The Prince of West End Avenue (3 page)

For OUR RENDEZVOUS I dressed with care, hoping to erase the image Magda must be carrying of me, wasted limbs and sodden nightshirt. The mirror was not flattering: I had achieved only modest success. My good gray suit hung shapelessly on me; like my nose, it has grown in proportion as my flesh has withered. On the other hand, a blue polka-dot silk tie, neatly fixed with a pin, and a pocket handkerchief, generously flounced, were after all interesting foci. And so was my boutonniere, a Shasta daisy I had removed from the breakfast room. I examined myself this way and that. No use, no use. As Prufrock puts it, "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be." Fortunately, I still hold myself erect.

Precisely as the eleventh hour registered on the clock above Selma's bulletproof window, I entered the lobby. Magda Damrosch—no, henceforth I shall call her by her new name,

Mandy Dattner—Miss Dattner was not there. I felt like a rejected swain. Thus cavalierly had Magda herself always treated me. I sat down in a lobby chair and waited. Selma waved to me through the glass. I pretended not to notice.

"Ah, but you have missed him, liebes Frdulein. He was here with the customs officer and the other officials when we stopped at the border. Do please allow me to find him for you."

She closed the door and sat down. "But that is exactly what I don't want you to do."

"But...?"

"With me it's a matter of principle," she said. "Do sit down, young man."

I obeyed. "But what, if I may ask, is the principle?"

She smiled and raised her left brow. The arrow of Cupid lodged itself firmly in my heart. "I cannot be expected to discuss my principles with a young man to whom I have not yet been introduced, a young man who, for all I know, may himself be unprincipled."

We got along famously after that, chattering our way into Zurich. Still, it must be admitted that she revealed little of herself. While she did not scruple to ask me the most outrageously personal questions, she somehow, without actually saying so, made it clear that any personal question of mine would bring our friendly conversation to an immediate halt, a delicate bud blasted by my clumsiness, my bad manners. Was I still a virgin, she wanted to know, or had I freed myself from Mama's apron strings? Such a question in 1915 from a young lady to a gentleman stranger! It was unheard-of. It was also exhilarating, captivating. I was in fact still a virgin, but I did not know whether experience or inexperience would prove the more appealing to her. On the whole, it seemed better to emphasize my independence and let her think what she would. "You see me here without Mama," I said. Then why was I not laying down my life for the Kaiser? This was a sore point. I actually believed at that time all that dangerous, disgusting rubbish about Kaiser, Vaterland, and Kameradschafi. Yes, I really did. I had longed to become a war

hero; to my shame, I still wove fantasies of my exploits at the front:

A bullet came a-flying: "Is it meant for me or thee?" Him did it tear away, Him at my feet did lay, As 'twere a piece of me.

(Excuse the poor translation of Uhland's poem. I've grown rusty.) It was always my comrade-in-arms who received the bullet. As for me, I wiped away a manly tear and went on to living glory. My God, can you imagine!

But in the early heady days of mobilization, when there were not uniforms enough to put on the backs of all the eager volunteers, I had been pronounced unfit for military service, my missing parts denying me access to the Kaiser's sausage grinder. ("So you see, Frieda," Aunt Manya had said, "it all turned out for the best.") There was nothing for it in that sun-bright carriage but to hint at some mysterious war-related mission: "There is more than one way to serve the Kaiser." I suppose I blushed.

"Reasons of state!" She laughed, delighted. "Well, I must not ask you to reveal state secrets, secrets upon which the fate of all Europe no doubt depends." I squirmed.

"Tell me instead," she went on, "what your prewar occupation was."

I toyed for a moment with several possibilities but saw her mocking smile. "I was—I am—a poet." "Wonderful! Say something in poetry." "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bliihn —" "Not that Goethe rubbish, something of your own." Goethe rubbish! Good heavens! I began to intone my

favorite poem from Days of Darkness, Nights of Light. In it a young man caught in the coils of a femme fatale expresses his wretchedness.

"Rubbish!"

She had allowed me no more than half a dozen lines. I knew in my soul that hers was the first word of honest criticism my poetry had ever received.

As the train pulled into the Bahnhofzt Zurich, she gave me my instructions. We were to walk together along the platform toward the ticket collector, obviously companions. About fifteen paces from the wicket, I was to put down my bags and begin worriedly to feel in my pockets. I had mislaid something, something important, perhaps left it on the train. Meanwhile, she would herself walk on through the wicket and stop just beyond it, indicating to the collector with a nod of her head that she was waiting for me. Perhaps she would stamp her foot impatiently. I was to open one of my bags, obviously looking for the lost item. But I should contrive to keep an eye on her. When I saw that she had successfully mingled with the crowd departing the Bahnhof I was to give a cry of relief—I had found it!—do up my bag, and go and hand in my ticket to the collector. Should I be asked for her ticket, I had only to tell the truth: I had met the lady that afternoon on the train; only in that sense had we been traveling together.

There, that was easy enough, wasn't it? Did I understand what I was to do? "We'll make something of you yet, young man."

The plan terrified me. She was asking me to abet her in the commission of a crime. My bourgeois soul rebelled against the very idea. If she found herself temporarily embarrassed, I told her as delicately as I could, I would be honored to furnish her with the money for a ticket.

"What a silly mama's boy you are!"

As it turned out, her plan worked like magic. When, with a pounding heart, I handed my ticket to the collector, he merely took it and reached past me for the next. He had forgotten all about her.

Too late I realized that I had no idea where I might find her. All Zurich yawned before me. My eyes smarted, and I cursed my stupidity.

confidently carrying the weight of our world on his shoulders, the sedentary sitting up alertly on both sides as he passed, smiling at him, "Good morning, Dr Weisskopf," solo-ambulant material all. The great man continued on his way.

Three of the four members of I Solisti di Morrisania, our string quartet, scurried across the lobby on their way out, prompting speculation among the sedentary that the group was breaking up, that Menasha Futterman, the missing cellist, was seriously ill, was perhaps already dead. Then Futterman emerged from the cloakroom, rosy-cheeked, buttoning up. "How you doing, Menasha? Feeling okay?" To which, Futterman, alarmed: "Sure I'm okay. What you think? I don't look okay?" And he hurried to join his mates, a hand over his heart. "That's not a well man," the sedentary agreed with satisfaction.

Hermione Perlmutter skipped in from the street, her Mary Janes twinkling, scanned the bulletin board, found her message, glanced at her watch, stamped a frustrated foot, and turned to skip out again, merely waving at Selma, throwing the solo-ambulant bookkeeping into disarray. For me, La Perlmutter did not spare even a glance, a rudeness duly noted by the sedentary, who nodded to one another very wisely. As I have hinted, she does not much like me.

Hermione and I arrived here in the same week, she a widow of some years' standing and I once more a widower. These circumstances threw us together, for we were both feeling our way into a new community. Perhaps I misunderstood her overtures. It seemed to me that she was after more than friendship. My experience with the Contessa, my second wife, had made me wary. La Perlmutter would often sit and stare at me with a very strange smile on her lips. She was always at my elbow—in the dining room, in the library, on my walks. "Hermione is a bit of a mouthful," she said. "Why not call me Hannah?"

Over the course of those first few weeks, I learned quite a

lot about her. She was born into London's East End, a teeming Jewish community, daughter to a tailor and his seamstress wife, turn-of-the-century Russian emigrants who had stopped off in England on their way to America and settled there. She was the last of seven children, "the baby, everyone's pet," she said, placing a finger upon her chin, a gesture of a faraway time. "As soon as they'd scraped together a little money, Daddy sent for Mummy's parents. Times were hard, but one thing we had in plenty was love. I would sit for hours on my granny's lap, smothered in kisses. She was something of a philosopher, as a young woman an active socialist, later disillusioned. No remark was permitted to stray past her unexamined. 'The Bolsheviks are transforming Russia,' Grandfather might say innocently. 'Wait a minute, smarty,' my granny would interrupt him, 'a Bolshevik is different from a Cossack? A Russian is a Russian. Tell me, what isz. Bolshevik?' And they were off on an hourlong discussion. That was my milieu."

The brightest of her siblings, Hermione completed grammar school and afterward found employment in the White-chapel Public Library, a social advancement that awed her family. "I loved books," she confessed, "loved the look of them, the feel of them. There was no appeasing an appetite like mine. I swallowed a whole library." Here she made a self-deprecating gesture, as if to suggest that her gluttony for books explained her current rotundity. "My daughter's the writer of the family, but all my life I've tried my hand—secretly, of course." On that occasion we were sitting in the Emma Lazarus library, and so she was whispering. "Perhaps one day, if you'll let me, I'll show you some of my stuff, awful though it is." I was noncommittal.

She met Milton Perlmutter, her future husband, in 1944. She was then in her early thirties and "something of a wallflower." He was an officer in the judge advocate general's corps, on special mission in England to represent American servicemen accused of paternity by Englishwomen they had (or had

not) "knocked up." They sat across from one another at a seder table in Hendon; with each of the four glasses of wine he impiously but romantically toasted her. Later he took her home. "He might have been from another planet. I was swept off my feet: lunch at the Savoy, a the dansantzx. the Dorchester, a blissful weekend in Brighton"—she blushed—"flowers, chocolates, nylon stockings, a bottle of slivovitz for Daddy. I was overwhelmed. He showered me with prewar pleasures I had never known. Not in the East End." By the time she disembarked in New York in 1946, a war bride, she was already six months pregnant.

"But you've told me next to nothing about yourself," she said accurately.

"My dear lady, there is next to nothing to tell." "I already know something," she said coyly. I must have looked startled. "You're very shy with the ladies. I like that." After the war, Milton Perlmutter prospered, first in practice alone, later in a successful partnership. "Years ago he represented the Emma Lazarus in a million-dollar suit. It made all the papers. One of the doctors was accused of indelicacy with a female resident, and her family held the home responsible. Totally false, of course. The wretched woman broke down and confessed the truth under Milton's cross-examination. Her family had put her up to it. That was when I first heard about the Emma Lazarus. Who'd have thought then that I'd end up here? Well, of course, ours is not any ordinary home, more of a luxury residential hotel. We're not exactly paupers here." I winced at this, but she merely patted me on the hand, as if to help me past a painful bubble of gas. "You think we have class now? You should have seen the Emma Lazarus in those days. Class isn't the word. No need for bulletproof glass then. The riffraff wouldn't have dared poke a nose through the door. Why, the doorman dressed like a five-star general."

"Your grandfather might not have been comfortable here," I murmured.

She seemed not to understand. "He died in England, my granny too, may they rest in peace. Frosch versus the Emma Lazarus was Milton's first big case. He sent me to NYU, bless him, with the proceeds. I majored in English and minored in German literature."

At that time, we were walking on Broadway. She had invited herself along. I had some errands in the neighborhood. She put her hand on my arm, stopping me in my tracks. "I know something else about you."

"I'm really a very uninteresting person."

"You're a poet. I remembered just the other day. I knew the. name was familiar. Then it came to me: the stacks at NYU, your book of poems on the shelf."

"That was another Otto Korner. With an umlaut. An understandable mistake."

I could see she didn't believe me.

"I suppose you could call it a comfortable marriage, no strains, none but the usual." Perlmutter had doted on her. "But it wasn't a perfect union." It had taken her eight years of widowhood to pinpoint the fault: "He lacked a spiritual dimension." For all the refinement of his education, he was too worldly, too much the lawyer, impatient of those immaterial truths with which literature deals. "There was no poetry in his soul, only torts and class reunions." But of course there was their daughter, Lucille, to link them in love—Lucille herself a mature woman now and, since her "sticky" divorce, "something of a spearhead in the women's movement," writing, lecturing, traveling all over the country.

One day I returned to my room for the siesta hour and, to my horror, found her sitting demurely and plumply on my straight-back chair. Her feet, crossed at the ankles, did not quite reach the floor. She was wearing the navy-blue tunic of the

English schoolgirl over a severe white blouse. Her hair was tied in a velvet ribbon. She was not in the least flustered.

"Forgive me," she said, "but the door was unlocked. In my view, you don't really know a person until you know the things he surrounds himself with. Don't you agree?" She touched her chin with her finger and smiled, dimpling. "You look so silly with your mouth open. Do sit down."