The Golden Hour Read online

  “I’m afraid not,” said the Englishman.

  The boozer looked like he was going to reply. He gathered himself, straightened his back, turned his head. His cheeks were mottled. The Englishman didn’t move, didn’t flinch. The boozer opened his mouth and caught his breath twice, a pair of small gasps. Then he closed his eyes and slumped forward, asleep. The Englishman removed his hand from the boozer’s shoulder and bent to sling the slack arm over his own shoulders.

  “I’ll just escort this gentleman to his seat, shall I?” he said to me. “I’m awfully sorry for the trouble.”

  No one spoke. No one moved. The stewardess stood in the aisle, braced on somebody’s headrest, hand cupped over mouth, while the Englishman hoisted the unconscious man to his feet and bore him—dragged him, really—toward the empty seat in the second row. The airplane found a downdraft and dropped, recovered, rattled about, dropped again. The Englishman lurched and caught himself on the back of the single seat to the left, third row. He apologized to the seat’s owner and staggered on. The stewardess then dashed forward and helped him lower the boozer into his seat like a sack of wet barley. Together they buckled him in, while the elderly woman to his right looked on distastefully. (I craned my neck to watch the show, believe me.)

  Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew quite what we had just witnessed. The engines screamed on, the airplane rattled like a can of nails. Across the aisle, a man in a suit of pale tropical wool turned back to his magazine. In the row ahead of me, the woman leaned to her husband and whispered something. I checked my watch. Only four minutes had passed, imagine that.

  By the time the Englishman returned to his seat, the roar of the engines had deepened into a growl, and the airplane had begun to stagger downward into Nassau. A cloud wisped by the window and was gone. I feigned interest in the magazine, while my attention poured through the corner of my left eye in the direction of my neighbor, who picked his hat from the floor—it had fallen, apparently, during the scuffle or whatever it was—and placed it back in the bin. It turned out, his hair wasn’t thoroughly gold; there was a trace of red in the color, what they call a strawberry blond. I turned a page. He swung into place and reached for the newspaper, which I had retrieved and slid into the cloth pocket on the seat before him. It seemed like the least I could do, and besides, I can’t abide a messy floor.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I do hope you weren’t troubled.”

  “Not at all.”

  He didn’t reply. I had a hundred questions to ask—foremost, was the boozer still alive—but I just turned the pages of the magazine in rapid succession until I ran out of paper altogether and closed the book on my lap, front cover facing up, the windsor team locked in eternal amity with their Union Jack sofa pillows. The loudspeaker crackled and buzzed, something about landing shortly and the weather in Nassau being ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, God save us.

  I cleared my throat and asked the Englishman what brought him to Nassau, business or pleasure.

  “I live here, in fact,” he said. “For the time being.”

  “Oh! So you were visiting Florida?”

  “Yes. My brother lives in a town called Cocoa, up the coast a bit. Lovely place by the ocean.” He nodded to the magazine. “Doing your research, are you?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “It was just a coincidence.”

  “Ah.”

  The airplane shook. I looked out the window and saw land, shrubby and verdant, and a long, pale beach meeting the surf, and a car flashing brilliantly along a road made of gray thread. “What a pair of romantics,” I heard myself say.

  “Romantics? Do you really think so?”

  I turned my head back and saw a serious profile, a pair of eyes squinted in thought behind the wire-rimmed spectacles. He hadn’t touched the newspaper. His lanky arms were folded across his chest, his right leg crossed over his left, immaculate, civilized. He didn’t look as if he’d lifted a pair of boots, let alone two hundred pounds of slack human weight.

  “Don’t you? But it’s the love story of the century, hadn’t you heard?” I said. “The king who gave up his throne for the woman he loves.”

  “A thoroughly modern thing to do. Not romantic at all.”

  “How so?”

  The airplane shuddered and thumped, bounced hard and settled. I looked out the window again and saw we had landed. The landscape outside teemed with color and vegetation and shimmering heat. I saw a cluster of palms, a low, rectangular building.

  By the time we rolled to a stop, I had forgotten the question left dangling between us. The sound of his voice surprised me, but then everything about him had surprised me.

  “A romantic would have sacrificed love for duty,” said the Englishman, “not the other way around.”

  The airplane gave a final lurch and went still. He rose from his seat, removed his suitcase and his hat from the bin, removed my suitcase and gave it to me, and put his hat on his head. I said thank you. He told me to think nothing of it and wished me a good day, a pleasant stay in Nassau, and walked off the airplane. The sunshine flashed from the lenses of his spectacles.

  As I passed the fellow from Savannah, he was still slumped in his seat, held in place by the safety belt, and I couldn’t honestly tell if he was dead or alive. The stewardess kept casting these anxious glances at his chest. I told her thank you for a memorable flight.

  “Wasn’t it though,” she said. “Have a pleasant stay in Nassau.”

  In the terminal building, as I waited my turn at the passport desk, I looked around for the blond man, but I didn’t see him. He might have gone anywhere. He might have come from anywhere. A fellow like that, he was like a djinn, like an enchanted creature from a fairy tale. Except this wasn’t a fairy tale, this was reality. He was made of common clay. He came from a woman and man, who fell in love, or had not. Who had married, or had not. Had spent a lifetime of nights together, or just one.

  As I trudged out the terminal building to the street outside, I remember thinking a vast history lay behind this man, which I would never know.

  Elfriede

  July 1900

  (Switzerland)

  The Englishman arrives at the clinic about an hour after lunchtime, while Elfriede sits in the main courtyard with Herr Doktor Hermann, discussing something she dreamed the night before. When she looks back on this moment, from a distance of years and—eventually—decades, she will remember nothing about the dream or the discussion, but she will hear the exact noise of the cartwheels and the iron hoofbeats on the paving stones of the drive as if the interior of her head were a phonograph disc, and these sounds imprinted it forever. She’ll remember the voices rising from the other side of the courtyard wall, and the smell of the pink, half-wild roses climbing that wall, and the way the sun burst free from the shade to warm the back of her neck and soak the courtyard in light.

  Except that the sun doesn’t really come out at that moment. Memory, it turns out, is unreliable. All on its own, your memory gathers up helpful details that match your recollection of an event, whether or not those details actually existed at the time. But does it matter? For Elfriede, the sun comes out when the Englishman arrives. That’s how she remembers it. Sunshine, and the smell of roses.

  Anyway, one of them is talking, Elfriede or Dr. Hermann, it doesn’t matter which one, and they both fall silent at the clatter of hoofbeats and cartwheels. “A new arrival?” Elfriede asks, after a moment.

  “Yes, a lung patient,” answers the doctor. “Pneumonia.”

  “How awful.”

  “He’ll be kept in the infirmary wing, of course. There is no danger of transmission.”

  “I meant, how awful for him.”

  Dr. Hermann nods and makes a note in his little book. He makes notes continually during these sessions—conversations, he calls them, as if purely social—and Elfriede feels sometimes like a laboratory experiment, an unknown specimen of plant or animal, something abnormal. “How do you feel about this?” he asks, still writing
, and for a moment Elfriede isn’t sure what he means, the note taking or the new patient. When she hesitates, he prompts her.

  “I don’t mind at all,” she says. “I hope he recovers quickly. Why should I mind?”

  “Indeed. Why should you mind?”

  “I don’t know. But you seem to think I should.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Another thing about Dr. Hermann, he never answers a question except with another question. He wants Elfriede to do all the talking, Elfriede to reveal herself. It’s the very latest treatment for nervous disorders such as hers, and really, as compared to some of the others, it’s not bad. Dr. Hermann is a large, soft-edged, round-shouldered man who folds his long limbs into normal-size chairs without the smallest irritation that they weren’t designed to accommodate him. There’s something malleable about him. Even his brown hair has a pliant quality. In later years, Elfriede will realize she never noticed the color of his eyes, nor can she recall his face. Just the soft, even shape of his voice, asking her questions.

  She makes her answer as clear as possible, so he can’t find another question in it. “When I said How awful, you told me there was no danger of infection. So you must have thought I was afraid of that.”

  Dr. Hermann adjusts his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. “Have you ever felt afraid of sickness, Elfriede?”

  “No.” She stands up. “I’m going to take a walk now.”

  Admission to the clinic is voluntary, and Elfriede is free to come and go as she likes, no restriction on movement, no requirement to stay. She could leave at any time, in fact.

  Practically speaking, of course, that’s nearly impossible. The clinic sits on the top of a mountain, surrounded by wilderness and reached by a single, steep road in poor repair. Until the middle of the last century, it was a monastery of the Franciscan order, and the last of the monks sold the grounds and the ancient buildings to Dr. Hermann for next to nothing, on the condition that the crumbling walls remain a sanctuary for healing and peace. Patients seek out its geographic isolation and clean, healthful air for a variety of reasons—lung trouble, nervous disorders, broken hearts, discreet pregnancies, discreet abortions—but the general point is to separate oneself from civilization. You can’t leave without mountaineering skills or help from the outside, and Elfriede has neither. Also, she has no money—none she can produce from a pocket, anyway. So, when she rises from her bench and leaves the courtyard, walks along the covered passage to the old chapel, passes the chapel, and exits the building altogether to emerge on the fragrant, sunlit hillside, she doesn’t imagine she could hail the driver of the Englishman’s carriage and convince him to carry her back along the twenty miles of steep, rutted roadway, or that she could simply walk them on her own. Where would she go, anyway? Who would want her?

  She just goes outside to be alone. That’s all she wants. To be left alone.

  As you might imagine, the quarters in this former Franciscan monastery are austere, to say the least. Elfriede’s bedroom is literally a monk’s cell, or rather two of them knocked together, and contains a single bed with a horsehair mattress, a stool, a plain wardrobe in which she hangs her three dresses, a dresser, and a desk and chair. There are no bookshelves. Elfriede’s free to borrow from the library, one volume at a time, but she wasn’t allowed to bring any books from home, nor is she allowed to receive any while she’s here. She’s encouraged to write, however. Each week, a fresh supply of notebooks arrives on her desk. Herr Doktor Hermann wants her to record her thoughts, her memories, and especially her dreams, and to bring these notebooks to their daily conversations so he can review the contents. When her notebooks aren’t sufficiently full, he doesn’t express any obvious displeasure to Elfriede. Of course, that would be unprofessional! Still she feels his displeasure like a disturbance in the air, turning his flared nostrils all pink, so she writes her devoirs daily, sometimes for hours, in order to satisfy his hunger for her subconscious mind. She also keeps another notebook under the horsehair mattress. This is the notebook that contains her real thoughts.

  In the evenings, or during the day when the weather’s inclement, Elfriede has another way of finding solitude. She makes her way to the music room, which nobody ever enters except her, and plays on the piano from sheet music obtained from the library. Sometimes she’ll go on for hours, in chronological order of course, Bach to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Chopin, one must be methodical about such things. Then it’s midnight, and as the notes fade a silence fills the chamber like a thousand ears listening, an audience of spirits, and Elfriede can almost—but not quite—feel that her husband and son are among them.

  Two weeks later, Elfriede encounters the Englishman for the first time. An orderly pushes him in a wheeled chair along one of the paved paths in the infirmary garden, and she observes them both from the hillside above. She’s just returned from a long, solitary hike, and the mountain air fills her lungs and her limbs, and the sunlight burns her face in a primitive way. She sits among the wildflowers and wraps her arms around her legs. Below her, about the size and importance of squirrels, the orderly and the Englishman come to a stop at the top of the rectangular path, inside a patch of sun. The orderly adjusts the blanket on the Englishman’s lap and they exchange a few words, although the breeze carries their voices away from Elfriede’s ears. After a last pat to the blanket, the orderly consults a pocket watch and heads back to the infirmary building, leaving the Englishman in the sunshine.

  For some time, he sits without moving. The chair’s positioned at such an angle that she can’t see his face properly, and anyway Elfriede’s a bit nearsighted, so he might be asleep or he might just be too weak to move. Still, he must be past the crisis, or they wouldn’t have left him outside like this, would they?

  Judging from the proportion of man to chair, he seems to be on the tall side, if slender. Of course, Elfriede’s husband is a giant, two meters tall and almost as broad, so most men look slender in comparison. Also, this fellow’s been sick, and he’s wearing those loose blue infirmary pajamas. His hair’s been shaved, and the remaining stubble is ginger, which catches a little sun and glints. Elfriede creeps closer. The brief, vibrant season of alpine wildflowers has arrived, and the meadow’s packed with their reds and oranges and violets, their sticky sage scent, clinging to Elfriede’s dress as she slides through the grass. She just wants to see his face, that’s all. Wants to know what an Englishman looks like. In her entire sheltered life, living in the country, small villages, Berlin once to shop for her trousseau, Frankfurt and Zurich glimpsed through the window of a train, she’s never met one.

  Closer and closer she creeps, and still his face evades her. They’re pointed the same direction, toward the sun, and Elfriede sees only his profile, his closed left eye. He must be asleep, recovering from his illness. His color’s good, pale but not ghostly, no sign of fever, a few freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. His left hand, lying upon the gray wool blanket, is long-fingered and elegant; the right hand remains out of view.

  Elfriede stretches out her leg to slide a few centimeters closer, and without opening his eyes, the Englishman speaks, clear and just loud enough. “You might as well come on over here and introduce yourself.”

  “Oh! I didn’t—”

  “Yes, you did.” Now he opens his eyes and turns his head to face her, squinting a little and smiling a broad, electric smile that will come, in the fullness of time, to dominate her imagination, her consciousness and her unconsciousness, her blood and bones and hair and breath. “My God,” he says, in a more subdued voice, almost inaudible over the distance between them, “you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here? You don’t look sick.” He glances cheerfully at her midsection. “Not up the duff, are you?”

  He says those words—up the duff—in English, and Elfriede doesn’t understand them, so she just shakes her head. “A nervous disorder,” she calls back.
>
  “You don’t look nervous.” He smiles at her confusion. “Never mind. I was only joking. I’m the family jester, I can’t help it. My name’s Thorpe. Wilfred Thorpe. I’d offer my hand, but I’m supposed to be keeping my germs to myself, at the present time.”

  “Herr Thorpe. I’m Frau von Kleist.”

  “Frau, is it? You look awfully young to be married.”

  She hesitates. “I’m twenty-two.”

  “As old as that?”

  “And I have a little boy as well,” Elfriede adds, for no reason at all.

  “Do you? Well, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” He turns his head back to the sun and closes his eyes. “Fine day, isn’t it? Won’t you come sit by me? I’ll promise not to cough on you.”

  “I don’t know if it’s allowed.”

  “Bugger that.” (In English again.) “I’ll take the blame, I promise. I’ll say I had a coughing fit, and you came to my aid in your selfless way.”

  She laughs rustily and rises to her feet. In the course of her creeping, she’s come to within ten or twelve meters of the low stone wall that marks the perimeter of the garden, and it seems so silly and artificial to be holding a conversation in this manner, calling back and forth across the gulf, that Elfriede goes willingly to the brick wall and perches atop it, a meter or so from Herr Thorpe’s left shoulder, crossing her legs at the ankle.

  “That’s better,” he says. “Easier on my lungs, anyway. You smell like wildflowers.”

  “I’ve been sitting on them. You speak German very well.”