I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Page 7

  “Actually, it’s five dollars a month cheaper than my room is now.”

  “See it how you wish,” he said.

  I paid the landlord fifty dollars for the first month’s rent, plus a twenty-five-dollar security deposit, which left me with five dollars in the bank. “Look,” Isador said one evening—he was providing me dinner at the hotel; meat loaf, mashed potatoes, asparagus, a small salad, pie for dessert—“you’re just twenty and already your nerves are shot. Try to put your ducks in a row, seeing as how you like birds so much—go out and get a job. Just promise me one thing, all right? Don’t live alone with that seagull on the wall. Get a nice colorful quilt. I’ll give you a typewriter from hotel storage. Type up some ideas and try to sell them to the newspaper again. Why not? Any luck with radio writing?”

  “Not yet.”

  We ate and had some laughs. Isador said, “Guess what’s on the TV at eight o’clock? The Maltese Falcon. Want to watch it?” So we settled down in Isador’s small living room and watched The Maltese Falcon, with Peter Lorre playing a character named Joel Cairo. “He is sinister in this one,” Isador said. “My feeling about that strange voice Lazzy always used is that as an actor his soul was without portfolio. Because just try and figure out which country he’s from, from the accent.”

  It’s probably accurate to state that Isador was a kind of self-taught scholar of Peter Lorre’s life and films. I don’t mean he used scholarly words to describe any of it. But he knew a lot, especially about what he called Lorre’s “early years.” He didn’t much care about movie stars, though like anyone he had his favorite movies. I was impressed by Isador’s knowledge in these matters. When you don’t know anything about a subject, everything’s a revelation. “You ever watch the one called M?” he asked. “In that picture Lazzy murders a child. Talk about guilt! You don’t get guiltier than Lazzy in that picture. There’s nothing worse than murdering a child, is there? There’s one scene, well, it’s famous, I suppose. Lazzy looks into a mirror and twists his face all up. Like he wants to permanently change his features. His character hates himself. At least that’s how I always see it.”

  Before I knew it, Isador’s face—no, his entire posture, it seemed—fell into severe despondency. As if all his years had actual weight that was pressing on his shoulders, he slumped on the sofa and tears filled his eyes. He opened a bottle of vodka, poured us each a glass. Then he used one of his favorite phrases, which characterized his inventive locutions in Yiddish-accented English—unconditional unforgiveness. “I have unconditional unforgiveness toward myself,” Isador said, pouring himself a second shot. You understand what I refer to?”

  “I was worried this would come up, Isador. Watching this movie.”

  “Just now I’m suffering plural remorses. Maybe you should go home.”

  Plural remorses—another of his memorable phrases.

  But I didn’t return to my apartment, which was Mathilde’s former apartment. I stayed and heard Isador out yet again about his decision to play a Nazi in The Cross of Lorraine. Naturally, to anyone else this would comprise the tiniest footnote in film history. But in Isador’s mind, it not only loomed large, it defined him from that point on as “not a good person.”

  Peter Lorre’s and Isador’s lives first intersected in the 1920s. Back then, in Germany and Austria, Lorre appeared in stage works by Bertolt Brecht; Isador was an understudy to him in Mann Ist Mann. He remembered going to a performance of the infamous musical Happy End, written by Brecht with music composed by Kurt Weill, and was friends for a few years with the actor Oskar Homolka. Isador and Lorre would meet in cafés in Berlin. “After Fritz Lang cast Lazzy in M—that was 1931—our lives fell away from each other almost completely. Then Hitler.” In 1933 Isador traveled on a Dutch passport—“this cost me an arm and a leg”—to Amsterdam. He eventually entered Canada through Pier 21 in Halifax—“the Ellis Island of Canada,” as he and many others referred to it. “I had dreams still of working on the stage, but in Halifax at that time there wasn’t much opportunity.” So began his work in hotels.

  “As for my nemesis, The Cross of Lorraine,” he said, “let me put it this way: for a moment it was a blessing, a paycheck, then the curse of a lifetime.”

  I had the pressing obligation to work off the debt for Laughing Gull, and two days after I’d purchased it at auction, I sat at the table in the cramped kitchen where Mathilde had served me breakfast and dinner. (“My opinion? If a woman doesn’t at least sometimes cook meals for you to eat together, she doesn’t love you. I don’t care if it’s just using a skillet on a hot plate,” she’d said after making lamb chops in a skillet on a hot plate.) I was scouring the employment listings in the Halifax Herald.

  My eye caught an advertisement for a night janitor at Nova Scotia Hospital on Dartmouth Street. I had a perfunctory interview with the director of maintenance services. She asked two questions: did I have a criminal record, and did I mind working alone. I signed some employment and tax forms, and she said, “You can start tomorrow night. Report to Mr. McKenzie in the cafeteria at nine o’clock. Your hours are nine P.M. to six A.M., and you don’t work on Friday or Saturday nights, but Sunday you work.”

  The next night, Mr. McKenzie, who was about sixty and the size of the actor Sidney Greenstreet, showed me the ropes. He introduced me to the men and women of the night janitorial staff and gave me a tour of the hospital wards, the supply rooms, the emergency exits. His instructions in how to use the electric floor polisher came with a World War Two reference. “I ran mine sweepers along the beaches in France,” he said, demonstrating the polisher. “Now you try it.” The machine was surprisingly difficult to control; in my first attempt, along a corridor in the children’s ward, it ricocheted loudly off the floorboards, leaving black scuff marks. “You’ll have to scrub those off,” he said. “You’ve just made extra work for yourself.” Then Mr. McKenzie left me to practice with the floor polisher.

  My first night of official employment I polished eight corridors on three different floors, and as a result my shoulder and arm muscles, my lower back and calves, felt knotted and sore. When Mr. McKenizie checked on me at about midnight, he said, “There’s muscle liniment in your locker. Don’t go asking a nurse to rub it in, either. The nurses’ll kick your butt halfway to Sunday, you ask that sort of favor.” I hadn’t thought of asking anybody. So now I was a floor polisher.

  The Cross of Lorraine tells the tragic story of the capitulation of the French army, narrated through the nerve-racking confusion, despondency, and anxieties of a small group of agents provocateurs who, against their better judgment, surrender and are transported to a German prison camp. There they realize the poisonous intent of the Nazis, and though one cowardly weakling defects, dignity and self-respect and French nationalist pride finally dictate their heroic actions. It is basically a War Office propaganda film. The Cross of Lorraine itself was originally a symbol of Joan of Arc and was added to the French flag by Charles de Gaulle, adopted as the symbol of the Free French. The film had a few commendable performances by the likes of Lorre, Hume Cronyn, and Joseph Calleia, and a stymied one by Gene Kelly, owing to the stilted script. Much of the story is clichéd. The French Resistance (no mention is made of the Vichy regime) is composed only of the noblest of brave souls; the Germans—with the qualified exception of the Peter Lorre character—are robotic sadists. As for Isador, Lorre had arranged for him a minuscule role as a Nazi prison guard.

  So in 1942, Isador, making his first plane flight, traveled to Los Angeles, where he stayed in a cheap hotel and had a total of three days on set. On one of those days, he told me, he got to watch Tommy Dorsey and his band rehearse a scene for Girl Crazy on the studio lot. And the day Isador left by cross-country train for home, then-Senator Harry Truman visited the set, escorted by the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Louis B. Mayer. “I was sorry to have missed those big shots,” Isador said. “But I’d bet Lazzy said a thing or two to Mr. Truman about the Nazis. I bet he took Mr. Truman aside and gave him wh
at for. I got to spend a total of about ten minutes alone with Lazzy. Enough for a cigarette. Though he greeted me warmly and introduced me around. In the commissary I sat with other actors playing Nazis. Not that any of this hurt my feelings exactly, and besides, Lazzy was a very busy man. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone out there. But I was paid all right, and I believe that Lazzy contributed something extra out of his own pocket. I never set eyes on Gene Kelly. It all was an experience to write in my diary, if I kept one, which I didn’t.”

  Emotionally, as they say, I was in a bad place. Spiritually lost. However, being in Mathilde’s old apartment seemed to help, primarily because I’d taken out a book from the library on séances, which contained a chapter on how to conduct them. Using this chapter as a guide, I held one-person séances at the kitchen table. I’d place various of Mathilde’s paintings and drawings nearby; I’d prop her final postcard against the candleholder. Mementos and conveyances, talismans and channeling objects. I quickly became a charlatan, a purveyor of false encouragement toward my own self. Passerbys looking in through the street-level window would’ve seen a young man sitting at a table with a freshly ironed tablecloth on it, a single candle in a solid iron holder, and the book on séances open like the Bible, for easy reference.

  “Don’t tell any of your colleagues at the hospital what you do with this nonsense,” Isador warned me. “You tell them, they’ll put you in a straitjacket and out come the syringes.” He was only half joking. “That typewriter I gave you,” he said. “Start writing something. How about you write me a long letter every day. Sit down when you come home from work and type. Anything. I’ll provide the envelopes and stamps. Get your imagination up and running.”

  Isador had far more faith in the rejuvenating, or at least distracting, powers of writing than I knew to have. I continued the séances for weeks. In all that time I thought I heard Mathilde’s voice just once, though I suspect I’d fallen asleep at the table and dreamed it, then started awake, confused. “Did you know that [garbled name] used to mix ashes in with his paint sometimes?”—that was the one sentence that flew in from my version of Mathilde’s afterlife, as if that dream had been the whole of her afterlife. I suppose this related to Mathilde’s having been burned to ash in the airplane wreckage.

  Self-generated, idiosyncratic forms of mourning—if that’s what I was doing—while excessively indulgent, probably don’t harm anyone else, and can for a time sustain a person. They did sustain me at least. My theory was, the best way to prove the depth of my love for Mathilde—the very capacity to love—was never to give in to convenient notions of closure. Do anything to keep the wound open, not merely in order to feel pain, but to feel pain as a way of staying connected.

  To that end, I opted for obsessive scholarship about the Saskatchewan landscape. In a way, I suppose I saw that western province as being her cemetery. Before the Internet, researches in the world of antiquarian books and esoteric texts required, to say the least, more fortitude and brainstorming. I’d befriended a professional researcher, Anne Handle, who offered me all sorts of advice on how to obtain monographs, books, and articles about Saskatchewan. I read them one after the other with various levels of comprehension (some were impenetrably “scientific”); this was the closest thing I had, short of setting up house there, to being on the very earth of Saskatchewan.

  I should have understood better at the time that the depth of my obsessive dedication to Mathilde after her plane crashed was severely disproportionate to the emotional distance I’d kept from her when she was alive. I never could bring myself to say I loved her. “You don’t need to say the words,” she said more than once, as if taking jurisdiction over my inability to say them. It wasn’t my age, or our age difference; a lot of twenty-year-olds were capable of saying those words and meaning them; it was my fear. One insomniac night I thought, If I say the words I’ll have to admit to myself the fact that I mean them. I should have told the truth and said them to Mathilde.

  Isador said, “My opinion is, if you move permanently to Saskatchewan, you’d be going overboard. That would be meshuggeh. It wasn’t your place, it was hers.”

  My janitorial duties at the hospital went swimmingly. I was never late for work, not once, and Mr. McKenzie took note of that. I got a small raise within two weeks. The hallway of the children’s ward was a difficult place to work, because I saw kids who were dealt such bad hands. There was one little girl, Ellen, age eleven. As for her medical condition, all I was privy to was the fact that she suffered seizures. I witnessed one of these, just one, but that was quite enough for permanent memory. Ellen’s mother, Jean, often spent the night in the room. Jean was wealthy; her family had a house in the south of France and an apartment in London. Ellen’s father was a diplomat of some sort; I saw him only once. But the money was from Jean’s family. “They’re in import-export,” she said.

  One time in the all-night hospital cafeteria, Jean said, “You want to know something? Ellen thinks that floor polisher is the funniest thing she’s ever seen. She doesn’t think you’re very good at it. You’re not very good at it, are you? But when Ellen sees you push by her door with that unwieldy machine, she just cracks right up. It’s like a cartoon to her. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “I had no idea. Why’s she think it’s so funny?”

  “Because she does. It’s just her sense of humor.”

  We continued talking, and Jean asked how I’d come to be employed as a night janitor. She seemed truly interested, so I told her how I’d gotten “caught up” at the auction. I remember her saying, “It’s like a crime of passion,” an analogy I didn’t fully comprehend, though it was said with sympathy. She asked more about my life. But I didn’t mention Mathilde at all; it seemed too complicated. Too many frayed threads. Over the weeks I spoke with Jean half a dozen more times in the cafeteria. I sat and talked with Ellen a few times, too, and once, during a break, read her twenty or so pages of A Tale of Two Cities, which her mother had been reading to her before needing to run home for some reason or other.

  In the meantime, I was paying my debt to the auction house. And during the afternoons I was reading about Saskatchewan. I was doing little else, except writing to travel editors and Sunday magazine editors of newspapers throughout Canada and the United States with proposals for writing about birds in places as far-flung and alien to me as Indonesia, South Africa, and Japan—and of course every province of Canada. In each envelope I enclosed my one published article about the birds near Port Medway. My mailbox was not even filling up with rejections, let alone offers of work.

  The novels I was reading at the time deftly orchestrated implausibilites along a clear narrative line, but I could not locate such a line in my own life. Every day seemed autonomously haphazard; one day was disconnected from the next. There was no unifying element of thought or strategy, just a bridging ennui and puzzlement. I’d set aside plans to take courses at McGill University. Then, early in March 1970, as she was leaving her daughter’s hospital room, Jean offered me a job at her travel agency. I thought it made no sense whatsoever, except perhaps that she felt sorry for me, a wannabe writer pushing a floor polisher around. I wrote travel brochures for her. They had mandatory categories: climate, entertainment, transportation, language—politics were to be avoided. And I was to incorporate upbeat quotes from people who had used Jean’s travel agency and had had wonderful times in Egypt, Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, Japan, Brazil, and so on. As for foreign countries, I myself had been only to Canada.

  Now I had two jobs and was more confident of paying off my debt to the auction house, but I was sleeping only a few hours a night. Plus, I was often wired on caffeine. I drank up to ten cups of regular coffee a day and, most often in Mathilde’s and my old café, at least three espressos. (It was one of the few places where espressos were served in those days.) Sleep usually consisted of catnaps on a sofa in the lobby of the Lord Nelson Hotel. I felt I had more than one address. And in and around all of this, I was still maniac
ally studying up on Saskatchewan, where Mathilde’s ghost might be wandering. My private séances were failing; she wasn’t to appear in her old Halifax apartment.

  Some days, when Isador was out visiting one of his old cronies from the hotel world or at a movie matinee, I’d work on a brochure at his kitchen table. In late March or early April, I was organizing notes for a brochure about Germany and fell asleep with my head down on the table. When I woke, Isador was watching television and it was nearly time for me to begin my shift at the hospital, so I quickly gathered up my papers and rushed out, scarcely saying goodbye, a little irritated that Isador hadn’t woken me earlier, since he knew my work schedule quite well. Anyway, it wasn’t until I returned to my apartment the next morning that I examined the notes I’d taken and saw Isador’s contribution. Vertically in the margins and between my written lines in a loose-leaf notebook, Isador had provided additions, emendations, and, in bold capital letters, queries such as WHY HAVE YOU NOT MENTIONED WHAT HAPPENED AT TREBLINKA AND AUSCHWITZ? Among my notes for transportation: YES THE TRAINS ALWAYS RUN ON TIME IN GERMANY. Alongside my notes for climate: GERMAN WINTERS ARE COLD AS HELL—DON’T LIE TO INNOCENT TRAVELERS! I never spoke to Isador about this.

  Jean got a windfall in that an airline became a very lucrative client. And one afternoon, after she had given my brochure on Spain her final approval, she said, “I paid off your debt to the auction house and hope you’ll come to work for me full time. I can find more things for you to do than write brochures. Besides, the brochures are mostly written for this season.”