The proper time for the summer exodus from Vienna was very simply decided. When the Court left the City, everybody else left the city too, happy in the implication that the simultaneous departure was no coincidence. Later, when there was no longer a court to follow and no army to join nor any other suitable occupations for gentlemen, many Viennese had to work. This necessity often meant, horror of horrors, going into industry or, even worse, into finance. Husbands could no longer retire to their hunting boxes, or to their little follies, nor could they accompany their wives and children to the mountains. Instead, they were left behind in a deserted city to work in their offices all day and dine at their favorite restaurants in the evening.
The staff usually accompanied the family to the Schloss, or villa, where they spent July and August, while a nameless charwoman was left behind to take care of the one room that remained opened in the apartment for the sole use of the head of the house.
The deserted Viennese husband was thrown entirely upon his own resources, and those had to be away from the house, since everything inside the house—from the crystal chandeliers to the pictures on the walls—had been wrapped in muslin or in slip covers made of a classic off-white fabric as universal as mattress ticking, and as uninteresting. The Viennese never considered transforming the house with gay summer slip covers of flowered chintz: The well managed home was taken apart, beaten. cleaned or washed, and wrapped in labeled off-white slip covers. For no reason other than unreasonable tradition. all beds and bedding were disassembled, slip covered, and carried into one bedroom, while all dressers were carried into another, and all chairs into a third. For the summer, at least, most Viennese homes looked like closed furniture stores. Silk-covered walls were draped with yards of the protecting cloth, portieres were fitted into their own clearly labeled sacks, which were then hooked into the curtain rings. Iron shutters were fastened to all the windows and all the doors were locked.
Somewhere in all this ghostly unlighted desolation, a little island of life remained for the man of the house. He called this haven his JunggesellenwobtwiiR—bachelor quarters—but even here he had to face the white wrappings everywhere. They left him a rug on the floor, but they enclosed it in a whiteduck carpet cover for him to stumble over all summer. They put covers on his lamps so that he could hardly see, and they covered his chairs, not with the beautifully tailored, zippered covers of today, but with loose, shapeless wraps that made the furniture unrecognizable (unless one read the printed labels) and quite impossible to sit on. They covered the headboard and the foot board of his bed, and the poor man even had to unwrap his closet before he could reach his clothes. They also left him a smell of tar and camphor strong enough to drive him from his home early each day and to keep him away as late as possible each night. This arrangement had the advantage that he never saw the charwoman, who came late and left early, and it also forced him to try out restaurants until he found one that suited him so well that he could spend most of his summer evenings there.
The restaurant had to be pleasant, the food had to be good, and, most important of all, there had to be a sympathetic Herr Ober, a headwaiter who rook the abandoned husband's plight to heart and filled the gap left by his departed family. Viennese husbands were gallant, romantic, and dashing—fescb, in a word—but they were also spoiled, pampered, and coddled. At table, especially, most of them became tyrants. As the summer progressed, the relationship between the employees of the restaurant and Herr Baron became, in a onesided way, extremely intimate. Herr Ober listened to excerpts of letters from the Barons family, he was initiated into family secrets, and he learned every detail of Herr Baron's state of health and digestion. He knew that Frail Baronin disliked Punschtorte and that, in spite of the happy relationship between the Baron and his wife, she refused even to be present when he are raw beef, which he adored. Herr Ober understood perfectly that his patron was having a gastronomical fling: A man separated from his family WAS bound to want a Wiener Rostbraten a rib steak, buried under fried onions, and might even go so far as to have Punschtorte on top of it. Herr Ober knew at once when there was no letter from Frau Baron in, and he helped to prepare the heart-shaped Nusstorte that Herr Baron sent to her by special courier for her birthday. A headwaiter who would not concern himself with these matters, who would recommend strawberries after cucumber salad without remembering that this combination was fatal for Herr Baron, deserved to lose a client. Herr Baron did not know the headwatter's name. If he had passed Herr Ober on the street, wearing a hat and street clothes, he would not have recognized this man, the same man to whom he had just confided the state of his liver. But in his customary place in the restaurant, moving among his patrons, he was Herr Ober, Herr Baron's closest summer friend.
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