Chapter 20 Not Like Donna Reed #4
The roommates felt good to have ventured out of their neighborhood, into the Inner City—die Innere Stadt.
It made them feel like they were more than students.
So much was up in the air. Jimmy had the feeling that the stage was set, but set for what?
There were too many things that might (or might not) happen.
It made Jimmy think of how his mom must have felt when she knew she wanted to be a mother, but she wanted Esther to have the baby for her. It was a kind of up-in-the-air moment.
James Winslow should have remembered that there was something Fraülein Eissler wanted to show him. Hadn’t she told him they would go out together very late one night?
It was late enough—after the last call at the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik.
Hard Rain was sleeping under the students’ café table, with her heavy jaw resting on Claude’s foot.
Claude was startled to see Annelies standing at their table; he jumped to his feet, tripping over Hard Rain’s big head.
Dagmar tried to tell Annelies that the café was closing, but the tutor pointed to Jimmy.
“There’s something he should see, and I’m taking him to see it,” Annelies said, holding out her hand to Hard Rain’s inquiring nose.
Annelies led Jimmy past the Staatsoper, along the K?rntner Stra?e.
In those days, the first-district prostitutes hung out on those side streets off the K?rntner Stra?e—on Johannesgasse and Annagasse, Jimmy might one day remember, and there was a hotel on Krugerstra?e, where the women took the men they picked up.
He’d seen the prostitutes around the Westbahnhof and the Südbahnhof; in the vicinity of those train stations, the prostitutes weren’t as young or as pretty as the women working in the first district.
Jimmy was standing with Fr?ulein Eissler on the Krugerstra?e—diagonally across the street from “the whore hotel,” as the IES students called it.
“If we wait here long enough, you know who we’ll see, don’t you?” Annelies asked Jimmy.
That was when Jimmy knew, but not until then. “Yes, if you mean Irmgard,” James Winslow managed to say.
“That’s why you should have sympathy for her, Jimmy,” Fr?ulein Eissler told him. “And if we wait until we see her, she’ll see us, you know—you better think about that, too.”
Jimmy certainly didn’t want Irmgard to know he was onto her being a prostitute, but Annelies and Jimmy had already been standing on the Krugerstra?e too long.
Even a first-timer could see the way it worked at the whore hotel.
A prostitute arrived with her client, but the client left alone.
The prostitute stayed longer, to fix herself up.
By the time the prostitute left, she’d found another prostitute in the hotel; the two women left the hotel together.
When Irmgard came out of the hotel, she was with another prostitute—a prettier one, though not necessarily a younger one.
Naturally, Irmgard saw Jimmy standing there with Fr?ulein Eissler.
“We were just passing by,” Jimmy stupidly said to Irmgard, in English.
“This is the student I told you about,” Irmgard said to the prettier prostitute, also in English.
“His family pays his education-related expenses—his mother told me,” Irmgard added.
The way the prettier prostitute smiled made it clear she understood English.
“We don’t count as education-related expenses, I guess,” Irmgard carried on, in English.
“If he’s a virgin, we should count—if he’s a virgin, we’re definitely education-related,” the prettier prostitute said; her English was as good as Irmgard’s.
When she spoke, Jimmy could see there was something wrong with her upper lip; a small scar appeared to pull her lip askew, but you saw the slight disfigurement only when her lips moved.
“I’m guessing Jimmy is definitely a virgin,” Irmgard said, smiling.
“Nice to meet you, Jimmy—I’m Berta,” the prettier prostitute said.
“And this is Fr?ulein Eissler—die Hauslehrerin, the one I told you about,” Irmgard said to Berta, interjecting the German term for private tutor.
“Tell me why you two would ever be ‘just passing by’ the Krugerstra?e!” Irmgard suddenly said to Annelies.
“A vocabulary lesson, Irmgard,” Fr?ulein Eissler answered her. “We walk everywhere, and I point to things. Jimmy has to tell me what the things I point to are—in German.”
Irmgard pointed to herself and Berta, but she looked only at Jimmy.
“Prostituierte,” Irmgard said. That was when Jimmy knew what Irmgard had meant—when they’d been watching From Here to Eternity and Irmgard had told him that Donna Reed wasn’t a real prostitute.
“We’re not like Donna Reed, Jimmy—we’re the real ones,” Irmgard said.
To make herself perfectly clear, she more emphatically pointed to herself and Berta.
“Ich wei?,” Jimmy said, as he was always saying to Irmgard. The two prostitutes linked their arms together, the way European women do when they’re walking. Irmgard and Berta were ready to move on.
“You know where to look for me,” Berta told Jimmy.
“Ich wei?,” James Winslow repeated.
But Berta had more to tell him. She touched the scar on her upper lip. “I was a child, at a family picnic—I was running with a mayonnaise thing in my hand,” Berta told Jimmy. “How do you say a stupid mayonnaise thing in English?” Berta asked Fr?ulein Eissler.
“A jar—a mayonnaise jar,” Annelies answered her.
“Ja, a mayonnaise jar. I fell, my lip was cut. Now I kiss a little funny,” Berta said, smiling.
James Winslow walked with Annelies to her Stra?enbahn stop on the Opernring.
“It would have been better if I’d just told you, but I thought you should see Irmgard for yourself,” Annelies said.
Jimmy wouldn’t recall how it came up, but both of them were impressed by how familiar Irmgard and Berta were with English.
“I’m sure they pick up a lot of English-speaking tourists in the first district,” Fr?ulein Eissler told Jimmy.
There was something Jimmy wanted to ask Annelies, but he didn’t dare.
Hadn’t she tricked Frau Holzinger into thinking he was sleeping with his Jewish German tutor?
Didn’t Irmgard find Jimmy in bed when there was someone under Jimmy’s bedcovers?
Then why did Irmgard sound so sure of herself when she told Berta that Jimmy was definitely a virgin?
Was Jimmy’s pathetic inexperience obvious, not only to a prostitute?
But Jimmy was afraid of what Fr?ulein Eissler might tell him.
Besides, her streetcar was coming, and she had more to say.
“You know—don’t you, Jimmy—what Berta was doing when she told you about her lip?” Annelies asked, as her Stra?enbahn came screeching into the streetcar stop. “You know she was trying to make you more attracted to her, don’t you?”
It had worked, James Winslow wanted to say. Jimmy was dying to know what would be funny about kissing Berta. But all he said to Annelies was the usual: “Ich wei?!” He had to raise his voice to be heard above the train braking on the tracks.
“And there’s something else you should know,” Fr?ulein Eissler said, as she was getting on the Stra?enbahn.
“Prostitutes usually refuse to kiss their clients!” she called to him, in English.
Her fellow riders on the train surely heard her, but it was late at night.
At that hour, it’s not likely there were any English-speaking tourists or first-district prostitutes taking the Stra?enbahn.
In the passing windows of Fr?ulein Eissler’s departing streetcar, Jimmy saw no hint of a face as pretty as Donna Reed’s.
Annelies must have taken a seat on the far side of the train.