A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  “My brother’s childhood and mine were quite different,” Emerson agreed.

  Their coffees came and Gwen knew she could easily change the subject. He had not asked about her parents and, unless someone chatty, like Connie Sue or Hester, had told him, it was a part of her history that she really could keep to herself, just as she’d planned.

  Only, suddenly, she didn’t want to do that. Suddenly, she wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. That she really and truly understood what he’d experienced.

  “My mother died when I was twelve,” she said, blowing gently on her demitasse cup of coffee. It smelled heavenly but looked very much like tar. She wondered briefly how it would taste. If it would be bad for her health. She wondered things like that a lot—too often, perhaps. “A brain aneurysm,” she added. “ Totally unexpected.” She ran her finger down the side of the cup and glanced up at Emerson, letting him see fully into her sadness. “I never ... ever ... got over it. Even now. It still doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Oh, Gwen. I’m very sorry,” he said on a sigh, catching her gaze and holding it.

  If she’d feared him pitying her, she was wrong. The look he gave her wasn’t laced with pity (like that of her teaching colleagues), or sympathy (like Richard’s default expression), or even empathy (like her experience with the few girls she’d met in college who’d also lost a beloved relative).

  No. Emerson’s gaze was instantaneous and comprehensive understanding. It was utter recognition of the hole in her childhood. Of the gap that could never be filled. And, somehow, the simple knowledge that he understood her softened the very edges of that crater of loss in her heart.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “For both of us.”

  He then told her a few tales about Thoreau, as if trying to lighten the conversation. About how his brother “dated demonically” all through his university years, was a serial monogamist and had gotten engaged to his ex-wife long before it would’ve been advisable.

  “He kept trying to replicate Mum and Father’s marriage,” Emerson said with a (sort-of) laugh. “I always thought that to be unrealistic, but he was more of an optimist in that regard.”

  Gwen couldn’t help but remember their first discussion on this topic, back at Festival del Gelato in Florence. Only she had more information now. More insight into how and why he thought as he did.

  “You don’t want to commit to a relationship because that would mean being like Thoreau,” she blurted. “Having yet another area of competition between you.”

  The two men, she realized, had sectioned off the universe, as if by subjects, and stamped their names on the pieces in which each claimed superiority. Thoreau had already called “marital commitment” as his; therefore, Emerson had to excel at its opposite—“dedicated bachelorhood.”

  Emerson’s lips twisted into a smile. “You think you know me so well,” he chided, taking a sip of his coffee. He motioned for her to do the same.

  Strong!

  She swallowed, blinked a few times and reached for the nearby glass of water.

  He chuckled and said, “Drink as much water as you need. The waiter will keep replenishing it, whether you want it or not.”

  “Why?” She gulped about half a glass more after taking her second sip of Viennese coffee. The stuff must have been brewed in asphalt.

  “Tradition,” he explained. “They bring additional water unrequested through your visit. It’s an unspoken message that you’re a welcomed guest, not one who should feel pressured to leave for other patrons.”

  Gwen could appreciate that and, as if on cue, their waiter headed over to them with fresh waters. Emerson thanked him and requested something from the dessert menu called Sachertorte. “You must try this. Trust me.”

  As they waited for it, a clock in the distance struck seven p.m., and live piano music drifted out to the patio to greet them.

  After listening to the café pianist for a few minutes, she said, “You play just as well, you know. Quite possibly better.”

  “Thanks.” He drank more of his coffee. “The music means a lot to me. When I’m not trying to show up Thoreau, when I’m just thinking about the notes, there’s no competition. Not against some stranger playing in a coffeehouse. Not even against myself. It’s just me, in harmony with the song. You understand what I mean?”

  Gwen hadn’t played in public enough to have felt the sting of competition (a couple of recitals for her family and a few of her parents’ friends when she was ten or eleven hardly counted), but she had experienced acute self-consciousness when playing for Emerson and the gypsy violinist and also, as with the impromptu singing on the trip, whenever she was asked to join a group in song. There were nights, back at home, though, when she was listening to her favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack in the car or in the kitchen and she would lose herself in the music so completely—even singing along in full voice—that it would startle her when she realized she’d been harmonizing aloud. Even though no one could hear her, just the thought of an imaginary audience listening in and, possibly, judging her was enough to make her heart race and her palms sweat. Enough, actually, to silence her. But the moment of deep immersion just before that awareness was bliss.

  “Yes. Sort of,” she told Emerson, remembering, too, what he’d said in Budapest about how the experience of being the creator of the music was different from merely being a listener. That a listener could rate a performance as “good” or “bad” based on the sharpness of his ear and his prior background in music. But that the person playing had a more complex task—whether or not he expressed through the song what he most desired. Whether or not the music touched the heart of the performer himself. Or, in this case, herself.

  The waiter returned again with a large piece of very chocolaty-looking cake. Two forks.

  “Sachertorte,” Emerson said simply. “Taste it. You’ll adore it.”

  She picked up one of the forks and speared the moist tip of the cake. “Mmm. It is good,” she said after the first bite. “There’s a filling of some sort in it. I can’t quite figure—”

  “Apricot,” he said in that know-it-all tone of his.

  He was smirking at her while speaking. So very cosmopolitan, was he. So very worldly and sophisticated and experienced. So very sure of himself. She couldn’t help but grimace and, in an effort to make him act marginally less victorious, she scooped up another forkful of cake and stuffed it in his mouth.

  He looked surprised but not displeased as he chewed. Then he picked up the second fork, heaped it with more cake and decorated her lower lip and chin with the chocolate glaze until she gave in and opened her mouth for it.

  She found herself laughing, her hands half covering her face like a mask. He was so goofy. So youthful, even at age thirty-five. So uninhibited that it was starting to rub off on her.

  He was laughing, too, of course, and attacking the remaining cake with his fork to try to score the biggest scoop. She battled him with her fork on the plate, as if in a duel.

  She had just managed to wedge another forkful between Emerson’s lips when, in a move so quick that time must have been fast-forwarded, he leaned across their little table as if to kiss her.

  But he stopped. His chocolate-smeared lips hovering close to hers, but not quite touching.

  He swallowed his bite of cake, took a breath and pulled back a few inches. “Gwen ...” he murmured.

  She gazed up at him, time instantly having been switched to pause, and tried to express through her eyes her strong liking of him. And, yet, that liking was at odds with the life plan she had mapped out for herself. She was thirty, after all. It wasn’t prudent to live without direction. But she also couldn’t shake the disquieting suspicion that what she thought she’d always wanted might no longer be the case.

  Life was full of so many dualities and inconsistencies.

  She shook her head and he sat back down. “I’m sorry, Emerson.” He shrugged and set his fork on the plate. She, too, had suddenly lost inter
est in the cake.

  “It’s quite all right,” he said with a sigh, looking down, his attention focused on something crawling on the ground. “My fault for not remembering what you’d told me.” Then, after another beat, “I don’t always know what I want either.”

  “You don’t know what you want to order?” said an amused male voice behind her. Thoreau. In front of her, Emerson looked up and stiffened. “Might I suggest some tasty Wienerschnitzel? ” his brother continued, clearly in the mood for mockery.

  She turned to fully face Thoreau, spotting Louisa and the honeymooners trailing several paces behind him. “Oh, hey, there,” she said. “We, actually, just had some cake,” she explained, since Emerson was not quick to offer a reply. She swiped the chocolate smears off her mouth and chin with her napkin. “But we’re done now.”

  “And, also, we were just leaving,” Emerson added as he pushed to standing. “Would you like our table?”

  “What? No, no. Don’t race away,” Thoreau said.

  Both she and Emerson had risen, but Thoreau spanned his arms between them like an eagle, placed his hands on their shoulders and, literally, pushed them back into their seats. He glanced at their two-thirds-eaten cake and raised a brow. “Sachertorte, huh? Not as good as you’d expected?”

  “No, it was great,” Gwen said loyally. “I guess we just weren’t as hungry as we’d thought.”

  Thoreau smirked. “Troubled by indecision, are we?” he mused, although there was a pointedness about it Gwen couldn’t ignore. He gazed speculatively at his younger sibling just as Louisa, Sally and Peter reached them.

  Gwen realized she and Emerson hadn’t seen the four of them coming, but that the reverse wasn’t necessarily true. While the others may have been too far back to observe with any clarity, Thoreau had outstripped the rest of his group and had, most likely, seen that almost-kiss. She suspected Emerson realized this as well and pieced together the not-so-subtle insinuations his brother was leveling at them.

  “I’m delighted we decided to go to the planetarium,” Louisa said pleasantly. “I haven’t studied astronomy or physics since my first year at university.” She sent Emerson a sheepish grin. “But the night sky is always so gorgeous, and all that talk of black holes and quarks and such is endlessly fascinating.”

  Sally was quick to agree, and her husband further observed that it was incredible to think of how much energy was packing into even a small white dwarf and how vast the distances were in our solar system, let alone between galaxies.

  “I’ve been a fan of math puzzles and science wonders for almost six decades,” Peter said, “but the idea of a light-year still boggles my mind.”

  “Oh, indeed. The universe is simply bursting with paradoxical elements,” added Thoreau. He nudged his brother. “Wouldn’t you agree? Weren’t you just spouting off about contradictions the other day? Some boring Bohr theory, as I recall,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

  Gwen saw Emerson clench his jaw. “Bohr’s principle of complementarity is not what I’d term boring, Thoreau,” he said, his expression hard. He turned a softer eye on Gwen, Louisa and the honeymooners, however, and explained that they shouldn’t let its name fool them. “The complementarity principle is actually about contradiction. Some objects have multiple properties that appear to be contradictory. Basically, it’s impossible to view both properties at the same time, despite the way they can coexist simultaneous in nature. You understand the way light can be either a particle or a wave, depending on the situation? Normally, any electron that’s both a particle and a wave would seem to be impossible because they’re mutually exclusive. Not true in this case.”

  “I would wager people are far more contradictory than even light,” Thoreau suggested thoughtfully. Gwen narrowed her eyes at him, and Emerson shot him a look that was just shy of scathing. The others did not appear to notice anything amiss.

  Peter nodded at Emerson’s explanation, and asked a few qualifying questions. Louisa bobbed her head in appreciation. And Sally smiled kindly at Emerson and everyone surrounding him.

  While Gwen wasn’t necessarily well-versed on the nuances of Bohr’s theory after this one lesson, she had to admit Emerson had encapsulated it well, and Louisa gushed, “You’re such a brilliant teacher, Emerson. I remember some French writer saying that what makes a person a genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.”

  Thoreau seemed to develop a nasty cough at the word genius.

  Emerson thanked Louisa then abruptly stood up. Gwen sensed there was no way his brother would be able to push him down this time. He flagged their waiter, who immediately came to their table with glasses of water for everyone.

  Handing several bills to the man, which amply covered their coffee and cake, Emerson smiled tightly and announced that he and Gwen were going to the park and would be taking a taxi back much later. He politely wished them all a good evening.

  This plan was news to Gwen, but she played along.

  Thoreau, sharp as ever and unusually ornery, went for the parting shot. “Have fun, kidlets,” he said condescendingly. “But do remember, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ Henry David Thoreau.”

  Emerson took several strides away from the group, so she thought Thoreau may have succeeded in getting that last word. She should learn never to underestimate the younger of the Edwards men.

  After a few additional paces, in a strike so witty and so intentionally ironic, Emerson turned and called over his shoulder. “Brother, ‘I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.’ ” He grinned. “Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

  Gwen caught the barbed glances between them—this latest skirmish cutting yet another notch in the backboard of their combative history.

  Their adventures in Salzburg were not exactly off to an auspicious start.

  Hans-Josef, who’d long awaited his morning off in his hometown, put Guido in charge of getting them to and from “The Sound of Music” tour. The tour itself (complete with the lake views from the Julie Andrews version of the film, the tree-lined drives, the lush gardens, the wedding church and the famous gazebo) had been lovely—once they got there. Guido, whose laid-back Italian nature jibed well with the streets and driving customs of Italy, southern France and even Hungary, was not entirely well suited to the precision of a German-Austrian border city. Or, more specifically, to their police force. And with their tour guide absent and unable to insist upon strict punctuality, not only were they late in getting to see the hills coming alive, but Guido also procured a rather pricy speeding ticket.

  Gwen, however, was amused by the way Guido laughed at it—once the policeman was well out of sight—and banished the thin paper to a half-folded, half-crumpled footnote in the bottom of his beverage holder.

  Hans-Josef, when he rejoined them that afternoon, was less amused. Perhaps it was only on account of his free time having ended, but their tour guide wasn’t in the best mood to begin with and this ticket didn’t help. Looking rather like Liesl’s too-serious boyfriend in the much-beloved musical, he reprimanded their bus driver sternly. Even having Cynthia hanging on his arm and trying to tug him away did not restore his humor with any immediacy.

  Richard would have acted like that, too, Gwen realized, having just spent the better part of a half hour comparing the two men in her mind again. Had he been in Hans-Josef’s position, he would not have dismissed the ticket and moved on with the afternoon portion of the tour. No. He would have scolded and grudged and sucked the fun out of someone’s day. Even though she was rarely inclined toward being late herself (and she’d never gotten a speeding ticket), she found herself displeased with this trait Richard and Hans-Josef shared. It was almost ... self-righteous.

  Thankfully, the beauty of the Alps served to distract her more than once. The hazy shades of alternating blues, greens and whites in the distance. The stunning peaks that looked more like a Universal Studios backdrop than real life. The crispness of the air at high elevation and the chirp of bir
ds calling to others in the flock as if to say, “What a beautiful day! To be young and free and in the mountains!”

  Upon returning from their afternoon drive to see the gorgeous alpine vista that was Eagle’s Nest, Gwen found herself nestled between Zenia and Connie Sue on a small café bench in downtown Salzburg, waiting for their tables to be set. It was dinnertime and, while she wasn’t normally overly hungry for any meal, the high altitude must have been playing with her appetite because, for once, she was ravenous.

  “Hmm. How much longer do you think it’ll take before they’ll be ready for us?” she asked the older ladies.

  “Dunno,” Zenia said, unconcerned. She elbowed Gwen and pointed to a distinguished-looking man in his early fifties—salt-and-pepper sideburns, trim and dressed in a navy sport coat. “I could feast on him, though. Hello-ohhh! Captain Von Trapp,” she beckoned, waving an arm at him.

  Gwen ducked her head, both out of embarrassment and to avoid getting bashed in the skull by Zenia’s wild swinging. Thankfully, the man soon walked deep into the restaurant, either having not heard Zenia’s call or not thinking she was talking to him.

  Connie Sue giggled. “Why, honey,” she said to Zenia, “you gotta be faster than that if you want to hook ’em. If you’re not quick enough to call the tile you want, it’s dead forever.”

  Gwen squinted at Connie Sue but didn’t bother to ask. If they were talking about “tiles,” it must have something to do with mah-jongg and, really, she didn’t want to know.

  Zenia laughed in response and took on the stagey voice of an actress in a Southern drama. “I don’t want me some old tile someone’s already discarded. Don’t you know I be picking ahead, Miz Connie Sue?”

  Connie Sue burst into a fresh round of giggles, her plump body jiggling in delight next to Gwen. Then, as if sensing her confusion, Connie Sue was moved to explain, “Sweetie, in a mah-jongg game, some players allow each other to ‘pick ahead,’ to choose the tiles that they want in the next round, instead of waiting. We don’t play that way.” She sent Zenia a pointed look. Zenia was not averse to attempted cheating. “But, for people who do, it’s kind of like predicting the future.”