The Rags of Time (16 page)

 

 

 

So—musical chairs.
A game Sylvie knows. She had, indeed, thought to move into New York, help care for those children, though never to hover. To teach them to pray, not as she prayed as a child, kneeling, crossing herself with belief in Catholic Austria, just pray, or something like it, as she prayed time would reverse itself after they ordered her father and Otto out the front door. Not a bad thing; call it wishing, simple enough, to wish the Alps would be snowcapped as ever, that the seas would withdraw in their assault on the shores. She would like to hear the crashing waves of the Pacific once more, can’t hear the gentle waves lapping the Connecticut shore.

Moving on became clear on the day when, making her bed, she discovered a little rip in the quilt at the center of the big star where all the scraps of the quilter’s remnants come together. She will patch it before she goes, leave everything in this house museum perfect. Sell up. Move back to the city, Upper West Side, where she first lived with Inga, studied English grammar at night, read books meant for kids half her age. It will be the third edit of the life she has made for Sylvia Neisswonger, a Catholic girl of good family. She showers, puts on fresh clothes, buttons up a warm sweater, recalling at this moment the snowflakes on her Alpine ski sweater as the mantle of a survivor. There had been that argument about the Jacquard loom, repetition of pattern, something to do with Otto. That memory had lost its power. This evening’s sweater—cold end of day—scratches at the neck and wrists, a cheap thing bought at the mall in Stamford where, during the winter Cyril was with her, they had gone on an errand that seemed urgent, but the lights of the pleasure palace were further blinding to him. Piped-in Muzak clotted her ears.

When the music stops, you must find a chair. She will sit on a bench in Central Park with a book she always meant to read. It concerns the triumphs and failures of the great scientists trained at Vienna and Göttin gen, but she will not find her father’s name among them, not even in the record of their exuberant youth in the cafés, arguing late into the night. So best close the book, for he may have been an everyday alchemist, extracting silver from veins of Alpine schist. And looking up at the tree above, she will be still when she sees the birds, for her friend has said you see more when you look from one point, one steady view, see the fluttering contraction of the tail as they alight—the warblers, the hawks, old owls with aging feathers—but she will not hear their song,
natürlich.
She will sign her name, Sylvia Neisswonger Waite, in the book at Goethe House upon the occasion of the anniversary of Bertolt Brecht’s death fifty years ago when she was translating documents at the UN. She takes her seat in the auditorium, is given the wireless device that will broadcast his
Jungle of Cities
into her ears.
Auf deutsch
, no need of the translation, yet she will hear, pretty much hear, a staged reading in English, Brecht’s dark laughter and brutal mockery of Hollywood despair, while dreaming back to the days when her mother was with Meyer, a cameraman who worked with Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Inga, having married into that aristocracy, bronzed and charming in yet another costume of a survivor—white linen slacks, the striped jersey of a sailor. Living at the crest of a hill on the Pacific Palisades, Inga had experienced vertigo looking down at the sea. Her grandest role, serving contraband Riesling to the likes of Thomas Mann.
Mutter
living it up with this distinguished crew, her day in the sun. Sylvie, her girl now on Fifth Avenue listening to Brecht’s jovial despair, one old lady among an audience of mostly students brought to this improving event. They laugh in the wrong places.
But will you still be here when we come back?
Would the play-wright have been amused? Could they imagine the audience eager for his work fifty years ago, for the political passion of his theater? Or might they learn it? Perhaps today they will be startled into listening, really listening, when the shot goes off in his cultural jungle, though it is only a play with gangland debauchery, a simple parable compared to the Götterdämmer ung of nightly TV. Frau Waite will straighten the electronic apparatus on her head; Sylvia, who remembers the plain girl, Inga’s daughter come on a visit from her studies in New York, remembers the scrunched little Brecht in his workman’s jacket, his sly squint of a smile, the ash trembling at the end of his cigar flipped onto the plate she was clearing. At home—that is, her sparsely fitted-out apartment on Columbus Avenue—she will now and again miss the empty house in Connecticut gone to the highest bidder, a quick sale much like her mother’s unloading the villa on the river Inn. The lesser pieces of Waite furniture stored for Gerald when and if he comes back to this country, the finer pieces auctioned at Sotheby’s. Sylvia, yearning for her language, will take Brecht’s early work off a shelf, find
Jungle of Cities
in the original.
Sind Sie nock hier, wenn wir zuruckkomen?
She will read, then begin to translate with ease, as in her working life long ago—
the remnants of a family, a pretty moth eaten family
, recalling Inga’s bold strokes of survival and at last, long last, Sylvia will admit undeniable love for her mother who she so readily mocked, made her endurance into a skit, a poor show. Translates:
To be alone—that’s a good thing to be. The chaos has been used up. And it was the best time. Es war die beste Zeit.

—The Crack-Up,
F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter

—Fritsch,
Sketchbook

 

That night I could not sweep my dreams into an easy narrative. Midlife (when was that!) I learned to make sense of these fragments, to translate my sorrows and the gold sticker of triumph into subtitles running at the bottom of the screen.
Why so hard on yourself?
he asked when we were first together, my husband sleeping soundly beside me. What would that be like, the sleep of the just? He’s entitled, the good man who rescues me daily from the brink with his dose of reality, but I’m given to self-drama—to mockery of my ambition, the little life I will soon leave behind. That’s the subplot left out in reporting my trek in the Park, the exhaustion as I climbed the slope up to the hippo playground. Had I ever told myself, as I looked long at the façade of the refurbished El Dorado, that this day might well have served up my last adventure? Throwing off the quilt, I pad into the back room where work confronts me—half written, half told—yet another of my stories offering a little love, a taste of war
like a sampler box of dark chocolates,
a harsh reviewer once noted,
some chewy, all bittersweet.
Looking down at the bare floor littered with postcards and yellowed clippings, curling with age—anniversary of D-Day, uranium 235, a note on the owl, mine as I now see him, from
The Audubon Guide: Well into Autumn and Winter the big bird perches by highways and may be sighted in parks. From a mile away, its tufted ears pick up the faint rustle of the small creatures it preys on.

Shuffling in the bits scattered among my own discarded pages, I do wonder if my mother ever read that rug woven with scraps of the past. Bill’s old tweed jacket worn only on weekends. When he presented state’s evidence in the courtroom, it was in three-piece suits, seat of the pants shiny with age. The cuffs could no longer be turned. My own Spring coat of robin’s-egg blue, a hand-me-down-from the neighbors, was cut into coarse ribbons. The checked riding skirt, rescued from better days when my grandfather’s workers boosted Loretta Burns up into the saddle to ride the trails of Beardsley Park. Yet somehow the strands in the rug came pleasantly together in my mother’s craft of making do; and there it lay on the bedroom floor for Mimi, alias Maureen, to trip over when she took up her post to skim Tolstoy’s novel, consigning the Napoleonic Wars to delay of the love story, passion to settle for domesticity, while ten thousand men had just died on the beaches of Normandy.

Still in search of that ultimate honesty, I look round my back room at the shelves and toppling stacks of books as though the landscape is new to me, yet I work day after day in this disorder, my fortress against reality. Often, as now, I get up in the middle of the night to mark down a word, a phrase that might be useful come morning. The streetlamp lights my way through the litter of journals and notebooks. Next to the phone a novel, my own,
Liebestraum
, love story with a slick jacket. Next to the chair that holds the imprint of my plump body: the reading lamp. Tonight: unfinished business. Long, too long delayed. I pick up the book, switch on the lamp, open to an earmarked page.

You gave me that scene, though your bar mitzvah was far from Levin’s. You did not read from Scripture.
All those memorized Hebrew words and a new suit.
You had signed on early as a dedicated nonbeliever. Your gold star lives with tarnished cuff links, pearl buttons, a Kennedy half-dollar, and the wedding ring of my first marriage in a Florentine box bought for just such tokens we can’t part with, can’t throw away.

Chill in her workroom. A shawl covers the back of the reading chair. I wrap myself in it. Old lady in a flannel nightgown, Mother Goose with her tales. Those geese, if that is what they are, skimming about on the water with their proprietary air. In all the years taking in the view of the city from the Reservoir, I’ve never seen one falter in flight, never seen a dead bird in the growth around the shore. But then, I had never seen a soldier dying except—a big exception it seems to me this night—in the movies back when I invented Levin’s story—the battlefield as on D-Day littered with bodies—oldies,
Red Badge of Courage, Paths of Glory, Platoon.
I was never sure how long it would take him to die of his wounds, only that I must get on with the Captain’s story, confident that in my scheme of things he had answers for the boy beyond those of his own father, the trusted pharmacist in the Berkshires. In the aftermath of that bloody invasion, Captain Warner would find the body of the kid, which was near impossible, and clip the chain from round Levin’s bloody neck, send the gold star back to a drugstore on a generic Main Street in Massachusetts.
Old Mother Goose when she wanted to wander . . .
My Captain suffered superficial wounds to take him out of action, transfer him to the army of occupation. The German of his student days was useful, assigned Warner to reading page upon page of documents supporting evidence that “Hitler’s Bomb” in the works, was two years behind the Project at Los Alamos. Writing on, I had known this much—how unlikely a leap from the slaughter of Omaha Beach to a desk job. The Captain requested the transfer for the sake of my story, for the curtain to go up on the opera singer in Bayreuth he’d fallen for, lost his head completely when a student in Leipzig, where the talk had been all uncertainty, not isolating heavy waters that might make the bomb. The novel optioned before the general acclaim, but Hollywood was in a brief period of denazifica tion, one might say, coasting with gangster epics homegrown, turned on by dazzling possibilities of special effects. The script, rewritten—less war, more sex, bodies wrestling in the sheets, a persistent a
chtung,
in scenes never shot. The soprano with flaxen hair, what was she up to after the war? Taping whatever the Captain discovered about Nazi scientists while she mourned the defeat of her country. Sleeping with the enemy, the American officer who spoke with enthusiasm of Einstein’s Relativity. Everything she learned from Warner was passed to her German lover, a detainee with the true secrets tucked away, the sorry information they never achieved the critical mass. Procuring the components, could not assemble them, to become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Deutsche
Science had failed. But how do you cast a Wagnerian soprano, one that is slim with cupcake breasts, with a delectable ass pumping smoothly as she positions herself above her American lover? How confuse such sport with the soaring Wagnerian score? Reads like a treatment. There was, of course, the Captain’s all-innocence wife and two little boys in New Jersey, a treat for the reader, dark chocolate to flavor the tolerably happy end.