more basilica than shul. Unfortunately, an usher took my arm and propelled me forward. On an ordinary
Saturday morning in June, even this, the largest synagogue in Europe, home of a great and wealthy Jewish community, could not muster more than a meager congregation. Not even a rumored forty-four kilograms of twenty-four-karat gilding could persuade the unobservant to sit beneath those soaring arches.

I closed my eyes while I waited for the organ and choir to signal the beginning of the service, but was immediately interrupted by an angry whisper.

“Dr. Zobel! Imré!”

I peeled back a reluctant eyelid to find Nina’s father standing before me, cloaked in a capacious tallith and an air of righteous indignation. I began to struggle inelegantly to my feet—a man of my girth is not well accommodated by a wooden pew, no matter how spacious and beautifully carved—but Mr. S. put a restraining hand on my shoulder. Instead, he sat down next to me and bent his head to mine. As he pressed his mouth close to my ear, I repressed a shudder. The generous lips that were on the daughter so sumptuous were on the father fleshy and glutinous.