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four sections. On one was engraved a lion’s head, on the
second a small castle, on the third a four-eaf clover, and on the fourth a
Maltese cross.
    “But I have seen this design somewhere,” said
Renate. “Could it have been on one of the shields on one of the statues in a
Vienna park?”
    “Yes, it could have been. I have some ancestors
there. My family has a castle forty miles from Vienna. My parents still live
there. The coat-of-arms is that of Count Osterling.”
    He brought out his wallet. Instead of
photographs of round-faced babies she saw a turreted castle. Two dignified old
people stood on the terrace. The man wore a beard. The woman carried an
umbrella. One could see lace around her throat. Her hand rested on the head of
a small boy.
    “That is me.”
    Renate did not want to ask: and how did you
come here, what are you doing here when you could be opening bottles of old
vintage wine from your own property, sitting at beautiful dining tables and
being waited on?
    “After the war we were land poor. I felt our
whole life growing static and difficult. Tradition prevented me from working at
any job. I came to America. I went to Chicago. I was only seventeen and it was
all new and elating. I felt like a pioneer. I liked forgetting the past and
being able to work without feeling I was humiliating a whole set of relatives.
I did all kinds of jobs. I liked the freedom of it. Then I met the Rhinegold
Beauty Queen that year. She was unbelievably beautiful. I married her. I did
not even know what her father did. Later I found out he owned a chain of
laundromats. He put me to work as an inspector. At first we traveled a lot, but
when he died we wanted to stay in one place and raise children. So we came
here.”
    “You never went home again?”
    “We did once, but my wife did not like it. She
thought the castle was sad. She was cold, and the plumbing was not efficient.
She didn’t like so much politeness, moth-eaten brocades, yellowed silks, dust
on the wine bottles.”
    Count Laundromat, she called him, as she
watched the gold signet ring with the family coat-of-arms flashing through
detergents.
    An enormous woman appeared through the back
door and called out to him. She was as tall and as wide as Mae West. The
beautiful eyes, features and hair were deeply imbedded in cushions of flesh
like a jewel in a feather bedspread.
    “My wife,” he said, to Renate; and to her he
said: “This is a neighbor who once lived in Vienna.”
    Then he took up her bundle of laundry and
carried it to the car, opened the door, fitted it in the seat with care that no
piece should be caught when the door closed, as if it were the lacy edge of a
petticoat.
    From the day he told her the story of his
title, the smell of kitchen soap, of wet linen, wet wool, detergents, became
confused in Renate’s nostrils with the smell of an antique cabinet she had once
opened in a shop in Vienna.
    The inside of the drawers were lined with
brocade which was glued to the wood and which retained the smell of sandalwood.
The past was like those old-fashioned sachet bags filled with herbs and flowers
which penetrate the clothes and cling to them.
    Every time she visited Count Laundromat, the
perfumes of the antique cabinet enveloped her, the smell of the rose petals her
mother kept in a small music box, the smell of highly polished sandalwood of
her sewing table, the vanilla of Viennese pastry, the pungent spices, the
tobacco from her father’s pipe, all these overpowered the detergents.

    IN THE SMALL TOWNS OF CALIFORNIA the occasional
absence of inhabitants, or animation, can give the place the air of a still
life painting. Thus it appeared for a moment in the eyes of a woman standing in
the center of an empty lot. No cars passed, no light shone, no one walked, no
windows blinked, no dogs barked, no children crossed the street.
    The place had a soft name: Downey. It suggested
the sensation of downy hairs on downy skins. But Downey was not like its name.
It