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Runaway Waltz
A Memoir from Vienna to New York
By Frederic Morton Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2005 Frederic Morton
All right reserved. ISBN: 0743225392
Chapter 1: Vienna 1936Austerlitz and I
He will arrive as He should arrive -- eventually, in due time. His slowness is part of the thrill. So is the slight shock against my skin as I sit down to await Him. Against my back tingles wood as hard and cold and electric as I've known only in the seats of the Lux Movie Theater in our outer district in Vienna, in the midthirties.
The fans won't start revolving until everybody has settled down. Overhead the three bulbs, already burned out last time, still haven't been replaced. Three chandelier arms still curve lightless, naked, sooty. This will make the transition from present dreariness to His radiance all the more exciting. Actually, the less illumination right now, the better. I'm less exposed to people staring at my clothes.
In the Lux Movie Theater almost all other kids my age wear rough loden jackets and manly weathered leather shorts. I must sit there in a sissy sailor suit. Those staring kids have no knowledge, of course, of my own leather shorts, which are as toughly weathered as any of theirs. They have no idea that the sailor suit is the fault of the Café Landtmann; that I'm allowed movies only right after our family hot chocolate at the flossy Landtmann downtown, where men's cuff links gleam up during hand kissing and where I must scrawl on some fringed paper napkin examples of my penmanship for Aunt Emma. The Lux kids don't know that her jokes about my Chinese letters always go on and on, followed by Uncle Karl's endless, nervous, underbreath interpretations of the latest speech from Berlin. Nor do the Lux kids know or care that that's how I'm kept captive until after 4 PM, which means no chance to change into my leather shorts: I have barely two and a half hours for Him at the Lux, including travel time: I must be home again, ready for the supper table, hands washed, at 7 PM sharp -- in fact, earlier these days, when the sun sets sooner. My father, having caught Uncle Karl's nervousness, has decreed that in such times as ours I can't be out after dark. Therefore, to make His five o'clock showing I must rush like mad from Landtmann to the Lux, still imprisoned in my horrid sailor suit.
How explain all that to the starers? Or explain further that I'm sitting almost alone in this expensive row up front only because even with my glasses I'd be unable to see Him clearly farther back? Since my bond with Him would be less special if I gave it away, I never mention Him to my mother in any emphatic way. I just remind her of the headache I get from eyestrain -- presto! she coughs up the extra fifty groschen for a seat nearer the screen. And she's always good for the thirty groschen more that buy the program on which only very few others in the audience have splurged. To me the program is vital, brimming with portraits and revelations of Him. To my father this is just the sort of indulgence that will spoil a child. Still, my mother always prevails with her theory about my film program collecting: it may not be as constructive as stamp collecting, but at least it does encourage the discipline I badly need if I am ever to improve my grades.
Grades, study habits, politics...all that fuss recedes, now that the chandelier is dimming. At the same time pictures begin to glimmer up across the speckles of the screen. They are His vanguard, even though they are just hand-painted lantern slides advertising local stores.
Two identical loden jackets appear; one coffee-stained and dotted by the little spots of the screen; the other with the stain removed but of course still screen-mottled -- A. Lazar, the neighborhood cleaner. Cherries, mottled and voluptuously lipstick red -- the greengrocer Peter Zeleny. The locksmith Alois Matuschek, with a big mottled, mustached grin, holding aloft a big mottled lock.
After Matuschek the house grows quite dark. The ceiling fans have begun to rotate: propellers that will soon fly the Lux Theater across the Atlantic. Their low whir mingles with the hiss of an air-freshening spray. The sprayer is the usher, who has as his badge of office a World War I sergeant's cap. A flashlight fixed to his visor, he bestrides the aisle, hissing aroma into the air, holding the spray can aloft like an annunciatory trumpet.
However, it's not He who responds to the fanfare -- not yet. It's more commercials. Still, these are no longer crude daubs but photographs, quite polished ones, and therefore already approximations of Him. There is the cravated lady-killer, sporting a patent-leather forelock and a silver cigarette case from which he extracts with knowing gusto a Jonny smoke, his dash mottled by the screen's rash. A pretty lady, mysteriously smiling, mottled from gamine bangs to stiletto heels, caresses her Odol toothpaste tube. No less mottled are the muscles of a runner in a relay race, handing along a bottle of Obi apple juice.
Out in the ordinary world the mottles might be blemishes. In the Lux they are the hallmark of a prelude like no other. They spice my expectation. They warm the slick pages of the program in my hand. It's too dark to read it yet another time, but my fingers can feel its centerfold illustration: Him, leaping high in black-tie glory.
Meanwhile, drums and woodwinds surge from the loudspeakers. The newsreels thunder onto the screen. No longer still photographs but moving pictures, they are yet stronger prophecies of Him. Great personages begin to loom. Unlike Him they have no personal connection to me. Yet their eminence points toward His ultimate peak.
The king of England, affable, breast handkerchief folded like a crown, pushes an amputee's wheelchair into the hospital he has just opened. In compassionate shirtsleeves the president of Mexico hugs a wizened peasant next to an adobe hut ruined by an earthquake. Our Austrian chancellor, standing in St. Stephen's Square, hair ruffled by September winds, inaugurates the annual charity campaign by shaking a coin box at the camera. Only the German part of the newsreel seems, at least for a moment, aimed in my direction: the Reich Leader performs a hearty handshake with the chairman of the committee organizing the Winter Olympics scheduled in Bavaria -- but just before he turns away his eyes glare at me -- me the big-nosed fancypants sitting in an expensive row on the Austrian side of the border. Yet even his ominous face is spotted with the same screen measles shared by the Austrian chancellor, the English majesty, the Mexican excellency, the lady-killer smoker, our neighborhood cleaner A. Lazar, etc. They have all merged into the parade of preliminaries to His main event.
Whose coming is still delayed, even after the newsreels. For now Mickey Mouse jumps into the picture. Here he is a hapless elevator operator in a hotel a zillion stories high. This means that Mickey Mouse lives somewhere in my god's skyscraper latitudes; in other words, Mickey brings His presence still closer. And indeed Mickey Country seems like a mottled fun house antechamber to the Real Thing which I can only reach after laughing my way through an infinity of pratfalls.
And so I chortle along with all the others at Mickey's inspired ineptitudes. The mouse is as nervous as Uncle Karl, but his anxiety is a lot more fun since it's not Germany that rattles him but his elevator. He simply can't keep the contraption from running amok. Going down, he crashes beyond the basement into Hell. Going up, he splinters through the roof into Heaven. Angels and devils tumble into his cabin, tripping over annoyed hotel guests. All passengers, winged, goat-footed, or luggage-burdened, are mottled, all furious at Mickey. Finally he fumbles his elevator into a tilt, sliding his tormentors into the hotel pool, thus finagling a happy end.
Only this, of course, is not the end.
It is the start of the beginning. At last the time has come for Him.
Loudspeaker explosions, drumbeats, cymbals. Orchestral fireworks launch the feature. Ready for this moment, my right hand (the one not clutching the program) has been curled around the wrapped lozenge in my pocket. Off with the paper, into my mouth, with this genuine imported American chiclet. Never mind what it has done to my pocket money. Even my mother refuses to fund "such American craziness" with an extra subsidy. The seventy groschen nearly kill my weekly allowance. Yet this Yankee chewing gum is much more pungently mint-flavored than the feeble Austrian sort. It spreads on my tongue the very flavor of His New World aura about to unfold on the screen.
The usher celebrates His advent with yet another air-freshening strut down the aisle. The spraying tempo joins the rhythm of the title-and-credits music -- puffs and sound track accelerate together into a simultaneous crescendo.
And, yes, there He is!
There He materializes on the screen, ambling down a street. Mind you, He is still mottled. He is still not the god, though all of us in the audience know that soon he will assume an unearthly grace. But only I am alert to that quick glance He shoots me as He rounds the corner: I am His kind. None of the differences between us really matter. True, He is a New York boulevardier striding along an avenue aroar with cars bigger and faster than anything seen by the Danube. I'm just a Viennese grade school slacker, all agog in my wooden seat. Yet proof of our kinship is spelled out in rotogravure print under His leaping picture in the program. I know His capsule biography there by heart: regardless of what He may be called in any film -- Bob or Dick or Jim or whatever American word, His real first name, the one He was born with, is exactly the same as my own. Fritz. And His real last name, Austerlitz (disclosing His Austrian parentage) contains not only the same number of syllables but also the same number of letters as my own: Mandelbaum.
Indeed as Fritz Mandelbaum watches Fritz Austerlitz, the other links between us come alive again. While Fritz Austerlitz is too big to be a problem child, He is certainly a problem person. For one thing, He is overdressed like me. A carnation flashes out of His buttonhole; tassels drip from His loafers. And He gets into hot water fast.
In this film, too, His trouble seems related to His objectionable way of talking, though in His case it's not that He keeps lapsing into raw Viennese dialect, which upsets my mother even more than my father and which raises teachers' eyebrows heavenward and which I love because the brawny street sounds make up for the sailor-suit self forced on me one way or another. No, His speech is nonslang, but far from good mellow Austrian German; it's German German of the Reich sort, with consonants as jagged as the Leader's glare at me a few minutes ago. What's more, this German German twists unnaturally out of His mouth, blurring and rasping, and, especially at the beginning of the action, anything He says has the wrong effect.
This is true once more here, in this film on that crowded New York sidewalk, where He tries to approach a fast-walking lady. Each time He catches up with her, He addresses her so awkwardly that she huffs off in contempt. To get away from him, she crosses the street while the light changes. He jaywalks after her right through the screaming of many brakes. A policeman (similar to the one who confiscated the soccer ball I kicked into the traffic last week) writes Him up because He answers back so badly. Immediately afterward He rushes into the building into which the lady vanished. She turns out to be a teacher in a dancing school, and it's a disaster when He enrolls as her pupil.
Austerlitz is as bad a student as Mandelbaum. During a fox-trot lesson He keeps sweet-talking her clumsily, pays no attention to her instructions, and, in a catastrophic stumble, sprawls on the floor, dragging her down with Him.
But it is at this very point that the transfiguration comes to pass. It is here that He, all aflounder on the parquet, wincing at the young woman's fury, turns wondrous. He sorcers his blunder into a masterful joke.
Music flows into his limbs. With superb suppleness He rises from the floor, suddenly commanding a language as new as His voice. This new voice is marvelously unblurred, untwisted, fitting his lip movements since it is no longer dubbed. That I don't understand His words only enhances their mystery: in contrast to His spoken German, he sings His limpid English. His cry, melodious beyond my comprehension...
You're lovely to look at, delightful to know, and heaven to kiss!
...frees Him from the gravity pulling down sodden mortals. Fritz Austerlitz soars into Fred Astaire.
Being Fred Astaire, he needs only to touch the woman to render her weightless as Himself. Instantly she lilts off the floor. Together they start gliding on violin wings, vaulting, swaying, pirouetting. Mellifluously intertwined, their momentum sweeps away all her anger. The whole world, until now so nasty to Him, so flyspecked, unmottles and melts into sheer elan and elegance and amorousness.
As for me in my wooden seat, my tongue can't speak the language danced on the screen, but my mouth can move to it. Between my teeth the gum floats to the beat of his legs. The rhythm effervesces down my body; it tickles my feet with the promise that some such wizardry, invoked in English, will lift me into the lightning ease of the planet's greatest soccer center forward. And just as His carnation is no longer foppishness but a prodigy's blazon, so the sailor suit will be the heraldic costume in which to kick in my world championship goal...
I must go before it's over. I must be home in time. Not that it's so terrible to miss the end. The end usually has Him in a static clinch with her, mouthing muzzy earthbound German. Better to walk up the dark aisle now, between rapt faces, and look back for a last glimpse of Him, slim-tuxedoed in mid-dance, levitating above a champagne goblet, smiling as though he'd never ever need to touch the ground again.
Today, though, I seem to have left Him too soon. The best time to relinquish His spell, to descend once more into ordinariness, is at the onset of twilight: early enough for me to reach our house before real night yet dusky enough, the city already obscure enough, that I can confuse, at least for a little while, my Vienna with His Manhattan.
But coming out of the dream-womb darkness, I am almost blinded by the Neulerchenfelderstrasse. Too much bruising harsh gray left over from the afternoon. The streetlamps are not yet switched on. In the day's unmerciful dregs they look so rusty and ungainly compared to the sleek lights of New York from which I've just parted. I close my eyes halfway to preserve inside my head His Broadway glow. With eyelids lowered I keep walking until I reach A. Lazar's Cleaner Store.
It is locked on Sunday, of course. But I know that if I press my spectacles against my nose and peer hard through the glass door, I'll be able to spot, far back in the dimness, leaning against the counter, the poster which weekdays stands in front of the store and whose picture of the two jackets, one stained, one cleaned, started the Lux magic culminating in Him. And I raise my eyelids to find again, through the poster, the promise of Him coming again.
What I see is nothing of the sort.
I don't even see any glass door -- just ugly ash-colored, wrinkled metal. Just another of those corrugated iron shutters sprouting lately all over town as protection. But they didn't protect A. Lazar against the bloodred words newly smeared across the corrugations -- a wet crimson curse screamed against the Lazars, the Mandelbaums, and their likes.
Quickly I shut my eyes against it. But paint sticks to my right index finger. Ugly, viscous, somehow hot, it burns away all pulsing echoes of His feet. And I no longer even care. Feet are no longer there for dancing, only for running. Running, running hard, I spit out my Yankee gum. Anything to breathe better as I tear down the five blocks home.
Copyright © 2005 by Frederic Morton
Continues...
Excerpted from Runaway Waltz by Frederic Morton Copyright © 2005 by Frederic Morton. Excerpted by permission.
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