Elfriede hesitates. “No,” she says, turning to the window to watch the children. “He’s going home to England, I believe.”
“But what about—I beg your pardon, Frau, but—”
“For God’s sake, Charlotte, will you nurse the poor child? That is your job, isn’t it?”
“Frau!”
Elfriede turns from the window. “My personal affairs are not your business, Charlotte. Your business is the children, that’s all.”
The stunned Charlotte drops into Elfriede’s armchair and unbuttons her bodice. Gertrud, who’s refused all breakfast in protest at being weaned, dives at Nurse’s nipple and suckles frantically. The light from the window drenches them both, and Gertrud’s eyes close in bliss. There’s no sound in the room but the smacks of her mouth, no movement except the working of her jaw and the ecstatic clenching of her fingers. The familiar pangs start to pull in Elfriede’s belly. She pivots away to her dresser and pretends to fiddle with the contents of the top drawer.
In a low voice, Charlotte says, “No, it’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I have a right, that’s all. They’re my children.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your personal affairs, indeed. Your affairs are my affairs, Frau. If we’re going to live here, or in England, or in Germany with that awful woman, that woman who hates me—”
“Don’t worry about her. You’ll be taken care of, wherever we go. You’ll stay with us. You and the children.”
“What about Mr. Thorpe? Does he really want—”
“Mr. Thorpe is not your concern.”
“You can’t just—you can’t just—” Charlotte looks down at her daughter’s flaxen head. “We’re not baggage, you know.”
“Of course you’re not baggage. You’re family. You know I’m as devoted to the girls as to Johann.”
Charlotte shakes her head.
“It’s true,” Elfriede says. “I couldn’t love the girls more if they were mine. I’d do anything to—”
“The girls. The girls. Yes, the girls.” Charlotte looks back up. Her eyes are fierce and red. “But what about me, Frau? What’s to become of me?”
“Why—why—whatever you want, of course. You’re their mother.”
Charlotte places her forefinger in the corner of Gertrud’s mouth, breaking the seal. She tucks her breast away and buttons her bodice ruthlessly to the neck. Gertrud whimpers and claws at the fabric. Charlotte rises to her feet.
“Indeed I am, Frau,” she says. “Indeed I am.”
At dinner that evening, Helga smiles back at her from Wilfred’s chair, and the children don’t say a word, let alone shriek with joy. Bath time’s equally subdued, like a funeral, except the girls’ nightgowns are snowy white and there’s nobody to mourn, after all, nobody’s actually died. Elfriede tucks Ursula and Frederica into their little beds, and Frederica starts to cry. “I want Mr. Thorpe! I want Mr. Thorpe to tuck me in!”
“Mr. Thorpe’s gone back home, sweetheart. He was only here on holiday.”
But Frederica’s only two years old and doesn’t understand. She seems to think Mr. Thorpe’s home is here in Florida, with them, with her. She repeats her demand over and over until suddenly she falls asleep, with the tears still wet on her cheeks. Elfriede turns to Ursula, whose eyes are shut tight, though she’s not really sleeping. Elfriede kisses her forehead and settles the thin summer blanket around her shoulders. “Good night, my love,” she whispers.
Ursula opens one eye. “Where does Mr. Thorpe live?”
“In England, sweetheart.”
“Where’s England? Is it close to Florida?”
“Not really, I’m afraid. It’s back across the ocean, like Germany. You have to take a big ship to get there, like we did to get here, and it takes days and days.”
Ursula closes her eye again. “I want to make a boat and sail to England.”
“That’s a wonderful idea, darling. He’ll be so happy to see you.”
She turns out the light and lifts Gertrud, who’s been playing patiently with the blocks on the floor. When she slips out the door, she finds Johann standing there in his pajamas, looking lost.
“Why, Johann! I thought you were reading in your room.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not? What’s the matter?”
Johann shrugs. “Nothing.”
Elfriede takes him back into his room and settles him under the blanket with his book about Africa. “Are you unhappy that Mr. Thorpe’s gone home?” she asks gently.
“No!”
“All right,” she says. “But I think he’s going to miss you. He’s going to miss you very much.”
Johann shrugs. “Don’t care.”
“Remember how he showed you how to build the kite? And you flew it on the beach together?”
Johann shrugs again and concentrates on his book. But when Elfriede straightens away and settles Gertrud back on her hip, she sees how the light from the lamp reflects some wetness in his eyes.
“I’ll be back soon to turn out the light,” she tells him.
As she descends the stairs carefully, holding Gertrud with both her hands, she recalls the day with the kite, and then all the other days, the other hours, the minutes, each one individually all at once, in the same way that God sees and knows a billion hearts simultaneously. Her mind grows as large and clear as the universe. My God, what have I done? she thinks. Why have I not seen what was right before me?
Because you’re afraid.
Well, what if I’m not afraid anymore? What then?
In that case, the steamship leaves New York in six days.
By now she’s reached the bottom of the stairs, and this thing she could not decide during the course of twenty days has now become obvious during the course of twenty seconds.
“Charlotte!” she calls out.
There’s no answer. She finds the nurse in the parlor, silent and rigid in one chair, while Helga occupies another chair across the room. Of course the phonograph is still. No cheerful dance hall music for Helga. The air itself might just crack from the weight of all this quiet, the kind of quiet that’s the opposite of peace.
“Charlotte,” Elfriede says. “The baby’s ready.”
Charlotte hoists herself out of the chair and heads for the doorway, where Elfriede holds a squirming Gertrud. Instead of joining Helga in the parlor, however, Elfriede follows Charlotte and Gertrud up the stairs to the small room next to Charlotte’s that serves as a nursery. Charlotte looks up in surprise as Elfriede closes the door behind her.
“Frau von Kleist? Is something the matter?”
Is something the matter! Elfriede’s nerves throb, her skin’s alive. She’s incandescent, she’s going to burst.
“We’re leaving,” Elfriede says. “We’ll pack our things tomorrow morning. I’ll check the schedule for the trains. I hope we’ll be gone by lunchtime Thursday.” (Today’s Tuesday.)
“Leave!”
“Yes.”
“But where?”
“To England,” Elfriede says. “We’re going to join Mr. Thorpe in New York and follow him to England.”
It’s astonishing how things accumulate when you inhabit a house for several months with several children. Every time you turn around, thinking you’ve retrieved it all, another object meets your eye. A toy, a book, a shoe, a pencil. They came to Florida with so little, and now there’s so much—where did it come from? By evening the next day, Elfriede’s exhausted, but her heart still thrills inside her chest. She keeps picturing Wilfred’s face when he sees them, the lot of them, Charlotte and four children and Elfriede, a multitude of trunks and suitcases, waiting for him on that pier in New York. They will live in England, of course, hundreds of miles away from Helga in Germany, from the rigidity and formality of Schloss Kleist. The children are young; they’ll be speaking English like Englishmen before long. Naturally they’ll visit their native land in the summer, on holidays, because Johann a
fter all is the Baron von Kleist. But England will be home. Wilfred will be Papa. Elfriede thinks of some rambling half-timbered house in the countryside, like Shakespeare, messy and rambunctious and filled with children. There will be more of them, of course. She’s not afraid any longer. She’ll have Wilfred by her side, and how could any blackness exist amid so much sunshine? She’ll give Wilfred babies of his own, delightful ginger-haired babies, two or three at least, and this time she’ll nurse them herself, she’ll care for them herself in the bedroom she shares with Wilfred, the house she shares with Wilfred, and won’t the girls be delighted at these darling new arrivals! Won’t they be a large, happy family together! Why, it’s all so simple! Why was she so afraid? She wants to laugh out loud.
By the time she goes to bed, it’s almost two o’clock in the morning, but everything’s packed and ready. She’s informed Helga of her decision, and Helga for once was rendered speechless. Oh my, the look on Helga’s face! Elfriede reaches for the pillow next to her, the one on which Wilfred’s head used to lie, on which she used to gaze at him rapturously while he slept like a dead man, and she tucks it into her arms. For some time, she lies awake, too dazzled to sleep, certain she’s incapable of any slumber this night, until she’s waking up to a bright Florida morning, sunshine irradiating the windows, Johann jumping on her bed and pulling at her shoulders.
“Wake up, Mama! Wake up!”
Elfriede sits up on her elbows and tries to make sense of the world. “Johann! Darling. What time is it?”
But Johann doesn’t know the time. What child ever does? His eyes are round and blue and stricken. He tugs her arm almost out of its socket.
“My sisters!” he says. “Where are my sisters?”
In the years that follow, Elfriede will recall, most of all, the emptiness of the house during that terrible day. The absence of things, the dusty absence of life, which she remembers as an absence of light itself, even though the official weather records indicate that the sun shone as brightly as ever, from dawn until dusk.
Helga’s happy to explain the whole affair. The previous evening, while Elfriede bathed the children, she offered Charlotte ten thousand marks to depart the next morning with her daughters, never to return to Germany, never to make any further claim on the family, never to attempt to contact the family again. After a short period of consideration, Charlotte counteroffered at twenty thousand marks, and Helga accepted. She wrote out the cheque right there in the parlor, and Charlotte had just tucked this valuable scrap of paper into her pocket when Elfriede arrived downstairs with Gertrud. Helga relates all this while sipping her coffee, nibbling her toast. Elfriede’s too stunned and enraged to speak, let alone eat. She leaves without a word, walks three miles to the train station with a bewildered Johann in tow, but the ticket master came on duty at ten o’clock, he doesn’t know anything about a party of four, a woman and three small girls, who might have departed on some train at dawn or thereabouts. Elfriede, not to be denied, insists he check the receipts, the ticket log left behind by his predecessor. He tells her he’s awfully sorry, but he can’t do that, confidentiality or something.
But not for nothing is Elfriede so beautiful as she is. She fixes her large, angelic eyes upon this ticket master, forty-five years of age or thereabouts, thinning hair and paunchy stomach, creased uniform of navy blue, who’s already stammering, poor fellow, in the presence of such a heavenly creature as Elfriede. She explains in her halting English how she’s raised these girls as her own daughters, how the nurse has absconded with them, how frantic she is to find them again. Possibly a tear or two wets her long eyelashes, and who’s to say they aren’t real, unfeigned tears? Elfriede’s desperate, after all, she’s heartbroken. She’s standing at the ticket office of this hot, cramped, dirty train station in the middle of Florida, atmosphere heavy with heat and the reek of coal smoke, and all she wants is her girls back, her beloved and irreplaceable girls, in the same way she wants air to breathe. And what do you expect? Within the space of a minute or two, Elfriede learns that one Charlotte Kassmeyer and her three minor children were aboard the six fifty-three to Savannah, Georgia, with tickets through to New York City.
But then the ticket master looks up regretfully, first at the clock and then at Elfriede. He’s sorry to inform her that the next train north doesn’t leave until noon the next day.
Five days later.
Now Elfriede stands inside another ticket office, considerably more luxurious, that of the Holland America steamship line on State Street, at the very bottom of Manhattan. Here in the middle of civilization, she doesn’t need beauty. Her title’s enough. The Baroness von Kleist and her son are shown to a private room, waited upon by an eager sycophant. The passenger lists for the most recent sailings to Rotterdam? Just a moment, Frau von Kleist. We’ll see what we can do.
They sit together bravely in a pair of armchairs, she and Johann. It’s the fourth steamship office they’ve inhabited this morning. Yesterday it was hotels, all the famous, well-appointed hotels of New York City and then some of the lesser ones. Surely this could not be so difficult? A blond woman in her thirties, speaking limited English in a heavy German accent, accompanied by three young girls, as fair as their mother, how could you fail to notice them? But New York’s a good place to hide, after all. It’s a question of numbers. A thousand hotels. Railway lines going every which way. Ocean liners crisscrossing the harbor, making their way up and down the mighty Hudson River to the waiting piers. A woman and her daughters, who has time to notice them? What’s that American expression? A dime a dozen. And every minute counted, at every hour the chances dimmed, the likelihood grew that Charlotte and the girls had disappeared forever.
At one o’clock yesterday afternoon, Elfriede dragged the weary Johann into a lunchroom near Madison Square and considered her remaining options. She considered what she might do, if she were Charlotte, and where she would go. This promise she’d made to live anywhere but Germany, for example. Would she keep it? Why, of course she wouldn’t. Charlotte wasn’t going to learn a new language. She wasn’t going to settle somewhere exotic. And—Elfriede realized, in a breathtakingly clear review of the past five years—nothing in Charlotte’s character suggested she regarded vows as sacred. In fact, Charlotte was most likely to do what suited Charlotte. Besides, there was that cheque for twenty thousand marks to consider. Where else could you easily cash such an enormous sum of German money, drawn on a German bank, than Germany?
Charlotte’s returning to Germany. Elfriede’s sure of it.
So here they sit, Elfriede and Johann, in the offices of the Holland America Line. Earlier this morning they visited the Hamburg-American Line, Cunard, the White Star. Naturally they’re unable to provide passenger information on future sailings, but manifests for ships already departed, that’s possible, certainly, Frau von Kleist.
The office is hot and smells of stale cigars. It’s midsummer in New York, a particular urban kind of heat, dirty and immovable, the atmosphere possibly fixed in place by all those vertical walls, and the perspiration crawls down Elfriede’s spine. Johann swings his legs. Elfriede aches when she sees his face, so young and so anxious, framed by wet blond curls. He should be out playing with his sisters. He should be doing battle with the Atlantic surf, not stuck in a stuffy steamship office in New York City, dressed in his jacket and short pants. Elfriede’s removed her gloves because of the heat, and her fingernails dig into her palms. Her jaw hurts with the force of her teeth grinding against each other, a reflex she can’t seem to conquer. Her girls, her girls. The smell of Gertrud’s hair. The small, plump shape of Frederica’s hand in hers. The sound of Ursula’s giggle. She’s going to die, she can’t survive this anxiety in her stomach, this grief.
Never to see them again. No, it’s impossible.
What if they’re sick? Hurt? Will Charlotte care for them properly, will she notice the little signs that a fever’s more than just a fever, a cough’s more than just a cough, a minor scrape might be turning septic? Ho
w can anyone love the girls so passionately as Elfriede loves them?
Johann. Is he never to see his sisters again?
It’s impossible.
The door opens. The officer enters, bearing some papers and an eager expression. “Here you are, Frau von Kleist. You may review these at your leisure, of course. May I bring you some refreshment?”
“Perhaps some water for my son? Lemonade, if you have it? It’s terribly hot.”
“Yes, Frau von Kleist. I’m very sorry. One moment.”
The officer disappears once more, and Elfriede bends over the papers. So great is her anxiety, she has trouble focusing on the names, on each individual entry. She reads them without reading them. Slow down, slow down. Think. The SS Statendam, ten thousand gross tonnage, departed from the Hoboken pier three days ago, bound for Rotterdam. 902 passengers, 147 in first class. Another 147 in second class, the remainder in steerage. Elfriede places her finger on the paper to mark her progress down the list of names, to make sure she doesn’t skip any lines. The paper’s shaking a little. The names are mostly Dutch, she perceives, but also German and some English. Mr. and Mrs. Josef Kuipers, 5 children, 1 infant. Mr. Andrew Harrison. Mr. Leopold Meisner. Mr. and Mrs. Willem Janssen. Mr. and Mrs. Rutger De Jong, 3 children.
The door opens. A woman enters, bearing a tray with two glasses of lemonade. Iced, even. Johann reaches greedily and remembers, at the last second, to say Danke. Elfriede’s own mouth is dry with thirst, but she can’t stop to drink.
Mr. Kaspar Ryskamp. Mrs. Thomas Beecham, 3 children.
Elfriede comes to the last of the first-class passengers. She pauses to reach for the lemonade on the small, round table between the armchairs. Already Johann’s finished his own lemonade. His small legs swing and swing.
“Just a few more minutes, darling,” she says. “We’ll find them, I promise.”
“Yes, Mama,” he replies.
The Golden Hour Page 26
