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