Mother Night

24: A Polygamous Casanova ...

After she gave me the news, I took her into a nearby cafeteria so we could sit down. The ceiling was high. The lights were merciless. The clatter was hell.

'Why did you do this to me?' I said.

'Because I love you,' she said.

'How could you love me?' I said.

'I've always loved you — since I was a very little girl,' she said.

I put my head in my hands. 'This is terrible,' I said.

'I — I thought it was beautiful,' she said.

'What now?' I said.

'It can't go on?' she said.

'Oh, Jesus — how bewildering,' I said.

'I found the words to kill the love, didn't I — ' she said, 'the love that couldn't be killed?'

'I don't know,' I said. I shook my head. 'What is this strange crime I've committed?'

'I'm the one who's committed the crime,' she said. 'I must have been crazy. When I escaped into West Berlin, when they gave me a form to fill out, asked me who I was, what I was — who I knew — '

'That long, long story you told' I said, 'about Russia, about Dresden — was any of it true?'

'The cigarette factory in Dresden — that was true,' she said. 'My running away to Berlin was true. Not much else. The cigarette factory' she said, 'that was the truest thing — ten hours a day, six days a week, ten years.'

'Sorry,' I said.

'I'm the one who's sorry,' she said. 'Life's been too hard for me ever to afford much guilt. A really bad conscience is as much out of my reach as a mink coat Daydreams were what kept me going at that machine, day after day, and I had no right to them.'

'Why not?' I said.

'They were all daydreams of being somebody I wasn't'

'No harm in that,' I said.

'Look at the harm,' she said. 'Look at you. Look at me. Look at our love affair. I daydreamed of being my sister Helga. Helga, Helga, Helga — that's who I was. The lovely actress with the handsome playwright husband, that's who I was. Resi, the cigarette-machine operator — she simply disappeared.'

'You could have picked a worse person to be,' I said.

She became very brave now. 'It's who I am,' she said. 'It's who I am. I'm Helga, Helga, Helga. You believed it, what better test could I be put to? Have I been Helga to you?'

'That's a hell of a question to put to a gentleman,' I said.

'Am I entitled to an answer?' she said.

'You're entitled to the answer yes,' I said. 'I have to answer yes, but I have to say I'm not a well man, either. My judgment, my senses, my intuition obviously aren't all they could be.'

'Or maybe they are all they should be,' she said. 'Maybe you haven't been deceived.'

'Tell me what you know about Helga,' I said.

'Dead,' she said.

'You're sure?' I said.

'Isn't she?' she said.

'I don't know,' I said.

'I haven't heard a word,' she said. 'Have you?'

'No,' I said.

'Living people make words, don't they?' she said. 'Especially if they love someone as much as Helga loved you.'

'You'd think so,' I said.

'I love you as much as Helga did,' she said.

'Thank you,' I said.

'And you did hear from me,' she said. 'It took some doing, but you did hear from me.' 'Indeed,' I said.

'When I got to West Berlin,' she said, 'and they gave me the forms to fill out — name, occupation, nearest living relative, I had my choice. I could be Resi Noth, cigarette-machine operator, with no relatives anywhere. Or I could be Helga Noth, actress, wife of a handsome, adorable, brilliant playwright in the U.S.A.' She leaned forward. 'You tell me — ' she said, 'which one should I have been?'

God forgive me, I accepted Resi as my Helga again.

Once she got that second acceptance, though, she began to show in little ways that her identification with Helga wasn't as complete as she'd said. She felt free, bit by bit, to accustom me to a personality that wasn't Helga's but her own.

This gradual revelation, this weaning of me from memories of Helga, began as we left the cafeteria. She asked me a jarringly practical question:

'Do you want me to keep on bleaching my hair white,' she said, 'or can I let it come back the way it really is?'

'What is it really?' I said.

'Honey,' she said.

'A lovely color for hair,' I said. 'Helga's color.'

'Mine has more red in it,' she said.

'I'd be interested to see it,' I said.

We walked up Fifth Avenue, and a little later she said to me, 'Will you write a play for me some time?'

'I don't know if I can write any more,' I said.

'Didn't Helga inspire you to write?' she said.

'Not to write, but to write the way I wrote,' I said.

'You wrote a special way — so she could play the part,' she said.

'That's right,' I said. 'I wrote parts for Helga that let her be the quintessence of Helga onstage.'

'I want you to do that for me some time,' she said.

'Maybe I'll try,' I said.

'The quintessence of Resi,' she said. 'Resi Noth.'

We saw a Veterans' Day parade down Fifth Avenue, and I heard Resi's laugh for the first time. It was nothing like Helga's laugh, which was a rustling thing. Resi's laugh was bright, melodious. What struck her so funny was the drum majorettes, kicking at the moon, twitching their behinds, and twirling chromium dildos.

'I've never seen such a thing before,' she said to me. 'War must be a very sexy thing to Americans.' She went on laughing, and she thrust out her bosom to see if she might not make a good drum majorette, too.

She was growing younger by the second, gayer, more raucously irreverent. Her white hair, which had made me think so recently of premature aging, now updated itself, spoke of peroxide and girls who ran away to Hollywood.

When we turned away from the parade, we looked into a store window that showed a great gilded bed, one very much like the one Helga and I once had.

And not only did the window show that Wagnerian bed, it showed a reflection of Resi and me, too, ghostlike, and with a ghostly parade behind us. The pale wraiths and the substantial bed formed an unsettling composition. It seemed to be an allegory in the Victorian manner, a pretty good barroom painting, actually, with the passing banners and the golden bed and the male and female ghosts.

What the allegory was, I cannot say. But I can offer a few more clues. The male ghost looked God-awful old and starved and moth-eaten. The female ghost looked young enough to be his daughter, sleek, bouncy, and full of hell.