Free Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer

my father and several other couples for dinner was sufficient to satisfy her needs. Though my parents went regularly to the opera I do not think that she had ever attended a concert or a recital. Even the opera bored her, unless it was
Carmen, La Bohème
or at a pinch
La Traviata
. But she enjoyed sitting in the box every Wednesday night during the season, casting a critical eye over what the other ladies were wearing, just as she always attended performances of long-running plays whenever notices appeared in the papers announcing that the leading lady had been fitted out with an entirely new wardrobe of costumes.
    She may have been a less than ideal mother. I was left largely in the care of a succession of German nannies (all of them answering to the no doubt generic name of Tante Anna) with my maternal grandmother, a rather sour soul, acting in a supervisory capacity. I would see my mother briefly in the morning before she went into town, and in the afternoon as she was about to change for dinner. Yet my parents were neither uncaring nor basically irresponsible, and certainly not vulgar—although it may be that I am too partial to be reliable on that last point. They had a measure of style and elegance—even though it was newly acquired and thinly applied. Again, I must be scrupulous in declaring possible partiality, but my mother seems to me to have avoided, then and later on, the crass vulgarity of those Hungarian ladies of Double Bay, with knuckleduster diamond rings and bracelets like the wristbands of a heavyweight wrestler, who talked at the tops of their voices in a barbaric tongue, or else slaughtered Australian-English in a way which was easy to parody. My parents were no doubt
nouveaux riches,
but they carried their new-found (and sadly temporary) wealth with some taste and discrimination.

    I know much less about my father’s family. This is so partly because he was naturally reticent, not a born myth-maker like my mother. It may have had something to do with a reluctance to speak about my grandfather’s defection, though in his last years my father mentioned it quite frequently. He seemed to bear his father no grudge, only a regret, perhaps, for my grandmother’s distress. The fundamental reason, though, why a mythology had not been elaborated in that family—apart from the half-jesting tale of Goethe’s friend and factotum—was their ordinariness. They were absolutely typical of a very large element in that Central European bourgeoisie which was already beginning to disappear by the time the war saw to their extinction. Apart from my grandfather’s peccadilloes, nothing remarkable seemed to have happened to them for generations. Nothing had disturbed the pattern of their commonplace and predictable lives, in sharp contrast to the fortunes of my mother’s family, who had suffered grievously during the disintegration of the Habsburg world.
    I did not know my paternal grandfather. After his death a few months before my parents’ wedding, his widow remained in the family flat in an unfashionable part of Budapest where she had always lived as an abandoned wife, consoled by my uncle, her unmarried son, and my aunt, who was married to a wholesale dealer in horseflesh. Though I have no clear memories of my uncle or of my aunt, I remember vividly the dealer in horseflesh. He was very tall and fat, with a shaved head. He terrified me—entirely without cause—and consequently the anticipation of pleasure every time we set out to visit my grandmother was tarnished by childishly irrational fears. Of my grandmother’s flat I recall no more than her china cabinet and collection of silver bibelots, and that the polished floors were covered with rugs. I still have some of her rugs, and much of her furniture—but not the fabled china cabinet—though I have no recollection whatever of these pieces in their original setting, where I must have seen them every time I