The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  “You mean the milk? Johnson and Johnson?”

  “All of it. Milk, diaper cloths, everything.” Her eyes narrowed, and I remember thinking she must be concentrating deeply on something, maybe the possible new sources of supplies, some alternative means of getting milk and diapers to the native mothers of the Bahamas. I sat and watched her, pen poised.

  After some time, she turned to me and pointed her finger at the leather bag containing my Kodak 35.

  “Be sure you get a few good photographs,” she said. “A picture says a thousand words.”

  Which I did, of course, and if you happen to come across that particular copy of Metropolitan magazine, the October 1941 issue, you’ll find two photographs of Wallis illustrating the “Lady of Nassau” column on the inside back cover. The first and larger one shows her dressed to the nines in a constellation of jewels and a Mainbocher gown the color of fresh cream, dancing with HRH at some charity ball or another. In the second one, she’s wearing her Red Cross uniform and an expression of deep compassion, as she hands a box of canned milk to a grateful Negro mother on Cat Island.

  There had been several more cruises since, to say nothing of the mornings spent packing parcels and rolling bandages at the Red Cross, the afternoons at the duchess’s maternity clinic in Grants Town, part of the Negro district they called Over-the-Hill. Now it was Christmas, another whirl of charity. She worked tirelessly at her causes, the Duchess of Windsor. She was like a lioness on the hunt. Those presents beneath her tree were only the latest kill.

  Together, we listened to the footsteps of Mrs. Gudewill and Miss Drewes clattering down the hallway. She still sat on the sofa, and her back was wonderfully straight, like a board, so that she only had to swivel her long neck and point her square jaw upward. She leaned her elbow on the sofa back and smiled at me. “Come sit. I have a little something for you too.”

  I positioned myself exactly where Miss Drewes had been. When I sat, the warmth of my predecessor seeped through the cushions into the backs of my legs. The duchess’s perfume floated free. I think it was Chanel. She reached for the bell on the table and asked if I wanted fresh coffee.

  “Coffee’s lovely, thank you.”

  “Have you brought your column?”

  I opened my pocketbook. “Right here. A busy month, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, it was awful.” She opened the drawer in the lamp table and took out her spectacles. Not everybody knew that the duchess wore readers, but I did. I had her trust, you see. She slipped them over her ears and took the typewritten page from me. When the butler arrived, he was already carrying the coffee service. He set the tray before us, piled the tea things on the existing tray, bore it all away while the duchess’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth like the typewriter itself, examining each word. I poured the coffee. Considered crossing the room to the crystal decanters on their own tray, another silver tray, the place was lousy with them, but there were only so many liberties the duchess would allow, and you had to count them carefully to make sure you didn’t exceed your allotment. So I added cream instead, precious cream and precious sugar, and sipped my coffee as I waited for her to finish.

  “Very nice.” She unhooked her spectacles and smiled at me. “Especially that bit about the bazaar. Next month you’ll have an account of the Christmas gifts, won’t you? Giving them away to the slum children? Poor lambs.”

  “Of course.”

  She handed me the column, which I tucked back into my pocketbook. The portico protected the room from the sunshine, and the air was cool, a relief after the unusual heat outdoors. Still, a trickle of perspiration made its way down my spine. The duchess ignored the coffee service and folded her hands on her lap. “We’ve worked so hard,” she said. “I’m awfully proud of this Red Cross business. Between that and the clinics, my God, they can’t say I haven’t done my bit.”

  “A maternity clinic is such an ideal cause.”

  “Brilliant, isn’t it? Of course it’s desperately needed. They breed like rabbits, you know, and show about as much care for their infants.”

  My hands enclosed my pocketbook. I stared at her thin red lips.

  “Was there anything else?” she said.

  There was an expectant look on her face, around her eyebrows, which were groomed into high, thin arches that suggested perpetual interest. I thought maybe she’d heard the crackle of the envelope inside the pocketbook. I heard her voice in my head. They breed like rabbits.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing else.”

  “Very well, then. Let’s— Oh, my darlings!”

  A familiar yipping sounded from the doorway. The duchess’s face lit like the Christmas tree in the corner. She held out her long, bony arms like a mother receiving a beloved child. Into those arms leapt Preezie and Pookie, panting and licking and wriggling, terrier coats as glossy as the duchess’s own coiffure, festive red bows tied around their necks. Detto settled himself at her feet, looking soulful. The duke followed, although he stopped short of his wife’s arms and merely stuck his hands in his pockets and grinned at the sight before him, the scene of mutual worship.

  “You see,” he said, “you see, Mrs. Randolph, if only the damned papers would show them this. Did you ever see such affection?”

  “Hardly ever,” I said. “Good morning, Your Highness. Merry Christmas.”

  “Yes, yes. Happy Christmas. Fine day, eh?”

  “The cake, David, darling. Get me a piece of cake.”

  The duke bent forward and plucked a generous wedge of rum cake from the plate on the coffee tray. The duchess snatched it from his fingers and broke it in two. In her lap, the dogs went wild. “Be patient, darlings,” she said, laughing, and the darlings went still, didn’t they, except for the furious wagging of their identical tails, while they received their Christmas rum cake from the fingers of the Duchess of Windsor, just like your dog at home.

  “Aren’t they precious,” said the duchess, in her throatiest voice.

  “Aren’t they,” I said.

  “It’s just because it’s Christmas. Ordinarily we’re very strict.”

  “Very strict,” said the duke.

  “Poor darlings, they’ve had such a time of it. This awful, awful war.”

  “At least they’re out of danger, aren’t they? A long way from Europe.”

  She buried her face in the silky pillow behind Preezie’s ear. “Yes, thank God. I only wish it were over, don’t you? One way or another, so we can get on with our lives, so we can settle somewhere, and David can take on a more suitable job. Governor of Australia, perhaps, that’s proper work for a man of his training. Don’t you wish that? Just that it were over.”

  “Preferably by victory, of course.”

  “Oh, of course,” said the duke. “Naturally one longs for victory.”

  The dogs, having finished their snack, now leapt back onto the rug and covered the duke’s shoes. “David, since you’re here,” said the duchess.

  “What, my darling?”

  “Shall we give Lulu her present?”

  “Oh! Yes, yes.”

  “My goodness, it’s hardly—I wasn’t expecting—”

  “Of course you weren’t. But we wanted to give you something, a little token. David, go fetch Lulu’s present from under the tree. We’re so awfully grateful, you know.”

  “Awfully grateful,” said the duke. Obedient as ever, he had gone to the tree, dogs at his heels, and bent to rummage out a small wrapped box from the bounty beneath. I stared at his pinstriped back, his immaculate shoulders, his shiny gold hair, and thought, as I occasionally did, My God, he was the king of England.

  The duchess watched him return. “It’s just a token, of course.”

  “There’s really no need at all—”

  “Now, now. Not another word. David and I, there’s nothing we admire so much as loyalty, Lulu, and you’ve been so loyal, such a good friend to us.” She took the box from her husband’s hand. “And I want you to know how much that means to us, in our
humble little way, stuck as we are out here like this.”

  “You’re too kind. I’ve done my job, that’s all. Just earning a living.”

  She placed the gift in my hands. “We both know it’s so much more than that.”

  The box was heavier than it looked, wrapped in green foil paper. The tag read To Lulu, Merry Christmas from the Windsors, the same way you might write Merry Christmas from the Browns, except in Wallis’s elegant handwriting that no mere Mrs. Brown could possibly duplicate. I untied the bow and the paper fell apart, revealing a plain red box stamped Cartier.

  “Open it,” said the duchess.

  I lifted the lid, and I’ll be damned if a pair of sapphire earrings didn’t glitter there in a pavé diamond setting, all nestled in velvet. I remember gasping. I don’t think I said an actual word. One of the dogs nipped my ankle, and I didn’t even flinch.

  Wallis set her hand on my knee.

  “As I said. There’s nothing we admire so much as loyalty.”

  You know, it’s a funny word, loyalty. Loyalty to what? And why? And especially how, that’s the kicker. It seems to me that loyalty requires a suspension of logic, of truth even. Like faith, like superstition, a thing you cling to in defiance of what lies before you in plain sight. On the other hand—like faith or superstition, like love itself—where’s the comfort in a world without it? We human beings possess a marvelous capacity to fool ourselves—oh, not me, never me, you tell yourself, but believe me, sweetheart, you do—and in the course of the six months, earning a salary of my very own, hobnobbing with the haute, I had fallen into a certain fatal habit of mine, for the second time in my life, a weakness perhaps born of certain circumstances in my childhood. I mean, isn’t that supposed to be the case? The circumstances of your childhood determine your character, the entire course of your future, your fate, your destiny, all of it. You are just a mere slave to your subconscious.

  Anyway, the sight of those earrings. The weight of them, the twinkle. I didn’t know whether to cry or vomit or run. In the end, I set the box on the cushion beside me and opened the clasp of my pocketbook.

  “I nearly forgot, in all the excitement,” I said. “Someone stopped by the bungalow with a special delivery.”

  Elfriede

  November 1900

  (Germany)

  A letter arrives for Elfriede, postmarked London. She notices the edge of the envelope, the unfamiliar stamp half-hidden by a napkin, while she’s pouring the coffee. Maybe her heart doesn’t quite stop. But her fingers go limp, and the pot, the pot, the beautiful porcelain coffeepot slips from her hand to land in an awful crash on the silver breakfast tray. Nothing breaks, thank goodness. Only a splash of coffee on her dress. She lifts the napkin and dabs. Reads the name now fully exposed on the envelope—hers, written in firm black handwriting, Frau Baroness von Kleist, and beneath it Schloss Kleist, Westphalia, Deutschland—and the lettering around the postmark circle. lon and the date, 2 nov 1900, two days ago. Her fingers shake. She sets down the napkin, hiding the envelope once more.

  A month has passed since Gerhard’s fever broke. There have been setbacks. Relapses. But like a mountain trail, his recovery trends inexorably upward, toward some summit on which he will inhabit his old, strong self. A fortnight ago, he felt well enough to rise from his bed and manage a few steps around the bedroom, supported by his valet. Now he bathes and dresses and walks in determined laps around the upper floor. Yesterday he descended the stairs, on Elfriede’s steadying arm, and spent an hour in his study. Today, the weather’s improved, and Elfriede has ordered the open landau for eleven o’clock, so she and Gerhard, together with Johann and Nurse, will ride about the estate. The fresh air and wholesome sunshine will do everyone some good. And this is all as it should be. Gerhard’s recovery is a sign from God, after all, a deliverance from evil. Yea, so the penitent shall return to her husband, and he shall be saved, and she shall covet no more neighbors, she shall harbor no more sinful love, she shall do him no evil the rest of her days, amen.

  No, she doesn’t think about Wilfred. Her days are busy. Her discipline is taut. The door of her mind is shut tight against ginger hair and wide smiles and gangly limbs. But she hasn’t forgotten him. He’s there like a ghost, like the air, invisible, unconscious, life-giving, there.

  Now here. Under the napkin beneath her fingertips. She tries again to pour her coffee, and this time, though the stream wavers as it falls into her cup, she succeeds. She sips the coffee and lifts the cover from her toast. The sunshine spills through her bedroom window, warming the back of her neck. She sleeps in the bedroom suite next to Gerhard’s, the bedroom that used to belong to Gerhard’s mother. When Elfriede was a newlywed, she used this room only to dress and bathe, sometimes to write letters at the escritoire near one of the tall sash windows overlooking the gardens. Once Johann was born, she moved her sleeping quarters here so the baby wouldn’t disturb his father during those nighttime feedings. A temporary measure, as she thought. Three years later, she’s returned and thinks she ought to have the curtains replaced, the bed hangings redone in a lighter fabric. The worn tapestry rug replaced with something softer. Decent, modern plumbing installed in the bathroom.

  On the other side of the wall, Gerhard’s valet bathes and dresses his master. Elfriede hears their voices, though she can’t make out the words—Gerhard’s gruff baritone, the valet’s soothing tenor. In that first year of marriage, honeymoon followed by pregnancy, Gerhard used to rise much earlier, six o’clock or even five, while Elfriede lingered abed until the maid arrived with her chocolate at eight. Now their roles are reversed. Elfriede’s up at six, bathed and dressed by six forty-five, upstairs in the nursery at seven, downstairs for her breakfast tray at eight, just as Gerhard wakes and rises from his own bed. These are Herr Doktor Rosenblatt’s instructions, by the way. Gerhard’s an invalid who needs his rest. At nine o’clock, Elfriede will knock on his door with a breakfast tray. She likes to do this herself, to pour his coffee and butter his toast, to read to him from the newspaper because his eyes are still weak. It’s the least she can do.

  From the other side of the wall comes a thick laugh. Elfriede swallows her toast and looks at the clock on the mantel. Eight thirty-two. Drinks her coffee. Knocks the top from the egg in its porcelain cup. She can’t taste a thing, but she goes on eating anyway. Later, she won’t remember any of this. Won’t remember a single bite of that breakfast, although she eats it all, every crumb, every drop, egg and toast and fruit, cold ham, coffee with milk. When there’s nothing left, she looks again at the clock—eight forty-eight—and wipes her fingers on the napkin before she picks up the letter from the corner of the tray.

  And what about Elfriede’s parents, by the way? What about her sister who stood bridesmaid, and her two brothers with their families? Why haven’t they offered her any support against the united von Kleist will? Elfriede’s always supposed they’re ashamed of her. But maybe it’s more complicated than that.

  Think of the wedding feast. The Hofmeisters lined up along one side of the table, wearing their best, nails clean, hair arranged, garnets instead of rubies, small freshwater pearls instead of South Sea pebbles, tiny respectable diamonds, nervous and polite. Then the von Kleists, whose forebears built Schloss Kleist, whose forebears’ forebears built the castle that had existed before it, and so on and so forth, whose clothing betrayed no particular effort, whose jewels came from vaults instead of jewelry shops. Elfriede still remembers the pain with which she gazed down that long, polished table and found her mother’s white face, frozen in mortification, across from Helga’s face, frozen in distaste. Probably there was some error to do with a spoon. Next to Elfriede, Gerhard was speaking to the man on his left, a grand duke who had traveled from St. Petersburg for the wedding. On Elfriede’s right sat the grand duchess, who was English and spoke no German, and whose expression of cynical amusement cut more deeply than Helga’s distaste. (But remember now, Elfriede didn’t cry until later that evening.)

  Anyway, Elfri
ede’s mother died of pneumonia just before Christmas that year, and Elfriede was never that close to her sister, five years older, who soon married a businessman and moved to Berlin. Her father came to visit after Johann was born, but the climate of the house—Elfriede’s nervous disorder, the disdain of Helga and Ulrika, the stiffness of Gerhard—seemed to bewilder him, and he’s never returned. Her brothers are busy with their own families and businesses. Elfriede, by far the youngest, the baby, the afterthought, sometimes feels like a boat cut adrift to find its own shore.

  Still, she thinks of her family often, and she thinks of them now as she holds this letter in her hand. She thinks of the last time she saw her mother, at the beginning of December, when Elfriede had been married for five months and the fatal pneumonia was just a slight cough, nothing to worry about. Naturally her mother was delighted by the news of Elfriede’s pregnancy. Full of advice that Elfriede ignored and no longer remembers. (Sometimes, Elfriede wonders whether she should have taken note of her mother’s strictures, and maybe then she would have avoided all the misery that followed. Oh well.) They sat in a cozy music room in the eastern wing, Elfriede’s favorite part of the house, where she used to play the piano for hours and hours while Gerhard attended to business in his study. They drank coffee and ate cake, and nobody disturbed them. Elfriede’s mother kept gazing in rapture at her daughter’s belly, as if unable to believe that a grandchild existed therein. The conversation moved from advice to trivia, gossip and weather and so on, and Elfriede remembers thinking that her mother betrayed a certain nervous animation, unusual to her.