Divorcing

tell anyone, you can be sure. Can I meet him someday? You wouldn’t have to introduce me as your mother,” Kamilla pursues, “in fact, it would be much more interesting for me if I would meet him as...No?” she laughs. “Oh, I understand perfectly, my dear. But if you told me when you are having dinner with him in a certain restaurant, I could see him without his knowing, I’m so curious. But, you’re right my dear. I am so glad you have a true romantic relationship at last. I hope you don’t intend to get married. Believe me, marriage ruins every happy relationship. It’s the little irritations of daily life—he sees your hairbrush on the table or you see him cutting his nails and the beauty goes. You are very wise to live apart. To share only the beautiful things. I know. Zoltan and I were the happiest lovers for five years and then as soon as we married...I don’t even want to talk about it. He wanted a mother substitute, a nurse, one of those classical neurotic types...but it really isn’t interesting. What you have with this young man is the ideal relationship. You should keep it that way. Even if he should want to get married, you know, men sometimes...You mustn’t do it. I am so happy for you, and perhaps now we shall see each other more often. And maybe you will come and visit me in New Jersey. It’s only an hour by bus. I have a cottage by the lake. It’s so peaceful. You should really come in the summer.”

• • •

Getting off the Greyhound bus at Meadow Lake station, Sophie doesn’t recognize her mother right away. She looks for her in one of the parked cars dimly aware of a hippy woman in a dirndl-style summer dress standing at the other end of the platform. Is this her mother? Her mother, with her face oddly as if someone had screwed chin and head between two boards and pressed slightly. She wears a dog collar of studded bamboo stalks. Suddenly she beams, grinning from ear to ear. It is her mother.

“Sophie,” she gushes. “Has my little girl come? I was watching the people get off the bus, asking myself where is my daughter? Where is my daughter? And here you are!” She is without her car. She was too nervous to drive today, she explains, and they take a taxi.

They enter the cottage, the gilded mirror and the old antique divan stare her in the face like from an old photograph. The familiar furniture is depressingly out of place in the little low-ceilinged bungalow with its unelegant square windows looking out on the asphalt road of a New Jersey pike and some more tasteless one-story cottages like the one they’re in mounted on scrappy lawns. They settle in the air-conditioned kitchen where the only trace of another era is a framed poem in Hungarian hanging on the wall: a child’s fancy calligraphy in red, black and silver ink, with illustrated capitals. Glimpsing it as they entered, Sophie read, “For my dear mother’s birthday,” and passed on, not daring to read further.

They sit drinking tea. “Sophie dear,” Kamilla begins in her little-girl voice. “May I ask you something? You won’t get angry? Because there is something I would like to understand—and perhaps now that we’re on better terms you can explain to me something that has always puzzled me about you. How can you live with yourself? Have you no pangs of conscience?...” It’s from an old soundtrack. Sophie hears out the record to its end and says, “All right, I was a terrible child, but you know I had difficult parents.”

“You—” Kamilla gasps, “you had the most wonderful parents in the world!” and launches into a new torrent of speech.

“But the divorce—” Sophie interrupts her mother’s paean to the ideal parents, but Kamilla is going full steam. “The divorce! It was the most beautiful divorce!” she exclaims with deep pathos. “There couldn’t be two people more loving and considerate to each other than your father and I—we laughed about the whole thing, we couldn’t decide about the dishes and the furniture. He wanted me to have everything, I wanted him to have it; no, my dear, you have a completely wrong idea, this wasn’t like the usual divorce, we cried and embraced and comforted each other; there couldn’t have been a more beautiful divorce and it didn’t mean that we stopped caring for each other; on the contrary. It was just a divorce of convenience. Everything would stay the same—who could imagine that you would go to America, or the war! Surely I am not responsible for that! Had I known that you would go to America, I would never have agreed to the divorce. Never! I thought the divorce would ease the tension and everything would continue as before. But to be separated from those I loved by an ocean, I have no other family than you and your father,” she weeps. “Sometimes I think that the whole thing was a plot against me. I don’t think Rudi would deceive me; we were both kept in the dark. The family waited till after the divorce before persuading your father. He had always been against the divorce and I would never have consented had I known. And now we are here, each of us living alone with our problems, your father alone in Garfield, you alone in New York and I alone here in New Jersey.”

“Can we go to the living room?” Sophie suggests after a pause. “It’s freezing here.” She stops on her way out to read the poem she wrote for her mother’s birthday in March, 1939, in which she wishes health and happiness to her beloved mother and regrets that she will not be with her on future birthdays. “Forgive me, dear Mother, that I won’t be at your side but I must follow the irresistible call to