by Nancy Horan
Mamah turned to leave when she saw no table available, but a waiter appeared at that moment and escorted her to an empty chair. The four men at the table stood when she sat down, while the women acknowledged her with nods. The man next to her leaned intently toward Mamah. He was small, with a body tense as a coil about to spring. His round spectacles magnified intelligent eyes. “Wine?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said. He said something else to her, but she couldn’t understand it because of the noise in the room.
Mamah wasn’t sure what the performer’s costume was intended to portray. The woman wore black satin pantaloons that stopped at her delicate ankles, just above stylish feminine boots. A short matching jacket, wrapped around her like a kimono, was held closed by a wide belt covered in seashells. Her straight black hair was cut just below her jaw. The face—lovely, with eyes as dark as her hair—was eerily familiar.
“My wife the poet.” The man next to her cocked his head toward the stage. “Else Lasker-Schüler. Or Jussef, prince of Thebes, depending upon her mood. She enjoys fantasy.” He extended a hand. “Herwarth Walden,” he said.
“Mamah Borthwick.”
“American?”
“Yes.”
When the waiter asked for her dinner order, Mamah scanned the menu for some small item.
“Have the pheasant and cranberries,” Herwarth said. He turned to the waiter. “Red, give her the pheasant.” Mamah fingered the cloth purse in her lap. It would take nearly every cent in it to pay for such a dinner. The man was merely being friendly; still, his familiarity annoyed her. She began to speak, but the waiter dashed off as the shrill sound of the flute pierced the noise, and the room fell silent. The poet handed away the flute, then surveyed the crowd through the smoke.
“Farewell,” she announced. She paused, her eyes focused on the man who sat next to Mamah.
“‘But you never came with the evening,’” she began, “‘I sat in a cape of stars.’”
Mamah shifted uneasily in her seat.
“‘When I heard someone knocking,’” the woman said, her voice hoarse with a gravelly despair, “‘it was my own heart.
“‘Now it hangs on every door post, even yours—among ferns a burnt-out fire-rose in garland brown.
For you I stained heaven blackberry with my own heart’s blood.
But you never came with the evening—
I stood in golden shoes.’”
The intimacy of the woman’s words, so clearly directed at her husband, created in Mamah a profound urge to get out of the room. “Excuse me,” she said as she got up and pushed past people clapping and shouting, “Jussef! Jussef!” She navigated her way through the crowd and stepped out onto the sidewalk, where the air hit her face like a cold cloth on sunburned skin. She wanted to leave but realized she’d foolishly left her wrap slung over the back of her chair. She would have to wade back in, pay the waiter, then plead illness to her tablemates just so she could retrieve her coat and be gone.
“Slumming tonight, are we?” a voice said.
Mamah almost jumped when she saw the poet standing not two feet from her on the sidewalk, her red mouth turned downward.
“I know you,” Mamah said.
“A lot of people know me.”
“You helped me one day—the only other time I was at this café. I had just gotten word that my friend had died, and…”
The woman stepped back and stared at Mamah’s face. “And you fell over, is what you did. I wondered whatever happened to you. You cried and cried.” She put an arm around her and patted her shoulder.
“Thank you for that day,” Mamah said. “I don’t know if I said it then.”
The woman took a cigarette packet from beneath the shell belt. Into her palm she emptied its contents—two cigarettes and one chocolate cookie. “Choose,” she said.
Mamah took a cigarette.
“Call me Else.” She struck a match. “What is a well-dressed American woman doing loose on the streets of Berlin on Christmas night? You look nothing like the other strays we get here at Café Megalomania.”
“My name is Mamah Borthwick.”
“You speak fine German, Mamah Borthwick.”
“Thank you. I’m here to study languages for a while—Swedish, actually. I am Ellen Key’s American translator.” Mamah instantly regretted the pretension in the remark. “I am waiting here until I can obtain a divorce from my husband.” Now she regretted spilling such personal information.
“Well.” Else raised her eyebrows and flicked a bit of tobacco from her finger. “Where are you from?”
“Chicago.”
“Chicago! I have a sister there!”
Else took her hand and led her back to the table. “Dearest Moderns,” she addressed the group, “we have among us a new friend. This is Mamah Borthwick of Chicago. She is the English translator for Ellen Key.”
“To free sex!” one of the women shouted, lifting her glass.
“These are my playmates.” Else went around the table. “Hedwig, Minn the Warrior, Lucretia Borzia, Little Kurt, Martha the Sorceress, and Caius-Maius the Emperor.” She paused. “And my husband, whom you appear to have met.”
“Let her eat her pheasant,” Herwarth said, his voice sour. “It’s already cold.”
Else pulled up a chair next to Mamah. “Oh, I love cold pheasant,” she said.
Sharing her plate, Mamah listened as the group talked about which artists might show their work at Herwarth’s new gallery when it opened. Mamah had heard of some of them and had actually seen the canvases of others. It seemed Herwarth was the editor of Der Sturm as well. She had read the weekly a couple of times since she’d been back in Berlin. In fact, she had relished his editorials, in which he picked fights with the kaiser over his antediluvian taste in art. As Mamah followed her tablemates’ conversation, it dawned on her that she was sitting very near the center of the German Modernist movement.
“Does this talk bore you?” Else asked her at one point.
“Not at all. I’m very interested in modern art.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place. Modernists, Expressionists, Secessionists. Cubists. Berlin is full of ‘-ists.’ Writers and painters flock here and pollinate each other. Quite literally.” She flicked her head toward a couple in the corner, where a man held a pretty young woman’s hand as if it were a small bird. “He’s probably seducing her with Rudolph Steiner quotes right now.”
Mamah leaned back in her chair and laughed. “Ah, it’s such a relief.”
“What is that?”
“To laugh. To be among people who are irreverent. I come from a different kind of place.”
“Isn’t Chicago cosmopolitan?”
“I’m speaking of a village I come from which is near Chicago. And yes, there are artists in Chicago who believe the same thing these people do, that art is going to save the world. It’s the architects who are the Moderns over there. They call themselves the Chicago School. They’re tossing up buildings that would take your breath away. The best is Frank Lloyd Wright.”
The poet assessed her. “Is he like Olbrich or Adolf Loos?”
“He’s like no one else.”
Else questioned her. In small pieces, Mamah let go of the truth, relieved to be opening up to someone who did not judge.
WHEN SHE RETURNED to the café a couple of days later, Mamah took a table near the window. She glanced toward the corner, where two of the men she’d met on Christmas night were huddled over their playing cards. They nodded when they spotted her. The waiter with the copper-colored hair delivered her tea, then presented a copy of Der Sturm with a friendly little flourish.
Was it her imagination, or had something changed in the space of two days? Because she certainly felt a difference. Even now people walking through the door acknowledged her.
She suspected Else’s sudden friendship had stamped her as “approved” among the artists. Mamah was amused by it. Back in Chicago, no one had heard of Ellen Key. Her name
wouldn’t have bought Mamah a cup of coffee. Here at Café des Westens, it was her passport.
Outside the window, scores of office girls walked by arm in arm. Military men in epaulets passed, along with hordes of others: fresh-faced farm boys turned factory workers carrying tin lunch pails; businessmen in homburg hats; gray-braided grandmothers in black dresses; nurses, shopgirls, society women out for tea. And then a woman like none of the others emerged from the crowd and stepped into the café.
“You sit down in this café, and the devil has you,” Else huffed as she took a chair across from Mamah. She was wearing a purple cape. Scattered over it were cameo pins with tiny photographs of faces inside each one.
“Your family?” Mamah asked, pointing toward a picture of an old-fashioned couple.
“Oh, no. I found them in a pawnshop. They were all begging to get out of the place.” Else ordered coffee, and when it came, she said, “I come from a village like yours. I was married to a doctor.” She pressed her coffee cup against her cheek to warm it. “I had fine china. Lovely rugs on the floor.” The serious brown eyes were flecked with gold. “One day I woke up and thought, What have you done with your gifts? You’ve traded them for furniture.” She moved the cup to the other cheek. “As you can see, I joined a different tribe. I have almost no furniture now, by the way. I owe the morning waiter and the midnight waiter, and I’m wondering how I’ll pay the rent now that Herwarth’s going. Still…” Her voice trailed off.
“Where is your husband going?”
Else put down the cup and looked away. When she turned back, her eyes were narrowed. “This is what I know of you, Mamah Borthwick of Chicago. You are a translator for Ellen Key’s sex philosophies. And you have left your husband for an artistic lover. Yet you live among the bourgeoisie here in Berlin. You’re a puzzle to me.”
Mamah stiffened as if she’d just discovered someone snooping around in her drawers. She crossed her arms. “My room is the cheapest one in the pension,” she said.
“You don’t have to defend yourself.”
Mamah felt embarrassed. “I admire the way you inhabit your life. You don’t seem to care whether other people approve.”
Else shrugged. “We all have our little battles going on inside.” That thought seemed to spark something, because she jumped up from her seat. “Work to do,” she said, then drifted off to her own table. She took out a notebook and began writing.
DURING THE WEEK of her holiday that followed, Mamah returned to the café every day. She had always loved the smell of coffee in the morning, and the aroma in the café did not disappoint. The place was nearly empty when she arrived, and the hard morning light revealed it to be a tawdry mess. The bust of the kaiser still leaned drunkenly on top of the battered phone booth. The edges of posters curled up at their corners on walls dirty with fingerprints. But the round marble tabletops were cleaned of beer-glass rings by eight A.M., when Mamah happily settled at a table near the front window.
She wrote postcards to her children and translated until people filtered in. Sometimes a new friend would sit with her for a few minutes to chat, but mostly, the regulars drank coffee behind their newspapers. It was when the poets and writers began arriving around lunchtime that the place filled up with laughter, arguments, ideas.
Else got there by two in the afternoon and settled at her own table in a back corner, where she held court when she wasn’t writing. Most days she brought her son, Paul, a boy of four who seemed content to color in a book across from her. Mamah was touched by the two of them huddled together.
“He’s left her,” the woman named Hedwig said to Mamah one afternoon, glancing over at Else.
“Herwarth?”
“Yes, he moved out. There’s a Swedish woman, someone said.”
Mamah was stricken almost sick by the statement.
“Herwarth has been good to the boy, but he hasn’t any obligation, really. He’s not his father,” Hedwig said. “Else claims the father is a sheik or something.”
When Mamah looked over again, she was seared by the pained little society in the corner.
As the afternoon wore on, she listened to the people around her. Liebermann, Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Kandinsky—the names rolled off their tongues like a litany of Secessionist saints. When the day grew dark, Red circulated through the café lighting candles. “The world is changing,” someone said. “It is, it is,” the others agreed.
The room grew blue from smoke and pulsed with excitement by four, as people ordered bottles of wine and beer. They talked of Italian Futurism, of Gaudi in Barcelona, of mathematics as “the way God thinks.” They talked of who was sleeping with whom, of politics, war, magic, socialism.
One evening Mamah joined a table where Else was holding forth to a group of fellow artists. “That’s your sacred office,” she was saying heatedly. Her son was nowhere in sight. “To continue the act of creation where God left off on the last day. To unlock the secret language of nature. I truly believe that every time I go deep enough to bring back a nugget of truth or beauty, God is making use of me.” Else looked around at her tablemates. “Artists can redeem the world. But we can’t tarry, my friends. You and I are the salvation of this country, not the generals.”
Mamah drank in the pleasure of the words around her, the camaraderie. She had two glasses of wine that night, then another, and felt as if she had never been so comfortable among a group of people. She had arrived in Berlin from someplace else where she felt she didn’t belong, just as they had.
The night before Mamah was to return to work, a snowstorm blanketed Berlin. She woke to the news that whole sections of the city were without power and that her school had been closed for the day. She bundled up and went out to a newsstand. With a paper under her arm, she moved on to the post office, which she found open, though eerily empty. In her box, one envelope waited. The letterhead belonged to a Chicago law firm she knew to be the one used by Wagner Electric. Inside, she found what she expected. Edwin Cheney was suing Mamah Borthwick Cheney for divorce. Grounds for Suit: Desertion.
She put the letter in her handbag and walked back toward the pension. It didn’t seem quite real that a major piece of her future had just fallen into place. She wanted to tell Else, but when Mamah looked in at the café, she saw that the place had only one other patron in it. She sat down at her table near the window and stared out at the street.
“I love a good snowstorm,” Red said to her when he brought a newspaper and a cup of coffee. “Stops people in their tracks.”
At the top of the front page, she saw the familiar words that Red stamped every morning on every newspaper that came into the place—STOLEN FROM CAFÉ DES WESTENS. She took a pencil from her handbag and wrote a note to Frank in the small section of empty white space at the top of the page.
January 10, 1911
It’s official. Got divorce notice today.
Loving you, Mamah.
“Is there an envelope anywhere around?” she asked Red, ripping her note off the top of the newspaper.
When he brought her one, she addressed it, slipped the folded note in, and sealed the envelope, then headed back out into the snow toward the post office.
CHAPTER 32
“There’s a man downstairs to see you.”
Mamah looked over her eyeglasses at Frau Boehm, who rarely made the climb to the third floor. “Who is it?”
“A Mr. Wright.”
Mamah leaped up from her chair and raced past the startled woman, taking the steps two at a time.
Frank was standing in the parlor in an overcoat, his hat in his hands.
“You didn’t tell me!” She threw her arms around him.
“I thought if I did, you would say not to come.”
She put her hands on his cold face. “You look as if you walked from Chicago. Have you had any sleep in the past ten days?”
“Not to speak of.”
“Seasickness?”
His nostrils flared at the word. “Don’t remind me.” He to
ok her hand. “I got a room,” he said softly. “At a little hotel not far from here.”
“I’ll get a bag,” she said, grinning like a madwoman. “It will take me five minutes.”
They walked through the Tiergarten on the way to the hotel. Frank was sober, his wicked wit nowhere in evidence. He had come to surprise Wasmuth, he told her, who had stopped printing the portfolio because of a disagreement between them. “The printing of the photo book is terrible, and he has misidentified at least two of the buildings on the plates. I told Wasmuth flat out I would not accept it. So what has he done? Stopped the whole damn project. He won’t do another thing on the folio until I accept the photo book.” Frank’s voice was raw with hurt at the unfairness of it. “I’m too far into this now. I will have to fight him for another contract.”
There were troubles back in Chicago, too, besides the fact that he was a pariah and no one would hire him. He was about to sue Herman von Holst for cheating him out of his rightful commissions for the work he had left behind. A light snow had just fallen. She watched two people ahead of them leave dark footprints on the stone sidewalk as Frank listed the litany of struggles.
“They hate me.” He was talking of his children now.
“But you wrote that they were ecstatic to see you.”
“Oh, it didn’t take long for the truth to out. She’s turned them against me.” He swallowed hard and regained his voice. “All the bloody recriminations, the public shaming…none of it was necessary. If only she had agreed to a divorce.”
“Edwin has agreed to a divorce,” Mamah said abruptly. “Did you know that? I wrote a letter, but you probably—”
His face registered surprise. “No, I didn’t get it.”
“It’s true. He agreed to meet me in August to settle the details. I feel as if I can go back now.” She looked at him. “Maybe when Catherine learns that Edwin has agreed…”
