In Search of Love and Beauty Read online

  “Why London, could you tell me?” she said at last.

  “I have to go.” He spoke in a firm, kind voice and turned back into the room. He was anxious above all to avoid a fight, not for his own sake—all he need finally do was pick up his suitcase and go—but for her: so as not to leave her in the painful way he had to once or twice before.

  “You don’t have to go at all. Not at all.” She sat up on the sofa: “You’re getting more and more irresponsible. You’re going to be like your father. You’re never going, to do anything.”

  Mark shrugged; he could take that lightly, for he knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t in the least like his father. She knew it too; she knew him to be like herself; part of herself.

  “Come here,” she said. “Sit here. No, I’m not going to make a fuss. I only want to talk to you. Come on.”

  He approached warily. When he was close enough to grab hold of, she resisted the temptation and waited with bated breath for him to sit beside her. Her heart beat terribly hard with this effort at self-control, it was like a stone flinging itself against her ribs.

  “When you’re not here,” she said when he was perched, somewhat cautiously, beside her, “I wait for your calls—rare enough, God knows. Any news of you. Yes, yes, I know, darling, I shouldn’t, but there it is all the same. I do it. . . . Don’t sit like that, poised for flight, it’s too—” She laughed to swallow up that last word, and the laugh ended on a sob and she raised her hands as though to clutch the front of his shirt but let them fall again and lie, veined and fine with beautiful rings, in her lap.

  “My goodness,” Mark said. “What a fuss. As if you’ll never see me again; as if I’m going forever. As if I’m shipping out to Australia instead of a quick trip to London.”

  “How quick?” she quickly pounced, so that he closed up again, guarded himself. She put her hands before her face and her shoulders shook; she wept like a little girl.

  He was moved by both pity and exasperation; the latter was stronger, but nevertheless he gathered her into his arms. He said, “Why do we have to go through this every time? Every time?” With her face buried against him, he stroked her back. He rather liked doing that—he had always liked it—feeling her slender back through the fine silk, it gave him a luxurious sensation; but at the same time he turned his wrist to look at his watch. She held herself stiffly, wanting this to go on forever but knowing that it would stop very soon.

  Natasha came home and found them like that. Mark looked at her over their mother’s back; he usually managed to make her understand without having to say anything. She understood now. She went into his room, she saw his packed bags. She sat down for a moment on his bed; but she didn’t bother him with her feelings—which was just as well, for he had his hands, literally, full with his mother.

  “I feel so strange nowadays, darling,” Marietta was whispering into his shirt where her face was hidden. “Sort of trembly all the time—can’t you feel it? . . . What do you think it could be? Could it be my menopause?”

  “What, already?” he said, for she was in her early forties at the time.

  “I haven’t been very regular these last months . . . You know how I’m like clockwork, usually.” He did know, he knew everything about her, there was no intimate detail she spared him.

  “Maybe you’re pregnant.”

  “Oh, sure.” She gave a sarcastic laugh. It wouldn’t have been impossible—except that she was certain it was; as if any of those people could impregnate her, those short-term boyfriends who had succeeded Ahmed. She allowed them to stay with her sometimes, only to turn them out as soon as Mark needed her for anything, even if it was nothing more than to accompany him to a show. “I should see a doctor,” she said. “I mean, in case it’s something really awful.”

  “You should.” Again he turned his wrist to glance at his watch.

  “You don’t think it could be?”

  “Menopause?”

  “Something really awful.”

  He had a plane to catch, a friend to meet at the airport; it was not the time to discuss his mother’s internal problems.

  “Do it some more, darling,” she said, for he had stopped caressing her back. “It really makes me feel better, calmer. You’re the one person in the world who can make me feel calm,” she pleaded.

  Natasha came out of his bedroom. She was carrying his suitcase; it was bigger than she was and pulled her sideways and her face into a grimace of strain. But she struggled on manfully.

  Mark let go of Marietta and jumped up in relief. “Put it down!” he cried to Natasha. Of course she wouldn’t—Natasha could be stubborn where it was a question of self-immolation—and he had to compromise with her by allowing her to carry his portmanteau. All this got him naturally into the swing of departure and farewell to Marietta. Natasha accompanied him down into the street and waited for a cab with him and helped him into it; and received his cool kiss and stood there to wave; while he drove off, relieved, looking only forward now to his journey and his friend, while Natasha went back up to do what she could for Marietta.

  Louise had grown up in a suburb of the town of D— in Germany. Her parents had a villa with a garden in which grew apple and plum trees. Every day Louise got in the tram to go to her school in D—. From the time she was thirteen—like most big girls she developed early—there was always some boy waiting near the tram stop to catch a glimpse of her. Sometimes he got on the tram, to have the pleasure of riding with her and furtively watching her. Another unknown boy might be hovering at the other end, waiting for her to get off. Louise didn’t mind, and learned to expect it. But it made her carry herself in a certain way—with her head held high and her bust thrust out, looking neither right nor left and apparently unaware of anything going on around her. She often tossed back her head so that her thick pigtail swung around; when she put up her hair—she never cut it, even when everyone else went for the Eton crop—she still did that, only now her coils of hair swayed like a crown on her proud head. By this time it was not boys but dashing young men who waited for her. Some of them were quite bold, though always respectful, and they approached her and dared to ask for a rendezvous. At sixteen she had her first affair of the heart, with a young medical student as romantic as herself. It was very beautiful but had to end when he was recalled on the death of his father to manage his family’s estate in Silesia. Fate tore them apart, her heart was broken, but only for a while.

  The town of D— had an excellent theater as well as opera house, and Louise was a devotee of both. She and her friends gathered up in the “gods” to cheer and bravo their favorites and clamor for encores and curtain calls. Afterward they appeared at the stage door to ask for autographs, and Louise only had to be seen to be asked out to after-theater suppers with the actors. By this time she had an inseparable companion—they called themselves The Inseparables—in her friend Regi, also very handsome though a completely different type. Regi was tall, thin, nervous, with short skirt, short hair, and a cigarette in a holder. She was sharper and more daring—altogether more modern—than Louise, but they made a good ensemble and a welcome addition to the town’s more advanced circles. But although they sat in smart cafés and visited expressionistic painters in their studios, they did not in any way behave cheaply. Both had to be home at a certain hour—their fathers sat up for them—and they attended serious classes in art history, cordon bleu cooking, and eurythmics. They accepted this routine for, while allowing them to be bohemian in their leisure time, it kept them basically bourgeois and unspoiled for the advantageous marriages to which their looks entitled them.

  So it happened that, when Bruno Sonnenblick first saw Louise at the Opera, she was exactly what he took her for: a pure young girl. He wouldn’t have settled for less; he hadn’t waited this long for less. Bruno was thirty-six years old—eighteen years older than she, today he would have been over a hundred! He was a director of his family firm of thread manufacturers and lived with his widowed mother in the family mansion in
the Kaiserallee. Every day he was driven home from the factory in a Mercedes-Benz to lunch with his mother, and then she saw to it that his nap was not disturbed. Only she herself came tiptoeing in, to replace his freshly laundered shirts or arrange gloves and spats on their appointed shelves. It could not have been easy for her when Louise entered the picture. But there was no help for it: Bruno was hotly in love.

  Every day flowers, chocolates, and the Mercedes-Benz came for Louise. She moved into a box at the theater, and supper afterward was alone with Bruno in an alcove at Schwamm’s. He ran the entire gamut of breathless courtship, but best of all were the letters he wrote when he had to leave on a business trip abroad. Yes, it was these letters that won her. They were written on pale stationery with the family watermark; they were entirely legible, for his handwriting remained as neat as his English suit, his spats, and Homburg hat, even when he was swept away by passion:

  Most Deeply Beloved,

  As I sit here in my hotel room overlooking the Hyde Park, your goddess face and form rise before my eyes and so overwhelm me that at this very moment I feel tempted to fling myself on the carpet and kiss it in ardent gratitude! Such gratitude at your blessedness and that the light of it has come to shine in my life. It is too much to grasp. Until the day I beheld you, I did not know that the human beings could live in bliss on earth. I did not believe in heaven—I have confessed to you, dearest, my views on religion—but now I believe in heaven on earth. Thanks to you, my goddess, immortal thanks. . .

  Shortly after Leo first met Louise, he moved in with her and Bruno into their West Side apartment. Those were strange times for all of them, when they were refugees who had lost their first hold on life and were trying to establish a new one. This was exciting as well as devastating for those of them still young enough to start again but for those who were not, like Bruno, it was only devastating. He shuffled around the apartment like an old man. It was the one place that felt familiar to him, for not only was it filled with his family furniture but it also had the same high ceilings, vestibule and corridor, and sliding doors between the living and dining rooms as the house in the Kaiserallee. He tried sometimes to go for a walk by himself but came back very soon and waited till Louise was free to take him. She loved this new city and felt herself to be growing and learning in it as much as Marianne (later Marietta) who had been a baby when they brought her.

  Louise considered it a privilege when Leo decided to move in with them. The apartment was dark, but with him in it the effect was as of shutters flung open, light streaming in. He did have a tendency to leave every door wide open—even bathroom doors sometimes!—enabling him to move from room to room in an unimpeded sweep. He needed free space and had in fact a theory about the stultifying effect of closed-in architecture. But he had theories about everything. He brought a lot of people in, very interesting types, and there were tremendous discussions and working out of plans and differences of opinion in which Leo’s usually prevailed. Every-one was finally ready to give way to him not only because he shouted louder—though that too—but because he really knew better, felt more intensely, was willing and able to carry through. At that time his principal aim was to develop an awareness of three-dimensional living in a civilization which was hopelessly crippled in all its responses. Through the theater, though reaching far beyond it, he intended to train initiates and form them into a movement which was to be socially, psychologically, and—why not?—biologically revolutionary.

  They all sat far into the night around the dining table from the house in the Kaiserallee, fortified by a continuous supply of Viennese coffee, lemon tea, petits fours, and sweet liqueurs. Louise never got tired of sitting there listening, sometimes clasping her hands in wonder at what she heard. Bruno was next to her, and when she got particularly excited, she squeezed his knee. For him it was a double pleasure to be present, for his own sake, and then to see her so alive, so caught up. Of course he got tired much earlier than everyone else, but she would plead with him “Just five more minutes, Brunolein, you must hear this”; so that he made an effort to keep awake, though not always successfully.

  By the time Bruno’s last illness was diagnosed and an operation performed, he was too weak to survive it. He lay in the high hospital bed, white and emaciated but somehow looking young, boyish almost, in his cerulean-blue pajamas and his eyes luminous as they followed Louise around the room. The nurses adored him. He never asked for anything, and when his lips moved to form a request, it was always and only Louise he wanted. She bent down to hear him and he tried to bring out words of endearment, smiling ruefully at himself because he was too weak to complete them. And tears like molten lead surged into her eyes and she could hardly wait to get out into the corridor. There she leaned against the wall, but its cool gray stone gave no relief. She stood there in grief, despair, and repentance till a nurse came out and said “Louise, he wants you,” smiling at such childlike attachment from the dying old man.

  After her father died, Marietta temporarily locked up her apartment and moved herself, Mark, and Natasha in with her mother. Unfortunately just at this time her husband, from whom she had been separated for several years, made one of his periodic attempts to persuade her to return to him. He did this regularly—she never knew why, because he wasn’t any happier with her than she with him.

  Tim was a weak person, but when he wanted something he could be very persistent. He pursued Marietta with endless telephone calls; he followed her down the street, jumped into cabs with her, barged into her showroom, turned up at her business lunches. He came up to Louise’s apartment at two o’clock one morning. As soon as the bell rang, Marietta knew it was he, and she called to her mother not to open. But he rang and rang till Louise got up and let him in. He walked past her into what she still called her salon (pronounced in the German way as “zalong”). He sat down on the sofa with his legs crossed, as relaxed as a casual afternoon caller. He was completely drunk, but the only sign was that he moved very slowly and carefully as though afraid of breaking something.

  At the time of Bruno’s funeral and in accordance with some custom she vaguely remembered from his family, Louise had shrouded all the mirrors in the apartment. Afterward she had not uncovered them; perhaps she forgot, perhaps she just did not want to see herself. Marietta too was glad not to see herself in mirrors. Both women looked tragic and neglected, shut up together in the dark, high-ceilinged apartment. It was dim, dusty, and disheveled even during the day, and how much more so at two in the morning. But Tim didn’t seem to notice; he sat there, elegant and completely at ease—the only bright spot in the room in his pale-gray suit and striped shirt and Countess Mara necktie—and said, “Couldn’t I have a drink?”

  “Why don’t you go home? Why don’t you go away? You know she doesn’t want you,” Louise said in the toneless voice she had during those days.

  “Whatever you’ve got,” he pleaded. He really couldn’t stand it anymore but got up to open the sideboard. All he found was an opened bottle of sweet red wine and, clicking his tongue in pity, he poured it into a glass. He made a face as he drank it, but it was better than nothing, so he refilled it again.

  By this time he had forgotten what he had come for. He moved around the room, so slowly that it seemed to take him an age to get from the sideboard to the grand piano. He swayed somewhat, but that was the way he always moved—maybe because he was so tall and willowy, like a reed that any breeze could ripple. He sat down at the piano; he opened it; before Louise could stop him, he began to play. He had a really nice touch on the piano. He played by ear and always the jazzy, catchy tunes he heard in the piano bars he frequented; he only had to hear them once and he could play them.

  And he really liked playing, and listening to himself. He entertained himself so well that he completely failed to hear Louise’s protests; or the wail that Natasha now set up from Louise’s bedroom where she lay in her cradle. There was something terrible about Natasha’s crying as a baby. They all dreaded it. It sounded l
ike the weeping of an old woman rather than a child, full of hopeless grief; and once it started it went on for hours. Only Mark ever managed to sleep through it; and now his father to play through it.

  Marietta got up and went into Louise’s bedroom. She picked up Natasha and walked up and down with her, to no avail. Louise joined her, she too rocked and shushed and clucked, but Natasha cried louder, and that made Tim play louder in order not to be drowned out. Marietta couldn’t stand it anymore—she went into the salon to try to stop him. He did look strange, enjoying himself so much in that desolate room with the shrouded mirrors and the chandelier dim against the windows growing smoky with dawn.

  “Listen to this, Mari,” he said. “Don’t you like it?” And he began to sing the words as far as he remembered them: “Parrot,” he sang, “why only Pretty Polly dear, what’s wrong with sweetheart love and sugar bun—” and forgetting the rest, he supplemented it with la-la-la and swaying and smiling, encouraging Marietta to join in with him. When she shut the piano, wedging his hands under the lid, he left them there and looked bewildered. “What did you do that for?” he said. “Open it, or I can’t go on playing.” He was so drunk he no longer knew what was going on, or why he had come, or anything. He waited for her to reopen the piano lid, and when she wouldn’t, he did it by himself. He went on playing; at least it drowned out the baby’s crying. But he stopped before Natasha did and slumped over the keys, bringing out a fearful sound that almost matched hers. He was asleep and muttered when Marietta tried to wake him. So she left him and returned to the bedroom she shared with Mark. She lay next to him—how peacefully he slept—and pressed herself against him and hid her face in his sweet warm hair.

  The Old Vienna first opened its doors in the thirties at the time when they all arrived in New York as refugees. In the beginning they laughed at it for the crudity of its effects—the deep-blue buttoned banquettes, the velvet curtains with gold-fringed valances over panels of white lace, the chandeliers hanging down as thick and fast as paper lanterns. But the place turned out to be so comfortable, the service so good, the management was so affable, not to speak of the Viennese specialties—the coffee with whipped cream, the strudel, nockerln, and all the rest of it—that everyone just kept coming, and it was crowded from the time it opened at noon till it shut at two in the morning. Louise and Regi often went there, either for a tête-à-tête or to meet other friends in their circle; and it was they who first brought Leo at a time when he couldn’t have afforded to come on his own. Afterward of course he became almost the reigning deity of the place.