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He didn't understand; he thought that everything was a thesis project to be accepted or rejected. I'd told him a hundred times that I didn't really care about the history behind everything as much as I cared for what it provoked in me. But he was hopeless, a diehard factualist to the end.
He gave me the money; in the end, he always did. 'Apparently it's all I have to give you that you'll take,' he said. 'My God, Vienna!' he added with disgust. 'Why not Paris or London or Rome? Take my advice and have a good time before you start taking yourself so seriously. Next thing, you'll get married. Oh God, I can see it: some countess, in name only. Penniless, but used to the finer things. Her entire family of raving hemophiliacs wants to move from Vienna to New York but can't bear to leave the horses behind.
'Take my advice,' my father said from his easy chair. 'If you have to knock up anybody, knock up a peasant. They make good wives; they're the cream of womanhood.' Books, magazines, notecards slid about in his lap; my mother stood surprised beside him. I thought of Brueghel's painting and of my father as he might appear in it: scrolls in both hands, sitting legless, as amputated as a beggar, his goblet of bad wine pinched between his stumps.
'You want to make a novel from a sixteenth-century painting!' my father cried. 'An education clearly wasted - at least, run amok. Why don't you try the Orient? They make excellent wives.'
Shellshocked, I left for Europe. I said goodbye to my mother at the airport (my father refused to drive). 'Thank God you have enough money to do what you want to do,' she said to me.
'Yes, I do.'
'I pray you'll remember your father in happier moods.'
'Yes, yes.' I tried to remember some.
'Thank God for your education, despite what your father says.'
'I do.'
'He's not himself lately,' my mother said.
'God?' I said, but I knew she meant my father.
'Be serious.'
'Yes, yes.'
'He reads too much. It depresses him.'
'I'll send you pictures of Vienna,' I promised. 'The prettiest postcards I can find.'
'Just tell me the good news,' my mother said. 'And don't try to write anything on the backs of the postcards. There's never enough room.'
'Yes, yes,' I said, remembering another thing that depressed my father: people who write on the backs of postcards. 'Do they think they're saying anything?' he used to yell.
He gave me a note when I shook hands goodbye with him. I didn't look at it until the plane was descending on Schwechart Airport. Suddenly, in the midst of our downward pitch and roll, the stewardesses played an old recording of Strauss's 'Blue Danube'. The eerie, gooey music blaring from nowhere startled nearly everyone, and the stewardesses smiled at their little trick. A man beside me went into a rage. 'Aaach!' he cried to me; he knew I was an American. 'I am Viennese,' he told me, 'and I love Vienna, but I get so embarrassed when they play that wretched Strauss. Why don't you break that awful record?' he hollered at the stewardesses, who went on smiling.
The man reminded me of my father, and I remembered the note. As the plane touched down, I read it.
Say hello to Schmaltz for me.
Give my regards to Kitsch City.
Love, Dear Old Dad
And the rest is history. Edith Fuller and I came to Vienna and fell in love with our tour guides. In her case, Severin elected to be her guide, but in mine Utch was more literally employed.
I met her when I went to see the Brueghels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I asked for the standard tour in English. I said I was especially interested in the Brueghel rooms, and that I wouldn't mind skipping the Rubens and all that. It was November, stone-gray and Baroque-cold. The tourist season was over; Vienna was turning indoors. A tour guide would be available in a moment; I was told I could have a special Brueghel tour. ('He's one of the favorites.') I felt as if I were waiting in a delicatessen for one of the more popular meats. Everything felt cheap. I remembered what my father had said and wished I had come prepared and could stride through the Brueghel rooms as an authority on the Northern Renaissance. I wondered if I had conceived of an historical novel from the point of view of a tourist. When my guide was introduced, I was struck by her Russian name - and also by the tilt of her nametag perched on her high breast.
'Fraulein Kudashvili?' I said. 'Isn't that Russian?'
'Georgian,' she said, 'but I am an Austrian. I was adopted after the war.'
'What's your first name?'
'My name is Utchka,' she said. 'I am not familiar with Americans.'
'Utchka?'
