“It was my fault. Don’t blame him, Frau. I went to him. I felt so sorry for him. I only meant to comfort him . . . I loved him so . . . I couldn’t bear it, how sad he was, how hopeless. He thought you might never come back.”
“Then you made him happy.”
“No. Not even that.” Nurse’s sobs are ebbing now. She turns her head to the side and stares at the wall, which happens to be the one shared with Gerhard’s chamber. “He felt terrible afterward. I think you should know that, how terrible he felt, the first time we did it. He wept, Frau, he wept in my arms like a child. He railed at himself. But then . . .”
“But then it got easier, didn’t it? I imagine the first time must be the worst. Particularly for a man like Gerhard, so terribly loyal and full of ideals. It must have broken his heart, at first. But then once you’ve started, how can you stop? You’ve already sinned, I suppose. It’s done. You might as well go on.”
“A man like the baron has needs, Frau.” Nurse sniffs. She rises from the floor and smooths her hair. “Anyway, I’ll be going. The upstairs maid is watching poor young Johann. I don’t want to say good-bye, it will be too hard for us both. You won’t tell Ger— You won’t tell Herr von Kleist, please? It’s better this way.”
“I don’t understand.”
Nurse turns to face Elfriede, and the expression on her broad, tanned, attractive face is brave and tragic, maybe a little too brave and tragic. “It’s better he never knows. I’ll go to stay with my sister. I’ve some money saved—”
“My dear. My dear girl. You mustn’t think of it.”
“I—I beg your pardon, Frau?”
Elfriede rises from the divan. Her heart is so full of—of something, some airy substance—she almost levitates. “Never knows he’s fathered a child? His poor child never to know his own father? His own brother?”
“Frau von Kleist!”
She picks up Nurse’s horrified hands. “We are all sinners, Nurse. We are none of us blameless in this mortal life. Why should we pile evil upon evil? You must stay here, of course. You must let us take care of you. If Gerhard has fathered a child, he must of course be a father to his child. It’s immoral to do otherwise.”
“But I can’t! Stay under this roof! It’s not—it’s not decent!”
“You will please let me judge the decency of the affair. I am, after all, the wronged party.” Elfriede smiles as she says this. Wronged party. Like a court of law, like the words on some document, impervious to the queer vagaries of the human heart, the unexpected levitations to which it’s subject. Wronged party. She thinks of Gerhard banging away atop Nurse in the summer twilight, roaring out his ecstasy as he spent. Did they do it in the baron’s bedroom? Some other chamber? By day or by night? Surely not Nurse’s bedroom, which she shares with Johann’s little cot. Well, wherever it was, whenever it was. Her heart aches for Gerhard’s guilt, the suffering he must have felt after the pleasures of copulation died away. Wronged party. If only she could laugh right now, if only she could laugh out loud and not have poor Nurse stare at her like you stared at a madwoman.
Lulu
December 1941
(The Bahamas)
The way I heard the story is this. When he first came to Nassau, at the invitation of none other than Harold Christie, who could smell money on a man the same way sharks smelled blood in the water, Harry Oakes (he had not yet been awarded his baronetcy by a grateful Empire) walked into the British Colonial Hotel in his rough clothes and his rough accent and got the rough treatment from the management. So he bought the place. End of story.
Probably the real history isn’t so simple as that, but human beings love nothing so much as a tale that confirms their particular prejudices, so I’ll let it stand. And the ending’s the same, either way. Harry Oakes bought the British Colonial, that much is indisputable, and in December of 1941 his daughter Nancy came out into society inside the walls of its ballroom. Oh, it was a swell party, believe me. I was there.
I was there, and so were the duke and duchess, and just about everybody of note in the Bahamas, including Alfred de Marigny. Freddie came in a few minutes