Nevertheless, while cozily soaping my limbs in the perfumed water here, I cannot but be moved at the thought of my Viennese relatives. I think of the prophetic threats that Uncle Helmuth uttered—to Aunt Hertha’s and Aunt Selma’s chorus-like approval and even the tacit agreement of Cousin Wolfgang (who by now has, alas, perished as a hero)—ranting on against “plutocrats”: those corrupt, degenerate exploiters of the have-nots, among whom he also counted John and Stella; those devils who pulled me back, despite all my enlightened upbringing with its sound views and true values, into the debauched world where my mother had gone astray and given birth to me, a fatherless child, and where, when she soon perished justly and shamefully, I would have been callously left to starve had not they, my Viennese relatives, taken me in.

In fact, there was little to say about this other than that it was correct. But it would never have induced me to hate that admittedly vile but nonetheless bright, cheery, spacious world of the rich, whose bathrooms I yearningly recalled, or to love the hard, confused, detergent-smelling uprightness of the benefactors forced upon me. Nor did it stop me from observing that Uncle Helmuth’s upward tantrums, against the plutocrats, were no more violent than his downward ones, against the proletarians, and that we, the educated have-not bourgeoisie, were hated from below, in the concierge lodges and back courtyard pens of our apartment house, as much as Uncle Helmuth hated the society people still putting on a show of aristocracy, the “snobs,” as he wrongly called them.

In this respect too I disappointed if not betrayed my foster parents. If they assumed that I, the bastard who had popped into their home from the taboo world of the rich, would become at least an ally in their even more violent dislike of the back courtyard proletarians, then their hope was lamentably misplaced. Aunt Hertha lamented this frequently and bitterly. How could she have known that Miss Fern had cautioned me to stay discreetly aloof from the “simple people” because I might otherwise embarrass them, and that these constant admonitions had aroused my burning curiosity to get to know these susceptible, hence obviously extremely sensitive people, get to know them as soon and as well as possible and find out what there was about me that could make them lose their composure, perhaps even assure them that there was no real cause for their response. Now that no visible social barriers separated me from them, I had the best chance to do so. So much childlike naiveté was bound to be beyond Aunt Hertha. And of course she could not know that the gray-faced men with collarless shirts, the haggard women in aprons, the snot-nosed children from the bedbug caves in the apartment house to which I was now exiled, were paradoxically the only people who had any sort of connection to my past life. Aside from the princely households of my mother’s friends and patrons, I had known only such humble people. They were far more familiar to me, far more of a homeland, than the almost equally limited, equally gray-faced, grouchy but demanding and overpowering philistines with their baroque moral code and their egotism, who, arrogating the right to control my thoughts, feelings, and actions, styled themselves my benefactors and exacted gratitude from me.