Renate took the pages, folded them as tightly as they had been folded to fit into the compartment, pushed them into the opening, and slipped the various slats back into place, as if she would bury the story forever. She walked down the hill with the box. She stood on the edge of the rock, and threw it in a wide, high arc, into the sea. Then she returned home, placed the pyramid of boxes inside the fireplace and set fire to them.
RENATE GATHERED TOGETHER ALL THE LINEN of the house stained with marks of love, dreams, nightmares, tears and kisses and quarrels, the mists that rise from bodies touching, the fogs of breathing, the dried tears, and took it to the laundromat at the foot of the hill.
The man who ran it mystified her. He was tall, dark-skinned, dark-eyed. He wore a red shirt which set off his foreign handsomeness. But it was not this which made his presence there unexpected. It was the pride of his carriage, and his delicate way of handling the laundry. He greeted Renate with colorful modulations of a voice trained to charm. He bowed as he greeted her. His hands were long-fingered, deft.
He folded the dry sheets as if he were handling lace tablecloths. He was aloof, polite, as if laundry were a country gentleman’s natural occupation. He took money as if it were a bouquet. He returned change as if it were a glass of champagne.
He never commented on the weather, as if it were a plebeian interest. He piled up the laundry as if he were merely checking the contents of his own home’s closets. He was proud and gracious. He pretended not to see the women who came in hair curlers, like a high born valet who overlooks his master’s occasional lapse in manners.
For Renate he had a full smile. His teeth were strong and even but for one milk tooth which gave his smile a touch of humor.
Renate also handled her bundle of laundry as if it were pastry from a fashionable shop.
The rhythm of the machines became like the opening notes of an orchestra at a ball. She never mentioned the weather either, as if they both understood weather was a mere background to more important themes. They agreed that if human beings had to attend to soiled laundry, they had been given, at the same time, a faculty for detaching themselves, not noticing, or forgetting certain duties and focusing on how to enhance, heighten, add charm to daily living.
Renate would tell him about each visitor who had come to see her, describe each costume, each character, each conversation, and then hand over the bundle as if it were the discarded costumes which had to be re-glamorized for the next party. While she talked they both handled the guest towels from Woolworth’s as if they were lace tablecloths from Brussels.
He looked over the bundles lined up on the shelf and ready to be called for as if he were choosing a painting in an art exhibition and said: “I always recognize yours by its vivid colors.”
As his brown, fine-bred hand rested on the blue paper around the package, she noticed for the first time a signet ring on his finger. It was a gold coat-of-arms.
She bent over it to examine the symbols. The ring was divided into four sections. On one was engraved a lion’s head, on the second a small castle, on the third a four-eaf clover, and on the fourth a Maltese cross.
“But I have seen this design somewhere,” said Renate. “Could it have been on one of the shields on one of the statues in a Vienna park?”
“Yes, it could have been. I have some ancestors there. My family has a castle forty miles from Vienna. My parents still live there. The coat-of-arms is that of Count Osterling.”
He brought out his wallet. Instead of photographs of round-faced babies she saw a turreted castle. Two dignified old people stood on the terrace. The man wore a beard. The woman carried an umbrella. One could see lace around her throat. Her hand rested on the head of a small boy.
“That is me.”
Renate did not want to ask: and how did you come here, what are you doing here when you could be opening bottles of old vintage wine from your own property, sitting at beautiful dining tables and being waited on?
“After the war we were land poor. I felt our whole life growing static and difficult. Tradition prevented me from working at any job. I came to America. I went to Chicago. I was only seventeen and it was all new and elating. I felt like a pioneer. I liked forgetting the past and being able to work without feeling I was humiliating a whole set of relatives. I did all kinds of jobs. I liked the freedom of it. Then I met the Rhinegold Beauty Queen that year. She was unbelievably beautiful. I married her. I did not even know what her father did. Later I found out he owned a chain of laundromats. He put me to work as an inspector. At first we traveled a lot, but when he died we wanted to stay in one place and raise children. So we came here.”
“You never went home again?”
“We did once, but my wife did not like it. She thought the castle was sad. She was cold, and the plumbing was not efficient. She didn’t like so much politeness, moth-eaten brocades, yellowed silks, dust on the wine bottles.”
Count Laundromat, she called him, as she watched the gold signet ring with the family coat-of-arms flashing through detergents.
An enormous woman appeared through the back door and called out to him. She was as tall and as wide as Mae West. The beautiful eyes, features and hair were deeply imbedded in cushions of flesh like a jewel in a feather bedspread.
“My wife,” he said, to Renate; and to her he said: “This is a neighbor who once lived in Vienna.”
Then he took up her bundle of laundry and carried it to the car, opened the door, fitted it in the seat with care that no piece should be caught when the door closed, as if it were the lacy edge of a petticoat.
From the day he told her the story of his title, the smell of kitchen soap, of wet linen, wet wool, detergents, became confused in Renate’s nostrils with the smell of an antique cabinet she had once opened in a shop in Vienna.
The inside of the drawers were lined with brocade which was glued to the wood and which retained the smell of sandalwood. The past was like those old-fashioned sachet bags filled with herbs and flowers which penetrate the clothes and cling to them.
Every time she visited Count Laundromat, the perfumes of the antique cabinet enveloped her, the smell of the rose petals her mother kept in a small music box, the smell of highly polished sandalwood of her sewing table, the vanilla of Viennese pastry, the pungent spices, the tobacco from her father’s pipe, all these overpowered the detergents.
IN THE SMALL TOWNS OF CALIFORNIA the occasional absence of inhabitants, or animation, can give the place the air of a still life painting. Thus it appeared for a moment in the eyes of a woman standing in the center of an empty lot. No cars passed, no light shone, no one walked, no windows blinked, no dogs barked, no children crossed the street.
The place had a soft name: Downey. It suggested the sensation of downy hairs on downy skins. But Downey was not like its name. It was symmetrical, tidy, monotonous. One house could not be distinguished from another, and gaping open garages exposed what was once concealed in attics; broken bicycles, old newspapers, old trunks, empty bottles.