A Glove Shop In Vienna Read Online Free PDF Page B

spinsters whose own lives never quite break into flame and who live at the periphery of others – often indispensable, as often ignored. She was pale, long-nosed and ageless and wore round her neck a necklace of the milk teeth of all the children in the family. It was a disquieting necklace: brownly mottled in places, never quite free of the suggestion of dental caries and tiny flecks of dried blood.
    Milk teeth or no, Cousin Lily was an excellent and unobtrusive housekeeper, keeping Uncle Max’s clothes in order, supervising the maids. And my Uncle Max, now a vigorous man in his early forties, thus had a beautifully run home, a prosperous business, an undemanding wife…
    Had, in short, everything.
    Well, nearly everything. For to tell the truth, Aunt Helene was a trifle
too
undemanding. Probably it was quite simply a matter of her bulk. One imagines her, in the matter of sex, prepared in every way to do her duty but feeling, perhaps, that it was all happening a long way off; possibly even to someone else.
    If Freud had by now stopped bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse, he could not have got much further than examining his incipient moustache in the bedroom of his parents’ house. It was therefore in the conventions of his own day that Uncle Max solved this most conventional of problems.
    He took a mistress.

    In the old Habsburg Empire there was a precedent for everything. From Bohemia one got the best cooks, the finest glass. From Hungary one imported horses and violin players for the Philharmonic.
    But for a mistress… somehow, for a mistress you couldn’t do better than a real, a proper ‘
eclit’
Viennese.
    My Uncle Max, searching the chorus at the Folk Opera, the little dressmakers scuttling by with cardboard boxes, found what he was looking for at last, in a glove shop in the Karntner Strasse.
    Susie Siebermann was everything a mistress should be: golden-haired, blue-eyed and not too young. Uncle Max, detecting an unexpected rip in his grey kid gloves, had been despatched by Tante Helene to replace them before an important dinner. Susie did nothing except sell him another pair, but it was enough.
    He offered her a villa in the Vienna Woods, but she was modest and sensible and took instead a small apartment in the unfashionable district beside the Danube Canal. This she furnished simply, in the old Biedemeyer style, with painted furniture, white-looped curtains and geraniums in pots – for there was nothing of the courtesan in Susie, who recalled a simpler, more pastoral kind of mistress: Giselle in her forest hut waiting for Prince Albrecht: Gretchen at her spinning-wheel… Only one object linked Susie’s love nest with the grand villa in Hitzing: a large, mildly malodorous stuffed squirrel (a present from an anonymous admirer) on which Uncle Max, when he came to visit, hung his hat.
    The apartment faced inwards, towards a cobbled courtyard with an old pear tree in the centre, and when the shutters were closed (and of course they always were closed when Uncle Max was there) the call of the street sellers, the carpet-beating, the sound of tug-boats hooting up the Danube, came as the gentlest, the most undisturbing counterpoint to their secret and illicit love.
    And indeed their love
was
secret. Very secret. It had to be. Let no one imagine that the Vienna of those days was a permissive ‘
oh-la-la’
sort of place. In the Imperial Hofburg, sixty-seven or so moribund Archduchesses tottered about on Spanish heels, sniffing out imperceptible breaches of etiquette. Vast armies of monumentally incompetent civil servants nevertheless managed to keep tabs on the bourgeoisie. No, in the Vienna of my Uncle Max’s youth, a prosperous solicitor who wanted to stay that way did not exhibit his mistress in public.
    And then, of course, there was Helene. Helene who, in one doom-filled moment, had been thrown so tragically from her steel cable above the underwater bottom of the Rhine and who must never, never be hurt