like today, when there isn’t much air to speak of. Charlotte and Wilfred soon break apart, panting and perspiring. Wilfred takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his forehead. Charlotte pours herself a drink. Elfriede, rising from the chair, calls the children to come upstairs with her for their baths.
These rituals of bath and bedtime are precious to Elfriede. By devoting herself to the children, she feels as if she’s making up for the lost time with Johann, for her failures as a wife and as a mother. Tonight, her mind’s elsewhere. Downstairs in the living room with Wilfred and Charlotte—she keeps seeing them locked in two-step, around and around the room—and also in her study, a small room off the library, where the afternoon post contained a letter postmarked Schloss Kleist and addressed in her sister-in-law Helga’s familiar, sharp handwriting.
Elfriede dislikes opening these letters. Ordinarily she just skims them, ensuring there’s no emergency, it’s just the same old querulous Helga, lecturing her on her duties and her failure to execute them. How absurd, when Helga’s perfectly capable of running Schloss Kleist on her own, and even (so Elfriede suspects) delighted to do so. And let’s not forget the added joy of martyrdom! The moral superiority from which she can regard Elfriede, who frolics, feckless and heedless, in her American paradise.
My dear Dowager Baroness, she begins—this reminder of Elfriede’s station starts off all their correspondence—Enough is enough! Your son the Baron must be raised on his own estate, not in some American playground for the idle rich . . . And so on. There, in paragraph two, appears the inevitable reverence to Elfriede’s dead husband, the duty Elfriede owes to him forevermore. In paragraph three, up pops Helga’s suspicion that Elfriede has gone to Florida specifically to engage in immoral behavior, because for what possible reason would a person otherwise travel to Florida? (Helga takes particular relish in listing the possible forms such behavior might take, all of which sound like a great deal of fun to Elfriede.)
But it’s paragraph four that strikes at Elfriede’s heart. If you cannot, therefore, bring yourself to your duty, I may be forced to bring it upon you myself. Make no mistake, Elfriede. I shall not allow you to destroy the name and reputation of this family, which generations of women far worthier than you have been proud to burnish. The young Baron must return home immediately to learn his duty. He is his father’s son, after all, and the only legacy that remains to my dear brother.
Of Johann’s sisters, of course, Helga makes no mention. So far as she’s concerned, they don’t even exist.
When Elfriede returns to the living room, carrying Gertrud, the phonograph’s turned to something melancholy and Charlotte sits stiff in the armchair, drinking from a tall glass of cut crystal. Wilfred stands nearby, against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. The room smells of heat and perspiration, perfume and mildew. Elfriede holds the baby out to Charlotte. “When you’re ready,” she says.
Charlotte sighs and finishes her drink. “Yes, of course. You’ll excuse me.” Rising from the chair, she nods farewell to Wilfred and extracts the sleepy Gertrud from Elfriede’s arms. The scent of whiskey forms its own pungent atmosphere around her.
“Are you all right?” Elfriede asks, in a low voice.
But Charlotte ignores her. “Up we go, then, darling,” she croons, carrying Gertrud to the stairs, and worriedly Elfriede watches them go, watches Charlotte’s skirt whisk from sight, before she turns to face Wilfred, who has not moved an inch. His gaze asks her a question, and her nerves shatter in reply. She’s exhausted by the ordeal of bedtime, confused and consumed by guilt. Johann made her read story after story. When at last she tucked him into bed and insisted he go to sleep, he sat up and put his arms around her neck instead. You’re not going anywhere, are you? he asked, and she kissed him on both damp cheeks and assured him she wasn’t going anywhere, of course not. She left the window open, screened against the mosquitoes, and thought maybe it was time to leave, to go back to Germany. Florida’s getting so hot for small children. If this is June, imagine July.
“I thought you’d be gone by now,” she says.
He straightens from the wall and uncrosses his arms. “I gather your Charlotte is the sort who drowns her grief?”
“Gerhard’s death devastated her, I’m afraid.”
“So it seems. I’m more concerned with you, however. How you’re