Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  Winifred and I passed into companionable silence. From my seat, shifting a bit, I could watch the lights popping on up on Castle Hill across the Danube, the grand Royal Palace gleaming, the sweep of burnished gold and Italian marble on buildings high in the Buda hills. A boy in a green canvas jacket shuffled in and placed copies of Le Figaro on a table. At a nearby table an old man closed his eyes, a smile on his face. Nighttime was arriving in Budapest.

  Vladimir Markov, hovering, put a platter of rye bread on our table, each slice bearing a chunk of opaque lard speckled with paprika and salt, an unappealing morsel Winifred and I ignored. As we watched, three short men ambled in, instruments slung on their backs. One man with close-cropped side whiskers wore a short jacket over an embroidered vest with silver buttons. Another, carrying a cimbalom, was laughing, a cigar stuck to the corner of his mouth. They began setting up on a small platform in a back corner. Dressed in a homespun jacket with white linen sleeves bunched at the wrist, the old violinist frowned as he tuned his instrument. A tzigane music man smoking a long pipe. Gypsy music.

  Cassandra sank into her chair with her eyes closed. Winifred and I quietly sipped our wine.

  Adjusting her shirtwaist, Mrs. Pelham stood, whispered something to Cassandra, and then left the room, headed into the lobby. She glanced back over her shoulder as she passed by our table, her face tight and lined, eyes steely. A supercilious woman, a sprig of white carnation pinned to her chest—a decorative accent that clashed with her steel-girder demeanor. But in that face I spotted something else: her unmistakable dislike of her petulant charge. Doubtless willful Cassandra, notoriously spoiled, was not what she expected when she assumed control. Mrs. Pelham looked like an American—though Harold informed us she was a British subject—because her stony face bore an old-time New Englander’s puritanical resolve. That was probably why Cassandra’s parents had employed her. Rockbound Calvinist, taskmaster, the frightening warden at a woman’s penitentiary.

  Who, I now believed, was failing at her appointed task.

  Her raised voice drifted back from the lobby, a precise voice one uses on the telephone. She quickly returned to Cassandra’s table, her jaw set, but flinched as the Gypsy violinist suddenly ran a tentative bow across his instrument, the discordant chord jangling. With exquisite timing, the overhead lights dimmed, flickered threateningly, then popped back on, and Mrs. Pelham drew her lips into a thin, disapproving line. But then so did I, believing the hotel would become a ball of fire as I slept unsoundly on the second floor.

  Cassandra had crossed her arms defiantly, and Mrs. Pelham hissed at her. Two men sipping brandy near our table were frowning, and one smirked and told the other in German, “Sie ist nur ein Fratz!” She is a brat.

  Within minutes, however, the room stiffened as a phalanx of six or seven men, shoulders touching, boots stomping, moustaches vaguely identical, dominated the doorway to the lobby. Near us Vladimir Markov gasped, tugged nervously at his scarlet necktie, and looked at a loss. His solution amused me—shrugging, he simply backed into the kitchen. A nervous hum swept the room. A table of old Hungarian women, resplendent in summer hats with peacock feathers, stood up, tittered for a moment, then lapsed into silence.

  Harold, who obviously missed little, his eyes flitting here and there—the roving journalist on the prowl—bit his lip and beamed. He stuck his head between Winifred and me, like a bobbing puppet in a Punch and Judy street revue. “Lord! Count Frederic von Erhlich. Himself.”

  The count hesitated a moment, directed something to one of his aides—the moustache twittered—and strode forward. As he moved, people rose, nervous, stood at uneasy attention. Only the foreigners remained in their seats. I certainly wasn’t called to military attention. His men blocked the entrance. Cassandra, watching her future husband approach, sat upright, ashen, but as if on cue, manufactured a little girl’s obligatory smile, something done to please a demanding parent. Mrs. Pelham, already standing, seemed at wit’s end, her fingers gripping the table.

  The count stood before Cassandra. I saw a thick, stubby man, an oak tree stump whose ramrod stance made him appear taller. A wide, florid face, large dark eyes under bushy eyebrows, a small mouth with thick lips. A shaved round head. What startled was the moustache, salt-and-pepper, grandiose, a lacquered and twisted and manicured affair so slick and scalloped it looked like a pasted-on exaggeration worn by a vaudeville villain. A man in his late thirties, a veteran of some military frontier, he wore the regalia of an Austrian army man: high black boots so polished they seemed shellacked, belted brown trousers under a dark brown jacket emblazoned by a rainbow of celebratory ribbons and braids, and gaudy epaulettes bulky on his shoulders.

  A strutter, this man, I thought, an overgrown boy looking for a parade to join.

  Harold, always the gadfly, bounced up and sidled nearby, as one of the count’s aides, watching from the entrance, made a loud, clicking sound, a warning. Harold froze, a sheepish grin on his face.

  The count leaned into Cassandra’s table, his back to fussy Mrs. Pelham, and said something to her. Belatedly, Cassandra stood up, performed a feeble curtsy, nodding at him. Like that, his mission done, the count swiveled like a child’s mechanical wind-up toy, and left the room. Seamlessly, the aides separated as the count moved through, looking straight ahead, and immediately closed ranks behind him. The Hungarians in the room who’d stood up slowly dropped back into their seats. One woman fanned herself with a lavender-colored parchment fan.

  Harold rushed back to his chair next to me and announced in a voice loud enough for the room to hear, “The count has to catch the night steamer to Vienna. Some crisis. He can’t have dinner with Cassandra and her parents. He offered…no regrets.”

  Hearing his booming voice, Mrs. Pelham turned and glowered.

  “Harold, please,” I implored, “a little decorum, no?” I stared into his wide-eyed face, another little boy excited to be at the grown-up table.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” Harold blubbered excitedly. “This—this was unexpected and…and, well, unheard of. Titled folks don’t hobnob in the Café Europa. They send their aides.” A reflective pause. “Maybe the man has a bone of humanity in his body after all.”

  Winifred said snidely, “Well, I’d hardly call it hobnobbing, young man. He looked like he was dismissing his troops.”

  Harold burst out laughing and wagged a finger at Winifred’s icy glare.

  When I glanced back at Cassandra, now seated, she wore a relieved look on her face. Her pretty features softened, the wispy smile gone. She sat back, folded her arms across her chest and surveyed the room, as though for the first time realizing where she was. She stared at our table and then whispered to Mrs. Pelham, whose baleful eye deliberately dismissed us. Yet, stunning me, Cassandra locked eyes with mine—and for a second she smiled at me, as though we were old friends suddenly come upon each other in a strange country. Confused, I nodded back. She offered me a half-wave before looking away.

  “Tell me about the marriage, Mr. Gibbon,” I began quietly.

  Winifred groaned. “Really, Edna. Gossip?”

  I ignored her. “Of course. People fascinate, no? Don’t you read my short stories in Everybody’s?”

  She didn’t answer and chose to glower at Harold. I knew Winifred didn’t like him, a man constantly at our elbow, very much the irritant, but there was about him an innocence, the slack-jawed farm boy happy to be in the big city. I might enjoy his company, I realized—such a new American concoction: brash, confident, demanding, yet with that trace of Peck’s Bad Boy, the neighborhood lad who steals an old woman’s crabapples but makes sure she has firewood in the snowy winter.

  “Well,” he began, sitting back down, “it’s one of the transcontinental marriages we’ve read about for years now, largely started in 1895 by Consuelo Vanderbilt and her imperious mother, Alva. American socialite, too much money, too few brains, unbridled ambition. A mother who
feels she is lacking something—European certification. That is, a coveted title to emboss on your stationery. Royalty. Aristocracy. Looking back to good old Europe where the thrones are stored. So Alva finds an impoverished bit of nobility to marry, the Ninth Duke of Marlborough, and like that, her family is aristocracy. Rich and titled, though in a loveless marriage. The Duke gets railroad stock worth millions, courtesy of a matchmaker named Lady Paget. Everybody’s happy because a struggling European noble can stay in the cold castle and look down on the rest of us. Of course, he now has a crass American countess at his side.”

  “Sham,” Winifred muttered.

  “Exactly, but Consuelo’s marriage just got the international wheels rolling and spinning. A dozen such marriages that year alone. Since her marriage, it’s been high season on the Atlantic. Lord, there’s even a magazine called The Titled American that lists eligible but poor noblemen—bachelors. Winaretta Singer of the sewing machine magnates married a French nobleman.”

  Winifred was fidgeting in her seat. “What?” I asked her.

  “In Britain today, in the House of Lords, probably one-quarter have American connections. Worse, when the American socialite Jennie Jerome roped in Lord Randolph Churchill, we ended up with the current Home Secretary, a rearguard politician named Winston Churchill.”

  “Why? What?” I asked.

  She trembled, her eyes moist, which alarmed me. “He’s notoriously anti-suffrage. If I may quote the powerful man: ‘Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.’”

  Harold snickered. “Well, no one said such mercenary unions produced children we could be proud of.”

  “But why Count van Erhlich?” I asked, puzzled. “If he’s part of Franz Josef’s family, the—”

  Harold cut me off. “A family scandal, my dear lady. And the countess mother lacking hard cash. You see, the count’s father, a cousin to Franz Ferdinand, was involved in some nefarious business dealings a while back and was caught embezzling funds. Red-handed. The story got into the press. Handed a revolver, his was a necessary suicide in his mountaintop cabin. So the haughty countess, struggling, a little bit stunned, maneuvered her only son—a confirmed bachelor—back into the good graces of Hofburg.

  “Now he’s a force in the Military Chancery, the Militorkanzlerei, a severe martinet whose military service—hence the uniform he always wears—gave him cover for his incompetence. But, I gather, old Franz Josef, tottering these days toward death, likes him. The old All-Highest doesn’t like the heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, with his marriage to Sophie from Bohemia. The emperor lives in the past—a man who won’t ride in a motorcar and refuses to use an elevator, climbing six flights of stairs to his bedroom nightly. Currying favor, the count told Franz Josef that man was meant to ride horses—or to walk. The countess has always been an indulged favorite. Sycophants, both mother and son.

  “Of course, her son will never be allowed in court with Cassandra, who must be relegated to a castle in Moravia, but the marriage is condoned because, well, his mother needs the cash to appear regal at the pre-Lenten balls in Vienna. And the count is…a shadow in the empire. He could never be admitted officially to court functions anyway because you need the quartering—unbroken descent from eight paternal and eight maternal ancestors.”

  “Cassandra doesn’t appear too happy with it all.”

  “She has no say, although I understand she says a lot. A little outspoken, the Gibson Girl with the tennis racket.”

  I laughed. “You know, Harold, I wonder how you know so much.”

  He blinked rapidly. “I gotta know everything. It’s my job.”

  I shook my head. “It’s a sentimental tale out of some nineteenth-century romance by The Duchess. Rich American girl involved with cold-hearted European royalty. Humdrum bathos.”

  Harold’s eyes became pinpoints. “Yeah, well, an American tragedy, really.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Harold was wound up now, his voice rising. “Simple, really. I’m a romantic and there ain’t nothing romantic about it. Think about it. Nobody ends up happy. And when the war comes, as it will, and shortly, trust me—you’ll have an American girl left stranded in a cold mountain castle.”

  “Are you saying the count will die in war?”

  “Of course not. Yeah, he is a part of the war—he is war, given his position—but the war will end ancient feudalism, shatter the royal houses, and crush empires. The Romanovs, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns. Gone, gone, gone. One, two, three. No, the count will never be in battle, though he’ll rattle his ceremonial sword when he leads parades and thunders praise on dead poor boys, but he’ll just be a man stripped of his precious identity.”

  Winifred smiled. “But he’ll still be rich, courtesy of American industry.”

  “But without a title he won’t be—loved.”

  “Look.” Winifred pointed to the doorway.

  “The American peerage,” Harold announced. “Marcus and Cecelia Blaine.”

  Cassandra’s parents had come to gather her, though they refused to step into the café. Impatient, clearing her throat decorously, Cecelia Blaine caught Mrs. Pelham’s attention, and the woman jumped as though slapped. She whispered to Cassandra, who appeared hesitant to move, turning aside and deliberately facing the wall. Mrs. Pelham, lips in a hard line, scurried to the Blaines and began her scattered apology before she even neared them.

  Cecelia Blaine, dressed in a turquoise ruffled gown, a girlish pink silk shawl draped over her shoulders, was a big-boned woman with a long patrician face that must have been appealing—even striking—when she was a young debutante: a tipped-up nose over a cupid’s bow lips, a narrow forehead that disappeared into a magnificent pompadour festooned with ivory hairpins and colorful aigrettes. Such a youthful look on a matronly woman suggested that she was a woman who refused age—and wisdom. A battleship of a woman, a force beneath the layered lace and magenta-colored ostrich feathers.

  “Well, demand it,” Cecilia hissed to Mrs. Pelham, speaking over Mrs. Pelham’s shoulder in a voice thick and syrupy. “We have an engagement.”

  Tight-lipped, Mrs. Pelham sloughed back to Cassandra’s table, delivered the demand, only to be rebuffed. Cassandra waved at her parents, dismissively, and mouthed the words, Leave me alone.

  Marcus Blaine had little interest in standing there. He stepped back, ready to leave. A pot-bellied man with a round but determined face, dressed in a white linen summer suit stolen from Mark Twain, polished black shoes and pristine white spats, an incongruous bowler resting atop his bald head, he barely glanced at his rebellious daughter. Instead, his eyes took in the room in dismissive judgment. The shadowy corners, the threadbare oriental carpets, the old rose-colored damask draperies, and the quaint chromolithographs of old Buda and OBuda hanging lopsidedly on the far wall all suggested to him a place he cared not visit. He withdrew his gold watch fob and checked the time, stubby fingers circling the timepiece. A garish gold ring with an oversized amethyst stone on his index finger caught the overhead light.

  “Enough, Cecilia. Leave her to her doom.”

  Harold laughed uproariously, and the man’s eyes swept our table. A flash of coldness covered me, so intense his raw condemnation of what he saw. Riffraff, ne’er-do-wells, rag-tag sojourners in a shabby café.

  When they left, Cassandra let out that same bubbly laugh she’d used before, but now it sounded hollow, shrill. A vein on the side of Mrs. Pelham’s neck jutted out, throbbed. A strand of vagrant white hair had broken free from her careful bun.

  “A curious mingling,” I said out loud. “The Old World and the New. The Austrian count and the pompous American man of affairs.”

  Winifred turned to Harold. “The father never comes in here?”

  “What do you think?”

  “And yet he stays at the Hotel Árpád,” I added.

  “They occupy the top
floor, all of it, a grand suite of rooms. They travel back and forth to America while he’s orchestrating an Aetna building on Rákóczi. The last time they traveled, Cassandra refused to go with them because she’d met Endre and…well, love was in the air. They had no choice but to leave her in the care of Mrs. Pelham, which made her more contrary. The Blaines are fawned upon here, and Cecelia has a dislike of anyone who doesn’t speak English. She has an American cook in their rooms, an American maid. Rumor has it Marcus is part owner of the hotel.”

  “How did Cecilia feel about Cassandra and Endre?”

  “She went looking for a count.”

  “And found one,” I concluded.

  “Well, they’re always standing around like potted plants, waiting to be spotted, hands out, last year’s Prince Albert morning coat a little shiny in harsh daylight.”

  “Endre is a good-looking man,” I noted. “Very dramatic in a swashbuckler way. A pirate on the high seas. The count, frankly, reminds me of a stolid pig farmer donning his Sunday best.”

  “Edna, really,” Winifred admonished. “Sometimes you sound so…” She paused.

  “Honest?”

  “I was going to say giddy.”

  “But if Cassandra is so rebellious, why is she going along with the wedding plans?” I asked.

  Harold shrugged his shoulders. “Because her mother has told her it’s a contract that cannot be broken.”

  “Poppycock,” I said.

  “They’ve scared her, and the result is that.” He pointed to the girl.