"Just like that?"
They nodded together. "Yup, and I said yes just like that. You think I wanted to draw Scrooge McDuck for the rest of my life? He shipped out, and I didn't see him this time for two months. When I did we got married."
"You and Scrooge McDuck?"
"No, me and twit." She hitchhiked her thumb his way again. "We did it in New York."
"New York?"
"Right. In Manhattan. We got married and had dinner at the Four Seasons and then went to a movie."
"Dr. No," Paul piped up.
We had ordered more coffee despite the waiter's having made it clear to us by his curtness that it was closing time and he wanted us out.
"So, what are you working on now, Joe?"
"Oh, I've been poking around this one idea I've had for a while. It would be a kind of oral history of Vienna in World War II. So much has already been written about the battles and all that, but what interests me is recording the stories of the other people who were involved – especially the women, and others who were kids then. Can you imagine living through years of that? Their stories are just as incredible as the ones of the guys who fought. Really, you'd be knocked out if you heard what some of them went through."
I was getting excited because the project interested me and because I had told only a few people about it. Until that moment it had been one of those "gotta do that someday" dreams that never get done.
"Let me give you an example. There is a woman I know who worked for an insane asylum out in the Nineteenth District. The Nazis ordered her bosses to get the whole bunch of cuckoos out of there. This woman ended up carting them out of the city and up to an old Schloss on the Czech border, and amazingly they survived until the end of the war. It was straight out of that film King of Hearts."
India shifted in her chair and rubbed her slim bare arms. The night had grown suddenly cooler and it was getting late.
"Joe, do you mind if I ask you something?"
Thinking it would be about the new book, I was completely taken off guard by her question when it came.
"What did you think of The Voice of Our Shadow? Did you like it? The whole play is so different from your short story, isn't it?"
"Yes, you're right. And to tell you the deep, deep truth, I've never liked the play, even when I saw it with the original cast in New York. I know that's biting the hand that fed me, but everything was distorted so much. It's a good play, but it isn't my story, if you see what I mean."
"Did you grow up with guys like that? Were you a tough guy?"
"No. I was Charlie the Chicken. I didn't even know what a gang was until someone told me. No, my brother was tough and his best friend was a real juvenile delinquent, but I was the kind who hid under the bed most of the time when the going got tough."
"You're kidding."
"Absolutely not. I hated to fight, I hated to smoke, I hated to get drunk . . . blood made me gag . . ."
They were smiling, and I smiled with them. India took out a cigarette – unfiltered, I noticed – and Paul lit it for her.
"What is your brother like? Is he still a tough guy or does he sell insurance or something?"
"Well, you see, my brother is dead."
"Ooops, sorry about that." She dipped her shoulders and looked away.
"It's okay. He died when I was thirteen."
"Thirteen? Really? How old was he?"
"Sixteen. He was electrocuted."
"Electrocuted? How did that happen?"
"He fell on a third rail."
"God!"
"Yes. I was there. Uh, waiter, could we have the check?"
2
Paul turned out to be kind and witty and scatterbrained. He could listen to the most boring person talk for hours and still look as if he was fascinated. When the person left, he would usually say something funny or nasty about them, but if they happened to come back later, he would be the same open, thoughtful listener and confidant.
He was from the Midwest and had a friendly, slightly bewildered face that was prematurely jowly and made you think he was much older than his wife. The Tates were, however, exactly the same age.
He worked for one of the large international agencies in Vienna. He would never be specific about his job, but it had something to do with trade fairs in Communist countries. I often wondered if he was a spy, as are so many other "businessmen" in that town. Once, when I pressed him on it, he told me even the Czechs, Poles, and Rumanians had things they wanted to sell to the outside world, and that these fairs were where they got a chance to "strut their stuff."
India Tate resembled a character you see in 1930s or '40s movies played by either Joan Blondell or Ida Lupino: a pretty face, but a hard, tight pretty. On the surface she's a tough, no-nonsense gal, but one who becomes increasingly vulnerable the longer you know her. Like Paul, she was in her early forties, but it didn't show on either of their figures because they were manic about exercising and keeping fit. They once showed me the yoga they did together every morning for an hour. I tried some of it, but couldn't even lift myself off the ground. I knew they didn't like that, and a few days later Paul quietly suggested I start some kind of program that would put me back in shape. I did it for a while but quit when it started to bore me.
On learning they were being transferred to Vienna from London, India decided to take a year off from teaching and learn German. According to Paul, she was naturally adept at languages, and a month or two after her classes at the University of Vienna began, he told me, she was able to translate the German news on the radio for him. I didn't know how much of this was true because she refused to speak anything but English whenever the three of us went out together. Once, when absolutely pressed, she stuttered out a slow, frightened question to a train conductor. It sounded grammatically correct, but it also had a strong Oklahoma accent tied around it like a bow.
"India, how come you never speak German?"
"Because I sound like Andy Devine when I talk."
She was like that in so many ways. It was easy to see how talented and intelligent she was, and that there were a number of things she could have sculpted a life out of. But she was a perfectionist and avoided or played down almost anything she did that came out only "half good" as far as she was concerned.
For instance, there were her drawings. Besides the German course, she had decided that during her "free" year she would do something she had had in mind to do for years – she was going to illustrate her childhood. When they were living in London she had taught art at one of the international schools there. During her free periods she'd made over a hundred preliminary sketches, but getting her to show them to me was impossible at first. When she finally did, I was so impressed I didn't know what to say.
The Shadow was one of those humpbacked Art Deco radios with cozy round black dials and the names of a million exotic places on them that were supposedly at your beck and call. This radio was on a table set far back in the room toward the top of the drawing. Jutting out stiff and doll-like from the bottom were three pairs of legs set right next to one another – a man's, a child's (black patent-leather shoes and short white socks), and a woman's (bare with pointed, high-heel shoes). Nothing more of these people could be seen, but the most wonderful, eerie part of the work was that all three sets of legs were pointing toward the radio, giving you the impression the bottoms of their feet were watching the radio like a television set. I told that to India and she laughed. She said she had never thought of it that way before, but it made sense. In all her work, that one-quarter naive, one-quarter eerie quality came through again and again.
In another one, an empty gray room was totally bare except for a pillow in flight across the middle of the picture. The hand that had thrown it was there in the corner, but in its frozen openness it had lost all human qualities and was suddenly, disturbingly something else. She said she planned on calling the final version Pillow Fight.