They sit in the living room which has too many doors and windows, which for this and many other reasons, the mirror with the gilded baroque frame and the divan do not dominate on this sticky summer day in New Jersey’s nowhere.
“Mother,” she ventures gaily. “You never told me about your first marriage to Count Csaba-Csaba.”
“My marriage to Count Csaba-Csaba?” she echoes, wide-eyed. “Oh, that was nothing, my dear. He came from one of those very old noble Hungarian families in Transylvania. They were completely ruined under the Hapsburgs, mostly drunkards; he came to Budapest to study law. But I tell you, it was nothing. We weren’t married even a year. I was only fifteen...”
Once more the story of the broken engagement is told. Kamilla tells it as the little sister; an old lady now looks at her daughter with the eternal girlish eyes that captured Csaba-Csaba and Landsmann. Her sister’s decision still rocks her. “...I couldn’t understand how Rosa could do it. They were the ideal couple. There was simply no comparison between your father and Gerechter. But I never held it against her. My sister and your father are the two people who have meant the most to me in my life...those were different times...actually Csaba-Csaba behaved very decently in the end. He attended to the legalities of the annulment himself so it didn’t cost us anything.”
“...And then you married Father?”
“Yes,” she says slowly, her face assumes a mask of childish perplexity. She doesn’t know what her story is in all this. She can’t recall what year she married Landsmann, and when her daughter asks how they lived just after they married, Kamilla dwells nostalgically on their blissful honeymoon on Lake Balaton. All she remembers is the ceiling. “For a month I didn’t leave the room. I can’t tell you how beautiful it was those first years. We were so in love; we couldn’t be separated for a minute. People called us love birds.”
“And then?”
She sighs, her face saddens. “And then,” she says very softly and timidly, “you were born and it was over.” The memory of the old hurt brings tears to her eyes. “He fell in love with you, you know the story. He gave you all his love, he took from me the little words of endearment and gave them to you, my little fish, my canary—” She pauses, for a moment the room resolves into that imaginary interior where a woman stands stripped of her satin ribbons that a man with talcum-powdered face and slicked-down hair hangs over an infant’s crib; then changes back into the cottage where an old lady weeps over her ribbons. “And the rest you know,” Kamilla resumes with a philosophic gesture. “Then you went to America with your father. No one is responsible for his nature. I don’t blame you...I am happy since I learned to live with myself. My one dream is to have one or two women friends like myself to talk to; analyze our nature. Understand what makes us do what we do.”
“Why do you live out in New Jersey?”
“That’s such a strange story you won’t believe it. But I’ll tell you if you really want to hear. It’s a true story. You know how troubled and full of disasters my life has been with you and your father, then Zoltan and the war, the affair with the painter and a lot of things you don’t know about—and then at last I met a man with whom I had a beautiful and harmonious relationship. You remember Eva? She called one day—a week or so after I told her about the way it ended with that impossible accountant your Ezra found for me. She has a proposition to make to me; she has an acquaintance, a fine man, in his early fifties, attractive, very wealthy, who travels a great deal and is looking for a woman about my age, cultivated, intelligent, for companionship when he was in New York; someone who would share his interest in concerts, opera, good dinners; would I be interested in meeting him. I said yes, I didn’t really believe the whole thing, it is rare that a man seeks friendship. ‘There is one condition,’ Eva said, ‘he insists on this. You must not ask him any personal questions as regards his family, his work, where he is coming and going. You will know him by the name of Alex Bondy, the name he gave me—it’s not his real name; you’re not to inquire about the life he lives when he is not with you. Before he meets you he wants to be sure you agree to this.’ Well we met, and discovered that we were truly kindred spirits.”
“Didn’t the conditions bother you?”
“Look, it is what a man is in relation to me that matters to me, not what he is with his wife or mother or any other woman. Every man I have ever been with has told me the same thing: that I’m the first woman with whom they can be completely themselves. Alex, like the others. In a way our relationship was the purer in that he never compared it to others he had. I was happy to be with him. I did not care what place I had in his life and when he confessed to me that, in fact, I had moved to a central place I was rather surprised and somewhat apprehensive. I was afraid he would propose marriage. But Alex was really marvelous. We were closer than I had even imagined. He said that while he could not marry me, he wanted me to have a house built on some beautiful spot—the love of beauty united us—designed and furnished to my taste, which he would consider as his ‘home’ whenever he was free to come to me. Money was
