The Golden Hour Page 13

  Still, when she finds the entrance with her hands, when she sweeps inside and sees a white head bobbing, hears a small voice crying, she feels no surprise.

  She kneels on the stone floor and asks him what’s wrong.

  “My private,” he says.

  Elfriede experiences a moment of bemusement. “Your private?”

  “My soldier. I left him here and he’s gone!”

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. This is terrible. Has he run off, do you think? Deserted his post?”

  “No, no. He’s a brave soldier. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Then we shall just keep looking, won’t we?”

  “I looked everywhere.”

  “Then we look everywhere twice. Come on.”

  On their hands and knees, Elfriede and Johann dredge every inch of stone, every seam of floor and wall, until Elfriede’s fingers discover a small metal object wedged between the cushions on the chaise longue. Still too dark to see it properly, but Johann, clutching the figure, joyfully declares his missing private found.

  “Now let’s return to your room, before Nurse finds out you’ve stolen away,” Elfriede says.

  Already Johann’s rubbing his eyes. “I sleepy,” he tells her, losing his grammar to fatigue.

  So Elfriede places her hands around his warm ribs and lifts him to her hip. “I’ll carry you.”

  They emerge from the summerhouse to discover a fine pink light on the horizon, a smokiness in the air. Dawn steals over them. Elfriede turns her face so she breathes nothing but the scent of her son’s hair. Ahead, the schloss rises from the earth in shades of gray. A lamp illuminates the master’s bedroom, and Elfriede experiences a shudder of fear for the abandoned Gerhard, though not regret. If her husband’s died of fever during this past hour, she will never regret leaving him to die alone. Not when she’s saved a son, their son.

  Because servants wake before dawn, the lights also burn on the third floor. Which is the nursery? Elfriede isn’t sure. She carries Johann up the steps to the terrace—he’s now asleep, his body slack against hers—and makes for the French door, still ajar, just as a woman flies outside in a blur of white nightgown.

  “Oh! Oh! What have you done?” she cries.

  Elfriede answers coolly. “I might ask the same of you, Nurse. How did my son come to be wandering alone outside at night?”

  Nurse comes up straight and indignant. “He’s been very naughty. Now give him to me before you kill him, if you haven’t already.”

  The woman holds out her arms. In the feeble light, Elfriede can’t see her face, but she knows the shape of that head, the shade of those blond braids. Johann stirs and lifts his head. “Nurse!” he cries, stretching his hands toward hers. “I found my private!”

  “Have you, now,” Nurse says. She thrusts again with her outstretched arms. “Frau von Kleist. You must give him to me at once.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You must. Haven’t you hurt him enough already?”

  Fury seizes Elfriede. The insolence! she thinks. I ought to dismiss her on the spot, I ought to slap her, how dare she.

  And yet. Isn’t she perfectly correct? Isn’t that why Elfriede’s fury is so fierce? Nurse is right. Elfriede’s crawling with germs. Possibly she has already transmitted the fatal bacterium to her child. And it’s true, God knows, she’s hurt Johann enough already. What boy can recover from a mother’s abandonment? His arms reach to Nurse and he whimpers with longing.

  Elfriede presses her lips to Johann’s hair. “I’ll see you again soon, my love,” she says, and she hands him carefully into Nurse’s arms. As she does, a puff of air strikes her nose, the scent of schnapps.

  Inside the house again. Elfriede wastes no time leaping up the stairs—not for nothing has she walked the mountains of Switzerland for the past two years, three thousand meters of altitude—and down the corridor to Gerhard’s bedroom. The lights are now ablaze. Her sister-in-law appears like a phantom in a dressing gown.

  “Come at once,” she snaps, and turns back into the room.

  Elfriede, terrified but unrepentant, follows Ulrika into the master’s bedroom. But Gerhard is not dead. The opposite. He’s awake, the fever ebbs. He spies her in the doorway and lifts his head, calling her name like a man risen from the dead.

  Lulu

  December 1941

  (The Bahamas)

  We all have a dream, don’t we? And I don’t mean some dream for the future, some grand desire of the heart. I mean that dream that comes to you in the dark of night. I mean that dream that visits and revisits, unbidden, crawling out from your subconscious while you sleep, the one that knows exactly how to make you scream. Mine goes like this.

  I’m in some cheap room in some clapboard house in some hot, dusty prairie town in the middle of America someplace, I don’t know exactly where, and I need to catch the next train out. The only train out. The trouble is, I can’t seem to leave the room. My fingers won’t button my blouse. My clothes won’t stay in my suitcase. My hairbrush, my toothbrush, my lipstick—they go missing, time and again, so I have to go looking, and I can’t find them. The room gets smaller and hotter. The clock ticks faster. The train approaches. And while I’m making these agonizing preparations that must be done, cannot be done, I’ve got to move silently, create not the smallest noise, because a stranger’s passed out drunk on the metal bed against the wall, and he’s going to wake up any second, any second, any second, goddamn, somebody get me out of here, somebody drag me out of this room, this scene, this dream I know is a dream, goddamn, it’s just a dream but I can’t get out, can’t wake, stuck here forever like a black fly in a jar, he’s going to wake, any second, any second.

  Thump, thump.

  Mother Mary, no. Don’t wake him up.

  Thump, thump.

  BE QUIET, FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP THAT THUMPING, YOU’LL WAKE HIM UP!

  Thump, thump. Dragging me outside myself, outside this sticky, dusty, terrible scene in my head. Thump, thump.

  A voice. Miss Lulu? Miss Lulu? You sleeping still?

  Eyes fly open. Small, white room. No prairie, no train, no stranger passed out drunk in a bed. Unless that stranger was me.

  From the rear patio of my little bungalow on Cable Beach, I sat and watched the Hog Island lighthouse rising from the turquoise sea, so white and tranquil that you simply couldn’t believe the entire world was now at war.

  I remember the patio was paved in this quaint mixture of crushed seashells and concrete. There’s a name for it, I believe, but I’ve since forgotten. Never mind. I liked the way it felt on my bare feet, the way there was nothing like it back home, the way it connected me to the beach beyond. I liked the way I could sit in a round-backed garden chair of cunningly wrought metal, lean my elbows on the small wrought metal table, smoke my morning cigarette, drink my morning coffee, like the only customer in a Parisian café that didn’t exist, while I stared out to sea and pondered things.

  This particular morning, I’d been pondering whether I ought to have mentioned the trifling matter of the Japanese attack in my monthly column—the “Lady of Nassau,” inside back cover, perhaps you’ve read it—in between the account of the Silver Slipper Ball and the speculative frenzy over the invitations to Nancy Oakes’s coming-out party at the British Colonial Hotel.

  It wasn’t as if we’d ignored the whole shocking incident, the barbarous attack on American soil. My goodness, Miami lay only a hundred and eighty miles to the east, whereas London was over four thousand miles away. In general orientation, Bahamians were more American than most of New York City. But there was this turquoise sea, you understand, these palm trees and sea grapes, this heat and this somnolence. When they broadcast the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio, everybody at the Red Cross and the sailing club just exchanged a blank stare with his fellow man. Shook his head and said how awful it was. Two weeks later, nothing had materially changed, except that the Americans had mostly fled and the hotels stood half-empty and sort of forlorn. At a loss what to d
o, really, since Nassau has nothing if it hasn’t got American tourists to tend to, then as now. Nassau was where you came to escape the war, and now the war had landed smack among us, like a Japanese bomb of unknown explosive power, yet to detonate. Did you acknowledge this thing? Or did you tiptoe around it, pretending it didn’t exist? This was supposed to be paradise, for God’s sake.

  The door creaked behind me. Veryl appeared, coffeepot in hand. “Telegram come for you, Miss Lulu,” she said.

  “New York?”

  “New York.” She refilled my cup in a long, steady stream. When she was done, she reached inside the pocket of her apron and pulled out a yellow envelope, which she placed on the table next to the saucer. “You decide what you gwine wear for the party tonight?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I be leaving at noon for the afternoon shift, remember. Can’t press no dress if I got no dress to press.”

  “I’m thinking of the blue velvet.”

  Veryl made a sound like Mmm, mmm, which might equally have meant approval or displeasure. I never could tell, but I did know that Veryl’s taste in clothing—unlike mine—was infallible. Her mother had been a dressmaker, she once said. Of her father, she said nothing, but I had the idea—I can’t recall why, maybe one of Jack’s tidbits—that he was a white man, a Bay Street merchant, which was not an uncommon state of affairs in the Bahamas in those days. Certainly it would explain Veryl’s canniness in the ways of the world.

  “You don’t like it?” I said.

  “Nobody wear velvet in Nassau, honey. That dress look like something somebody Boston grandmother wear.”

  I plucked the cigarette from the ashtray. “Then what do you suggest?”

  “That red silk. It got that V, Miss Lulu, that show off you bosoms.”

  “Veryl! It’s a debutante ball, for heaven’s sake. Anyway, there’s nobody there to appreciate my bosoms.”

  Again, the Mmm, mmm, but in an entirely different tone of voice. She lifted the corner of her apron and wiped an invisible smudge from the surface of the coffeepot.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “I hear that French fellow back in Nassau.”

  I poured in the cream, the sugar. “He’s not French, Veryl. He’s from Mauritius.”

  “He talk French. He French.”

  “Regardless. I heard he was off the island until the New Year. Hunting ducks or something.”

  “No, ma’am. He in Nassau. He fly here on that Pan American yesterday.”

  “Then I guess he had a change of plans. But I don’t see what it’s got to do with me. Or my décolletage.”

  “Miss Lulu,” said Veryl, the way you speak to a child, “you ain’t getting no younger.”

  I lifted the cup and wrapped my fingers around the bowl. Veryl waited, arms folded. Behind her, the surf fell placidly on the sand of Cable Beach, making comfortable noises as it landed. A woman of great and several talents, that Veryl. She was a chambermaid at the Prince George and we’d gotten to know each other on a daily basis during my period of incarceration. When Alfred de Marigny drove me out to Cable Beach in a giant Lincoln Continental to visit his properties there—no more than a week, I believe, after I received a check for two hundred dollars from Metropolitan magazine for the first “Lady of Nassau” column—and offered me this sweet little bungalow at a rent that was practically peppercorn, Veryl asked if I might be needing a housekeeper. I said, Perhaps. Not because I thought I needed a housekeeper—God knows I’d gotten along without them before—but because I thought it was generally a good thing to have someone trustworthy by your side in a strange, complicated country like this one, someone who knew the shape of the landscape. Someone to tend your mysterious tropical flowers, someone to brew your coffee just right and iron out the creases in just about everything, then to throw in the advice gratis. Perhaps, I said. Veryl said, Fine, boss-lady, I be working morning at you place and afternoon at the Prince George, Monday to Saturday, thirty shillings a week. I said, Deal. So I was bound to accept her advice, wasn’t I? Even on such intimate matters as my romantic affairs, or lack thereof. That was implicit in the terms of Veryl’s employment. I set the coffee cup back in the saucer and fluffed my hair.

  “These are modern times, Veryl. I’ve got my own career to look after.”

  “Career not making you warm at night. Career not giving you no babies.”

  “I don’t want babies, and the nights are warm enough already. Anyway, Freddie’s a dear, but I’m simply not interested in him that way.”

  Veryl leaned forward. “I hear that Oakes girl got she own eye on that French fellow.”

  “Nancy? And Freddie?” I laughed. “Veryl, Nancy Oakes is seventeen years old. She’s still in school. She’s at the lycée in New York City, for God’s sake. And he’s not French.”

  “You meet this girl?”

  “Just briefly.”

  “She pretty, ain’t she?”

  “Pretty enough, if you like that kind of pretty. But she’s a child.”

  “She no child, Miss Lulu. She know what she want. She be wanting a big, strapping boss-man who take no sass from she father. And that Miss Nancy, she get what she want, just watch.” Veryl swept up the coffeepot and turned for the door. “You wear you red dress, Miss Lulu. Veryl said so.”

  Now, let me make something clear about the nature of my business arrangement with S. Barnard Lightfoot. I think it’s important. Several months ago, when I sat before Lightfoot’s desk in my best dress—such as it was—begging for a job, he had given me a piece of advice. Listen up, now.

  It was the second Monday of June, and eleven stories below us, a few thousand sweating shoppers pullulated along the sidewalks of Madison Avenue. Inside Lightfoot’s office, all was calm. A masculine sanctuary of dimpled leather chairs and trays of amber liquor, of wood the exact color and shine of maple syrup, an entire damned spectrum of brown. Except his suit, which was charcoal gray and pinstriped. Lightfoot lit a cigar, gave off a fulsome puff or two, and told me the Metropolitan’s Havana correspondent had been covering events in the Bahamas just fine, what could I possibly have to offer? I leaned forward and said there had to be something fishy going on, for God’s sake, couldn’t you just smell it. Everybody knew the Windsors had a soft spot for Hitler; everybody knew Wallis hated her in-laws like poison, and the venom was mutual; everybody knew that whatever differences in temperament existed between the royal couple, whatever mismatch in intellect or upbringing or what have you, they held this in common: they’d both sell their souls for a chest of gold doubloons. Besides all that. A Southern lady inhabiting the governor’s mansion of a British colony that was eighty-five percent Negro—wasn’t that rich, wasn’t there bound to be trouble?

  And what did the dear old fellow say to that? He laughed, that’s what. Laughed around the corner of his cigar at me. Leaned back in his plush chair and explained that Metropolitan readers weren’t interested in any of that, weren’t interested in politics or war or the Negro problem. For these things, they might consult the New York Times over a pot of morning coffee. No. From the Metropolitan, consumed in the après-midi over a gin and tonic or a nice dry sherry, they wanted gossip, they wanted scandal—elegantly presented, of course, tied together with a bow of silken wit—not dreary things like death and poverty and the tragedy of color. (Here he took his cigar out of his mouth and paused to contemplate the sleek white ceiling, the curl of blue smoke drifting toward same.) Now. On the other hand. If I could charm my way into the beating heart of the matter, if I could discover a few tender tidbits, say, an intimate royal secret or two, and render them into the kind of sophisticated prose that sent delight shivering down the Metropolitan reader’s superior spine . . . well then. For such a column, presented monthly, the Metropolitan might be willing to pay as much as two hundred dollars, plus expenses.

  Having consumed nothing in the past twelve hours except a cup of coffee and a stale roll of brown bread, I thought perhaps I hadn’t heard him correctly. I began at a squeak,
cleared throat, proceeded in husky drawl: Two hundred dollars?

  Lightfoot tapped the end of his cigar in an ashtray and said, Plus expenses.

  I clenched my hands together in my threadbare lap and said, Done.

  Lightfoot then stretched his pinstriped arm to the intercom box on his desk and pressed the button for his secretary. Miss Brown would arrange everything, he said, airplane ticket and expense account, perhaps a small advance—here he passed a disdainful glance over my costume—for a tropical wardrobe. I rose from the chair and said thanks. He rose too and actually troubled himself to travel around the desk and plant a damp, cigar-infused kiss on my cheek, interestingly close to the corner of my mouth. For an instant, I caught the smell of his hair oil. He pulled back, and his two hands captured one of mine, and his brow settled down atop his blue eyes. Lightfoot was then sixty-two years old, and possessed but five more in his allotted share before a mighty stroke was due to topple him (inside the bathtub or his mistress’s bed, depending on whom you asked, and my money’s on the mistress) but on that June day in 1941, he could still stare you right down to the carpet, by God, make you feel the full weight of his parting words:

  But no politics, Lulu. Politicians, naturally, but no politics.

  Now, a half year later, his advice had lost none of its weight. I finished my coffee, stubbed out my cigarette, stared at the yellow envelope tucked beneath the saucer. The sun climbed higher in the sky. Even in December, when the soupy heat of midsummer had long since eased, the Nassau sunshine bathed you in a peculiar soporific warmth I have never experienced elsewhere. Just you and that sunshine, drenching your bones, while you stare at a yellow Western Union envelope that must be opened, sooner or later. The latest Lightfoot salvo.

  I tugged the envelope free and opened it.

  As I said, after consideration, I’d crossed out any mention of Japanese infamy from my December “Lady of Nassau” column, even though the duke and duchess had talked of nothing else at a Government House dinner party on December the eighth. (I still have the invitation card somewhere.) I mean, the Nazi invasion of Poland was one thing. But a dastardly sneak attack by wicked Orientals on an English-speaking people! I remember the duke just about spat with rage. The damned yellow disease is spreading right across the Pacific, he said. By God, I’d like to bomb those bloody Nipponese hoards myself. The fury in his voice was enough to boil the vintage claret in our glasses. The next morning, I sat before my typewriter and painted the scene just as you see above, just exactly as I remembered it. Because why? Because it was so singular, you know. No act of Nazi barbarity had ever inspired that kind of outrage from the Duke of Windsor, at least in my experience. You got the distinct impression that the Jews had had it coming, rather, what with their cunning attempts to control the world’s financial markets. So why this opprobrium for the Japanese? I just thought it was interesting, that’s all. An interesting conversation around a dinner table, perfectly suitable for the Lady of Nassau to report to her readers. I stared at the brutal words, the elegant paragraph, pencil between my teeth.