It was in this way, in 1950, late in the year and not long before my twentieth birthday, that I set off one day for Westchester County. Rosa Gerhard awaited me in her twelfth house. Constance said she had decided to throw me to the lions at last; she would be leaving for Europe the next day. She thought the whole affair hilarious.
So did Miss Marpruder, the assistants, the secretaries, and the rest of the staff. They gave a small party for me to speed me on my way. They gave me, as a good-luck gift, a pair of earplugs.
“Just be absolutely, totally, three hundred percent
firm
,” Constance said as I was leaving.
The secretaries collapsed against their desks. They moaned with laughter.
“Remember to ask after the children!” one wit called.
I gave them a cold glance. I told myself they were being juvenile. Being twenty, optimistic, still inexperienced, I told myself I could cope. Yes, Rosa Gerhard was difficult—but she could be handled. All clients could be handled. I just had to hit on the right technique.
I returned home ten hours later. I was wrecked.
“Please, Constance,” I said, “please. Don’t do this to me. I like her, but I can’t work with her. Don’t go to Europe. Stay. Better still, give her to someone else.”
“Oh, she loves you, too,” Constance replied. “She’s already telephoned three times since you left Westchester. She thinks you’re wonderful. Sympathetic. Intelligent. Beautiful. Original. She’s
wild
about you.” Constance smiled. She was enjoying this very much.
“I’m dead,” I said. “As far as Rosa Gerhard is concerned, I’m dead. I’ve done eighty thousand miles. Like the husbands. I’m finished. I’m worn out.” I stopped. “Oh, and by the way—you were wrong about that. The husbands, I mean. There was only one.
Is
only one. The survivor. Max.”
“Was I wrong?” Constance gave me an innocent look. “Ah, well, it made a good story. The fact remains: if you can cope with her, you can cope with anyone. Mrs. Gerhard is yours. So are the husbands—sorry, the husband. So are the children. Do tell me, did you meet any of them?”
“Yes, I did. One.” I hesitated. “Only briefly. On the way in and on the way out.”
“I told you. They flee. They’re rare birds. But you had a sighting. How thrilling! Which one?”
“One of the sons.”
“And? And?” Constance leaned forward. “What was he like? I want
all
the details. You’re not being very communicative….”
“
He
was uncommunicative. There
are
no details. He said hello and goodbye. That was it.”
“I don’t believe it for a second. You’re hiding something, I can tell.”
“No, I’m not. I told you—we were introduced, we shook hands—”
“Did you like him?”
“I didn’t have time to like or dislike. Though he seemed to dislike me—”
“Impossible!”
“Very possible. Maybe he’s allergic to decorators. Under the circumstances, I could understand that.”
“Well, yes. Indeed. I suppose so.” Constance gave a little frown. “And which one was this?”
“The second son, I think. Frank Gerhard.”
“Handsome?”
“Memorable. Obviously very bright, from what Rosa said.” I turned away. “Not that it matters, but he’s the Nobel Prize one, I think.”
T
HE NOBEL PRIZE ONE
: Frank Gerhard. On that first day I met him, years before our encounter in Venice, he might have been uncommunicative, but Rosa Gerhard was not.
In the course of the ten hours I spent with her, we made little progress on the designs for her house, a great deal of progress in other respects. By the time I left I had had Rosa’s family history from her great-grandparents downward. I could now see exactly how Constance, embroidering as usual, had misled.
She was right about one thing only: There were a round dozen children. Nine were Rosa’s own, and three were the children of her husband’s brother, taken in by Rosa after this brother’s death. Max, the only and enduring husband, was absent—Rosa suggesting, with a smile, that this was a practice of his. Even when not lecturing or teaching, it seemed, the professor found it hard to work at home. He could not, Rosa said fondly, concentrate on his books. This was understandable: Children—a bewildering number of children—ricocheted through the house.
Rosa took this in her stride. The children seemed to range in age from five to the early twenties. Taking me on a tour of the house, the chaotic house, Rosa would pause in mid-anecdote; she would attend to a cut knee, arbitrate in a squabble, assist a ten-year-old who had punctured a football, or an anguished teenager who could not find a clean shirt. She did so excitably, throwing herself into their predicament with energy, then returning to the subject at hand without missing a beat.
“How about this carpet? You like this carpet? I hate this carpet, but Max likes it—so it stays, yes? Do you think blue with it? Or no, maybe yellow? Or green? This is Daniel. Daniel is fifteen. He writes. Poetry. All the time—also he loses shirts. You want the blue shirt, Daniel? How about the white? Okay, okay, the blue. It’s in the chest in your room—
Lieber Gott,
it is
so
in the chest in your room. The second drawer on the left. Did I sew on that button? Yes, I sewed on that button. Maybe if we moved the carpet—put it downstairs? Would Max mind that, do you think? I sometimes think that all he sees is his books. Still, men can be like that. Ah, through here, Victoria. More introductions. Are you keeping count? This is Frank.”
Frank Gerhard, a handsome man, rose to his feet as we entered this room; it appeared to be his study. He had been reading a book, which he put down politely enough. We shook hands. Rosa launched herself on a lengthy speech, first on the subject of Frank Gerhard’s accomplishments, and then on mine. There followed a highly embarrassing list of my gifts as a decorator, and a warmhearted but equally embarrassing explanation of the sympathy Rosa had felt toward me, the instant we met.
Frank Gerhard listened to this recitation in silence. I could see that he doubted the accuracy of the praise and considered the sympathy precipitate. He made no comment but simply stood there, arms folded, until Rosa came to the end of her speech.
Toward the end of it, even Rosa seemed to sense that there was something wrong, an undercurrent of unease, for, in a way uncharacteristic of her, she faltered, began again, lost impetus, and then hurriedly ushered me from the room.
Our meeting was not, as you can see, quite the way I described it to Constance. Frank was not the only son I met; it was not a hurried exchange, on the way in and the way out. Perhaps there was something in that encounter, even then, that I wished to keep to myself. Certainly I continued to be puzzled by it, and so, I think, did Rosa, for when we went back downstairs for tea, she returned to the subject of this son.
“He works so hard,” she said, “and we interrupted him. He has his finals soon at Columbia—I think that was it. He is a perfectionist.” She stopped, shook her head. “Frank is not … I wouldn’t like you to think … He is working too hard—such long, long hours. I think that is it. Last night, for instance, he stayed up all night, not a wink of sleep. He came down, ate no breakfast, nothing. His face was white. I told him: Frank, you’ll make yourself ill with all this work. There are other things in life. I tried to tell him about the house, about you, how you were coming over—well, he knew that. But no. He wouldn’t listen. Back to his books. I thought he looked pale—when we went in—didn’t you?”
I agreed he had looked pale, though his pallor was not the chief thing I remembered of that encounter. After some further discussion of this son, his dark good looks, his dedication to medicine, the honors being forecast for him, it was possible at last to steer Rosa back to the subject of this house.
For a while, with animation, she told me of her plans, but we did not stay on the subject long. I think in some ways that Rosa was never truly interested in houses. She dreamed of a perfect, an ordered environment, a setting for her family life: a room for every child, space for everyone in a huge family to enjoy both community and privacy, punctual meals, exquisite planned rooms. Yes, I think she dreamed of these things, but she never achieved them and, had she done so, would have hated it. As it was, the constant moves, the color schemes, the purchases, all these served to absorb some of Rosa’s prodigious energy. But the houses were never her main concern, as I quickly realized that day; that concern remained, in all the years I knew her, her husband and her family.
That day, to my relief, we returned to that topic very quickly. Rosa, on color schemes, was exhausting. Rosa, on the subject of her family’s dramas and characters, was interesting.
Consider: I was an only child. I had never been to school. I had very few friends of my own age; from my childhood in England through my years in New York, I had spent my time almost exclusively with those much older than I. I lived, with Constance, in an apartment that was the antithesis of this house, an apartment in which every object, every piece of furniture, every painting had its perfect, its inviolable place. To come to the Gerhards’ was to take a journey to a foreign country. Sitting there, listening to Rosa, I felt an unspeakable loneliness, a passionate wish that I, too, had grown up with brothers, sisters, disorder, friends.
Perhaps Rosa sensed this. She was one of those women who, by sheer warmth of personality, invites confidences from others. She also had the directness and determination that breaks down reticence. She found me very reticent, she said—and then, when she had discovered more about my background, laughed.
“Ah, but you are English, then,” she said. “The English are like this. They make friends by millimeters, don’t you think? A very little, then a little more. After sixty years, maybe you can say you are their friend. Not before. Never before. Whereas I—sixty minutes. Sometimes, sixty seconds. If I like someone, I like them. I always know. At once.”
Rosa was right about this, right about me anyway. I had become too wary and too reticent. I longed to be different. I longed to be as fearless as Constance, as open and impulsive as Rosa. I used to think, sometimes:
I am marking time. When does it start: my life?
For that reason I tried to open up to Rosa, both on that first day and at our subsequent meetings over the following months. As a result of this, Rosa knew a great deal more about me than anyone except Constance, and I failed to resist when Rosa’s questions steered me closer and closer to the subject that was closest to her own heart: romance.
Rosa was, as you may imagine, a convinced, a flagrant, an evangelical romantic. She had already told me, many times, the story of her meeting with Max, their courtship and their marriage. She had also regaled me with the love stories of her parents, her grandparents, her maternal uncle, several cousins, and a woman once encountered on an uptown bus.
Rosa told these stories very well. We had first meetings, we had
coups de foudre.
We had parental opposition, misunderstandings, hopes, temptations. All these stories, so far as I recall, were alike in one respect: They had happy endings. No divorce, no death, no quarrels, no adultery; like the novels my great-aunt Maud had liked when I was a child, all Rosa’s stories ended with a ring and an embrace.
It was some while before I understood: These tales were also cues. I became aware that they would be followed by silences, by looks, by hints. Rosa was waiting for
my
story, my romance. There was none—a fact I bitterly regretted. When, under onslaught, I admitted this, Rosa became very knowing indeed. English reticence again, she suggested. Well, well, she understood. In time, I would confide in her perhaps. No, no, she would be good, not another word; she would ask no more questions….
She asked another question, next breath.
“On the other hand—a special friend?” We were sitting in her drawing room. I had silk samples spread out at my feet, a plate of superb Sacher torte on my lap. Sweet tea, sweet cake, sweet confidences. “I feel sure”—she looked at me wistfully—“a lovely girl like you, so young, all her life ahead of her—there must be
someone.
You wait for him to call, yes? Your heart beats faster when you hear his voice? He writes perhaps, the way my Max used to write to me, and when you get his letters—”
“No, Rosa,” I said, as firmly as I could. “No calls. No letters. I told you—no special friend—”
I stopped. Frank Gerhard had just come into the room. He asked his mother some question, then, without a glance in my direction, left.
“Such a blush!” Rosa said as the door shut. She gave a smile of maddening complacency. “You’re hiding something. Ah, well—you’ll tell me in time.”
Rosa was right: I did tell her in time. By the time that confession came, many months later, the work on Rosa’s house in Westchester had long been completed. That work, which continued for some eight months, cemented our friendship, though it often did so via quarrels.
I should explain that Rosa’s taste was very odd indeed. Rosa’s rooms, like Rosa herself, were a hybrid. From her own family she had inherited a great deal of fine, though somewhat heavy, furniture and some excellent paintings. There were tapestries that might have suited a
Schloss
but which looked unhappy in Westchester. There were antique black oak German cabinets, towering ecclesiastical candlesticks. These were expected to complement the furniture Rosa herself had acquired, much of which was florid.
Rosa loved gilt and curves. She worshipped the rococo. She had a weakness for buhl. She had a whole collection of costly (and, I suspected, fake) Louis Quatorze chairs. Room had to be made for a collection of Steuben glass animals on the one hand and, on the other, for some exquisite Meissen. Finally, there was the influence both of Max and of those numerous children. There were books, stacks of pamphlets, a creeping tide of papers, records, musical instruments, toys, sports equipment, academic journals. Order, in this house, fought a losing battle with clutter. I might have liked to
be
there, but to
work
there was to abandon all my own principles.