He looks up. “Can you not even bear to kiss me, then?”
“Of course I can bear to kiss you.” Elfriede sits beside him and pats his bony knee. Leans forward and places a kiss on his damp lips. “But we can’t just wave a wand and make everything the way it was before. It’s been three years. So much has happened. We’ve both been wrong.”
“Ah, God.” He sets his elbows on his knees, sets his head in his hands, his fingers in his hair.
“Don’t, darling. Don’t despair. My God, you’re like a child yourself, sometimes. Just because we can’t wave a wand doesn’t make it impossible. Of course we can be man and wife again. We already are, remember? I don’t remember a divorce. I don’t remember renouncing any vows.”
Instead of smiling or even laughing, he makes another noise of agony.
Elfriede touches his stiff, short hair. “Listen to me. Of course I want nothing but the best for Johann. I want him to have brothers and sisters to play with, to be his family when we’re gone.”
There’s a little silence, occupied only by the sound of Gerhard’s breath. “Elfriede? Do you mean this?”
“But we have all the time in the world for these things. There’s no hurry at all. I’m not going to leave you. I won’t leave my son. Never again, do you see? I’ve come home. So we have time for all of this. We have time to start fresh from the beginning, to wipe away the past and start again, two clean souls—”
“Yes, yes—”
“—forgive each other for these terrible sins and start again—”
He lifts his head and stares at her. “Yes, forgive me. Forgive me.”
“Of course.”
“Forgive me.”
“Gerhard, you’re weeping.”
“It’s nothing. It’s nothing.” He takes her hands and bends over them, holding her fingers against his lips, almost as if praying. When he straightens, his eyes are bright and wet, his pale lashes stuck together. He lifts her to her feet and tucks her arm back in the shelter of his elbow. “We’ll go into the house now. We’ll start again, our souls clean, our hearts pure. How does that sound, Elfriede?”
Ah, what a Romantic he is, this Gerhard.
Instead of exhausting him, the morning’s exercise seems to have invigorated Gerhard. He escorts his wife into the house, kisses her tenderly, and practically bounds off down the hallway to his study, to be called for when luncheon’s ready. Typhoid, what typhoid? He’s a new man.
Elfriede, on the other hand. She glances at the clock—eleven-thirty—and considers the hour to be consumed before luncheon. She finds the housekeeper and informs her that she and Gerhard will take the meal together in the family dining room, that she and Gerhard will now be taking their afternoon and evening meals together unless notice is otherwise given. The housekeeper responds with a small smile, a tiny flicker of eyebrow that might mean relief, or satisfaction, or cynicism—who really knew the opinions of servants? Always there was this barrier. This metal shield between you and them. Elfriede returns what she hopes is a warm smile and drags herself up the stairs to her room to change for luncheon. She ought to wear something pretty, something to please her husband, something that will begin to bridge the distance between them.
Elfriede doesn’t ring the maid to help her. She’s used to dressing herself, and she dislikes the invasion of privacy that service requires. The poking and prodding of a stranger’s hands, the foreign gaze on her skin. As she unfastens her buttons, she discovers her fingers are shaking. That her stomach is somehow sick. And why? This is only what she wants, after all. This is only the answer to her prayer. Redemption. Resurrection! In time she’ll be a good mother. In time she’ll be a good wife, and Wilfred—yes, say his name, don’t be afraid—Wilfred, in some way she can’t quite explain to herself, can’t put into words, has given her the courage to do this thing, to return to her abandoned home and take up the unfinished yarns of her life and weave them together once more. She has been given this chance! She won’t waste it. Just imagine Johann with a brother, a sister. Imagine the joy on Gerhard’s face. Imagine a whole, happy, boisterous family. A miracle! Hers to create. Fingers, behave. Stomach, steady yourself. Button after button. White skin under sunlight. Oh God, she’s dizzy. She sits on the divan and puts her head between her knees. On the floor, the tweed skirt lies crumpled. The ivory blouse on top of that. The woolen jacket, she’s sitting on it. A knock on the door. She jumps to her feet and stares at the connecting door, the one attached to Gerhard’s bedroom, but this knock comes from the other door, the outer door.
“One moment,” she says.
One by one, she lifts the discarded garments and carries them to the wardrobe. Hangs them in place and selects a dress of rose-colored silk for luncheon, which she slides on over her corset and petticoat. The buttons go down her back, impossible to reach them all, so she fastens as many as she can and sits in the chair before the escritoire.
“Come in,” she says.
Enter Nurse, in the same high-necked dress of dark green wool as this morning. Nurses don’t change clothes in the middle of the day. She walks to the center of the rug, in the center of the room, and folds her hands. “I’ve come to tender my resignation.”
“Your resignation?”
“Yes, Frau. I can no longer—can no longer—” She pulls a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs swiftly at her eyes, which are already red.
Elfriede stares at her in amazement.
“Why, whatever’s wrong? Has something happened?”
“No, Frau. I simply can’t stay, that’s all.”
“Why not? Is it me? Can’t you bear to share him with me? Because I assure you—”
“Share him? Share him?” Poor Nurse is properly crying now, mopping away at her eyes.
Elfriede forgets her buttons and springs from the chair. “You mustn’t, Nurse. You mustn’t. I’m not a bit jealous. We’ll love him together.”
“Oh . . . oh . . .”
“Sit down. Come.” Elfriede leads her to the divan and makes her sit. “I’ll ring for coffee. Milk? Would you rather have—”
“Stop it. Stop it. You’re murdering me.”
“Murdering—”
“I’m pregnant!”
Everything stops, the beat of the universe. The air, the sunlight crystallize in the room. Elfriede’s mouth hangs half-open, in the act of saying the rest of her sentence, whatever it might have been. She never will remember.
“I’m with child,” Nurse says, more calmly. For some reason, the truth stops her tears, at least for the moment. She makes a last few dabs at her eyes and cheeks and slips the handkerchief back into her sleeve.
Elfriede must say something, of course. But what?
“I suppose,” she says, quite slow, “I suppose I need not ask whose child.”
“You see why I have tendered my resignation.”
“Yes, I see.” Elfriede stares at her hands, clasped at her waist. Strangely, they’ve stopped trembling. Her stomach has righted itself. Her head’s not dizzy anymore. She feels a little like she’s in a tunnel, that’s all, as if the sights and sounds of the room are just echoes of themselves, distant and not quite real. Gerhard and Nurse. Dear me. And then, poor Gerhard. He must have been so lonely. Forgive me, forgive me, he cried in the summerhouse, shedding tears of remorse on her hands. Now she understands. “How much time?” she finds herself asking.
“Since Christmas. I did try to be careful, Frau, but sometimes I couldn’t—”
“I mean how much time until the baby’s born.”
“Oh. In May, I think. The end of May.”
“Ah, then it was conceived in August. How lovely.”
“Lovely?”
Elfriede sits on the divan and reaches out to clasp Nurse’s damp hand. She says kindly, “Are you very much in love with him?”
“I—no, of course—I mean—oh, Frau von Kleist—”
“Now, don’t cry. Don’t weep so. Everything will be all right, I promise.”
“We
didn’t mean it. We never meant to.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I don’t know what came over us.”
“Hush, now. You were lonely, that’s all. Both of you, and Johann between you. Of course you fell in love.”
Nurse slides to the floor, sobbing.
“You must hate me,” she gasps. “How I’ve betrayed you. Your son and then your husband. I’m a wretch, a wretch.”
“Does he know?” Elfriede asks gently, stroking Nurse’s hair.
“N-n-no. I only suspected—and then he was sick—”
“I see. Of course.”
“It was my fault. Don’t blame him, Frau. I went to him. I felt so sorry for him. I only meant to comfort him . . . I loved him so . . . I couldn’t bear it, how sad he was, how hopeless. He thought you might never come back.”
“Then you made him happy.”
“No. Not even that.” Nurse’s sobs are ebbing now. She turns her head to the side and stares at the wall, which happens to be the one shared with Gerhard’s chamber. “He felt terrible afterward. I think you should know that, how terrible he felt, the first time we did it. He wept, Frau, he wept in my arms like a child. He railed at himself. But then . . .”
“But then it got easier, didn’t it? I imagine the first time must be the worst. Particularly for a man like Gerhard, so terribly loyal and full of ideals. It must have broken his heart, at first. But then once you’ve started, how can you stop? You’ve already sinned, I suppose. It’s done. You might as well go on.”
“A man like the baron has needs, Frau.” Nurse sniffs. She rises from the floor and smooths her hair. “Anyway, I’ll be going. The upstairs maid is watching poor young Johann. I don’t want to say good-bye, it will be too hard for us both. You won’t tell Ger— You won’t tell Herr von Kleist, please? It’s better this way.”
“I don’t understand.”
Nurse turns to face Elfriede, and the expression on her broad, tanned, attractive face is brave and tragic, maybe a little too brave and tragic. “It’s better he never knows. I’ll go to stay with my sister. I’ve some money saved—”
“My dear. My dear girl. You mustn’t think of it.”
“I—I beg your pardon, Frau?”
Elfriede rises from the divan. Her heart is so full of—of something, some airy substance—she almost levitates. “Never knows he’s fathered a child? His poor child never to know his own father? His own brother?”
“Frau von Kleist!”
She picks up Nurse’s horrified hands. “We are all sinners, Nurse. We are none of us blameless in this mortal life. Why should we pile evil upon evil? You must stay here, of course. You must let us take care of you. If Gerhard has fathered a child, he must of course be a father to his child. It’s immoral to do otherwise.”
“But I can’t! Stay under this roof! It’s not—it’s not decent!”
“You will please let me judge the decency of the affair. I am, after all, the wronged party.” Elfriede smiles as she says this. Wronged party. Like a court of law, like the words on some document, impervious to the queer vagaries of the human heart, the unexpected levitations to which it’s subject. Wronged party. She thinks of Gerhard banging away atop Nurse in the summer twilight, roaring out his ecstasy as he spent. Did they do it in the baron’s bedroom? Some other chamber? By day or by night? Surely not Nurse’s bedroom, which she shares with Johann’s little cot. Well, wherever it was, whenever it was. Her heart aches for Gerhard’s guilt, the suffering he must have felt after the pleasures of copulation died away. Wronged party. If only she could laugh right now, if only she could laugh out loud and not have poor Nurse stare at her like you stared at a madwoman.
Lulu
December 1941
(The Bahamas)
The way I heard the story is this. When he first came to Nassau, at the invitation of none other than Harold Christie, who could smell money on a man the same way sharks smelled blood in the water, Harry Oakes (he had not yet been awarded his baronetcy by a grateful Empire) walked into the British Colonial Hotel in his rough clothes and his rough accent and got the rough treatment from the management. So he bought the place. End of story.
Probably the real history isn’t so simple as that, but human beings love nothing so much as a tale that confirms their particular prejudices, so I’ll let it stand. And the ending’s the same, either way. Harry Oakes bought the British Colonial, that much is indisputable, and in December of 1941 his daughter Nancy came out into society inside the walls of its ballroom. Oh, it was a swell party, believe me. I was there.
I was there, and so were the duke and duchess, and just about everybody of note in the Bahamas, including Alfred de Marigny. Freddie came in a few minutes late, dressed to the nines, as we all were, crisp and sleek and deeply tanned. He grabbed a coupe of champagne from a nearby waiter, caught my eye, smiled, and wandered over.
“I thought I might find you here,” he said.
“Wouldn’t miss it. How was the hunting?”
“Terrible.”
“I didn’t realize you were such friends with the Oakeses.”
Freddie pulled out a cigarette case and tilted it toward my neck. I shook my head. He pulled out one of his strong, brown-papered cigarettes and ejected a flame from his gold lighter, the one his ex-wife had given him for a wedding present. “I like Oakes,” he said. “I like the way he is his own man, the way he stands up to these Bay Street fellows.”
“Yes? Anything else you like?”
He glanced to a nearby cluster of guests. “How lovely you look this evening, Mrs. Randolph. That dress is very much becoming to you.”
“Why, thanks. My housekeeper recommended it.”
“Your housekeeper has an excellent eye.”
“So do you, I hear.”
He opened his mouth. I smiled. We had come to a certain understanding, Freddie and I, landlord and tenant. I think he had made the offer of the cottage with certain hopes, and maybe Veryl was right. Maybe I should have entertained those hopes, maybe I should have put on my red dress and perfume and invited him over for cocktails, put on a record or two, lit some candles, all those things. But I had not. I couldn’t say why. Freddie was a good bet, a gentleman, someone I could like enormously and never fall in love with. Ideal, really. And now he had caught the attention of Miss Nancy Oakes, who always got what she wanted, and I wondered if the twinge I felt in my ribs had something to do with regret or something else.
“Just remember, she’s only seventeen,” I said. “She’s got a hell of a lot to learn, even if she’s the last one to admit it.”
“Ah, Lulu—”
But the commotion was already starting, the entrance of Miss Nancy Oakes on her father’s stocky arm. We turned to the entrance of the ballroom and shuffled back respectfully, while the orchestra made important noises. I remember Miss Oakes wore a green silk dress that perfectly suited her slender figure, and turned her auburn hair especially bright beneath the incandescent lights. I remember how her smile consumed her face and lit her skin from underneath; the way you smile when you’re thrillingly conscious of everyone’s gaze, when you’re experiencing the admiration of every single person in a ballroom like that, when you’re drinking it all in one gulp.
I remember the enchanted expression on Alfred de Marigny’s face, and how I thought, with remarkable detachment, He’s a goner.
Sir Harry Oakes claimed the first dance with his daughter, of course, but when he returned her to the table she grabbed de Marigny’s hand and said something to him, I don’t know what. Whatever it was, it acted as a signal. He stubbed out his cigarette, rose and led her to the floor, or maybe she led him, I don’t recall exactly. I returned to my champagne and drank it all in one marvelous gulp. Across the room, the duke drew his wife from her seat and led her to dance. I checked my watch and saw that the supper wasn’t going to be served for at least another couple of hours.
I knew I should turn to my left-hand companion and strike up some kind of
conversation. I knew I should engage with my fellow man, cadge a dance or two from my fellow man—why, it was part of my job, wasn’t it? I was on duty. The social event of the season, don’t you know, and a breathless America awaited my account of the evening. The violins sang, the trombones slid up and down, up and down. The air stank of cigarettes and perfume. Thank God it wasn’t July, I thought. I opened my evening purse and pulled out my Kodak 35. The duchess wore a long, beautifully draped Mainbocher gown of sapphire blue; the duke swept her around the edge of the dancers. She was smiling, had her head tilted back. How she loved to dance, that woman. I lifted the camera and waited patiently until they came into profile through the split finder, aligned, and snap. And again. Next to me, a stoutish, pink-faced man in a wilted collar glanced my way and stubbed out his cigarette, as if he meant business. I excused myself and pivoted toward the doorway, stuffing the camera back into my purse as I went.
Outside, the air reeked of the sea. I made for the beach, which belonged to the hotel and in daylight hours would be spangled with cabanas and umbrellas. Now it was empty and sort of mysterious, the sand unraked, forming cool hollows in which to lose your foot. I took off my shoes and stepped carefully, carefully, until I found just the spot and settled there, in my dress of wine-colored silk, and lit a cigarette while the waves lapped nearby. In the western sky, a half-moon glowed above the horizon, gilding the length of Hog Island before me. The lighthouse put out a faithful beam to the left. The universe beat its slow, thirsty pulse.
I heard the footsteps in the sand an instant before the voice called out, closer than I expected.
“Abandoning hope so soon?”
I closed my eyes.
“Just the same old, wasn’t it? Daddy throws a party for his poor little rich girl, society swoons.”
He dropped into the sand. Not so close as to touch me but close enough that I felt his warmth and smelled his skin. I held out the cigarette. He took it from my fingers and returned it a moment later. I opened my eyes. In my other hand lay the cigarette lighter, clenched in my palm. I curled the fingers outward, and the metal caught some light from the moon.
The Golden Hour Page 17
