Good Living Street by Tim Bonyhady

Author:Tim Bonyhady [Bonyhady, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90681-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Hermine maintained her guest book until early 1936. She had visitors on New Year’s Day and then again on the fifth, seventh, tenth, and fourteenth of January, when seven women joined her for two tables of bridge, accompanied by the usual tea and sandwiches with heated cheese pastries. It was her last bridge party. A week later she was in hospital for a gallbladder operation and, though her doctors initially declared it a success, she died of a blood clot on February 6 at age sixty-five and was buried on February 8, which the Gallias otherwise would have celebrated as Erni’s forty-first birthday. A day later Annelore turned fourteen.

Annelore had many memories of these events. She remembered how Hermine left the Wohllebengasse on a stretcher, carried from her bedroom down the hall of the apartment, and how she thought Hermine would never return. She remembered being very frightened when she was taken to the hospital after Hermine died and had to kiss Hermine’s hand one last time. She remembered being taken to see Hermine in a coffin with a window at one end so her face remained visible. She remembered that Erni, Gretl, and Käthe led the vast funeral procession at the Hietzing cemetery, she followed with Mizzi, and Hermine’s three brothers, Otto, Guido, and Paul, walked behind. Anne remembered that she wore a black hat and a black armband that Gretl bought for her for the funeral. She remembered that she cried bitterly, although she was not really sad. She also remembered that while Hermine usually gave her things she did not like and forced her to use them to her annoyance and embarrassment, that year she had received two embroidered pillowcases bought by Hermine before she fell sick that were exactly what Annelore wanted.

Hermine left Käthe most of her shares and bank deposits and all of her stake in the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft because she had not received part of a factory like Erni or a dowry like Gretl. Hermine also specified how her silver was to be distributed. She gave the remainder of her estate to Erni, Gretl, and Käthe in equal shares and left it to them to decide what to do with it. They agreed to remain joint owners of the Wohllebengasse and the Villa Gallia while dividing the rest, a process that was sometimes complicated, sometimes simple. One of Hermine’s most spectacular pieces of jewelry—a string of huge pearls from the Adriatic—was so long that Gretl, Käthe, and Mizzi could split it in three and each wear one of these thirds.

Hermine addressed how her daughters should live through a provision that was as controlling as it was perceptive. Rather than leave it to Gretl and Käthe to recognize that they got on too badly to continue living together, Hermine stipulated that they live separately, an instruction they obeyed. Their new apartments were both in the Third District, a middle-class area much less prestigious than the Fourth. While Gretl rented a prewar apartment on the Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse,

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