Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  Cycling past the tennis court at dawn early one morning, I’d heard a ball slapping against a backboard. Karin was alone, hitting vigorous forehands and backhands. She wore a sleeveless black evening dress. She was barefoot. When she saw me, she waved her racket.

  “How are you, old Billy?” she called.

  I stopped my bike. “Hello, Karin.”

  “Are you growing up all right? You’re quite handsome, you know. Are you going to become a horseman like your lovely father?”

  She was spending only a couple of weeks at Walden. Berlin was supposed to be stifling in summer, and no doubt she missed the Walden horses, the swimming pool, the scents of balsam and sweet hay. Lady Maire rode her hunter to early morning Mass at the Catholic church in Niederrad, and I’d seen Karin with her a couple of times, mother and daughter clip-clopping along the gray village streets. Karin would have been nineteen, just.

  “Much too young to be off by herself in a wicked city like Berlin!” my mother said.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be that much of a rider,” I told Karin. “Unless I find a horse like Hatatitla. If I do I’ll steal her and strike out across el llano.”

  “Good for you! I’ll come with you, Billy! Across el llano together.”

  She didn’t mean anything by it, wasn’t even flirting, just tossing a light line across the gap—in experience, in worldliness—that separated us. Or that’s what I told myself then.

  After a stunned moment, I pedaled away. I had a job that summer as an office boy for the baron’s lawyer, Herr Kaufman, and was in the habit of stopping at a Parisian-style café on the Friedberger Landstraße to sip café au lait and read Le Figaro, the Daily Telegraph, or the Paris Herald Tribune. Reading foreign newspapers made me feel like myself, or the man I wanted to be. I didn’t feel like myself at Kaufman’s. My father had set up that arrangement. He had hopes I would choose the law for a career, but that was never going to happen. I didn’t know who I was, but sipping a café au lait and reading the Paris Herald, I was at least trying to get into character, like an out-of-work actor auditioning for a role.

  Oberleutnant Fröhlisch had taught Karin to play ragtime during the war. And Longo actually was a decent player; he and Karin did a lively four-handed “Saint Louis Blues.” They listened to jazz records in her father’s library late at night and danced the shimmy. They’d roll up the rug and push the windows open wide, and I could hear the nervous music floating across the lawn along with their laughter.

  Sometimes late at night Karin played Chopin with the windows flung open. Once I lay out on the cold grass and imagined she was playing those nocturnes for me.

  Longo’s real name was Paul von Müller-Languedoc. He got on well with everyone. The Weinbrenners were relieved he wasn’t a wild Berlin bohemian.

  My mother was applying salve to his saber scar when Longo announced he was going to marry Karin Weinbrenner when she “settled down.”

  “Karin is a yearling, the yearlings are always crazy. You can break them or let them run. I shall let our beautiful Karin run. And when she has run herself out, I shall marry her.”

  Longo had acquired his scar, his Schmiss, at Heidelberg, where he was studying law. Ritualized sword fighting—the Mensur—was a big deal for students in fraternal Brüderschaften. For those too young to have fought in the war, the Mensur was a slice of savagery they could have for their very own.

  Longo’s Schmiss was on his left temple, running from the corner of his mouth almost to his ear. A Schmiss was supposed to be proof of a manly and fearless character. Even my middle-class schoolmates at the Klinger-Oberrealschule in Frankfurt, aiming to be businessmen or engineers, could hardly wait to join a university Korps of some sort. We heard stories of young men cutting themselves with razors to simulate saber scars.

  Longo’s scar was fresh and raw. It wasn’t healing neatly. Sometimes young men disturbed the healing process deliberately; they wanted scars as ugly as possible. Karin called it the bug—“What is that horrid bug doing on your pretty face, Longo?”

  He was proud of his Schmiss, and I think it annoyed him that Karin didn’t seem impressed.

  When we reached the train yards that morning we were told the wagon with the Irish mare had been detached and pushed onto a siding.

  As my father and I approached the wagon, a young man leaped down. He had on a suit of tweed, with a cap, and a silk scarf around his neck, and horse boots. A cigarette hung at his lips, but he tossed it away before shaking hands with my father.

  “Have you traveled well?” Buck asked.

  “I have,” the groom replied. “And herself as well, for a country girl.” Then he grinned at me. “Any salmon running hereabouts?”

  And that was when I recognized my Sligo companion-in-arms, Mick McClintock.

  Later I learned that it was my grandmother who told Charlie Butler to hire Mick for a stableboy. He’d worked his way up to the position of head groom at Knockmealdown and had been handling Lovely Mare since she was foaled.

  My father understood the angst caused by uprooting and dislocation, and he believed animals were vulnerable to that sorrow as well. That was why he’d asked that a Knockmealdown groom accompany Lovely Morn on the journey. Mick McClintock was actually leaving Ireland for good—he was emigrating to America—but it had been arranged that he would see the mare settled at Walden first. In exchange, the baron was paying Mick’s passage from Bremerhafen to New York.

  We shook hands. Mick McClintock had the strong grip of a point-to-point rider, accustomed to holding horses to stone fences and wild country. He was medium height and leathery. I was tall, frail, and frequently stumbled over my own large feet. The boyhood we’d shared at Sligo seemed remote.

  Mick’s brown tweeds were rough and horsey. I wore plus fours and a schoolboy’s white blouse with a necktie. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere in my father’s company unless I wore a necktie: it was one of Buck’s iron laws. Over the years he’d grown increasingly obsessive about attire. The baron, the richest man in Frankfurt, might wear the same ragged green-and-blue polo jersey day after day, but English worsted suits, crisp collars, and a pale-gray homburg on his head were essential to my father’s sense of himself. If he wasn’t wearing one of the elegant suits made by his English tailor in Hamburg, perhaps he feared he’d be mistaken for a prisoner or a deportee. Tweeds, brogans, and a soft-collared shirt were just acceptable for a Sunday walk in the Taunus hills, but that was as dishabille as you’d ever see Buck Lange. And he spent at least an hour and a half every week polishing his boots. Not only his, my mother’s and mine as well. This adds up to three days per year. And that’s a month out of each decade, polishing boots.

  In some ways his imprisonment never did end.

  In my gawky regalia I felt like a schoolboy next to Mick. His handsome clothes and the raffish way he wore them, his Sweet Afton cigarettes, the confident manner in which he addressed my father, one horseman to another…Mick McClintock was a person out of another country. And I don’t mean Ireland, but a territory I’d imagined though not yet visited, the unclaimed region of experience, savoir faire, knowledge.

  I’d never seen Longo shake hands with grooms or exercise riders at Walden, but that morning he shook hands with Mick. Longo was impressed by anything authentically English, and “Irish” was just a more intense form of Englishness as far as he was concerned. Longo was a snob, but he could sense that Mick McClintock wasn’t going to be a groom for the rest of his life.

  “Well, aren’t you something wild!”

  I looked up to see my grandmother Con standing in the door of the train wagon, with all the powerful eccentricity I remembered from Sligo still attached to her. She was tall and rangy and brown in the face as all Irish country people seemed to be. Her tweed suit had bits of hay and straw stuck to it, but she had the radiance of a powerful person, strong willed and physically striking, though she was in her seventies by then.

  I would have liked to be wild, but wasn’t. When I wasn’t sipping my
bol of café au lait and looking at foreign newspapers, I ran Herr Kaufman’s messages, sorted the post, emptied the wastebaskets, and flirted meekly with the lawyer’s youngest secretary, name of Heidi. Every now and then Kaufman handed me a contract to proofread. The work of a lawyer seemed to mostly involve reading and rereading paragraphs of High German legalese until they began to blur, until they achieved perfect meaninglessness and read like a transcription of monkey chatter.

  I was eighteen. Women were not real to me. Even Karin. Not then. I wasn’t even a practical enough or normal enough adolescent to fantasize having sex. In my most daring fantasies she and I were riding across boundless open country together, Texas or New Mexico, under wide blue sky.

  That morning in the Frankfurt freight yards, I had to listen to Longo pointing out all Lovely Morn’s qualities to Karin while Mick led the nervous, whickering mare down the ramp.

  “See, from the size of the nostrils you can tell her volume of air intake, it means she has the raw ability, the heart power, so she can run. Ears alert, see them twitching, and bright eyes—it means she has a good brain, she knows how we are watching her. Broad chest, yes. Good hips, yes, cannon bones not very long, big feet—this hints that your mare is a wonderful runner.”

  Longo knew horses, I have to admit. Lovely Morn was a beauty. She would be a great success at Walden. At least two of her foals, Desmond and Herald, were Deutsche Derby winners.

  While Longo was showing off his equine knowledge, Buck was helping his mother down from the horse wagon. Con had insisted on traveling in the windowless wagon after Duisburg, so that Mick, who’d never been out of Ireland before, could take her seat in a second-class carriage and see something of Germany.

  “Oh, Buck, my own!” my grandmother crooned. “A beautiful man you are.”

  They’d not seen each other in nearly twenty years. Buck was beautiful then. He had the gift of becoming more slender each year. He took only a single glass of Rhine wine or beer in the evening while looking at the Vossische Zeitung, or reading the baron’s memoirs. He rode every day, and on Sundays we often went hiking in the Taunus. We ate well, fresh food, some of it grown right there on the estate. The famous Walden pears were a staple for us.

  My Irish grandmother, on the other hand, looked…unique, and gallant, but poor. As in destitute. A piece of the lining drooped from the hem of her tweed skirt, her stockings were all wrinkles, her brogues were cracked and ancient. At Wychwood she had been lady of the manor, even if the manor was falling down, but she had come out of Ireland with only a suitcase, an ancient leather baggage my father strapped to the Ford’s running board while Mick coaxed the anxious mare into the horse van, and Solomon stood glowering and puffing one of the baron’s cigars. The chauffeur distrusted horses.

  Mick was going to ride in the horse van with Solomon. Karin, Longo, and my grandmother crowded into the backseat of the Ford. My parents and I squeezed into the front seat, with Eilín at the wheel and me in the middle, gearshift between my legs. The canvas top was up to give us some protection from the noon sun. The seats were button-tufted black leather and there was a not-unpleasant aroma of steel, engine lubricant, and horse. My mother set the advance and kicked the starter button. The engine rattled to life.

  Eilín was just shifting into gear when Karin in the backseat said, “Hold up, please, Frau Lange.”

  I twisted around to see her opening her door. She was climbing out.

  “I shall catch a ride in the van,” she said, “and leave you a bit more room!”

  Longo started to protest, but she ignored him and shut the door. I watched her approach the cab of the horse van and say something to Mick in the passenger seat. He jumped down and helped her climb in. Then Mick got back in himself, shut the door, and gave us a thumbs-up. Eilín let out the Ford’s clutch, Longo sighed, and with a jerk and sputter we all set off for Walden.

  I don’t know how thoroughly my parents had discussed Con coming to live with us. She had given birth to the bucko seaman one thousand miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico, brought him ashore to the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, and made agreeable if chaotic childhood homes for him at Melbourne and Hamburg. But they’d spent most of their adult lives in different countries, writing letters back and forth. They weren’t familiar with each other, whereas my mother and I, after our time at Wychwood during the war, thought we understood Con pretty well. She was poetic and romantic and disorganized and enjoyed spending money she didn’t have. She liked to gamble. She could be supercilious, snobbish. We knew she had no interest in housekeeping and was not fastidious in her personal habits. She smoked cigarettes while reading in bed and more than once had fallen asleep and set the mattress on fire.

  Con had Anglo-Irishness, horsemanship, and hunting in common with Karin’s mother, and maybe that was what drew Karin to Con, especially as Con radiated a warmth the baroness lacked. When Karin was at Walden she and my grandmother occasionally had tea in Con’s upstairs sitting room. And they often rode the bridle paths together.

  My grandmother borrowed money. From Karin. Small amounts, which Con bet on horses. She loved to gamble but never would bet against a Walden runner—that was a matter of principle with her. When she was flush she sometimes took Karin into Frankfurt and repaid her with extravagant lunches.

  My father, Buck, was a most-meticulous, punctilious person. He structured his days with routines and rituals. My father was aware of the speed of life, how life seems to beg all questions and deliver no answers. Four and a half years had been taken from him and not given back. I think he still felt empty sometimes, and he had learned to use ritual and routine to get himself through those spells.

  Routines and schedules were irritations to my grandmother Con, who had trouble with numbers and never could keep track of time. Buck was born at sea because she’d completely miscalculated her due date.

  Con often went days without sitting down to a meal. She never ate breakfast, and breakfast was one of my father’s rituals. Every morning he ate an orange and a slice of rye toast with bitter marmalade, but without butter, which he despised. He drank two small cups of black coffee. At the breakfast table he looked at the Frankfurter Zeitung and didn’t like to share it with me, though if there’d been an important football match the day before he might tear off the sports page, carefully, and hand it over.

  Still, it wouldn’t have surprised anyone to learn Buck was his mother’s son. They had the same rangy height and broad shoulders. They dressed in ways that illustrated their personalities so perfectly that their clothes seemed like costumes. The baron once remarked to my mother, “Your Buck is so well tailored that looking at him brings tears to my eyes.” Con’s tweeds were startling. Where in remotest Donegal did she find those weaves, so hairy and intense, always with a line of unexpected color—scarlet, chrome yellow—shot through the pattern?

  Buck and Con did share a love of hats. He wore a dove-gray Homburg with a black two-inch band. She preferred velvet sombreros.

  Con had her suite—bedroom, bathroom, sitting room, each with its own fireplace—on the second floor of our Newport cottage. It was cold up there in the winter, hardly luxurious, but more comfortable than Wychwood, where toward the end she had been living almost out in the open.

  After my grandmother settled in at Newport, her chaos engorged the second floor. At first Buck tried to organize and manage her affairs, which only irritated her. He sorted her mail, looking out for bills that he’d have to pay anyway. He gave her money to buy clothes and disallowed an extra telephone line she had ordered, as it was ridiculously expensive and she chiefly wanted it so that she could call her bookmaker at Frankie’s English Bar, across the river, and place bets. The disorder in her rooms upset him deeply, until he at last took my mother’s advice and stopped going upstairs. Twice a week our charwoman was dispatched to clean and tidy my grandmother’s apartment. Con offered the woman tea and cigarettes, practiced speaking German with her, and tipped her extravagantly.

  Every no
w and then Con had a check from her brother, who lived on his farm in the Happy Valley, in British East Africa; but she depended on the allowance my father provided. He had set up an account for her at the local bank. If a teller refused to let her withdraw money she didn’t have, she would storm into the bank manager’s office and insult him. She usually wanted the cash to bet on a horse. In Frankfurt she used a Polish bookmaker, Willy Chopdelau, who kept his own table at Frankie’s and gave odds for all the English and Irish races.

  I remember my father’s dismay whenever he heard of my grandmother’s quarrels at the bank, usually in an acerbic note from the bank manager.

  “How can she want to spend money she does not have?”

  “She’s your mother, my dear,” Eilín would say.

  But his mother’s ways, I think, remained a mystery to Buck. They understood horses better than they understood each other. Buck would always know to the penny what he had in the bank. He kept a dozen perfectly sharpened Faber pencils lined up on his desk like a rank of little yellow soldiers, and made strenuous inquiries if one went missing. He hated to gamble, and when he learned his mother had put four hundred reichsmarks—real money, probably loaned by Karin—on Graf Isolani to win the Deutsche Derby, he flinched in real pain, though of course she’d told him only after her horse had galloped home a winner. Walden didn’t have a derby runner that year, otherwise my grandmother would have put her money on the Walden horse as a matter of principle, whether or not she liked its chances.

  When my mother and I lived at Wychwood the McClintocks had long since stopped paying rent to my grandmother and insisted they owned the patchwork of tiny fields where they grazed scraggly sheep, made hay, cut turf, and lifted lumper potatoes. However, Con got along well enough with the tribe, apart from occasional feuds. Wychwood was one of the few big houses in that part of the world not torched during the War of Independence. Con believed she’d been spared on account of the McClintocks’ putting in a good word with local Volunteers, but Mick told me that no one ever considered the house worth burning as it was already a ruin.