MY DAUGHTER Debbie is a very boastful mother. She is proud of both her children and finds it difficult to accept that one should be doing better than the other. She thinks, or pretends to think, that it is Andrew’s fault he is not as successful as his sister, and that if only he tried harder, he would catch up with her. Debbie sees it as her duty to make him try harder, just as she did when he was at school. Andrew never did well at school—to others Debbie asserted it was because he was too brilliant, but at home she gave him no peace. From early morning, even before she had had her coffee and when she is never at her best, she nagged him about his poor performance. This had the effect of making him stop going to school altogether, and for a period, when he was about fifteen or sixteen, no one knew where Andrew was, or with whom. It was also the period during which his tastes were formed, among the group of older men who took him along to their studios and favorite downtown bars and uptown gallery openings. In this milieu Andrew grew up quickly—fortunately with a basis of seriousness that made him recognize his need for education.
At around twenty he entered architecture school but soon turned to other arts, several of them. He wrote the libretto for an opera and also, during a time when his best friend was a dancer, he designed and painted the scenery for a ballet. His next best friend was a young Indian film-maker who introduced him to Indian music, and together they made a documentary about a famous shehnai player. Debbie became very proud of him and her attitude to him changed completely. Now she would never appear before him in the morning the way she used to, shrew-like in curlers, but always careful to be her best, in appearance and manner. She even, when she remembered, developed a special way of speaking to him, more thoughtful and refined, with her lips slightly pursed. She soon reconciled herself to his homosexuality, confiding to her friends that it was inevitable among those of an artistic temperament. She also claimed that the frequency and strength of Andrew’s passions came from her, and although I never contradicted her, I knew it was not so. In her relationships, Debbie has always managed to remain in control, of herself and of circumstances, indignation overcoming pain, and marital settlements compensating for unsatisfactory husbands. But nothing could compensate Andrew for what he suffered; and Debbie herself marveled at the all-consuming extent of his passionate relationships which obliterated everything else in his life, including whatever work he was engaged on.
His sister Veronica—fifteen years younger and from a different marriage—is the opposite. She is cool and detached in all her relations—part of the fascination that has made many people fall violently in love with her, and probably also the cause of her emotional pull with audiences. She is a film actress, at twenty-four already famous; whenever there are articles about a new generation of young stars, her name is prominent among them. She has beauty, of course, but she carries it lightly, as lightly as she moves, her long dress, which seems to be always the same, clinging to her like a length of cloth thrown carelessly over a classical statue, not to hide but to outline her figure. Her dark hair is long and free and sometimes she winds it into a knot to put it out of the way. But I need hardly describe Veronica, her picture is often in magazines, and sometimes on billboards ten feet tall.
Although Veronica has received training from some notable acting coaches, including a famous and tyrannical eighty-year-old actress from Berlin, it was always, and still is, her brother to whom she turns for guidance. This began in her childhood, when she was six and Andrew twenty-one. Whatever he happened to be doing became her interest too—painting, poetry, even music, though she wasn’t musical. Every morning he would assign a poem for her to learn, and when he came home—this might not be till next morning—she would be waiting to recite it for him; and however exhausted he might be (for God only knew where he had been all night), he would patiently listen to her recital; and then she waited, and when he said, “Very good,” she let out her breath as if she had been holding it in anticipation of that moment. When she discovered her talent for acting, he encouraged and began to train her. He introduced her to classical drama, and at sixteen she was declaiming Phèdre to him while he, book in hand, modulated her like an orchestral conductor. Sometimes, to raise her pitch of passion, he accompanied her with tremendous chords struck on the piano. Or later, when she had begun to act in summer stock, he would take the text and read it with her. One of their favorites was Chekhov, especially The Seagull. She was Nina—and who more apt to play that youthful bird of hope aspiring to art and greatness?—while he read the young poet already doomed to failure. Only at that time there did not seem to be a breath of failure on Andrew, no diminution of his brightness. Except for the thinning of his hair, he was the same he always had been, slender and quick, with quick green eyes.
Are suicidal tendencies hereditary? I know that from the 1890s onward they were almost endemic in many assimilated German-Jewish families, including my own. Much later, I tried it too, and so did Andrew, who cut his wrists. Debbie found him and took him to the hospital, and afterward she kept him by her at home, nurturing him more than she had been able to when he was small and she had been going through her first divorce. The idea of someone relinquishing life has remained utterly incomprehensible to her. Although both I and my husband Gerd had come to New York as refugees, Debbie acquired all the attributes of a standard American optimism. She grew up in our West Side apartment, among our books of philosophy and theology, many of them in German, our collection of classical records, our copies of Renaissance sculptures and Impressionist paintings, as though it were a suburban villa with a two-car garage and breakfast of pancakes and orange juice. She was rosy and blonde, healthy and pretty, with a meticulous taste in bobby sox and saddle shoes and boys as popular as herself, whom she cheered at their football games. Now, in middle age, Debbie is still an all-American type. She has been married three times, divorced twice, and is in the process of another divorce. She lived for a while in California—this was when she was married to a studio executive—and now has moved back to New York on the Upper East Side, across the Park from my apartment. Through all her vicissitudes, she has retained her faith in her ideal, which is success in the sense of a complete development of one’s human potential. Whether it is being the most popular girl in the class, or having the best decorated house, or the most highly promoted husband, she regards falling short of it as a sin of character that has to be atoned for and corrected by psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, medication, divorce, diet, or whatever else her friends have tried out and recommended.
“I’m not an intellectual,” she used to tell us. As a girl, this difference from her parents was a matter of pride to her; but now, in view of how her children have turned out, she has become defensive about it. She still looks as far from an intellectual as she did as a bobby-soxer. She has remained blonde—though her hair is more a burnished gold now and built up to give her more height, for she has always been short. She has also tended to be plump, but since menopause she has had a real weight problem, compounded by what she calls her eating disorder, as a result of which she is always nibbling something. She has not changed much from when she was a little girl in short frocks with a frill at the hem. She is still wearing a version of those frocks, though a more expensive one, from Bergdorf’s or Saks designer salon. However, she has now largely disowned her teenage tastes in favor of her children’s. She has become interested in modern art and dance. She has also tried to read some of the books Andrew has bought for Veronica, and she likes to scatter them around where her friends can see them. These books, with their bright jackets and photographs of the author on the back, look more accessible and attractive than those she grew up with in our apartment, or saw at the Hochs.
Debbie did not know until she was middleaged that Gerd, my husband, was not her father. Although in earlier years he and I had discussed the pros and cons of enlightening her, we kept postponing it and finally I did not tell her till after he died. It had turned out to be impossible while he was still with us and so devoted to her. He had delighted in all her plump, blonde, feminine ways, had loved to watch her ice-skate and tap-dance and whiz around on roller-blades, as graceful and vivacious as he was slow. After being a wonderful father to Debbie, he became a devoted grandfather to her children, who often stayed with us, and for long periods of time. Andrew and Gerd used to go for walks together by the river or sit in a park while Gerd told him about the planets and all the world’s natural and architectural wonders. He took him to the Metropolitan museum and led him, week by week, month by month, from the Egyptians to Cézanne (which was as far as Gerd himself had got in the history of art). By the time Veronica arrived, fifteen years later, Gerd had had two of his many operations and was mostly in a wheelchair, so they sat together in what had been his study, he with a tartan blanket on his lap, and she on the carpet with her frock drawn over her knees, listening to the English children’s classics he had already read first to her mother and then to Andrew. My apartment is full of photographs of Gerd with our two grandchildren.
Gerd and I had been fellow students at Freiburg, and when that was no longer possible, in New York. Indeed, we had known each other as children and had been brought to play together under the supervision of our nannies while our mothers went to their coffee parties and matinée concerts. Later we arrived about the same time in New York and joined the same course under the famous Professor Hoch. During the first year or two in New York we formed a small, rather inward-looking group with other refugee students. Although some of us came from Germany and others from France or Italy, we had more in common with each other than with the American students—if only that we were adrift from the solid land of our own background and social assumptions, and our language. None of us was entirely fluent in English, though we were determined to become so and spoke nothing else, in a variety of accents and sometimes with comical mistakes. (Gerd and I never spoke German together again, till Debbie came, and then only when we didn’t want her to know something.) As children, Gerd and I had often played at weddings together, and although later we did not speak about marrying, there remained an assumption between us. But it was a point of honor among all of us to leave each other perfectly free; we were quite smug about it. I know that Gerd never availed himself of this arrangement, not even during those times when I did—and there were occasions, before Professor Hoch, when I could not resist trying out an affair with another of our refugee friends. I was adventurous at the time, afraid of missing something, ready to be stimulated by others or to take the initiative myself. But I really liked Gerd better than any of the other students.
Gerd and I were married when I was six months pregnant with Debbie. We hosted a noisy, highspirited wedding lunch in our favorite Irish pub-style restaurant with a bar and checked tablecloths, and our friends’ epithalamia made jocular reference to the maternity smock I was wearing. No one except Gerd and I knew that Debbie—only we thought she was a boy, to be called David—was not Gerd’s child. Professor Hoch was not present; we all stood in too much awe of him to invite him to such an intimate occasion. It was very different with Gerd, when he in due course became a professor of philosophy and attended all his students’ celebrations. Hoch never hid his low opinion of his students—donkeys he called most of them, always in German, “Esel.” But Gerd not only loved, he esteemed his young people. I have seen him with tears in his eyes over a paper he was marking, only to have a student get something right; and it was the student he praised and admired, taking no credit at all for his own part in this achievement.
I still live in the West Side apartment that the University allowed us to keep after Gerd’s retirement and even after he died. It is an enormous, cavernous place, and our furniture is also dark, standing on claw feet and embellished with carved clusters of grapes. We had bought it all second-hand, as soon as we could afford it, and in imitation of the furniture we had known in our childhood. On one of my birthdays Gerd gave me a chandelier. All through our years here we filled the place with friends and students. There were always house-guests, and people eating, either at impromptu meals or helping themselves out of our large ice-box. We also took every excuse for a party—New Year’s Eve, birthdays and anniversaries, Easter and Passover, we didn’t care what it was as long as people ate and drank and talked through the night. None of us was very tidy and there were books lying about, and records, used cups and glasses, and suitcases belonging to whoever happened to be staying. We often forgot to turn off the lights, so that lamps and the chandelier burned all through the day.
The Hoch family lived in an almost identical West Side apartment, and their furniture was as ponderous as ours. Only theirs was not second-hand, for though they were also émigrés, they were voluntary ones who had been able to bring their possessions with them. Professor Hoch left Germany with the first dismissal of his Jewish colleagues and in protest at everything that was happening there. In New York they continued to live in a solid bourgeois German way. Frau Professor Hoch—Hedda—ran a strict and orderly household, to the exclusion of all dust and noise. Their two sons—tall, tow-headed—were models of respect and good behavior. Students were not encouraged to visit, except once or twice a year when there was a gathering at which Hedda played Bach two-handed clavier with her son. Only the Professor’s favorite students were invited; Hoch made no pretense of not having favorites. I was always included, Gerd only rarely.
The front rooms in the Hoch apartment were given over entirely to the Professor, one to his study and two to his library, which also acted as a buffer against any disturbance from the rest of the household, or from the world in general. All domestic activity, including that of his growing sons, was confined to the other rooms leading off the long corridor. Here Hedda, with the help of her German maid, not only kept her house swept and polished but also acted as her husband’s secretary. Like the rest of us, she too had been a student of philosophy, his student, when he was a young docent at Weimar, so she was able to deal with his notes, to type and arrange them. There was no room for another study, and she had to make use either of the kitchen or the dining table, quickly clearing them as needed. It was always Hedda who answered the telephone, or who opened the door for the Professor’s visitors—of course none of us came without an appointment, arranged by herself, but nevertheless she scrutinized us before leading the way past the umbrella stand to the study door; and it was she who opened the door and then stood aside to let us pass—as stern, tall, and stiff as a Turkish dragoman, and as full of the pride of office.
I entered of course with a beating heart—I was the only graduate student of our year whose thesis he was personally supervising, for he had allowed me to research into some minor aspect of his own work. This was like being allowed to splash in the shallows of his oceanic thought. Oceans and mountains—those were the images I associated with him, the only concepts large enough to contain my impressions of him. He overwhelmed me, not only mentally but by his physical presence. He was a big, heavy man, with a square stubbled skull; he had fought in the First World War and still looked more like a Prussian officer than a philosophy professor. When I sat close beside him at his massive desk, I hardly dared glance into his face. I kept my eyes lowered to the papers before us, so that all I could see of him was his waistcoat. He always wore a three-piece suit, with an oldfashioned gold watch-chain stretched across his stomach that rose and fell with his breathing. His breathing was heavy and became more so as his excitement mounted with his mounting thought; sometimes he seemed even to be panting like one who had climbed to a height never yet attained by man. I too felt my heartbeat increase with excitement as he spoke to me of his central idea (the reversal from the Western tradition of technology, or the excarnation of spirit into matter, to the Hindu concept of Maya, the incarnation of matter into spirit). And once, as if unable to sustain himself in those regions without some physical support—we are, after all, all of us here, still within the limits of our bodies—he put his hand on the back of my neck and said, “My little one.” He said it in German—“Meine Kleine”—which was always for him the language of his earthly desires. He shut his eyes when he kissed but I kept mine open. It was the only time I really dared to look into his face. He was in his fifties then, with heavy jowls that were always somewhat red and raw from the close shave he gave himself with a huge open razor. He was greatly attached to this razor and took it with him on all his travels; when I began to accompany him, I too became familiar with it, and with the leather strop on which he sharpened it and the shaving brush that looked like horsehair but was actually beaver.
After my marriage and Debbie’s birth, my work with Hoch continued, for I had begun to act as his English translator and had become indispensable to him. I had nowhere to leave Debbie, so I always brought her with me, slung in a carrier on my back, along with my notebooks. The Hoch boys took charge of her and loved playing with her, all three of them fair-haired and rosy-cheeked. Hedda Hoch was also fond of Debbie and gave her cookies and milk in the kitchen and stroked her blonde curls, confiding that she had always longed for a little daughter. I could never make out how much Hedda knew or suspected. She appeared in complete command of her thoughts and feelings, as she was, of course, of the whole situation. It was she who slept beside him in their double bed brought from Germany; and it was she who cooked and served his meals and cleaned his house (on Saturdays, her major cleaning day, I had to get to his study by stepping over rolled-up carpets and past Hedda and her maid wielding mops). In the summer the whole family left for their vacation in the Swiss Alps; they always stayed in the same hotel, where months before Hedda had reserved his favorite rooms.
Hedda lived on into her nineties and continued to work with me on the Hoch papers. Debbie often met her, but she remembered Hoch, who died when she was five, only as a threatening presence behind a forbidding closed door. The revelation that he was her father excited her perhaps more in its novel and scandalous aspect than the fact of her descent from one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. She was also thrilled suddenly to acquire two half-brothers, and as a result sought out the two Hoch boys whom she hadn’t seen for maybe forty years. One was an engineer in Pittsburgh, the other a partner in a Washington law firm, both settled with their families in households as orderly as the one they had grown up in. They did not welcome Debbie’s revelation, nor I suspect Debbie herself, hung around with costume jewelry and trailing her aura of adulteries and divorces—anyway, she came back disgruntled and seldom mentioned these half-brothers again except to say that they had inherited not one jot of their father’s genius, which had, she insisted, passed in a pure straight line through her to her own two wonderful children.
*
Although she has inherited nothing from Hoch except his height—she is much taller than anyone else in our family—there is something about my granddaughter Veronica that is reminiscent of him. This may be her complete absorption in what she is doing—that is, in her career, her stardom—and, with it, her absorption in herself. One has the feeling with her, as before with Hoch, that nothing can really touch her; that within herself, in her own sense of dedication, she is inviolate. The word ruthlessness attached itself naturally to Hoch, and so it does to Veronica. Yet her attitude to her own success is one of apparent indifference. She seems to regard it as her natural due, something she was both born for and works for, with all the strength of her ambition. And she has ambition—she is tense with it, always has been since childhood, even before she knew what she was going to do. Hoch’s ambition was to reach the loftiest heights of thought; hers is to star in what she herself sometimes characterizes as “dumb little movies”: in both cases the result has been a complete and utter singlemindedness. Not that there is any resemblance between Hoch’s personality and his granddaughter’s. He was ponderous, and it is her business to enchant. I think of her returning to us from one of her trips—and she is often away, on location, or in Beverly Hills, where she has recently bought a house. She comes to us straight from the airport, either to my apartment or to Debbie’s, wherever Andrew happens to be living at the time. Someone else has taken care of the luggage, so she arrives unencumbered—light as a butterfly in her simple frock and as if borne to us on a spring breeze (actually it was a chauffeur-driven limousine). Though protesting that she is dead tired from all that sitting on a horrible plane, she always has an amusing story to tell of something that happened to her en route, and from there other amusing stories—an encounter, maybe, with a stupid journalist—which she tells with great skill and that make us laugh. She is full of news and excitement—her news, her excitement, she doesn’t expect us to have any. Aroused by what she is telling us, she can’t sit still but strides up and down our living room, tall, slender, and strong: and her presence among us is wonderful—it is like having a goddess, a Diana or Ceres, descend into the middle of one’s little life, irradiating it for a moment with her splendor.
Ever since his last project—a semi-fictional documentary about a dancer who had died of Aids—failed to take off for lack of funds, Andrew has started nothing new. He has had projects fail before, in his various fields of interest, and usually, after a period of depression, has been ready to start on something new. It was always a pleasure to see Andrew with a new involvement, whether in work or love—and often the two coincided. Unlike Veronica, Andrew is short like the rest of us, and although he never played any sport, he used to have a firm, compact body like an athlete; for years he retained a boyish quality, as if he had only just started out and was unmarred by experience (this air of innocence remained even after his suicide attempt). But the other day I encountered him in the long corridor of my apartment when he was coming out of the toilet and zipping himself up. He wasn’t wearing a belt and his stomach, which had once been so flat, drooped over his pants; he was in slippers and was shuffling a bit and was suddenly—this seemingly perennial boy—a middleaged man.
The reason he is staying with me is because of his mother. Debbie is the same with him now as when he wasn’t doing well at school and she thought she could improve him. And he reacts now as he did then, by running away: this time not into the world at large with strangers but home to my apartment, where he stays all day in the library with the door shut. When Debbie comes, and she comes all the time, he locks it while she stands outside and shouts at him through the door. He doesn’t answer and there is a terrible silence.
I must have seen more than one production of The Seagull over the years, but I remember it chiefly from Andrew and Veronica’s readings, when she played Nina and he Konstantin the young poet. In the last scene of the last act Konstantin locks himself up in a room, and the last line of the play is “Konstantin has shot himself.” Not that Andrew has a gun, or would know what to do with it if he had one. But living alone with him, I’m in constant anxiety, which I dare not share with Debbie. She has high blood pressure, and when she gets worked up, her face swells under her golden hair and a pulse beats dangerously inside her rosy rouged cheek. After shouting at Andrew through the closed door, she turns on me: “What’s he doing in there?” she says, as though his locking himself away were my fault.
Andrew was the person most strongly affected by my revelation that not Gerd but Hoch was his grandfather. When I look back, I realize that it is from that time—which was also the time of his last project—that Andrew seems to have lost heart. It is as if the shadow that great men tend to cast on their descendants has caught up with Andrew at the age of forty. He has been trying to read Hoch’s works; that is what he has been doing behind that closed library door. I have many editions of those works and in many languages; the English ones are mostly by myself, though I have not yet translated the last two volumes he published. They are impossibly difficult, for right till the end—even after his stroke—Hoch was penetrating into seemingly inaccessible areas of thought. Now a younger person than I will have to try and render them into English and so complete my life’s work. Hoch’s earlier phases have by now been absorbed into philosophical tradition and are thus accessible to those with the right training and background. But Andrew’s interests have always been in the arts, never—maybe in reaction to Gerd and myself—in philosophy; and without a thorough academic grounding in both Western and Eastern thought, Hoch cannot be understood. When Andrew and I are alone, he has sometimes asked me to explain, and this is not at all difficult because, like all truly universal thought, the gist of it is simple to formulate. But to follow the steps—the long ascent—by which this peak has been reached, is not possible without many years of study and discipline. I go into the library and I stand behind Andrew where he sits hunched over Hoch’s tome, which must seem like a tomb of cognition to him; he is running his hands through his sparse hair, and when I touch his shoulder, he looks up at me and his intelligent green eyes are dimmed with reading and incomprehension.
When Debbie asks me what he is doing, I say, “He’s reading.”
“What’s he reading?” When I tell her, she snorts and says, “We’ve had enough of all that.” Secretly I agree with her. Although it has been my whole life, I don’t want it for Andrew any more than Debbie does. At least once a day she comes around to my apartment; she knocks on the study door in vain and then stands there and looks at me. She has always been jealous that Andrew should so often prefer to be with me, his grandmother, instead of with her, his mother. But now, standing outside the locked library door, we are united in our anxiety for him. I don’t tell her about The Seagull, but my fear is so great that I now confess to her a secret Andrew and I have shared for the last two years. Ever since my heart attack, I have been on strong medication; Andrew goes regularly to the pharmacy to have the prescription refilled and to get whatever else Dr. Stein has ordered for me. When Andrew returns from the pharmacy and gives me the pills, I thank him and wait till he is out of the room. Then I open my chest of drawers and add the new phial to my little collection, hidden at the back of a drawer under some clothing I no longer wear. Sometimes I take out one little phial after the other to read the labels. Once it happened that Andrew came back to tell me something, and when I turned around, I saw him standing in the doorway and looking at me with a grave expression in his eyes. I shut the drawer and he went away without saying anything. Now, when he brings my prescription, he hands it to me with that same grave expression and walks away quickly, respecting my secret.
But now it is his secret too, and I have to tell Debbie about it. She does not reproach me—probably she will later, Debbie does not pass over one’s mistakes in silence. She accompanies me to my bedroom and, opening the drawer, takes out the pills. Together she and I carry them to the bathroom and flush the contents down the toilet. While we are doing this, she talks constantly—not about what we are doing and why, but about one of her favorite dreams that has never yet been fulfilled: she would like to go on a trip with Andrew, just the two of them, mother and handsome son. It doesn’t really matter where, although she would like it to be Italy, where she has already been twice with a party of her women friends. They had a good time, but none of them was very knowledgeable and the guides tended to rush them. But if she went with Andrew, he would explain everything so beautifully, the churches and the frescoes and the paintings, and they would live in a hotel in adjoining rooms, maybe with a shared balcony on which she would appear in the morning and call out to him.
Andrew has been to Italy many times, but never with her. Last year he was there with Veronica, on one of her locations. Veronica too wants him with her as much as possible. She would like him to live with her in her house in Beverly Hills. Veronica has never changed toward her brother and refuses to see, or really does not see, that he has changed in himself. She will not accept any role unless he has first approved it; she won’t even read the script until he has recommended it. Only then will she sit down, usually on the floor with the script propped in her lap, winding a strand of her long hair around her fingers. Debbie is proud of this relationship between her children—Veronica’s continued dependence on him—but she is also irritated by it. “As if he’s got nothing better to do than read her silly scripts,” she grumbles to me (though to no one else). “That’s not what he went to Princeton for, and is this brilliant genius.” Last year, when he went to Italy, she protested that it was a waste of his time; and when he sent home picture postcards, she looked at them wistfully and said what a shame to be there with a film crew who spoil everything with their vulgarity.
But now Debbie herself has sent Andrew away with Veronica. This is the way it happened. Veronica had been on a publicity tour for the film she had just finished and was about to start shooting the next one, again in Italy, in Florence. On her way, she touched down in New York for a day to persuade Andrew to go with her. She called Debbie from the airport—“Is he with you?” then switched off when she heard he wasn’t.
Debbie was soon with me: “She’s back. She’s asking for him—of course not a word for me; no ‘How are you, Mummy? How have you been?’ Just ‘Where is he?’”
Veronica was with us sooner than we expected. Andrew was asleep, or pretended to be. When she knocked on his bedroom door, he didn’t answer. Then she came to talk to me—all charm, all radiance; she perched on a footstool at my feet, her dress pulled over her knees the way she had done as a little girl. She gazed at me out of her dark blue eyes, clear under her high square forehead—Hoch’s lofty brow—her hair swept back and falling away from it, so that the steady gaze of those beautiful eyes gave an impression of serene sincerity. Her voice too was full of sincerity. She asked after my health, laying her hand on mine in deep concern, then laying it on her heart in anxiety: “Are you okay—here? You’re sure?” Naturally I lied, and she was glad to accept my lie. She hadn’t come here to talk about my health.
She looked at her watch: “But where’s Andrew? We have to go.”
“Who’s we?” said Debbie.
Veronica smiled into space. Then she consulted her watch again and began to tell us everything she had to do: fly to Florence, then back to L.A. for more interviews, then to London for some fittings—she made it all sound rushed, breathless. As usual, she stalked around restlessly—an anomalous presence in my living room with its furniture and rugs worn out by years of family use, and the old clock I always forget to wind, and the photographs of the children with Gerd.
Andrew appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes and looking somewhat bedraggled—so he hadn’t been pretending, he really had been asleep. “What’s the time?” he said. Veronica replied: “It’s three o’clock. What are you doing sleeping in the middle of the afternoon?” He didn’t respond but sat down on the sofa, yawning, and rubbed his hands through his hair.
“Naturally, he’s tired with all the reading and studying he’s been doing,” Debbie said. When he looked at her quizzically, she went on, “Well, what else is it you’re doing locked up in there with all those books?”
“Oh those books: they’d make anyone fall asleep, they’re so damned erudite.” He smiled, and yawned again.
I could see that he was making Debbie frantic with irritation and misery. But all she could think to say was, “You need a vacation.”
“A vacation! How exciting! Is it you and I who are going?”
Debbie’s lips trembled: “Yes, I could do with a change too.”
But Veronica really had no time to waste: “You promised! Yes you did, when I phoned from L.A. you said you’d go with me.”
“Where to? Are we going anywhere really adorable?”
“What will be really adorable is to have you with me—one real person instead of all those creeps.” It was rare for the two of them to touch each other, but now she laid her hand on his shoulder: “I need you. You have to come.” She sounded desperate—of course, Veronica has been trained in all the emotions, but in relation to her brother, they may often have been real.
“Andrew has to stay with Grandma,” Debbie said, “I don’t want her left alone.”
“But Grandma’s fine!” Veronica cried. “She’s told me herself!”
“Oh she’ll say she’s fine of course,” Debbie said. “She’ll never admit she needs a doctor or anyone else, not if it kills her.”
“But I am fine,” I protested, looking at Andrew.
He nodded, adding, “And in case of an emergency, you always have your pills.” The way he spoke, I realized he had already looked for them in their hiding place and found them missing.
Probably Debbie realized it at the same moment; or else, what was it that suddenly changed her mind? She shrugged—an uncharacteristic gesture for someone with her strong opinions and feelings. “It’s a total waste of your time of course,” she said, “but if she’s giving you a free air ticket, you might as well go.”
Andrew has seen Hoch only in published photographs. Besides the formal portrait used as a frontispiece to the collected works, there are those in the two biographies that have already been written about Hoch. These include early family photographs—for instance, his mother in 1895, as stern and stiff as Hedda and encased up to her jawline in a blouse like a breastplate; and of Hedda herself, and the two sons. The only mention of myself in these two biographies is as his translator; he never kept any of the letters I wrote to him. He was nervous about receiving them, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself, I had to write them; of course he wrote no letters to me. Yet for twenty years he and I led a secret life together—never here in New York but when he went away on one of his many conferences and symposia and allowed me to follow him. Somehow I scraped up the fare by giving tutorials, or secretly doing clerical work, addressing envelopes at so much an hour. Board and lodging were free, for I shared his hotel room, where I waited for him every night to return from whatever dinner or reception he had to attend. For the sake of appearances, I would slip out at dawn and walk around in the nearest park; this was all right in the summer, but less pleasant at conferences held in Sweden during his winter break. When he left the hotel for the day’s session, he gave orders at the desk for his secretary to be admitted, so I took the key and stayed in his room. He also left his breakfast tray for me with the remains of the English breakfast of bacon and eggs he had ordered, which would sustain me for most of the day. I was ready to be alone and wait all those hours since I knew that finally, however late, he would return to me. The first thing he did was to sit on the hotel bed and ease himself out of his big brown boots. This took some time because they were laced right up to the top, ending in a double knot that was difficult to untie. Next he took off his gold watch and chain and laid them on the bedside table, and after that he unbuttoned his waistcoat. It was only then that he turned to me and said, “Kiss me.” Although in the morning he had given himself a close shave with his open razor, by this time his cheeks were rough again with grey stubble: rough and manly.
I cannot say that these excursions were the happiest hours of my life, but they were certainly the most ecstatic. It is impossible to describe the bliss of being with him, this stolid Prussian professor thirty years older than I, who after making love at once turned over on his side and went to sleep, snoring tremendously. But he performed as a lover as he did everything: with all the force of his being—which was, after all, that of a man who had explored and conquered vast territories, impenetrable thickets of the mind. I adored him. But also, when he was not there and I was left alone all day in his hotel room, I shed bitter tears at the humiliating nature of the affair, and its futility.
Before we left on our conference trips together, his wife would give me instructions. These were partly professional, for whereas I had translated the paper he was to present, it was she who had prepared the final typescript. After he had been diagnosed with high blood pressure, she would also instruct me about his diet and other precautions. Although she only did this when she knew our work for the day was finished, her intrusion irritated him. Ignoring his mood, she carried on in slow and meticulous detail, driving him mad, especially when she warned against the red meat and red wine for which he had such a huge appetite.
“Yes yes yes, we know all about that,” he growled.
She turned to me: “I rely on you.”
He sneered at her: “Wouldn’t it be best to hire a nursemaid for me?”
“We can’t afford one, let alone her fare. If we could, I’d come myself to make sure you don’t kill yourself.”
She looked at him out of her flat, pale eyes that always seemed empty of expression to me; but not, it seemed, to him, for he looked away from her and muttered a curse in German. But I never had to remind him about her instructions; he followed them carefully, as though she were there with us.
When I became pregnant with Debbie, he offered me money for an abortion. That was the only time he ever offered me money, and when I refused, he said no more about it and we continued our work. We did not mention the subject between us again, either then or subsequently. It happened to be a stressful time, for we were working on an important paper he was about to publish. One day, a week after I told him my news, he became very impatient because I kept failing to get my translation right. This happened every time he made some further advance in his thought, since any new concept of his was impossibly difficult to grasp, and then to find English words in which to express it . . . I became desperate—because he was angry and because I was failing him. I was hampering his great work not only with my dull mind but now also with my body and its uncalled-for pregnancy. It was making me nauseous and causing pain in my breasts and other unworthy symptoms—unworthy, that is, of the work to which I was called.
He was by nature an impatient, irascible man, especially when interrupted or obstructed in his train of thought. For me his wrath was like a storm at sea or a mountain avalanche, where I could only cower and pray—and on that day this is what I did, hiding my head in my arms. At the sound of his raging voice Hedda came bursting in, overcoming her own fear of the closed door and even without knocking. She was intent on a rescue mission—rescuing him, that is, from the storm of blood rushing into his brain (it is his high blood pressure that Debbie has inherited). She didn’t ask what had caused his outburst but said, with her heavy humor, that it couldn’t be all that bad, we’re not all going to be hanged, are we? So why not just sit down quietly and drink the cup of good coffee that she would make and bring for him. She called him by his first name, Helmut—the name I never used; for me the most intimate address was Hoch without the Professor, and that only when we were alone together in some place away from home. He was spluttering with fury but did what she said and sat down. I was still holding my head in my hands, but neither of them took any notice of me. When I looked up, I saw them together like that, husband and wife; she was caressing his sleeve, but at the same time her eyes swept over my sheets of translation spread over the desk. She wore the usual impassive expression she reserved for my work with him; it was the one task she had to delegate, for her English never became good enough for her to displace me. She waited for him to simmer down, then said she would make that cup of good coffee for him. She didn’t offer me any, and I saw it was time to leave them together.
At that time I lived in an old row house off First Avenue, in a railway flat I shared with two other refugee girls, Eva and Renate. We had two bedrooms and took turns sleeping on the couch in the living room, though this arrangement changed whenever one or other of us had a man friend staying the night. That morning, before leaving to work with Hoch, I had washed some stockings, and on my return I went straight into the bathroom to take them down; there was also some underwear belonging to the other girls, and none of it was quite dry yet, but I needed the rope. I pulled out the table in the living room and placed it under a hook in the ceiling; a previous tenant must have had an electric fan, which he took away with him when he left. I placed a chair on the table and climbed up on it. My principal worry was that table and chair would break under me while I was fastening the rope. All our furniture was old—some donated by friends, some found abandoned on the street.
There was a ring at the door—the bell went through me like an electric shock. It was only then that my heart started beating fast, as though shocked into life; before that I had been calm, cool, doing everything correctly. I stood waiting, hoping the caller would leave, yet also waiting for the bell to ring again. As I counted the seconds, it rang again, and then again. I went to the door: the visitor had started calling my name, knocking on the door till I opened it to him. It was Gerd. He was holding a bunch of flowers.
“Thank heaven,” he said. “I thought you weren’t home, and then what would I do with these?” He stretched them out toward me. They were cheap flowers, all any of us could afford at the time, bought on the street and wilting from the city dust while they waited to be sold.
I didn’t ask him in; on the contrary, I stood blocking his way.
“Should we put them in water?” he asked. For a few seconds more, we stood facing each other, his smile uneasy but persistent.
To prevent him from going into the living room, I led the way down the passage to the bedroom at the other end. The door of the living room was open—did he turn his head to look in, and if so, how much did he see? He said nothing, but followed me; when we got to the bedroom, it was he who shut the door behind us. Although by nature a shy, reticent person—we had never yet slept together—he did not hesitate to take the initiative. He sat down on the bed and, making me sit close beside him, put his arm around me; for the first time in our relationship he was in charge.
I told him I was pregnant, and by whom. Perhaps he thought that this was the only reason for what he had seen through the open door of the living room. If he had seen—we were married for over fifty years, and never once did he refer to that open door. He reacted to my news with such a rush of joy that it overflowed into me. He convinced me that it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me, and to him. And this was how it was between us from that moment on—through our wedding day, for which Hoch and Hedda sent a set of kitchen utensils, so sturdy that they are still in use—and then through all my years with him and Debbie, and with Hoch. For my life and work with Hoch continued, even our journeys together to conferences and the waiting for him in hotel rooms, although in his last years I was allowed to accompany him to the conferences, for he needed someone to help with his notes and, after his stroke, to help him physically too.
Usually I fulfilled my function with him without demur or question; but there were times when I felt the same as on that day when Gerd came with the flowers. Although these depressions tended to occur during the summer months—about the time the Hoch family left for their vacation in the Swiss Alps—I always thought of those days as my frozen winter days. And always, like that first time, it was Gerd who melted the ice that had formed around my heart, asking me perhaps to explain some aspect of Hoch’s new ideas that I had been working on. Gerd freely admitted that he really was the donkey that Hoch took him for, and it is true I had difficulty getting some of these ideas across to him. But it was always worth it because when a glimmer of their meaning began to dawn on him, Gerd would clasp his hands and cry out, “What a man! My goodness, what a great man!” Then I realized all over again the joy and privilege of working with Hoch. And Gerd made out that he too felt privileged to be part of this situation.