Free Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal

tree and goes to sleep, and Phyllis’s granddaughter and Phyllis and Bethy Bernstine know, and Ida Farkasz used to know, and even people who have not read, and never been told the story, know that the girl will marry the prince with the kind eyes. They will inherit half the kingdom, and if they haven’t died they are living to this hour.
    Ida Farkasz
    When Bethy walked into the ER, she saw Lucy and she saw the fat girl and the fat mother, who was telling the brother to quit already, and throw the bottle in the trash. That waswhen the legs of the old man with the blood dried on his forehead shot suddenly upward as if a puppeteer had decided the moment had come to pull all his strings at once.
    “Is he okay?” Bethy asked.
    “He’s fine,” the Mayan Nurse said.
    “Which is Ida Farkasz?”
    The nurse pointed to a sleeping hunchback and said, “Doesn’t know who she is, where she lives, or anything. I’ll see if there’s a free cubicle. Going to be one of those nights.”
    Bethy said, “Ida Farkasz? I’m supposed to interview you.”
    The old person was not a hunchback. You see subway drunks, sometimes, who have descended into a sleep so deep it cancels the human instinct to remain sitting up in a public place. The old woman had slipped way down the seat of her chair. Her gray head with its pinkish patches of scalp was curled forward onto her diminished, child-sized breast. There are things—and may we forgive ourselves that there are people—we would rather not touch. Bethy Bernstine placed her right forefinger on this old person’s sleeve. “Mrs. Farkasz?” she said, and Ida opened her eyes and turned the corners of her mouth so radically downward that Bethy thought, She doesn’t like me.
    Bethy sat across from the dreadful old person and asked her did she know where she was.
    “The Emergency Room, Cedars of Lebanon.”
    “Name?”
    “Ida Farkasz.”
    “Do you know where you live?”
    Ida Farkasz named her New York address and the date and place of her birth: “Pojorny before World War One, when it was still Hungary. The Slovaks call it Bratislava. In German it’s Pressburg.”
    The Intake Form for Seniors had no rubric for the twentieth-century history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “Nearest relative?”
    “Marta, my daughter. My sister Poldi and I don’t talk.”
    “You remember your daughter’s phone number?”
    “And a lot of good it does me. I call and have my little chat with the answering machine and then I sit on a chair in my apartment and wait for it to occur to my daughter to call me back.”
    “Marital status?”
    “Some status,” said Ida Farkasz, “when your new husband takes you home from the wedding on the bus with a carpet rolled under his arm.”
    “A carpet? How do you mean ‘carpet’?”
    “Carpet! A carpet. Crappy thing that Mama had by her bed and Berta thought I might use in my foyer . Who had a foyer ? Berta was the oldest so she got the apartment at Twelve Judengasse. In the end, of course, the Nazis got it. Poldi and Kari, and Miklos and I were the only ones that got out. Who brings a carpet to a wedding?”
    “Occupation?”
    “The Nazis marched into Bratislava in March of 1939 …?”
    “I think they mean your occupation—what work did you do?”
    “Miklos was dead by the time the child and I got to New York. Poldi had a job as companion to her ‘Miss Mar gate.’ Never introduced me, never took me to Miss Margate’s ‘ evenings .’ Didn’t take me with her to Herta Frankel’s birthday, and it wasn’t even Poldi, it was me that was in Herta’s class, even if we weren’t best friends.”
    “What work did you do?”
    “Poldi’s Kari used to import wine in Bratislava, with a branch in Vienna. In New York, the men got jobs as mail clerks. Packerl Schupfer , we used to call them. ‘Little-parcel-tossers.’ After he died—that was Fifty-three—Marta and I moved in with Poldi and I got my social work certificate and worked at the Kastel House