The Golden Hour Read online

  “So do you.”

  She laughs again—so out of practice at laughing, but she can’t seem to help herself. “But it’s my native tongue, and you—you’re an Englishman, aren’t you?”

  “Indeed I am. I learned my German in school, from a fearsome and very fluent master. Used to beat me with a cane whenever I slipped accidentally into the informal address.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “It’s supposed to build character.” He opens his eyes and squints into the sun. He looks nothing like her husband, not just because he’s smaller and his head is shaved and his bones stick out from his skin, not just because he’s in a wheelchair while her husband is as huge and hale and hearty as a woodsman. Herr Thorpe is terribly plain, wide-faced and thick-lipped, freckled and ginger-haired, and the electricity of his smile can’t disguise his current state of febrile emaciation. She holds her breath in disbelief at the sharpness of his protruding bones, at the length of his pale eyelashes. He’s positively lanky inside his blue pajamas, and then there’s this enormous pumpkin head stuck on top of him.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Pneumonia can be so dangerous.”

  “Oh, I’m all right.”

  “You wouldn’t have come here if you weren’t quite sick.”

  “I couldn’t have come here at all if I’d been really sick. It’s a damned long journey from Vienna, you know. No, I came through the crisis all right, but the doctors were worried about my lungs, so they sent me here for recuperation. And my parents agreed because—well.”

  “Because why?”

  “A personal matter.”

  “Some girl?” Elfriede asks boldly.

  “Yes,” he says. “Some girl, I’m afraid. But it all seems rather long ago now. What about you?”

  “A personal matter.”

  “Let me guess. Coerced to marry some doddering old bastard against your will, and you’ve gone mad to escape him?”

  “Nothing like that,” she says.

  “Crossed in love?”

  “No.”

  “Some terrible grief, perhaps?”

  “Nothing too terrible.”

  The man drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “Have you been here long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Ah. Then perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity on a small matter. You see, late in the evenings, when I’m meant to be sleeping, I sometimes hear the most extraordinary music floating into my chamber. Piano. Goes on for hours. I can’t decide whether it’s coming from outside the window or down the corridor. At first I thought I was dreaming. Do you hear it at all?”

  “I—well, I . . .” She stops herself on the brink of a lie. “I’m afraid it’s me.”

  “You? Ah. Ah.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize anyone could hear me. I’ll stop—”

  “No! No. Don’t stop on my account.”

  “If I’m keeping you awake—”

  “I don’t mind at all, I assure you. It’s enchanting. Last night, the Chopin . . . I had the strangest feeling . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Enchanted, that’s all. Absolutely enchanted. And it was you, all along? All the more enchanting, then.”

  From another man, this compliment might have sounded unctuous. But Mr. Thorpe speaks the word enchanting with such easy intimacy, Elfriede laughs instead, and laughter feels so good in her chest, in her head. She looks down at her feet, crossed at the ankles, and only then does she realize she’s blushing. She asks hastily, “What were you doing in Vienna?”

  “What does anybody do in Vienna? Art, culture, philosophy. Opera and cafés and whatever amusement comes one’s way. I suppose I was attempting what they used to call a grand tour, except I kept getting stuck in places.” He pauses. “Delaying the inevitable.”

  “What’s so inevitable?”

  “Returning home. My father’s found a place for me in chambers.”

  “What does this mean, ‘chambers’?”

  “Law. I’m meant to become a lawyer.”

  “How—how—”

  “Grown up,” he says. “Grown up and rather dull. Pretty soon I shall get married, grow a beard, and start a brood of rascals of my own, and the whole cycle will start over again.” He looks as if he might say something else, but starts to cough instead. The sound is wet and wretched, cracking off the walls of the garden and the stone infirmary building across the grass.

  “Are you all right?” Elfriede asks anxiously. “Shall I call the orderly?”

  He waves the idea away. The fit dies down, and he leans his head back against the chair. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s gotten much better, believe it or not.”

  “You must have been at death’s door, then.”

  “Yes, I rather think I was. It’s a real indignity, to catch pneumonia in the summertime. My mother says it was all the dissipation.”

  “Dissipation? Really? You don’t seem like the dissipated sort.”

  “Well, my mother’s idea of dissipation is a glass of sherry in the evening. Her side of the family is all Scotch Presbyterians. Strict,” he adds, apparently realizing Elfriede isn’t well acquainted with the tenets of Scotch Presbyterianism. “Damned strict.”

  “So you were escaping.”

  “Something like that. I finished university a year ago and thought—well, one’s only got this single chance to sin, before that inevitable time of life when one’s sins puncture the happiness of somebody else.”

  “It’s not inevitable,” Elfriede says. “You don’t have to do it.”

  “Do what? Go home and take up the law and become a respectable chap?”

  “No. You should go back to Vienna instead. Go back to Vienna and the cafés and that girl of yours—”

  “Frau von Kleist,” he says solemnly, “you’re making me weary with all your talk of rebellion. I’m a sick man, remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “I require a long period of rest and recuperation, not a program of debauchery.”

  “How long—” She clears her throat and continues. “How long are you supposed to stay here?”

  “As long as it takes. A month or two, perhaps. Just in time for autumn. And you, Frau von Kleist? How long do you expect to stay?”

  She shrugs. “As long as it takes.”

  “A month or two, perhaps? I’m afraid I don’t know much about nervous disorders.”

  “More time than that, I think.”

  There is a queer, heavy silence, the kind for which the clinic is famous. The deep peace of the mountains settles over Elfriede, a sense of motionless isolation that sometimes unnerves her, or increases her melancholy, because it seems as if she’s the only human being in the world, and she wants passionately to belong to somebody, anybody, almost anybody. Elfriede smells the wildflowers, the faint odor of something cooking in the refectory kitchen—it’s nearly lunchtime—and something else as well, a peculiar, indecipherable scent she will come to recognize as that of Herr Thorpe himself, a scent that will forever remind her of mountains, even in the middle of a teeming, dirty city.

  Herr Thorpe murmurs, “There’s the orderly.”

  Elfriede glances to the infirmary door, and the white-uniformed man presently emerging from it. A shimmer of panic crosses her chest, the way you feel when the nurse arrives to draw your blood from your veins. She climbs to her feet atop the wall.

  “I must be going, Herr Thorpe—”

  “Wilfred.”

  “Wilfred.” She hesitates. “My name is Elfriede.”

  He presents her with that wide grin, one eye squinted. “Why, it’s practically the same as mine! What are the chances, do you think?”

  “Very slim, I think.”

  Wilfred puts his hand to his heart. “Shattered. Will I see you again?”

  She leaps back to the meadow side, which is about a half meter higher than the garden, rising upward along a soft, rounded hill. “I don’t see why we should.
We occupy entirely different wings of the clinic.”

  “And yet you’re here.”

  “A mistake!” she says, over her shoulder, as she starts to climb the hill.

  Wilfred’s voice carries after her. “There are no mistakes, Elfriede the Fair! Only fate!”

  Elfriede climbs quickly, and the word fate is so thin and distant, it’s almost out of earshot. Nevertheless, she hears it. In fact, it echoes inside her head, over and over, in time to the heavy smack of her heart as she approaches the summit of the hill. She tells herself it’s only the effort of the climb, the thin air, the anticipation of the view from the top.

  Lulu

  July 1941

  (The Bahamas)

  Every town has its watering hole, where everybody gathers to share a few drinks and some human news, and in Nassau that particular place was the bar of the Prince George Hotel. You couldn’t miss it. If, newly disgorged from some steamship onto the hot, smoky docks of Nassau Harbor, you staggered with your suitcase across Bay Street to shelter from the sun, you found yourself bang under the awning of the Prince George. And since the Prince George, as a matter of tradition, offered the arriving tourist his first glass of rum punch gratis, why, you can see how the bar developed a loyal following. I should know, believe me, even though I’d arrived by air instead of by sea. That punch went down so well, I made straight for the reception desk and booked a room. Three weeks later, I had almost forgotten I’d lived anywhere else. Every evening at six sharp, I made my way downstairs and took up a stool three seats down from the left, and the bartender—we’ll call him Jack—whipped up a cocktail while I lit a cigarette from a case full of Parliaments, a brand relatively rare in New York City but nigh ubiquitous in this British Crown colony. So began my twentieth night in Nassau. Now pay attention.

  Jack was the kind of bartender who sized you up first and decided for himself what kind of drink you needed. On this particular evening, with the place just loosely occupied and the afternoon sun still filling the windows, he took a bit of time and asked, “Be a double for you, Mrs. Randolph? Look like you been dropping bombs all over Germany today.”

  “Nothing as exciting as that.” I rested my left hand on the thick, sleek varnish and stared at the gold band on my fourth finger. “Just a day with the ladies at the Red Cross.”

  Jack made a low, slow whistle. “Since when?”

  “Since this morning, when the nice fellow in charge of the magazine was so dear as to send me one of his telegrams to go with my breakfast.”

  “The good kind of telegram?”

  “See for yourself.” I set the cigarette in the ashtray, pulled the yellow envelope from my pocketbook, and removed the wisp of paper, which I spread out flat on the counter before me. How I hated the color yellow.

  HAPPY ANNIVERSARY STOP TODAY NOW THREE WEEKS SINCE YOUR DEPARTURE NASSAU STOP TOTAL EXPENSES TO MAGAZINE $803.22 STOP TOTAL EXCLUSIVE WINDSOR SCOOPS ZERO STOP RETURN TO NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY REPEAT IMMEDIATELY STOP NOT ONE MORE PENNY EXPENSES WILL BE PAID BY THIS MAGAZINE=

  =S. B. LIGHTFOOT

  Jack peered over and whistled. Above our heads, a ceiling fan purred and purred, lifting the ends of my hair. Jack shook his head and returned to his bottles.

  “So you see,” I continued, replacing telegram in envelope and envelope in pocketbook, “my time in Nassau may be winding to an end.”

  “Don’t you like it here, Mrs. Randolph?”

  “Very much. But I can’t stick around if the magazine’s cutting off my expenses.”

  “You could write them a story, like this fellow suggests.”

  I inclined my head to the pocketbook. “This fellow? You mean Lightfoot? That’s a nice way of putting it. Orders, is more like it.”

  “So? Write the fellow a story.”

  “It ain’t that easy, sonny,” I said. “There’s only one thing to write about in this town, this blazing, backward, godforsaken burg, and it turns out you can’t just waltz right into Government House and ask to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, s’il vous plaît, and make it snappy.”

  “I guess not, at that.”

  “No, sir. You’ve got to weave your way into society, it seems. For starters, you have to join the local Red Cross, of which said duchess is president, and make nice with the ladies.”

  “That bad, was it?”

  “It was awful.”

  Jack set the drink in front of me. A martini, it turned out. “Compliments of an admirer.”

  “A what?” I sputtered into the glass.

  “An admirer, like I said. And that’s all I’m saying.” Jack zipped his lips.

  I set down the glass and lifted the cigarette. Jack observed me with interest, thick eyebrows cocked. When I’d taken the first long drag, and another sip from the martini, I crossed my legs and began a survey of the room around me. As you might expect, there was plenty of room to survey, plenty of height and arch, plenty of solid rectangular pillars done in handsome raised wood paneling, plenty of large, masculine chairs and ashtrays on little tables. Not so many customers. Everybody still out enjoying the sunshine, no doubt, and aside from the elderly gent near the window, buried in his newspaper, and the two fellows in linen suits having an earnest discussion in an alcove, the joint was empty. I turned back to Jack.

  “Not the old man with the newspaper, I hope?”

  “He’s mighty rich, Mrs. Randolph. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Are you calling me a beggar, Jack?”

  Jack’s face assumed an aspect of innocence. Above his head, the glasses glittered in their rows, highballs and lowballs, champagne coupes and brandy snifters, not a speck of dust, not a hair’s width out of order. “Just an old saying, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “Something my mama used to tell me, that’s all.”

  “I have my faults, I’m the first to admit. But I’ve never begged for a dime in my life, and I don’t intend to start now.” I tilted my head toward the window. “Certainly not with some old moneybags trying his luck in a hotel lounge.”

  “You have your standards, is that what you’re getting at?”

  “I have my standards.”

  “Oh, then I should take back this little glass here?”

  I slapped away his hand. “Don’t you dare. The poor fellow’s perfectly free to buy me all the drinks he wants. So long as he understands he’s not getting his money’s worth.”

  “Aw, he’s not so bad. Just look at the poor sucker. Got most of his hair. Nice clean suit. Shoes all shiny. Can’t see his teeth, but I bet he’s got a few left.”

  “I’ll take your word for that.”

  “You’re a real tough dame, you know that? A lot of pretty girls might take pity on a nice guy like that, money to burn. A one-way ticket to Easy Street.”

  “I’m not a lot of girls, am I? Besides,” I said, reaching for the ashtray, “I happen to know firsthand where that kind of arrangement ends up, and it’s not Easy Street, believe me.”

  The ashtray, if you’re asking, was a heavy old thing made of silver and embossed in the middle with what seemed to be a tavern scene. A border wound around the edges in a series of scrolls, dipping now and then to make space for a resting cigarette. I knocked a crumb of ash inside and measured the weight of Jack’s curiosity on the top of my head. Not that I blamed him. You said a provocative thing like that, you expected someone to wonder what you meant by it, to clear his throat and ask you for a detail or two.

  Jack’s black waistcoat shifted in the background, his crisp white sleeves. He put away the bottle of gin on the shelf behind him and said, over his shoulder, “Just as well, I guess, he ain’t the fellow who bought your martini.”

  “But you said—”

  “You said.” Jack turned back to me and grinned. “I was just following along, you see?”

  “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have amused you.”

  “Now, don’t be sore with me, Mrs. Randolph. I’m sworn to secrecy, that’s all.”

  “You’re teasing me,
aren’t you? I’ll bet this admirer of yours doesn’t even exist. You just poured me a free drink for your own entertainment.”

  “Oh, he exists, all right. Paid me up front and everything. Nice tip.”

  “Is he here right now?”

  “In this room?” Jack’s gaze slid to the door, traveled along the walls, the panel and polish, the glittering windows, and returned to me. “’Fraid I can’t say. Kind of a shy fella, your beau. But don’t you fret. I got the feeling he’ll make himself known to you, when he’s good and ready.”

  Before me, the martini formed a tranquil circle in its glass, a cool pool. Not a single flaw disturbed its surface. I pondered the chemical properties of liquids, the infinitesimal bonds of electricity that secured them together in such perfect order, the beautiful molecules held flat in my glass by gravity. The great mystery eluded me, as ever.

  “How long have you tended bar, Jack?” I asked.

  “How long have I tended bar? Or tended this bar here?”

  “Tended bar at all, I guess.”

  “Well, now.” He shut one eye and judged the ceiling. “Landed here in Nassau in twenty-one when I was just a wee lad, helping my dad with the old schooner—Lord, what a sweet ship she was—”

  “Rum-running, you mean.”

  “Just engaging in a little maritime commerce, Mrs. Randolph, serving the needs of you poor suckers dying of thirst back home. Used to load and unload them crates of liquor all the livelong day. Oh, but we lived like kings in Nassau back then. Those were good years.” He shook his head and wiped some invisible smudge of something-or-other from the counter. “Then they brought back the liquor trade stateside.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  “For you folks back home, maybe. Come to find out, my dad spent all the money from those years, every damn penny, Mrs. Randolph. Left me here in Nassau, broke as a stick. Lucky I knew a fellow who tended bar in those days. Took me under his wing, taught me the trade. Now here I am.” Jack spread his arms. “Got my domain. Nothing happens here without my say-so, Mrs. Randolph, and don’t you forget that. You got a problem with any fellow here, you come to me.”