with her chocolate at eight. Now their roles are reversed. Elfriede’s up at six, bathed and dressed by six forty-five, upstairs in the nursery at seven, downstairs for her breakfast tray at eight, just as Gerhard wakes and rises from his own bed. These are Herr Doktor Rosenblatt’s instructions, by the way. Gerhard’s an invalid who needs his rest. At nine o’clock, Elfriede will knock on his door with a breakfast tray. She likes to do this herself, to pour his coffee and butter his toast, to read to him from the newspaper because his eyes are still weak. It’s the least she can do.
From the other side of the wall comes a thick laugh. Elfriede swallows her toast and looks at the clock on the mantel. Eight thirty-two. Drinks her coffee. Knocks the top from the egg in its porcelain cup. She can’t taste a thing, but she goes on eating anyway. Later, she won’t remember any of this. Won’t remember a single bite of that breakfast, although she eats it all, every crumb, every drop, egg and toast and fruit, cold ham, coffee with milk. When there’s nothing left, she looks again at the clock—eight forty-eight—and wipes her fingers on the napkin before she picks up the letter from the corner of the tray.
And what about Elfriede’s parents, by the way? What about her sister who stood bridesmaid, and her two brothers with their families? Why haven’t they offered her any support against the united von Kleist will? Elfriede’s always supposed they’re ashamed of her. But maybe it’s more complicated than that.
Think of the wedding feast. The Hofmeisters lined up along one side of the table, wearing their best, nails clean, hair arranged, garnets instead of rubies, small freshwater pearls instead of South Sea pebbles, tiny respectable diamonds, nervous and polite. Then the von Kleists, whose forebears built Schloss Kleist, whose forebears’ forebears built the castle that had existed before it, and so on and so forth, whose clothing betrayed no particular effort, whose jewels came from vaults instead of jewelry shops. Elfriede still remembers the pain with which she gazed down that long, polished table and found her mother’s white face, frozen in mortification, across from Helga’s face, frozen in distaste. Probably there was some error to do with a spoon. Next to Elfriede, Gerhard was speaking to the man on his left, a grand duke who had traveled from St. Petersburg for the wedding. On Elfriede’s right sat the grand duchess, who was English and spoke no German, and whose expression of cynical amusement cut more deeply than Helga’s distaste. (But remember now, Elfriede didn’t cry until later that evening.)
Anyway, Elfriede’s mother died of pneumonia just before Christmas that year, and Elfriede was never that close to her sister, five years older, who soon married a businessman and moved to Berlin. Her father came to visit after Johann was born, but the climate of the house—Elfriede’s nervous disorder, the disdain of Helga and Ulrika, the stiffness of Gerhard—seemed to bewilder him, and he’s never returned. Her brothers are busy with their own families and businesses. Elfriede, by far the youngest, the baby, the afterthought, sometimes feels like a boat cut adrift to find its own shore.
Still, she thinks of her family often, and she thinks of them now as she holds this letter in her hand. She thinks of the last time she saw her mother, at the beginning of December, when Elfriede had been married for five months and the fatal pneumonia was just a slight cough, nothing to worry about. Naturally her mother was delighted by the news of Elfriede’s pregnancy. Full of advice that Elfriede ignored and no longer remembers. (Sometimes, Elfriede wonders whether she should have taken note of her mother’s strictures, and maybe then she would have avoided all the misery that followed. Oh well.) They sat in a cozy music room in the eastern wing, Elfriede’s favorite part of the house, where she used to play the piano for hours and hours while Gerhard attended to business in his study. They drank coffee and ate cake, and nobody disturbed them. Elfriede’s mother kept gazing in rapture at her daughter’s belly, as if unable to believe that a grandchild existed therein. The conversation moved from advice to trivia, gossip and weather and so on, and Elfriede remembers thinking that her mother betrayed a certain nervous animation, unusual to her.
When the time at last wore away, Frau Hofmeister brushed away the crumbs