The Last Innocent Hour

by Margot Abbott

  No, I never could have imagined these flimsy black-and-white images could come to dominate my life so.

  Sometimes, I feel that they are all I have left and are the only connections I have to life, to people. I laugh. Photographs are all I have left of him and are what I will use to condemn him.

  Evidence.

  PERHAPS ONE OF the strangest pieces of evidence is my passport, which, in the space where it asks for my place of birth, reads: “Berlin, Germany.” None of my family was born in the same place as any of the others.

  My mother’s childhood was spent on a huge ranch in Texas. Her father, an Anglo, had met and married her mother during a visit to Argentina. He brought his black-haired, tawny-skinned wife back to his family, and was immediately rejected by them. So Mama was brought up with no family, except her parents.

  My mother went away to Smith College in the East, and while she was there, an aunt, her father’s sister, whom she’d never met, died, leaving Mama a sizable fortune, which included a good chunk of Texas real estate. Mama never returned to Texas. Perhaps that was what her aunt had intended.

  My father’s family was respectably poor. He was born in San Francisco, his father a refugee from a wealthy patrician family in the East and his mother the daughter of a banker. Daddy was an only child and fled, as soon as he could, from the gentile poverty of his parents. He was very well educated, first at Stanford and then at the university in Berlin.

  He and Mama met in Paris, where he was researching the French Revolution. She always said it was her influence that pointed him toward Charlotte Corday, Marat’s murderer. Father wrote a biography of Corday that was not only a critical and professional success, but a popular one as well. He probably hated that.

  Eddie was born in England, while they were visiting, and about a year before I was born they moved to Germany, to Berlin, where Daddy finished his research for his thesis. I had a nursemaid, to leave Mother time for her artistic pursuits. I don’t think my mother liked children very much. Not that she was mean or thoughtless; I just don’t think she knew what to do with us. My father had even less to do with us.

  We moved to Rome the year after I was born. When I was three, Mama took Eddie back to the States for school and remained there for the rest of the First World War.

  I never thought much about my mother’s leaving me alone with my father all that time, until I started seeing a psychiatrist. He was very interested in those years, and I finally faced the emptiness in me that seemed to stem from those lonely years without her.

  Logically, my father and I should have grown close to one another in the two years we lived alone together in the chilly marble villa in the Roman suburb, but we didn’t. What would a man like my father, fluent in several languages, an acknowledged authority on eighteenth-century European history, especially that of the Hohenzollerns, and an aficionado of early-Renaissance painting, with a particular affinity for Cimabue, what would a man like that have to do with a child of three or four?

  The answer is: nothing. He left me in Graziella’s care.

  Anyway, when my father and I returned to America after the war, we all lived together in New York City, except for the two-year stint in Vienna. But when Mama was killed crossing Third Avenue on a rainy afternoon, my father, unable and unwilling to take care of Eddie or me, sent both of us off to boarding schools.

  My parents had first visited Lake Sebastian when they lived in Berlin at the time I was born and began returning to it after the war. I spent every summer there between the ages of six and fourteen.

  Perhaps the main reason for my feelings about the Mayrs was because of Lisa Mayr’s warm acceptance of me. With so many children of her own, she just seemed to include me, effortlessly, in her affections. And I adored her in return.

  I did love my own mother, although I always felt I was a disappointment to her. I was not a pretty little girl, with my messy hair and my big feet. And Mama was accomplished at so many things. She painted and played the piano and sang in a wonderful, rich alto voice. She read poetry out loud at parties and was a good cook and decorator.

  I did none of these things, although I always liked to look at pictures and never complained about hours spent tramping through museums and churches. It wasn’t until I started playing the piano that she took an interest in me. And it wasn’t until I started to show some talent for it that we began to get to know each other.

  And then she was gone, hit by a skidding taxi. I remember that, only the day before, she had given me Pride and Prejudice to read after I’d told her that I’d read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I missed her dreadfully. And because I had lost her once already, when she had left my father and me in Rome, it took me years to get over the notion that one day, if I was good enough, she would come back.

  In the miserable months after her death, while my father locked himself away, leaving Eddie and me alone with our grief, the only connection I had with anyone was letters from Germany, from Lisa and from Christian. He wrote me twice, short letters, not very informative, but enough to let me know he was thinking of me. Lisa wrote often, and it was her letters that allowed me to grieve. I would sit at the upstairs hall window, facing east, facing Germany, and cry to be with her, not realizing I was crying for my own mother.

  Christian was my best friend, away from the lake as well. We would write sporadically during the year, but at the start of each summer, one of us would race around the lake to the other’s house to pick up right where we had left off the last September.

  At first, we were friends because we were so close in age, born the same year, just months apart, and later because we were so similar, both loners, both serious readers, both inclined to daydream. His sisters, Marta, Elizabeth, and Ursula, were too old to be friends with me, and Annaliese was too young.

  There were two milestones in our early friendship. The first happened when we were both ten and the next four years later, during the last summer we both spent at the lake.

  THE SUMMER WE were ten, Christian started spending more and more time with the boys, including Eddie and Kurt. There was a gang of them and they went off together, secretly, privately, leaving me out. I began following them, just as secretly, and discovered that they had found a pond deep in the forest behind the Mayrs’ house. Every day, they went there and had, as I saw with my envious, lonely eyes, great fun—swimming, horsing around, and even smoking cigarettes.

  So, to get back at them, I stole their clothing. I did it three times over the next several weeks—sneaking up on them, in spite of their guards, and spiriting away their things. I always left the clothes somewhere for them to find, but they did have to run, naked, through the forest to do so.

  Naturally, they could not allow this to continue and they planned a terrible revenge. They sent Christian to lure me to it.

  He arrived one hot afternoon, while I was sitting in the window seat in the dining room, reading, and invited me for a walk. I went, of course. I hadn’t seen him in a while and I was reading a wonderful book about Howard Carter’s spectacular find in Egypt that I wanted to tell him about.

  “I’ll take you to a secret place,” he said. I babbled on about Tutankhamen as we walked, single-file, along the lake. Finally he turned into the woods, up a rise and over, to the edge of a small meadow covered with wildflowers. There was a convenient fallen log for us to sit on.

  Saying nothing, Christian put his arm around my shoulders, which really surprised me. It stopped me in mid-sentence. We sat in uncomfortable silence. Or, at least, I was uncomfortable. I didn’t know what was expected of me or what would happen next. I turned my head slightly to look at him. I had never been so close to him and drank in the sight of his golden eyelashes and the almost transparent down on his smooth, tan skin.

  “You are so beautiful,” I blurted out in German, “and I love you forever.” I was thinking of the handsome young Egyptian king and the small dried bouquet of flowers Carter had found on his sarcophagus.

  I heard laughter
. Horrified, I saw Eddie, Kurt, Christian’s older brother, and their other pals come tumbling out of their hiding places behind the trees and scrubs, laughing and repeating my declaration in the most scathing manner.

  I swung my arm at Christian, smacking him hard against his shoulder, and sending him sprawling off the log onto the grass. Then I ran. I didn’t think about where I was going, my only thought was to escape.

  I ran down the path straight for the lake. And found myself cornered. I turned to face the boys as they came up.

  “What?” I yelled at them. “What do you want?”

  “Your dress,” Kurt cried.

  “Yeah, yeah,” they all yelled. “You’re always stealing our clothes. Let’s see how you like it. You give it to us or we’ll come and get it.”

  I rolled my lips together, considering. They were right. I had to acknowledge their victory. I had stolen their clothes and they had the right to punish me by taking my dress. So I reached behind my back to unbutton my dress. It was hard. My fingers felt huge and clumsy and the buttons would not slide through the buttonholes, but finally I finished, letting my arms drop to my sides. I kept my head down as I pushed the dress down to where I could step out of it. I was left in my plain step-ins, which buttoned at my shoulders. I was adequately covered, but acutely embarrassed to be in my underwear. I raised my head and looked at Christian. He stood behind the boys, his hands in his pockets, his weight on one foot, his head cocked. He stuck his chin out defiantly when I called his name.

  “Here,” I said, holding out my dress imperiously. Someone snickered, but the boys fell silent as Christian walked forward to take the dress.

  “I hate you,” I hissed in German, and whipped the dress at him. Then I turned and ran into the lake, walking, then swimming, heading straight for the freezing center.

  I ignored the cold and the shouts behind me and just swam as fast as I could away from them all.

  At one point, I turned and looked back. In the distance, the boys were in a flurry of activity, some running toward the Mayr house, others leaping about in excitement. They looked funny and I was pleased that I had caused so much action.

  Floating on my back, I looked up at the sky and stuck my arms up into the air, into the sunshine. Already, I was so cold that the sun barely warmed my arms. Lake Sebastian was in the Bavarian Alps, and although it warmed up enough for swimming near the shore, the deeper water farther out never did.

  Eddie and Kurt came after me in the Mayrs’ little rowboat. I yelled at them when they reached over the side for me, fighting so violently that they backed away from me.

  “C’mon, Sal,” Eddie said. “Please. It’s freezing. Don’t go any farther.”

  I kept swimming, although my arms and legs were becoming heavier and heavier with the cold. I stopped when I heard Eddie apologize.

  “Not you,” I said, my teeth chattering.

  “What, then?” said Kurt.

  “I want him to,” I said.

  “My dumb brother.”

  “Yes. If you promise to get him to apologize, I’ll come back,” I promised. “And I won’t tell anyone what you did to me.”

  “You started it,” protested Kurt.

  “We promise,” said Eddie, who had realized that our parents would not consider five boys’ forcing me out of my dress to be the same as my stealing their clothing. The boys were the ones who would be in terrible trouble.

  I allowed Kurt and Eddie to haul me into the boat. I sat on the bottom, my arms wrapped around my middle, feeling the goose bumps, and shaking with cold. Eddie wrapped his shirt around my shoulders, but the thin cotton did little to warm me.

  At the dock in front of our house, the other boys stood waiting. After Kurt had delivered my demands to his brother, Christian approached me, still carrying my dress. He held it out to me wordlessly, and just as silently I took it from him. I was shaking too hard to get into it, my hair plastered across my chest and shoulders, my tortoiseshell clip lost in the lake. I put the dress over my shoulders, on top of Eddie’s shirt, and glared at Christian.

  He stood in front of me, his eyes downcast, his hair falling forward into his face. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Please forgive me.”

  “No,” I said loudly. Kurt, Eddie, and Christian all protested, but I merely turned and walked away on my frozen, numb legs, my anger propelling me.

  Christian came to visit me while I was convalescing from the bad cold I got in the lake. But I refused to see him. Only my tears convinced my mother of my determination not to let him near me, and she finally sent him away.

  I wouldn’t talk to him for the rest of the summer. That might have been the end of our friendship, but fortunately, Christian sent me a card during the year, at Easter time. It was a pretty card, covered with lilacs, old-fashioned looking. He didn’t say much in it, but by that time I missed him, and enough time had passed. So I decided to forgive him and sent him a treasured postcard of the Statue of Liberty.

  FOURTEENTH SUMMER

  AFTER MY MOTHER died, everything changed. Daddy, who had accepted a position at Stanford, arranged for me to enter Mary Rose, a small boarding school near Palo Alto, which had a fine music program. Eddie was still at Phillips Exeter in the East, and so the Jackson family was tucked, safely, and separately, away. Perhaps it was better than staying on in the house in Gramercy Park, where my mother’s presence haunted every corner, but we all retreated, any chance of reaching out to each other gone.

  Daddy said we wouldn’t return to Germany that summer. It was too expensive and too far and, I imagine, although he never said, too painful a prospect for him. But, for me, to be deprived of my mother and the Mayrs in one year was too much to be borne. For the first time in my life, I let him know how much I wanted something, and in the end, he gave in.

  Eddie was going to spend the summer with his roommate in Maine, but he saw Daddy and me off from New York in June of 1927. Daddy spent most of the trip staring out of windows or trying to read. He and I were alone together again and had just as difficult a time talking to each other as before.

  It would be the pattern of our relationship all our lives, except for a brief time in Berlin. I think, with the wisdom of adult hindsight, that he blamed me for my mother’s death. I do know I always felt I was not the person he wanted with him. He must have loved my mother very much.

  That summer, I didn’t think about my father. I never received any comfort from him—and never considered offering him any. All I wanted was to be with Lisa Mayr, in her friendly kitchen or at the dinner table with her large noisy family.

  Nothing turned out as I expected. Germany seemed finally to be pulling itself out of the inflation and unemployment that had plagued it since the end of the Great War, but families such as the Mayrs continued to suffer economically. Not that I paid attention to any of that. Money was another thing I was blind about. I wanted to get home, that was how I thought of Lake Sebastian, and the closer we got to it, the more impatient I became.

  We stopped for a week in Stuttgart to visit an old friend of Daddy’s. I was barely polite to our host and hostess, but I think they believed my brusque behavior was because of Mama’s death. Perhaps it was.

  Finally, we set out on our last lap of the journey, by train, to Lake Sebastian.

  We were met by Hermann Grune who, with his wife Grete, had taken care of the house and us since my parents’ first visit to the lake. They both muttered, as they always did, about the changes Germany was going through. Hermann blamed the Communists, and Grete the lack of morals; and both agreed that things had been much better during the Kaiser’s day.

  We had a light supper and even my father seemed happier. I kissed him good night and he patted my shoulder, an almost indulgent show of affection from him. In my room, after changing into my nightgown, I went to the window to look across the lake toward the Mayrs’ house. My heart sank. There were no lights, nothing. Grete came in to check on me and I asked her about the ominous darkness.

  “Ah, no,
Sally, there’s no one there, and I’m not at all sure any of them will be there this summer. Herta”—that was the Mayrs’ housekeeper—“had a letter saying not to open the house.”

  I was stunned. I could no more imagine a summer here without them than I could imagine going to bed hungry. And after all the fuss I had raised to get here. The next morning I ran around the lake on the familiar path, just as I had imagined doing, only to discover that Grete was right. The house was locked up tight, the furniture still under covers. I sat on the front steps almost an hour, trying to come to terms with this horrible new development. Obviously, there was nothing for me to do but wait, which I did with absolutely no grace at all.

  I thought music might help. Our house had an old upright in the front parlor and one of the summer rituals was the visit from Herr Leidecker, a short, stout man, to tune the piano. My mother had always planned to move a better instrument into the house, but summer after summer she—and I—played on the stiff old keys, worn smooth as silk.

  Anyway, that summer, the summer after my mother’s death, I hadn’t touched the old piano, and hadn’t even realized Herr Leidecker had never come, until one afternoon, wandering around the house, I sat down and tried some chords. Some pianists absolutely will not play on a piano that is not tuned regularly. I was not so fussy, maybe because I never took my playing very seriously, but even I could not stand the sour noise I was making. It depressed me even more and I closed the cover, running my hands along the smooth, shiny surface. The two elaborate candleholders at each end of the box were empty now. My mother had kept white candles in them, and sometimes, at night, she would turn off all the lights in the room and play by the light of the flames.

  I remember Daddy sitting by the open window, the one that faced the forest; Eddie sprawled on the sofa, and me sitting quietly in a chair behind Mama, ready to turn the pages for her. The smell of the candles and her perfume mixed with the clean pine scent of the forest outside. She would play anything then: Schumann or Brahms; Victor Herbert or Cole Porter; and, sometimes, the best of all—the sweet, sensual music of Argentina that her mother had taught her.