The Oriental Wife by Evelyn Toynton Page A

one who predicted what would happen. And everyone thought she was crazy.”
    “Get them out as soon as you can,” he told her. “But don’t let’s talk about it now. Tell me what you’ve been doing this morning.”
    They had gone to the Frick, she said, she had loved the Vermeers, and Sir Thomas More … “But the John Singer Sargents were wonderful too. I’d never seen one before.” Rolf shook his head apologetically; he didn’t know them, he said, he had never been there. It turned out he hadn’t been to Tiffany’s either, or Saks Fifth Avenue, or the jazz clubs on Fifty-seventh Street (but she wished she hadn’t mentioned them).
    “Tell me where you go, then,” she said, laughing. “Go on, tell me.”
    He had been to the Metropolitan Museum, he said stiffly, several times, and the American Indian Museum, and of course to the Empire State Building; he had walked the whole length of Central Park.
    “Do you never do anything frivolous?” she cried, and he turned pink. Phillip was making faces at her, signaling that she should stop, but a peculiar happiness had seized her; the pleasure of teasing him had gone to her head. “Never anything at all?”
    “Sometimes I ride the Staten Island Ferry.”
    “You like being on the water?”
    “Yes. And also …” He stopped.
    “What?”
    “I like to see the Statue of Liberty.” At first she thought he was joking; she started to laugh again, and then, seeing that he was serious, tried to turn it into a cough. His eyes were so innocent of guile behind his glasses, she felt a sudden falling in her stomach, as though she might start to cry. She and Phillip, of course, had stood on the deck to see the statue as the ship pulled into the harbor. Phillip had quoted, in a mocking voice, the poem the Americans were so proud of, and told her of the signs that used to say NO IRISH NEED APPLY ; some of them, he said, who had come to escape the famine, had starved to death in New York instead.
    Now the cough got stuck in her throat, she was choking, and had to reach for a glass of water.
    “Are you all right?” Rolf asked, alarmed, and she made ineffectual little hand movements, in between splutters, to show she was fine, while Phillip, taking out his notebook, asked Rolf to give him some names and numbers for the refugees.
    “He’s an odd duck,” Phillip said, with a little snort, when they had parted.
    “Do you think so?”
    “What do you mean? You were the one who laughed at him back there. You were damn rude, actually.” She sensed him scowling at her, and looked across the street, at the crowds hurrying along; the hot-dog vendor on the corner, in a dirty apron, was bawling out indistinguishable words. A woman hurried past in a red, belted suit, her face emptied of expression. She imagined Rolf on his way to work that morning; he would not really see those people; he would carry an idea of them in his head.
    “Come along,” Phillip said. “I need to get back to the hotel and phone some of the people on his list. We don’t have much time left here.”
    But the only person he managed to reach was the pediatrician who had treated Louisa when she was small, a man she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. He used to recite nonsense rhymes while he listened to her heart, and sometimes, when he was finished, perform magic tricks for her, the joke being that they never worked. He’d put a pfennig behind her ear, inviting her to remove it and see what it had changed into, which was always just a pfennig; promising to produce a rabbit from his doctor’s bag, he brought out his hand with a flourish and peered in dismay at the stethoscope that appeared instead. “The clever devil,” he’d say, “he got away again,” and sigh loudly. It was his own enjoyment of this foolishness that made her giggle.
    Phillip had offered to go to the rooming house where he was staying with his wife and daughter, but the doctor refused. He would prefer to come to their hotel, he said. So