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Diary Entry 1981-39 : Mr. and Mrs. Godowsky
Tag: English 1981 ← Please click here. Tag: English 1982 ← Please click here. Tag: English 1983 ← Please click here.Writings in English ← Please click here.
I lived in the Godowsky’s house as a live-in babysitter, but that was not all I did. The amount of work I actually performed was enormous, and sometimes I would even work for 17 hours a day. I cleaned the gas stove every day, but their requirements how well it should be done were extraordinary. I can bet they would never be that thorough themselves. Mrs. Godowsky was seeing a doctor because of the pain she had in her face. She showed me a white line that ran inside her mouth, and I knew her problem from my own experience. In addition, her eldest son got sick as well. “It is now really always like this” she had said, but my workload continued increasing nonetheless. The babysitting too required very long hours, and I could have no rest even on Saturday or Sunday. Mrs. Godowsky was lazy, and in addition to all the work I did, she was hiring a cleaning lady twice a week to change the sheets and to polish the water place. She followed about the person working and criticized our work although it was well done. In a high-handed manner, she would try to force the door-to-door cleaning service to move as it suited her. There are so many people around us whose motto is, “Use others to make it easy for myself, and to gain profit for myself.” All those who want to make other people do what they don’t want to do by themselves are the same kind of egoistic, sick misers. They spend any amount of money on themselves, but their only philosophy of life is to “use people”. When you live with them, you can understand their household and their family background. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard that before marriage Mrs. Godowsky worked as a stewardess and a high school teacher. She increased my workload as it pleased her. However, during the free time she gained, she would not go and cook properly for example. She would just brag she was a housewife, presenting herself as Mr. xxx’s wife, or little xxx’s mom. Weather it is because as a manager of a bedspring factory he spends his whole day in noise, but Mr. Godowsky hates it if children are noisy when he’s back home. That is why the three adults eat at a big round table, whereas the three children eat at a small table at a separate place. When the children start frolicking and laughing gaily, their father’s face turns angry. I stifle my smile/laughter at the table. The word spread among the Godowsky family’s acquaintances, friends and relatives that their babysitter was an admirer of Gould, and that she had a record she received from Gould personally. On one occasion, a number of them gathered at the Godowskys’ place in order to hear my piano performance.
I’ve had problems with my memory that were caused by the shock I suffered during the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, but at that time I had had memory of a genius. Thanks to my photographic memory that had been in excellent shape at the time, with softened fingers I was able to play musical pieces I had learned 10 years previously. Mrs. Godowsky told me, “My mother-in-law said, ‘Why on earth did you employ a girl pianist with frail body?’” Mr. Godowsky commented, “Mako is great with kids, and she’s doing that job very well. She’s a genius.” It seems Mr. Godowsky thought I’d work for them for a long time, and so he provided me with an insurance coverage. Even after escaping that awful house, I often received phone calls about the insurance issue.It seems the husband was not aware that my leaving was provoked by his wife’s exploitation and her stinginess. They just continued in the same fashion, though, seeking people to succeed the ones who left, and repeating the same behavior over again. Several years later, about the time when I was quite busy with my life at the conservatorium, I saw the Godowsky couple at a musicale in the Heart House. Earlier that day I had a strange feeling I was going to have an uncommon meeting that day. Suddenly, there they were, the couple I had completely forgotten. “Look, there is Mako standing over there,” I heard Mr. Godowsky whispering to his wife. Seeing them there, I thanked my lucky stars that my life with the Godowskys had not continued for long.
Another time, at a music conservatory, I asked Mr. Tchaikovsky, John Philip’s professor, about the kids. “Are the Godowsky children doing well?” “That family, the whole year long they are just traveling and enjoying themselves. All the time they are doing things people like you and me, who don’t have much money, cannot afford. That’s about that,” he immediately answered, covering the children’s life, as well as their study attitude with his reply. When the parents behave in a selfish way, the children are selfish just because they are copying their parents. In such a way, misfortune follows a family, and a house becomes rickety.
Translated by Saiko
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by mhara21
| 2018-04-15 00:00
| English
|
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