go hunting for new plants. That was his obsession, even then.”
“Botany,” I say.
“Yes. He was always outdoors. There was this lake at the edge of the garden. I taught him to swim there. He was six.”
“Isn’t that a little old to start swimming?”
“My grandmother wouldn’t let him near the water.”
“Really? Why not?”
She flicks ash into the fireplace and replaces the photograph on the mantel. The metal makes a decisive noise as it strikes the marble. She turns to me and folds her arms. “Grandmothers have their reasons. You haven’t eaten, have you?”
“Not since lunch.”
“Then I suppose we’d better make dinner.”
Dinner is brown bread, margarine, pea soup with tiny pieces of ham, washed down with weak tea. I ask her about Thorpe as a boy, about summers in Germany, about this grandmother of theirs, but she doesn’t want to answer me. Instead she asks me about my own childhood, about America, about my parents, and she listens earnestly to my replies. “How queer,” she says, over and over, as if America is something exotic, as if my father and mother are a species of animal you find in a zoo.
We wash the dishes. She shows me to the lavatory and finds me a toothbrush. She shows me to my room—Thorpe’s room—and only at the last second, as we exchange awkward good nights at the door, do I summon the resolve to press her again about her past.
“Do you miss it? Germany, I mean. Could you ever go back?”
“Go to Germany? Are you mad?”
I shrug one shoulder, like a question. Margaret bends down and lifts Tuxedo from the floor, where he’s been winding around my legs, making suggestive noises. She strokes the fur between his ears. When she speaks, she addresses herself to the cat, not to me.
“I’m afraid there are certain places to which you can never return.”
Elfriede
October 1900
(Germany)
On the canopied bed where Gerhard von Kleist consummated his marriage by the light of two dozen beeswax candles—Schloss Kleist was not then electrified—he now lies in darkness, attended by a doctor brought in from hated Berlin, a Jew, the foremost expert in infectious disease, who once raised the Kaiser’s own son almost from the dead.
Gerhard has typhoid. It’s not hopeless, everyone insists, as they go about the corridors in dark clothes, mute voices, furrowed brows. Not hopeless at all. He’s such a strong, big fellow. How could a puny germ conquer Baron von Kleist?
Elfriede knows how. It’s five o’clock in the morning and she sits by the bed, reading aloud from Faust—naturally, Gerhard worships Goethe—but she doesn’t hear her own words. Inside her head, she’s begging God to let her husband live, not to punish Gerhard because Elfriede has fallen in love with another man and committed adultery in her heart. That last conversation with Wilfred, she hears every word echoing against her skull: If something were to happen to my husband. And: It would be like wishing he were dead. Almost as if she knew, as if she obtained some subconscious knowledge of what was happening in Westphalia while she sat on her mountaintop with her lover, speaking of Gerhard in the past tense. He loved me so much.
Everyone’s asleep except Elfriede and, possibly, Gerhard, who exists in a febrile state of half slumber. When she first took her seat and began reading, he became calm, as if the sound of her voice gave him rest. But now he’s twitching again. Tosses his head from side to side. Mumbles words. Twice Elfriede’s bathed him with a sponge and a basin of lavender water, yesterday morning and yesterday evening, and still he carries that awful smell of sickness, that putrescent sourness. Now she breaks off her reading and touches his dry, warm, pale cheek. How devoted he was. A perfect husband. Never raised a finger against her, let alone his voice. She could have had no complaints, it was all her doing. Even when she told him she couldn’t face the idea of having another baby—enduring that awful blackness again, that certainty of something deeply wrong at her core—he never objected. He moved his sleeping accommodation into the anteroom, now occupied by Dr. Rosenblatt. Only his eyes reproached her. Poor Gerhard. Now he suffers all over again, because of her. And her face is like an angel’s.
Elfriede lifts the linen cloth that lies across the bowl of lavender water, sitting atop the nightstand. She wets its, wrings it, lays it along the beam of Gerhard’s forehead. A paraffin lamp glows at the