The Rags of Time (13 page)

Louise laughed,
An improvement over
The Crucifixion
?
She was, let’s recall, an artist, or had been when she first met Sylvie. Something wistful about her quick judgment, the pleasure she took dwelling on Grosz’s dark romance, the arrogance of many self-portraits.

Sylvie’s account depends on doubtful stories told by Inga. As a student, late nights in the Public Library would never reveal that her father was called Herr Professor, a title he sharply rejected as he did the von. He came back to Innsbruck from his studies to run the family silver mines, and there Inga was, a village girl with aspirations. The mines’ picture-book village sat at the bottom of a valley below the Neisswongers’ hunting lodge, and at every turn there was Inga radiantly pious at Sunday Mass, flirtatious in the tavern where she washed up the steins, his with the family crest, eagle rampant. He came upon her each day on the path going down into the village, or at the bend in the one narrow street. She seemed always to be in his way that first season. He was reviewing the accounts, learning to manage the workers in the mine. This lovely girl’s smile distracted him from the reality that times were already bad, quite bad, that he may never go back to the University, listen to the arguments of his scientific betters. Inga had been once to Innsbruck with her confraternity for a procession—Immaculate Conception, Epiphany? The feast day was movable when Inga told of her meeting young Neisswonger on such an excursion. And wasn’t he surprised to see her in town looking smarter in her loden jacket than any village girl? Her “professor” became more than he ever could be, her Ulrich, who published one paper discrediting the uncertainty principle in a popular scientific journal. Why would Sylvie, a child transported to New York, not believe in this legend, yet still believe that her father followed the news of the brilliant men who practiced Jewish Science, as the Reich would name it. Sylvie telling Louise the story of her father’s great learning, his degrees, a man so certain—isn’t that odd?—that National Socialism with its diseased anti-Semitism, its anti-Christian program would never take hold in
Catholic Austria.
In going back over her father’s miscalculations about the fate of his country, his silence, then his defense of the Jews, she avoided his lonely pursuit of mathematics, knowing Louise fears that her husband might never run the course, that Artie’s makeup exam may prove to be a layman’s fiddling with numbers, much like her father’s.

And on another day Louise turned the page of a coffee-table book sent years back to Sylvie, gift from Inga to her daughter intended to enforce her tale of Bauhaus good taste. A glamour shot of a slim crystal carafe (Otto Wagner, date uncertain) faced off with a silver broach set with moonstones (Josef Hoffmann, 1919).

You understand I was shamed by my mother’s claim that such objects were part of our life. I was ten years old when we finally left the villa, escaped through the garden wall huddled in Inga’s fur coat, the two of us linked together like kids in a three-legged race.
Kinderspiel.
Martha latched to her brother. Gerald.

 

 

 

But the story not told—one woman to another, working girls who found their way in the big city—was of Sylvie’s lonely investigations of the vanished life on the river Inn. She had wanted more than a postcard world of cuckoo clocks, a lost realm of kitsch and personal memory—Otto in lederhosen. When she was well enough grown in New York, Inga took off, made her way out to the émigré movie crowd in sunny California. Then Sylvie designed a course of study outside the curriculum at Hunter College, carefully tracing the marriages and bloody wars that redrew the borders of Austria again and again, adding and subtracting Venetia, Dalmatia, Lombardy, Bohemia. Her father had turned the page in his atlas back to the Holy Roman Empire. Poor Papa: the borders he finally believed in were erased. His repeated claims for the honor of
Catholic Austria
now seemed more than an annoyance to his daughter, more than a scratch in the record of his wife’s favorite Strauss waltz stuck in three-quarter time. It was far too late when he changed his tune. That is what she presumed, too late defending the Jewish bankers, and Rosen, who sat on a high stool over his ledgers, green shade sheltering his eyes as he once figured the ounces of silver mined by the elder von. The mines now property of the Reich. She further imagined that her father spoke up for his teachers at the University who were relieved of their posts, that he defended his café companions not practicing Aryan science. Now he became the elder; the line had run out save for his son, Otto, and why, she would ask, taking notes in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library, why turn through pages and pages of the Nuremberg Trials, the verdict clear as to crimes against humanity, but with no hope of the answer? Why take a boy? A miscalculation from hell, his name set down with his father’s, by a simpleton following rules? Simple is evil, is death by paperwork, damnation filed away. By the year Papa Neisswonger’s daughter graduated with honors from a city college in New York, the map he honored, give or take a slice of northern Italy, was in place once again. But his lectern by the study window was no longer in her dreams.

She had taken to the books. March 12, 1938, the date on which Austria was annexed by the Reich. The players who led to Austria’s downfall—Chancellors Dolfuss, Schuschnigg, the German ambassador, Papen—could not answer her question: when did Papa wake to the nightmare of Catholic compliance? Did he speak against the very prelate who laughed at his Dürer story? They ordered him to work his mines for their benefit two years before the
Polizei
led him out the front door with his son. The camp where she presumed her father and brother were taken was enlarged early, December of ’39. She worked on in the library at 42nd Street until the lights dimmed, then took the subway uptown to a rented room, the maid’s room in a big drafty apartment. The accounts of the war were not sorted into the arguments and fables of history. She discovered a portrait, Marie Elizabeth of Austria, radiant child who, disfigured by smallpox, became an abbess, d. Innsbruck, 1808; Emperor Ferdinand I required a yellow patch to be worn by all Jews, 1551. Protestants denied citizenship, their lives endangered with the punishment of heresy, 1527, according to Catholic state law.

 

 

Searching for a family story, Sylvie copied down notes in her neat hand: the operation of silver mines, Hapsburg political marriages, the Vienna Boys’ Choir (est. 1498, held in contempt by Otto, an athletic boy). Her ledger was thick as a poultice to sooth the pain of her father’s fate. Had she really expected to discover a record of that meeting in the Silver Chapel, the nature of the documents passed to the old priest? The chapel with the luminous silver altar was carefully preserved in memory
.
She went to mass every Sunday, obedient to her father’s political belief. There came one night when she discovered that titles were passed out liberally by the Hapsburgs long before they settled into their palace in Innsbruck. Best not pass that item to Inga, or that von,
often a mere honorific,
was now prohibited by the Austrian government.

She had turned back three volumes on the Treaty of Versailles and a rant claiming Hitler was indebted to Nietzsche, and to Descartes’s
Meditations
in which the philosopher questions if we can ever come up with the answers. Bright Sylvie said clearly—
No thank you.
She walked the long block to Broadway, took the bus uptown. A couple with theater programs, flirting madly, just out of a show, or perhaps, in the heat of desire, they’d left during intermission. Cut out to make out at home. Well, her home was that narrow maid’s room in the apartment of an old refugee couple. Each week, she paid twenty dollars in cash, passing an envelope to them before sunset on the Sabbath. They had little to say to their boarder with a cross on her neck in search of a family story, reading history to solve yesterday’s crimes when any day she might see that Solomon’s watchband did not fully conceal the numbers on his wrist. Inga had discovered their vacant maid’s room through a friend of a classy friend, then gone off to California, where yet another friend dealt her secretarial work for swank émigrés. Later Sylvie would understand that she took a page from her mother’s book, Inga writing her own script, a quick read that instructed: get on with your life.

Study your languages, pass the exam to translate.

The UN was plain and sturdy, no mirror tricks of Versailles. No more fiddling with lines of Rilke, better treaties securing the here and now. Her inner ear could not connect with the poet’s feeling. It was a sort of deafness that plagued her, more troubling than the deafness that would come upon her late in life.

 

 

 

The altar of the Silver Chapel with its shimmering zodiac was not revealed to Louise on the day she flipped the pages of an extravagant book, a storybook really: how superb the Austrian designers before the First World War at the modernist game, how their artifacts—beautifully photographed—vases, candlesticks, gems worked into silver, each crafted with the vision of the maker upon it—predicted a future unburdened with the sodden bourgeois trappings of the past.

The villa, you see, was as my father must have it, as it had always been in his time. Biedermeier curves of each sofa, his ashwood desk. My room of the spoiling was kitsch, Tyrolean cute. He had no anger against his privilege or trappings of his class, not a dollop of sour
schlag.
Not a worthless Austrian mark.
Turning now to the page with:
Silver clip in the form of a maple leaf for a fräulein’s hair,
and: a slim Wiener Werkstätte mirror.
Unburdened with a view of the past.
Meine Mutter
so clever—refurnishing memory. How we do live the life set forth by our tables and chairs.

Sylvia Waite is on her way to JFK, then on to the white house on a hill in Connecticut. Her late husband, an airline executive, had been a pilot in the war—their war, she calls it. He led his squadron of Spitfires halfway to Dresden.
Then we turned back.

We had only enough fuel to escort the bombers off on their mission. Escort them through dog fights. I lost half my squadron one night.
Bob Waite gave no personal details, which she found troubling, the way the firebombing of a city could be no more than an order carried out.
It’s all in the books,
he said.

In time she came to believe in her husband’s reserve, though answers she sought were not in the books. She had married something of a hero, a widower with a ready-made family, enjoyed his gentleness in the old bed with creaking wooden slats. Passion would not come until she met Cyril O’Connor, shared a cab on a rainy day at the UN. Cyril had served in the Korean Conflict. Their emotional extravagance might have been shot as a war movie—lovers on
Waterloo Bridge,
tearful parting. They returned to their dutiful married lives until Sylvie, of all the unimaginable things, came back into his life. The sleeping prince—ailing eyesight, sparse white hair—was kissed back to life. Not her boldest move; that would always be the flight through the garden wall with
Mommi
. Still, finding their loved ones had passed, she took a chance that in matters of the heart there might be a second chance duty-free. Now their caresses were tender, the way kids courted a millennium ago. Sylvie runs the story off. Her visions—the love of her men in varying degrees. Of her father who she mourns in the full knowledge of his folly.

Soon after they met, Bob Waite took Sylvie to his house listed as a historic treasure. She raised his kids, lives on there in comfort though carpenter ants are back at their mischief. It is not truly her house: never can be.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Translate to the language you live in.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
How her beautiful mother of the
grun-grau
eyes came to quote Rilke with ease though she had no education to speak of. But that was in California, where Inga took tea with Thomas Mann, did more than frolic with Peter Lorre by the pool. Then Inga Meyer, moving on, was married to Billy Ray Boots by a Baptist minister in Houston and must be put to rest with many artifacts of genuine beauty, forgiven at last by her daughter.
Wer jetzt allein ist . . .
Translate
: Whoever is alone will stay alone.