“Will it be explained at the station at home?” she said. “Someone is supposed to be meeting me.”
“Meeting us,” Herbert corrected, because in the eyes of these strangers he and Christine were married. The truth was that they would separate at their home station as if they were strangers.
The woman in the corner emptied one of her plastic bags of all the food it contained and filled it with the rubbish. Sundays I had them for the two meals. They wanted just soup for supper, with cold ham and iceberg lettuce, dressing their way. The men ate Harvard beets in the factory canteen; they started wanting them. They wanted two or three different kinds of pizzas, mushroom ketchup, mustard pickles.
Little Bert kept an eye on Christine. “You never finished reading,” he said.
“I can’t remember what I was reading about,” she said.
“What is the book called?” he said.
“All About Bruno,” said Christine. “What else could it be?”
“No, that might confuse him,” said Herbert. “He knows Bruno is his own invention. The book is supposed to tell Christine how to think, little Bert. The Bruno story might be there. I don’t say it is.”
“Now who is confusing?” said Christine.
“But is the Bruno story inside?” said little Bert. “Look again,” he urged Christine.
She looked, or pretended to. “Bruno goes to the moon?”
“No, I know about the moon.”
“Bruno goes to an antiauthoritarian kindergarten?”
“Don’t tease him,” said Herbert.
“The kindergarten,” said little Bert. He leaned against her, out of fatigue, apparently. She might have felt pity for the fragile neck and the tired shadows around his eyes, but there were also the dirty knuckles, the bread-and-butter breath, the high insistent voice.
During the Depression the factory laid off, nobody was buying the kitchen units. I went to collect the relief, he was too ashamed. They didn’t send you checks in those days, you had to go round and see them. The other couple still came for dinner. We ate beans, sardines, peanut butter, macaroni. You could get lambs’ kidneys for twenty cents, nobody in the USA ate them. Also heart, tongue. He was laid off from February 16, 1931, to September 23, 1932. Went back part-time. I did part-time work cooking in Carol Ann’s school. She called me “Mrs.,” would never say I was a relative. My cousin-in-law never worked, always had headaches, had to lie down a lot, never learned English. Then the factory picked up full speed, getting ready for the conflict. I fed them all through the war, stood at the electric stove, making oxtail soup on the one hand, baked squash on the other, bread and milk when my cousin had his ulcer.
“I have something he might like to look at,” the woman in the corner said. She offered little Bert part of her collection of postcards, but he put both hands behind his back and pressed even closer to Christine. Taking no notice of him, the woman began handing the cards around clockwise, starting with Herbert. “My friends on their summer holidays,” she said. Herbert passed on the dog-eared coffee-stained views of Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, Abidjan, Pisa, Madrid, Sofia, Nice. “Very nice,” she said, encouraging Herbert. “Very nice people.”
The Norwegian looked at each card seriously, turned it over, examined the stamp, read the woman’s name and address, and tilted the card at an angle to read the message. The messages were aslant, consisted of a few words only, and ended in exclamation marks. He read aloud, “ ‘Very nice friendly people here!’ ”
The woman was smiling, handing the cards around, but her mind was elsewhere. We never took the citizenship so we never voted. Were never interested in voting. During more than forty years we would only have voted four times anyway. Would have voted:
In 1932—for repeal.
In 1936—against government interference and wild spending. Against a second term.
In 1940—against wild utterances and attempts to drag the USA into the conflict on the wrong side. The President of the USA at that time was a Dutch Jew, his father a diamond cutter from Rotterdam, stole the Russian Imperial jewels after the Bolshevik revolution, had to emigrate to avoid capture and prison sentence. Within ten years they were running the whole country. Had every important public figure tied up — Walter Winchell, everybody. Their real name was Roszenfeldt.
In 1944—against a Fourth Term. My cousin had a picture, it looked like a postcard, that showed the President behind bars. Caption said, “Fourth Term Hell!!!!!! I’m in for Life!!!!!”
Apartfrom those four times we would never have voted.
“We are on an electric line again,” Herbert told little Bert, who could not have had the faintest idea what this meant. The child looked wilted with heat. Their conductor had opened all the windows — there seemed to be no further news about fires — but nothing could move the leaden air.
“I want it all in order,” Herbert said to Christine. “I really do intend to write a letter. Most of the toilets are still locked — true? There isn’t a drop of drinking water. The first vendor had no ice and no paper cups. The second had nothing but powdered coffee. The third had nothing at all. All three were indifferent.”
“True,” said the woman, answering in place of Christine. She took off her black shoes and put her feet on top of them as if they were pillows.
The conductor returned to check their seat reservations for the third or fourth time. “This is only a flag stop,” he said, as their train slowed. To make it easier for him, those who were in the wrong places — Christine, the Norwegian, and little Bert — moved to where they were supposed to be. The train was now inching along past a level crossing, then gave a great groan and stopped, blocking the crossroad. The barriers must have been down for some time because a long line of traffic had formed, and some of the drivers, perspiring and scarlet, had got out to yell protests and shake their fists. The sight of grown people making fools of themselves was new to little Bert, or perhaps the comic side of it struck him for the first time; he laughed until he was breathless and had to be thumped on the back. The woman in the corner kept an apple between her teeth while she looked in her purse for the ticket. Her eyes were stretched, her mouth strained, but there was no room on the table now, not even for an apple. As for the three men — Herbert, the conductor, and the Norwegian — something about the scene on the road had set them off dreaming; the look on their faces was identical. Christine could not quite put a name to it.
The woman found her ticket and got rid of the apple.
My husband said that if the President got in for a fourth term he would jump in deep water. That was an expression they used for suicide where he came from, because they had a world-famous trout stream. Not deep, though. Where he came from everybody was too poor to buy rope, so they said the thing about jumping. That was all the saying amounted to.
To be truthful, said Christine to herself, all three of them seem to be thinking of rape. She wondered if the victim could be the pregnant young woman — a girl really, not as old as Christine — who was running along beside the tracks, making straight for the first-class carriage. Probably not; she was unmistakably an American Army wife, and you could have counted on one hand the American wives raped by German men. There existed, in fact, a mutual antipathy, which was not the case when the sexes were reversed. But—here Christine imitated Herbert explaining something — we are not going to explore the attraction between German girls, famous for their docility, and American men, perhaps unjustly celebrated for theirs. We are going to learn something more about Herbert.