WHEN I WAS IN high school, my best friend for almost a year was another boy of about the same age by the name of Werner Hauser, who disappeared from his home one night and never came back. I am reminded of him indirectly sometimes, in a place like Luchow’s or Cavanagh’s or Hans Jaeger’s, when I am waited on by one of those rachitic-looking German waiters with narrow features, faded hair, and bad teeth, who serve one with an omniscience verging on contempt. Then I wonder whether Mr. Hauser, Werner’s father, ever got his own restaurant. I am never reminded directly of Werner by anybody, because I haven’t the slightest idea what he may have become, wherever he is. As for Mrs. Hauser, Werner’s mother—she was in a class by herself. I’ve never met anybody at all like her, and I don’t expect to.
Although Werner and I went to the same high school, like all the boys in the neighborhood except the dummies who had to go to trade school or the smart alecks who were picked for Townsend Harris, we were really friends because both our families had back apartments in the same house on Hamilton Terrace, a street which angled up a hill off Broadway and had nothing else very terrace-like about it, except that its five-story tan apartment buildings had no store fronts on the ground floors. Nowadays that part of Washington Heights is almost all Puerto Rican, but in those days nobody in particular lived around there. My parents had moved there supposedly because it was a little nearer to their jobs in the Seventh Avenue garment district than the Bronx had been—my father worked in the fur district on Twenty-eighth Street, and my mother still got work as a finisher when the season was on—but actually they had come on the insistence of my Aunt Luba, who lived nearby—a sister of my mother’s, of whom she was exceptionally fond and could not go a day without seeing.
When Luba talked about the Heights being higher-class than the Bronx, my parents got very annoyed. Like a lot of the garment workers of that day they were members of the Socialist Labor Party, although they no longer worked very hard at it. Occasionally, still, of an evening, after my father had gotten all worked up playing the violin with two or three of his cronies in the chamber music sessions that he loved, there would be a vibrant discussion over the cold cuts, with my mother, flushed and gay, putting in a sharp retort now and then as she handed round the wine; then too my older sister had been named after Ibsen’s Nora—which sounded pretty damn funny with a name like Rosenbloom—and of course nobody in the family ever went to a synagogue. That’s about all their radicalism had amounted to. My younger sister was named Carol.
The Hausers had been in the building for a month when we moved in on the regular moving day, October first; later a neighbor told my mother that they had gotten September rent-free as a month’s concession on a year’s lease—a practice which only became common in the next few years of the depression, and, as I heard my mother say, a neater trick than the Rosenblooms would ever think of. Shortly after they came, a sign was put up to the left of the house entrance—Mrs. Hauser had argued down the landlord on this too. The sign said Erna Hauser. Weddings. Receptions. Parties, and maybe the landlord was mollified after he saw it. It was black enamel and gold leaf under glass, and about twice the size of the dentist’s. When I got to know Werner, at the time of those first frank questions with which boys place one another, he told me that ever since he and his mother had been sent for to come from Germany five years before, the family had been living in Yorkville in a furnished “housekeeping” room slightly larger than the one Mr. Hauser had occupied during the eight years he had been in the United States alone. Now Mrs. Hauser would have her own kitchen and a place to receive her clientele, mostly ladies from the well-to-do Jewish families of the upper West Side, for whom she had hitherto “helped out” at parties and dinners in their homes. From now on she would no longer “help out”—she would cater.
Most of what I learned about Werner, though, I didn’t learn from Werner. He would answer a question readily enough, but very precisely, very much within the limits of the question, and no overtones thrown in. I guess I learned about him because he was my friend, by sucking it out of the air the way kids do, during the times I was in his house before he was forbidden to hang around with me, and during the dozens of times before and after, when he sneaked up to our place. He was at our place as often as he could get away.
Up there, a casual visitor might have taken him for one of the family, since he was blond and short-featured, like my mother and me. He was a head taller than me, though, with a good build on him that was surprising if you had already seen his father’s sunken, nutcracker face and bent-kneed waiter’s shuffle. It wasn’t that he had the special quiet of the very stupid or the very smart, or that he had any language difficulty; he spoke English as well as I did and got mostly nineties at school, where he made no bones about plugging hard and was held up as an example because he had only been in the country five years. It was just that he had almost no informal conversation. Because of this I never felt very close to him, even when we talked sex or smoked on the sly, and sometimes I had an uneasy feeling because I couldn’t tell whether he was stupid or smart. I suppose we were friends mostly out of convenience, the way boys in a neighborhood are. Our apartments partly faced each other at opposite sides of the small circular rear court of the building; by opening his bedroom window and our dining-room window we could shout to each other to come over, or to meet out in front. I could, that is, although my mother used to grumble about acting up like riffraff. He was not allowed to; once, even before the edict, I saw the window shut down hard on his shoulders by someone from behind. After the edict we used to raise the windows very slightly and whistle. Even then, I never felt really close to him until the day after he was gone.
Saturday mornings, when I was that age, seemed to have a special glow; surely there must have been rainy ones, but I remember them all in a powerful golden light, spattered with the gabble of the vegetable men as they sparred with women at the open stalls outside their stores, and ringing with the loud, pre-Sunday clang of the ash cans as the garbage collectors hoisted them into the trucks and the trucks moved on in a warm smell of settling ash. It was a Saturday morning when I first went up to the Hausers’, to see if Werner could get off to take the Dyckman Ferry with me for a hike along the Palisades. I already knew that he helped his mother with deliveries evenings and afternoons after school, but I had not yet learned how prescribed all his hours were. The hall door of the Hauser apartment was open a crack; through it came a yeasty current as strong as a bakery’s. I flicked the bell.
“Come,” said a firm, nasal voice. Or perhaps the word was “Komm.” I was never to hear Mrs. Hauser speak English except once, when Werner and I, who had not heard her come in, walked through the parlor where she was dealing with a lady who had come about a daughter’s wedding. That was the occasion at which I saw her smile—at the lady—a fixed grimace which dusted lightly over the neat surface of her face like the powdered sugar she shook over her coffee cakes.
I walked in, almost directly into the kitchen. It was very like ours, small and badly lighted, but it had two stoves. Rows of copper molds and pans of all shapes hung on the walls. One graduated row was all of Bund pans, like one my mother had, but it was the first time I had seen utensils of copper, or seen them hung on walls. Supplies, everything was in rows; nothing wandered or went askew in that kitchen; even its choke-sweet odor had no domestic vagary about it, but clamped the room in a hot, professional pall. Werner and his mother, bent over opposite ends of a cloth-covered table, were carefully stretching at a large plaque of strudel dough which almost covered its surface. Both of them glanced up briefly and bent their heads again; the making of strudel is the most intense and delicate of operations, in which the last stretching of the dough, already rolled and pulled to tissue thinness, is done on the backs of the hands, and balances on an instinctive, feathery tension. I held my breath and watched. Luba and my mother made strudel about once a year, in an atmosphere of confused merriment and operatic anguish when the dough broke. As I watched, red crept up on Werner’s face.
Almost opposite me, Mrs. Hauser bent and rose, angularly deft, but without grace. I had expected some meaty-armed Hausfrau trundling an ample bosom smeared with flour; here was the virginal silhouette of a governess, black and busked—a dressmaker’s form collared in lace. From the side, her face had a thin economy, a handsomeness that had meagered and was further strained by the sparse hair spicked back in a pale bun.
Suddenly she straightened. The paste had reached the edges of the cloth; in a few whisked motions it was dabbed with butter, filled, rolled, cut, and done. She brushed her hands together, blew on the spotless front of her dress, and faced me. She was not handsome at all. Her nose, blunt-ended, came out too far to meet one, her eyes protruded slightly with a lashless, committed stare, and the coinshaped mouth was too near the nose. She wore no make-up, and her face had the triumphant neatness of the woman who does not; next to it Luba’s and my mother’s would have looked vital, but messy. Her skin was too bloodless though, and her lips and the nails of her floured hands were tinged with lavender, almost stone-colored, as if she suffered from some attenuation of the heart.
Werner mumbled out my first name, and I mumbled back my errand.
Mrs. Hauser, holding her hands lightly in front of her, still gave me her stare, but it was to Werner that she spoke at last.
“Sag ihm nein,” she said, and turning on her heel, she left the room, still holding away from her dress the hands with the stone-colored nails.
After that, I knew enough not to go to Werner’s unless he asked me to, usually on evenings when his father was on night duty in the restaurant where he worked, and Mrs. Hauser had an engagement, or on Sundays, when she had an especially fancy wedding and Mr. Hauser, dressed in his waiter’s garb, went along to help her serve. I never got used to the way their apartment looked, compared with the way it smelled. When there was no cooking going on, and the hot fumes had a chance to separate and wander, then it was filled, furnished with enticing suggestions of cinnamon, vanilla, and anise, and the wonderful, warm caraway scent of little pastries stuffed with hot forcemeat—a specialty of Mrs. Hauser’s, of which her customers could never get enough. Standing outside the door, I used to think it smelled the way the house in Hansel and Gretel looked, in the opera to which my parents had taken me years before—a house from whose cornices and lintels one might break off a piece and find one’s mouth full of marzipan, an aerie promising happy troupes of children feasting within, in a blissful forever of maraschino and Nesselrode.
Actually, the four dim rooms, curtainless except for the blinds which the landlord supplied—one yellow, one dark green to a window—had an almost incredible lack of traces of personal occupancy, even after one knew that the Hausers never thought of the place as anything but temporary. It was furnished with a bleak minimum of tables and chairs like those in hired halls. Mrs. Hauser had procured everything from a restaurant supply house, all except the beds, which were little more than cots, and wore hard white cotton spreads of the kind seen in hotels. Here, in the bedrooms, some of the secondhand surfaces were protected with doilies, on which a few European family photographs had been placed. Years later, when I was staying in the luxurious house of a family which had managed to keep on its servants in the old-fashioned way, stumbling inadvertently into the servants’ wing, one morning, I came upon a room that reminded me instantly of the Hausers’, although even its dresser had a homely clutter of tawdry jewelry, dime-store boxes, and letters.
Even so, when Werner and I hung around awhile in his room, we never sat on the drill-neat bed. Usually we sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. Except for the times we did our homework together, we either just talked or exchanged the contents of our pockets, for it was the kind of house in which there was simply nothing to do. Once or twice we smoked cigarettes there, carefully airing the room and chewing soda-mints afterward. I supplied both the cigarettes and the soda-mints, since it was an understood thing that Werner never had any money of his own; the considerable work he did for his mother was “for the business.” The rows of cakes, frilled cookies, and tiny quenelles that we sometimes passed, going through the kitchen, were for the business too. I never got anything to eat there.
Usually, after we had been there a short while, Werner, wriggling his shoulders sheepishly, would say, “Let’s go up to your place,” or I would invite him up. I knew why Werner liked to be there, of course, why he could not keep from coming even after Mrs. Hauser had forbidden it. It may sound naïve to say so in this day and age, but we were an awfully happy family. We really were. And I never realized it more strongly than during the times I used to watch Werner Hauser up there.
I guess the best way I can explain the kind of family we were is to say that, although I was the only nonmusical one in a family that practically lived for music, I never felt criticized or left out. My father, although he tired quickly because of a shoulder broken when he was a boy and never properly healed, was the best musician, with faultless pitch and a concertmeister’s memory for repertoire. Nora played the cello with a beautiful tone, although she wouldn’t work for accuracy, and Carol could already play several wind instruments; it was a sight to watch that stringy kid of ten pursing her lips and worrying prissily about her “embouchure.” Both Luba and my mother had had excellent training in piano, and sang even better than they played, although Luba would never concede to my father that she occasionally flatted. My mother, contrarily, tended to sing sharp, which so fitted her mock-acid ways that my father made endless plays on words about it. “Someday,” he would add, striking his forehead with his fist, “I am going to find a woman who sings exactly in the middle; then I will steal the company’s payroll, and take her to live at The Breakers in Atlantic City!”
“Mir nix, dir nix,” my mother would answer. “And what kind of music would be at The Breakers?”
“A string quartet,” Luba would shout, “with a visiting accordion for the weekends!” Then the three of them would pound each other in laughter over the latest “visiting accordion” who had been to our house. All kinds of people were attracted to our house, many of whom had no conception of the professional quality of the music they heard there, and were forever introducing a protégé whom they had touted beforehand. Whenever these turned out to be violinists who had never heard of the Beethoven Quartets, or pianists who had progressed as far as a bravura rendition of the “Revolutionary Etude,” our secret name for them was “a visiting accordion.” Not even Carol was ever rude to any of these though; the musical part of the evening simply ended rather earlier than usual, and dissolved into that welter of sociable eating and talking which we all loved. When I say I wasn’t musical, I don’t mean I didn’t know music or love it—no one in that family could help it—I could reproduce it and identify it quite accurately in my head, but I just couldn’t make it with my hands or my voice. It had long ago been settled upon that I was the historian, the listener, the critic. “Ask Mr. Huneker here,” my father would say, pointing to me with a smile (or Mr. Gilman, or Mrs. Downes, according to whatever commentator he had been reading). Sometimes, when in reading new music the group achieved a dissonance that harrowed him, he would turn on me: “We should all be like this one—Paganini today—Hoffman tomorrow—and all safe upstairs in the head.” But the teasing took me in; it never left me out. That’s what happened to Werner at our house. They took him in too.
We had our bad times of course. Often my father’s supper-time accounts of his day on Seventh Avenue, usually reported with a deft, comedian’s touch, turned to bitter invective, or were not forthcoming at all. Then we knew that the mood in which he regretted a life spent among values he despised had stolen over him, or else the money question was coming up again, and we ate in silence. Luba and my mother quarreled with the violence of people who differ and cannot live without one another; their cleavages and reunions followed a regular pattern, each stage of which pervaded the house as recognizably as what was simmering on the stove. My sister Nora, eighteen and beautiful, was having trouble with both these contingencies; each month, just before her periods, she filled the house with a richly alternating brooding and hysteria that set us all to slamming doors and leaving the house. A saint couldn’t have lived with it. And Carol and I bickered, and had our pint-size troubles too. I can see how we must have seemed to Werner though. No matter what was going on, our house had a kind of ruddiness and satisfaction about it. Partly its attraction was because there was always something going on. If anyone had asked me about the state of my innards in regard to my family, I guess I would have said that I felt full. Not full of life, or happiness, or riches, or any of those tiddly phrases. Just chock full. I would have said this, most likely, because, as I watched Werner hanging, reticent but dogged, to the edge of our family, watched him being stuffed by my mother, twitted by my father, saw him almost court being ignored by Nora and annoyed by Carol, I had the awful but persistent fancy that he must be absolutely hollow inside. Literally hollow, I mean. I could see them, his insides—as bleak as the apartment where his parents were either oppressively absent or oppressively around, and scattered with a few rag-tag doilies of feeling that had almost no reason to be there. There would be nothing inside him to make a feeling out of, unless it were the strong, tidal perfume of the goodies that were meant for the business.
One evening at the beginning of that summer, Werner was with us when my father scooped us all up and took us to the concert at the Stadium, only a few minutes’ walk from home. We went often to those concerts, although, as everyone knows, open-air music can rarely have the finish of the concert hall. But there is something infinitely arresting, almost pathetic, in music heard in the open air. It is not only the sight of thousands of ordinary faces, tranced and quiet in a celebration of the unreal. It is because the music, even while it is clogged and drowned now and then by the rusty noises of the world outside the wall, is not contaminated by them; even while it states that beauty and the world are irreconcilable, it persists in a frail suggestion that the beauty abides.
Werner, at his first concert, sat straight-backed on one of the straw mats my father had rented for us, taking in the fragments of talk milling around us, with the alertness of a person at a dinner who watches how his neighbor selects his silver. During the first half, when an ambulance siren, combined with the grinding of the trolleys on Amsterdam Avenue, clouded over a pianissimo, he winced carefully, like some of those around him. But during the second half, which ended with the Beethoven Fifth, when a dirigible stealing overhead drew a thousand faces cupped upward, Werner, staring straight ahead with a sleepy, drained look, did not join them.
As we all walked down the hill afterward, Carol began whistling the Andante. As she came to that wonderful breakthrough in the sixteenth measure, Werner took it up in a low, hesitant, but pure whistle, and completed it. Carol stopped whistling, her mouth open, and my father turned his head. No one said anything though, and we kept on walking down the hill. Suddenly Werner whistled again, the repetition of that theme, twenty-three bars from the end, when, instead of descending to the A flat, it rises at last to the G.
My father stopped in his tracks. “You play, Werner?”
Werner shook his head.
“Somebody plays at your house?”
“Nein,” said Werner. I don’t think he realized that he had said it in German.
“How is it you know music?”
Werner rubbed his hand across his eyes. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were translating. “I did not know that I know it,” he said.
In the next few weeks Werner came with us almost every time we went. I didn’t know where he got the money, but he paid his own way. Once, when he hadn’t come to go with us, we met him afterward, loitering at the exit we usually took, and he joined us on the walk home. I think he must have been listening from outside the Stadium wall.
He always listened with a ravenous lack of preference. Once he turned to me at the intermission and said with awe, “I could hear them both together. The themes. At the same time.” When I spoke sophomorically of what I didn’t like, he used to look at me with pity, although at the end of a concert which closed with the “Venusberg,” he turned to me, bewildered, and said. “It is possible not to like it.” I laughed, but I did feel pretty comfortable with him just then. I always hated those triangles in the “Venusberg.”
Then, one time, he did not come around for over a week, and when I saw him in the street he was definitely avoiding me. I thought of asking why he was sore at me, but then I thought: The hell with it. Anyway, that Sunday morning, as my father and I started out for a walk on Riverside Drive, we met Werner and his mother in the elevator. Mrs. Hauser carried some packages and Werner had two large cartons which he had rested on the floor. It was a tight squeeze, but the two of us got in, and after the door closed my father succeeded in raising his hat to Mrs. Hauser, but got no acknowledgment. My father replaced his hat on his fan-shaped wedge of salt-and-pepper hair. He chewed his lips back and forth thoughtfully under his large, mournful nose, but said nothing. When the door opened, we had to get out first. They passed ahead of us quickly, but not before we heard what Mrs. Hauser muttered to Werner. “Was hab’ ich gesagt?” she said. “Sie sind Juden!”
Anybody who knows Yiddish can understand quite a lot of German too. My father and I walked a long way that day, not on the upper Drive, where the Sunday strollers were, but on those little paths, punctuated with iron street lamps but with a weak hint of country lane about them, where the city petered out into the river. We walked along, not saying much of anything, all the way up to the lighthouse at Inspiration Point. Then we climbed the hill to Broadway, where my father stopped to buy some cold cuts and a cheese cake, and took the subway home. Once, when my father was paying my fare, he let his hand rest on my shoulder before he waved me ahead of him through the turnstile, and once he caught himself whistling something, looked at me quickly, and closed his mouth. I didn’t have a chance to recognize what he whistled.
We were at the table eating when the doorbell rang. Carol ran to answer it; she was the kind of kid who was always darting to answer the phone or the door, although it was almost never for her. She came back to the table and flounced into her seat.
“It’s Werner. He wants to see you. He won’t come in.”
I went to the door. He wasn’t lounging against the door frame, the way he usually did. He was standing a couple of paces away from it.
“Please come for a walk,” he said. He was looking at his shoes.
“Gee, whyn’t you come in?” I said. “I’m dead.”
“Please,” he said, “I want you please to come for a walk.”
I was practically finished eating anyway. I went back to the table, grabbed up a hard roll and some pastrami, and followed him downstairs.
Summer in the city affects me the same way as open air music. I guess it’s because both of them have such a hard time. Even when the evening breeze smells of nothing but hot brick, you get the feeling that people are carrying around leaves in their hearts. Werner and I walked down to our usual spot on the river, to a low stone wall, which we jumped, over to a little collection of bushes and some grass, on the other side. It was an open enough spot, but it reacted on us more or less like a private cave; we never said much of anything till we got there. This time it was up to Werner to speak. I had the sandwich, so I finished that.
The electric signs across the river on the Jersey side were already busy. Werner’s face was turned parallel with the river, so that it looked as if the sign that gave the time signal were paying out its letters right out of his mouth. THE TIME IS NOW…8:01…Ordinarily I would have called his attention to this effect and changed seats with him so he could see it happen to me, but I didn’t. The sign jazzed out something about salad oil, and then paid out another minute.
Werner turned his head. “You heard…this morning in the elevator?”
I nodded.
“Your father heard too?”
I nodded again.
He pressed his knuckles against his teeth. His words came through them with a chewed sound. “It is because they are servants,” he said.
“Who do you mean?”
“My father and mother.”
“You mean…they don’t like Jews because they have to work for them sometimes?”
“Maybe,” said Werner, “but it is not what I mean.”
“It’s no disgrace, what anybody works at, over here.” I wasn’t sure I believed this, but it was what one was told. “Besides, they have the business.”
Werner turned his back on me, his shoulders humped up against the Palisades. “Inside them, they are servants.”
He turned back to face me, the words tumbling out with the torn confiding of the closemouthed. “They do not care about the quality of anything.” His voice lingered on the word. He jerked his head at the Mazola sign. “Butter maybe, instead of lard. But only because it is good for the business.”
“Everybody has something wrong with his family,” I muttered.
Werner folded his arms almost triumphantly and looked at me. “But we are not a family,” he said.
I got up and walked around the little grass plot. The way he had spoken the word quality stayed with me; it popped into my mind the time in spring when he and I had been sitting near the same old stone wall and two scarlet tanagers lit on it and strutted for a minute against the blue. You aren’t supposed to see tanagers in New York City. Sooner or later, though, you’ll see almost everything in New York. You’ll have almost every lousy kind of feeling too.
The river had a dark shine to it now. It smelled like a packinghouse for fish, but it looked like the melted, dark eyes of a million girls.
“I wish we were going up to the country this year,” I said. “I’d like to be there right now.”
“I hate the country!” Werner said. “That’s where they’re going to have the restaurant. They have almost enough money now.”
Then it all came out—in a rush. “Come on back,” he said. “They’re out. I want to show you something.”
All the way up the hill he talked: how his mother had worked as a housekeeper for a rich merchant after his father had left for America; how he had always been the child in the basement, allowed to play neither with the town children nor the merchant’s; how his mother would not agree to come over until his father had saved a certain sum, and then required that it be sent to her in dollars before she would sail. Then, in Yorkville, where they had only taken a larger room because the landlady insisted, they used to walk the garish streets sometimes, listening to the din from the cafes—“Ist das nicht ein…? Ja, das ist ein…”—but never going in for a snack or a glass of beer. “We breathed quiet,” I remember him saying, “so we would not have to use up too much air.”
And always, everything was for the restaurant. At Christmastime and birthdays they did not give each other presents, but bought copper pans, cutlery, equipment for the restaurant. They had their eye on an actual place, on a side road not too far from some of the fancy towns in Jersey; it was owned by a man whose wife was a cousin of Mrs. Hauser’s. It already had a clientele of connoisseurs who came to eat slowly, to wait reverently in a waft of roasting coffee, for the Perlhuhn and the Kaiser-Schmarren. The cousins were smart—they knew that Americans would pay the best for the best, and even wait a little long for it, in order to be thought European. But they had let the place get seedy; they did not have enough discipline for the long, sluggish day before the customers arrived, and they had not learned that while the Americans might wait out of snobbishness, they would not do so because the owners were getting drunk in the kitchen. The Hausers would be smarter still. They would serve everything of the best, at a suitably stately pace for such quality, and they would not get drunk in the kitchen.
He stopped talking when we got to his door. The whole time, he hadn’t raised his voice, but had talked on and on in a voice like shavings being rubbed together.
His room was dark and full of the cloying smell. He stood in front of the window, not turning the light on, and I saw that he was looking over at our place. I saw how it looked to him.
That was the summer radios first really came in. Almost everyone had one now. We hadn’t got one yet, but one of Nora’s boy friends had given her a small table model. There were a couple of them playing now at cross purposes, from different places on the court.
“Thursday nights they are broadcasting the concerts, did you know?” he said softly. “Sometimes someone tunes in on it, and I can hear, if I keep the window open. The echoes are bad…and all the other noises. Sometimes, of course, no one tunes it in.”
I wondered what he had to show me, and why he did not turn on the light.
“Today was my birthday,” he said. “I asked them for a radio, but of course I did not expect it. I am to get working papers. When they leave, I am to leave the high school.”
He walked away from the window and turned on the light. The objects on the bed sprang into sharp black and white: the tie disposed on the starched shirt, which lay neatly between the black jacket and pants. That’s what it was. It was a waiter’s suit.
“Of course I did not expect it,” he said. “I did not.”
It was after this that Werner, when he whistled across the court, started using themes from here and there. Sometimes it was that last little mocking bit from Till Eulenspiegel when Till’s feet kick, sometimes it was the Ho-yo-to-ho from Valkyrie, sometimes the horns from the “Waltz of the Flowers.” It was always something we had heard at the Stadium, something we had heard together. When my father, to whom I had blabbed most of that evening with Werner, heard the whistle, his face would sometimes change red, as if he were holding his breath in anger against someone; then this would be displaced by the sunk, beaten look he sometimes brought home from Seventh Avenue, and he would shrug and turn away. He never said anything to Werner or to me.
The last night, the night it must have happened, was a Thursday a few weeks later. It was one of those humid nights when the rain just will not come, and even the hair on your head seems too much to carry around with you. We were all sitting in the dining room, brushing limply now and then at our foreheads. Nora was in one of her moods—the boy who had given her the radio had not phoned. She had it turned on and sat glowering in front of it, as if she might evoke him from it.
My father was standing at the window, looking up at the sky. The court had its usual noises, children crying, a couple of other radios, and the rumble from the streets. Once or twice some kid catcalled from a higher floor, and a light bulb exploded on the alley below.
My father leaned forward suddenly, and looked across the court, watching intently. Then he walked slowly over to the radio, stood in front of it a moment, and turned it on loud. We all looked at him in surprise. He didn’t think much of the thing, and never monkeyed with it.
I looked across the court at Werner’s window. I couldn’t see into its shadows, but it was open. I thought of the look on his face when he met us outside the Stadium walls and of his voice saying, “Sometimes no one tunes it in.” I would have whistled to him, but I couldn’t have been heard over the music—Scheherazade, it was—which was sweeping out loud and strong into the uneasy air.
My mother whispered a reproach to my father, then took a side look at his face, and subsided. I glanced around at Carol, Nora, all of us sitting there joined together, and for some reason or other I felt sick. It’s the weather, I thought, and wiped my forehead.
Then, in the square across the court, the blackness merged and moved. The window began to grind down. And then we heard Werner’s voice, high and desperate, louder even than the plashing waves of the Princess’s story—a long, loud wail.
“No! Please! Scheherazade is speaking!”
Then there were two figures at the window, and the window was flung up again. My mother clapped her hand against her face, ran over to the radio and turned it down low, and stood bent over with her back against it, her fist to her mouth. So it was that we heard Werner again, his words squeezed out, hoarse, but clear. “Bitte, Mutter. Lass mich hören. Scheherazade spricht.”
Then the window came down.
The next evening the house was like a hive with what had happened. The Hausers had gone to the police. There had been one really personal thing in their house after all, and Werner had taken it with him. He had taken the whole of the cache in the wall safe, the whole two thousand dollars for the restaurant.
The detectives came around to question me—two pleasant enough Dutch uncles who had some idea that Werner might have made a pact with me, or that I could give them some clues as to what had been going on inside him. I couldn’t tell them much of use. I wasn’t going to tell them to look over at the Stadium, either outside or in, although for years afterward I myself used to scan the crowds there. And I wasn’t fool enough to try to explain to them what I had hardly figured out yet myself—that nature abhors the vacuums men shape, and sooner or later pushes the hollow in.
Mr. and Mrs. Hauser stayed on, and as far as anyone could tell, kept on with their usual routine. They were still there when we moved—Luba had decided the air was better in Hollis, Queens. During the months while we were still at Hamilton Terrace though, my father acquired an odd habit. If he happened to pass the open dining room window when our large new radio was playing, he was likely to pause there, and look out across the court. Sometimes he shut the sash down hard, and sometimes he let it be, but he always stood there for a time. I never decided whether the look on his face was guilty or proud. I knew well enough why he stood there though. For it was from our house that the music had come. It was from our window that Scheherazade spoke.