Problems with People (11 page)

“You didn’t?” his mother asked. “He was unusual for a Canadian in that his skin was an olive tone. He might have been Greek or Italian—handsome! You know what I dislike about Canada?” she added. “They don’t really have minorities here. They don’t have the blacks and Hispanics like we do. Everyone here is lily-white. Everyone here is a WASP.”

Time to speak up—he had to; this couldn’t stand. He put a hand to his rearview mirror and said, “You’re sitting next to a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Mom. My wife. Your daughter-in-law. For whom ‘WASP’ is a derogatory term.”

His mother leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “ ‘WASP’ isn’t derogatory,” she said. “It’s a description. It describes. Don’t you know that?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know it. ‘WASP’ is derogatory.”

For the next hour—until they reached the hot springs—he regretted having broken a rule about his mother, his own three-part mantra: not worth it, you lose, keep your mouth shut.

There was snow on the ground at Harrison Hot Springs, or the remains of snow, a patch here or there, eroding to slush beneath the rain. Fortunately, they’d reserved ground-floor rooms with sliding glass doors, only steps from the adult pool, which boiled and steamed like a cauldron and at the moment steeped a dozen or so couples. Bathers came and went in white terry-cloth robes, padded along the covered walkways in zoris,
toweled off in the frigid air, and knoodled in furtive corners. They were mostly Japanese—young couples with good haircuts, fashionable—engaged in misty giggling, teasing, and grappling while in easy reach of poolside drinks.

The judge, after putting on what his father called “swim trunks,” prepared his own poolside drink—whiskey and water in an aluminum water bottle—and told his wife that, contrary to her repeated assertions on the matter, she looked fantastic in a bathing suit. “Right,” she said, then in a well-knotted bathrobe left for the indoor round pool since it was the warmest on the premises at 104 degrees. The judge tried his drink, knocked on his parents’ sliding door, waited for them to do the things they always did before they went out—use the bathroom, take pills, discuss footwear, discuss food—and then, because the patio was rain-slicked, he took his mother by one arm and his father by the other and led them to the steps, with sturdy rails, that gave access to the adult pool. Stoutly, on wide and dimpled legs, hands on her hips, his mother waded forward while his father, after a spate of preparatory heavy breathing and a few stated hesitations—“Oh boy, this is hot”…“Not my cup of tea”—immersed his drooping frame at last.

“Okay,” said the judge. “I’ll be right over there.” He pointed. “In the pavilion.”

“Go,” said his mother. “The two of you deserve some lovey-dovey time.”

The judge gave a little farewell wave and, carrying his water bottle, went into the pavilion and hung his robe on a peg. Finally—after a day of battles, hassles, and irritations—he parked himself, with a sigh, in the water beside his wife,
whose cheeks looked flushed, even scalded. “Your mother’s in extra-fine fettle,” she observed. “On a roll. In her element. Long drive with captive audience.”

“Sorry,” said the judge.

“Of course she meant ‘WASP’ as an insult—obviously.”

“It’s true,” said the judge. “But let’s take the high road. There’s no point getting into it with her.”

He unscrewed his water bottle. The pool pavilion, lit by wall sconces against the winter dark outside the glass, was hushed and steamy and, like the adult pool outside, had a libidinous effect on bathers. Here, too, were couples at play. They made the judge feel pleased with his life, and in particular with his wife, who at fifty-four did look fantastic in a bathing suit. She was perennially a beauty—a shiksa, as his mother put it—shiny, golden, smooth-skinned, trim. The judge put an arm around her waist.

An hour later, showered and dressed, they sat with his parents by the resort’s grand fireplace, the judge and his father in side-by-side armchairs and his wife and mother at one end of a sofa, where they paged through a coffee-table book called
Great Resorts and Lodges of North America
. Couples passed on their way to dinner, freshly groomed and neatly attired. On one side of the hearth stood a lit and tinseled Christmas tree, and on a nearby table a diorama depicted a snowy New England village circa 1925, decked out for Yule and inhabited, largely, by busy shoppers and frenetic children. Piped-in, if watered-down, carols played, and a swag of holly and winking lights traversed the mantel. The judge’s father noticed none of it, preferring to rehearse, with the judge, their schedule: “Dinner
at eight-fifteen, breakfast tomorrow at nine, around ten or ten-thirty this walk your mother keeps talking about so she can look into the shops and so forth, then—”

“You know,” said the judge’s mother, “it really drives me nuts when you do that all the time. Try to enjoy right now for once, will you? Stop talking about your calendar every second.”

“It’s a little after eight,” his father replied. “Shouldn’t we go now? Our reservation is for eight-fifteen.”

Another couple approached. The man, bald in an exacting way, head shaved to a polished sheen, wore a plaid vest under a jacket stretched taut by a swell of hard belly fat. The woman, though silvered, didn’t quite pull off patrician; her Scottish knitwear was elegant enough, but her makeup lacked subtlety. They were nevertheless, both of them, aspiring to baronial, which provoked the judge’s mother: “Excuse me,” she said as they stood with their backs to her, warming their hands and murmuring to one another. “Are you enjoying yourselves there by the fire?”

The man turned and said, “Why, yes, we are, thank you. Thank you for asking. Where are you from?”

The judge’s mother turned a page of her coffee-table book and said, “No. I mean, what I mean is, would you move, please? Where you’re standing right now you’re blocking the fire. And we were here first.”

The baron and the baroness glared, then stepped left in tandem. “Sorry,” the judge said to them, only too aware that his mother looked and sounded like a Jew. “No big deal. We’re heading off to dinner anyway. The fire’s yours. Please, enjoy.”

“The fire is communal,” said his mother. “It’s meant to
be shared. No one has the right to dominate it like that. It’s everybody’s.”

“Forgive us,” replied the baron, with thick irony. “You people have a nice evening if you can.” And with that he saluted the judge’s mother both combatively and dismissively, took his baroness by the elbow, and fled at a stately pace.

“And you, too,” called the judge’s mother after him. “Have a very, very nice evening!”

At eight-fifteen the judge’s party sat for dinner in the Copper Room. Here, as in the lobby with its massive fireplace, Christmas was old-fashioned, fussy, and conspicuous—a tree, strung lights, garlands, seasonally accoutered staff, piped-in carols, gratis mulled wine, and a menu insert turned toward Yorkshire pudding and cranberry conserve. “Goyishe and hoity-toity,” said his mother in a hushed tone, lest she goad into action the Copper Room’s anti-Semites. “Just look at these prices! This isn’t our world. This is for the goys, not us.”

“Enjoy it,” said the judge. “I’m paying for it.”

“Listen to Mr. King of England,” she said, studying her menu. “So ritzy, he’s paying. Hey, for years, sonny, we paid for everything. For everything, everything, everything!”

“Exactly,” said the judge. “So now it’s my turn.”

But inside he was steaming. His mother ruined everything; her mere presence was infuriating. He couldn’t stand the sour odor of perfume or her gnomish face—like a fat, dried apple—or her witchlike head of hair or her squat, rotund figure. Actually, he couldn’t stand anything about his mother—not at the moment, in the Copper Room, at Christmas. And he had to imagine his father felt this, too. In fact, he would have bet his entire fortune, however modest, that his
father, moment by excruciating moment, experienced his wife of nearly six decades as a hellish, dogging, insufferable presence that, if you didn’t do battle with it, however subtly, would drive you to despair.

The Copper Room, though subject to a dress code, was not so precious that it couldn’t plate a roasted chicken, grilled filet of beef, or prime rib with mashed potatoes, which meant that the judge’s parents could eat inside their accustomed parameters. The judge ordered wine and encouraged appetizers and salads, and, after dinner, desserts, which they ate while the Jones Boys warmed up their act. Before long, the first couples took to the sprung floor. One in particular was entertainingly good, and, despite gimpiness and years, danced ballroom with flair and swing with joie de vivre. It was cheering, even moving, but it veered toward schmaltz when the Jones Boys began what their front man called a “Christmas waltz in the Viennese style. The grand old Austrian style. One, two, and a-waaaaay we go!” he boomed.

Now the judge’s father leaned in, as his mother had done earlier. Looking a little parboiled from his half-hour in the pool and his glass of wine, he said, “Sinatra used to do this song. Irony is, it was written by Sammy Cahn.”

“Sammy Cahn!” exclaimed the judge’s mother. “I’d completely forgotten about Sammy Cahn. ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’—that was Sammy Cahn. It—”

“Sure,” said the judge’s father. “The Andrews Sisters.” And now, off-key, he sang, over the Jones Boys:

“That’s it!” the judge’s mother cried, then kissed him, hard—mwah!—on the cheek. “You’re sharp as a tack! And so, so handsome. Isn’t your father handsome?” They drank to each other, and when the Jones Boys moved on to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” got up and approximated dancing.

“They’re awful,” the judge said, sitting back with his glass of port. “Look at them. They’re embarrassing.”

“No,” replied his wife. “It’s really, really cute. I love that. Look at them! All of a sudden they’re having a good time! The hot spring’s got them in a good mood.”

“I don’t get it,” said the judge. “I don’t get them at all.”

“Don’t try,” said his wife, and slid her hand over his. “Let’s dance!”

At dusk they were delivered by a driver named Jürgen to the five-star luxury Brandenburger Hof at Eislebener Strasse 14. It was not so much this hotel’s location—near the Tiergarten and the Berlin University of the Arts—as it was its “exceptional service and taste” that had led the tour company to recommend it and then, on his approval, to reserve a double Comfort City room with twin beds and a sitting area. As soon as they were ensconced and organized—the geriatric toiletries arrayed by the bathroom sink—his father took hold of the remote control and tuned in CNN International. “Close enough,” his father remarked, and fluffed his pillow. “I know this person—Amanpour.” Then: “This is what the Krauts call sports? Nothing. I didn’t get the scores.”

“Germany doesn’t own CNN, Dad.”

“Can’t even get the score of a ball game!”

“Okay, we’ll go online, then,” he said. “I can get you the
Seattle Times
.”

“Puh.”

But, at his father’s behest, he got the scores anyway and then read aloud the names above obituaries, so that his father would know if, back at home, someone he knew had passed away since they’d boarded their plane for this trip to Berlin, where his father had lived as a child.

In the morning, they met their guide in the Brandenburger’s lounge—otherwise known as the Quadriga—which was open-air and rife with perfect plants. The guide was a woman in her mid- or late twenties who was waiting for them with her coat over her arm, looking, he thought, poised but under strain. His first impression was of this blue elegance—a woman with enough learning to be generally troubled, but with enough youth, also, to enjoy herself. She appeared urbane and professional in caste. Her expression, her mien, her manner, her carriage—all of it, frankly, was not what he’d expected. He’d rather thought that Jewish Tours of Berlin would send them someone of substantially greater years, but, then, at his age—fifty-eight—he was perennially surprised that twentysomething people were able to do the jobs they did; so why not a tour guide, along with all the rest? Besides, this one seemed mature enough, courteous, considerate, amenable, intelligent. Her name, she said, was Erika Wolf, and her work, until recently, she gave them to understand, was at Berlin’s German Historical Museum—“in walking distance of the Brandenburg Gate, eastward along Unter den Linden, which is a beautiful boulevard lined with lime trees”—though technically her employer had been the Federal Office for Central
Services and Unresolved Property Issues. Erika Wolf had impeccable English with no hard edges or telltale Teutonic music. She wanted to know if they’d had their breakfast; if not, the hotel breakfast was very good. At this, his father opened his mouth. “Breakfast!” he said, looking at his watch. “For me, it’s already six-fifteen p.m. because of the nine-hour time difference.”

His father had dressed, on this April morning, in khakis, a sweater vest, and a button-down chambray: the travel outfit he’d bought the month before, when the two of them went to a mall for clothes and to pick up a rolling carry-on with swivel wheels, AARP five-star recommended but, even better, on sale. He’d also put on his comfortable walking shoes—the ones with room for custom orthotic inserts—and carried the lightweight nylon hooded parka he swore by as the ticket when it rained. Was it going to rain today? he asked. In Berlin, as they were “kicking around”? Erika Wolf smoothly fielded this query by pointing out that, though April was not the city’s wettest month—that award went annually to June—one could never really be certain, and therefore it was a very good idea to have a raincoat such as his father was carrying. Or an umbrella, she added; there were three in her car.